Today we'll be taking a look at the Aiishen adventure, but we've got a few stops to make before that.

Dreams

Remember the dream sequence after the first adventure? A story event where, during a dream, our protagonist finds herself being sexually serviced by various Leirien and Shapeshifters. This moment is interrupted by another character who mentions they have enough aether for "the sacrifice". This dream is very unconnected from any other character or event in the story, except for the fact that around this same period in time, Drishtya instructs our Candidates at the Passion Temple to perform a ritual where they sacrifice the aether collected through salfis flowers at the Shapeshifter tribe to the Goddess.

There were four other dreams planned for the rest of the game. We're going to take a look at the summary of the rest of them, but I'm going to save some details to discuss them in a later post.

Second dream: The dreamer is an Aiishen, clearly respected and even dued obedience by everyone in the room. She inspects three young women: a Leirien, a Shapeshifter, and an Aiishen. She interviews each of them, evaluating their progress, and has them visit her in her bedroom, one by one.

Third dream: The dreamer is a Leirien. She is walking around the remains of a city in ruins, some of it still in flames. The dreamer is engulfed in anger, cursing the Lizardlins for having murdered the Leirien, for having murdered her children. Clearly, they're ungrateful bastards who didn't deserved to be enlightened by the gift of magic.

Fourth dream: The dreamer is at a desk in a somewhat tight room, with bunk beds, drawers and bookshelfs. She is using magic to alter a small slime she has on the table, a somewhat pathetic creature that could hardly even be considered sentient, but our dreamer is fascinated, pondering on the significance of life. Another woman enters the room all of a sudden, complaining to our dreamer that she doesn't know whether she should hang out with her boyfriend or study for tomorrow's exam, but gets scared when she sees what the dreamer is doing at her desk, and warns her that such research could get her expelled. The dreamer argues back that the most important mages in the world are doing similar research, and that the University of the Alliance has a moral duty to stay on the front line of knowledge.

Fifth dream: Our dreamer is being told about the state of various things happening in the Confined Valley, her interlocutor clearly expecting her thoughts in turn. Our dreamer, however, can't pay attention, and excuses herself. At her room, she inspects her tigress Beastkin form, her golden hairs and her perfect physique. She wonders who she is, and then a voice replies, and then another, and then another. Our dreamer realizes that she is all of them, and breaks in tears, consumed by guilt. She returns to the old city with a determination to make amends, but the dream is interrupted by Varyonte, who lashes out angrily at the Gaanidan Candidate.

I invite you to discuss the dreams on Discord or on the comments! They will be explained in a few days, so if you enjoy speculation the right time is now.

Before the Aiishen adventure

After coming back from the Beastkin tribe, the Gaanidan Candidate tells Drishtya about her troubles with Sheze. The regent explains that, while a baku Beastkin developing such powers isn't completely unprecedented, the fact that the Gaanidan Candidate fell to her control so easily, yet all the other victims of Sheze required a long time of adaptation, is very strange, and has Taototh run tests of the protagonist. Taototh discovers that the Gaanidan has an extremely malleable aether in her very self.

An explanation on the nature of aether follows (with minor variations depending on whether Mesquelles became a guest at the Passion Temple), exposing that there's a difference between the aether of one's body and one's mind or soul. Shapeshifters have an extremely malleable body aether, while their soul aether is more malleable than the mean person in the other tribes, but not as malleable as the soul aether of Aiishen. The protagonist may explain that Mesquelles discovered many months ago that her body was very easy to transform, even if it didn't reach the degree of Shapeshifters, but Taototh says that, much more importantly, her soul is actually even more malleable than an Aiishen's. Before the protagonist has a chance to respond to this information, the Aiishen says he suspects it may be related to the artifact she swallowed during the first skirmish against the Lizardlins, and it should be further examined at the Aiishen tribe. When the Gaanidan asks what this means for herself, Taototh explains that she must learn to exert magic over her own soul, which would allow her to defend herself if someone ever tried to control her again like Sheze did.

Ate and the Aiishens

The Aiishen tribe story is the least developed, for reasons you might imagine, and it's tied up much less neatly than the rest. Two arcs had to be solved here: Maaterasu's and that of a special guest.

By this point, it is an assumption that Ate has developed any sort of meaningful relationship with any other Candidate. Even if it would be mechanically feasible to completely isolate her and prevent her from developing any relationships, it is such a niche scenario that it wouldn't be acknowledged in the story. Instead, when Drishtya and the Candidates reach the Aiishen tribe, Lainomia (the tribe's leader) realizes fairly soon that Ate hasn't changed her ways since their discussion after the second adventure, and attempts to impose an extremely rigid schedule on her during her stay, which Ate is torn between following or defying. Let me quote a segment about Lainomia and Ate from Shelved Plans II:

> Lainomia will interrogate Ate about her progress in her training. Upon realizing that Ate is starting to develop relationships with the other Candidates, she will reprimand Ate. This may trigger a later conversation with Taototh, where he explains that the Aiishen follow a strict social hierarchy where specific people receive certain duties and roles in their society, chosen at birth by analyzing a newborn's soul through an orb of stars. This recontextualizes Ate's introduction at the start of the game: when she said that "the stars chose her", she meant that she was chosen to be trained as priestess at her very birth, and therefore was forced to follow a particularly strict routine during her whole life. Plenty of people in Aiishen society are also wary about forming emotional connections with people from other tribes. This marks the narrative beginning of Ate's character arc, although it was already moving in the background.

While this remains true, it is shown during this adventure that the degree to which Ate's life is regimented is on a another league in comparison with the other Aiishen. While it is true that attempts by the Candidates to communicate with the other Aiishen are difficult, Ate belongs to a very select group of Aiishen who must spend most of their day in isolation, not even allowing her to meaningfully participate in usual recreation activities for the tribe, such as music, geometry and artistic uses of magic. When any other Candidate issues a complaint about Ate's situation, Lainomia argues that each tribe in the Valley has their own talents, rights and duties, and the same applies to each individual in the Aiishen tribe. The Goddess created them for the sake of watching over the Valley, protecting it and gardening it, and therefore it is their duty to always be ready to fulfill their responsibility. While the other tribes aren't as gifted for magic, the Aiishen have the sacred, unavoidable duty to preserve the maximum expression of the Goddess' aethereal arts, and Ate must return the Goddess' gift with similar responsibility and devotion.

Are the Aiishen a metaphor?

Time for a due intermission, let's discuss the meta for a moment. It should be obvious for most people that, during her introduction, Ate fits into a somewhat old trope when portraying autistic characters: she has a deadpan expression, she doesn't know how to communicate with others, and she's great at the thing she has a talent for. Naturally, all of this is intentional. However, this rigid script gets twisted as we progress into her arc: Taototh's explanation about her background at the Passion Temple suggests that her difficulty to interact with others is due to the rigid customs and regime that she went through during her development (making her character be explained through environmental factors, rather than being intrinsic to the person, like autism is), but we're also told that the Aiishen have their own means of communicating by expressing emotion directly through aether (which is intrinsic to the person), but then again we see, during this adventure, that Ate is also pushed to isolation from her Aiishen peers (turning back to something environmental again).

When I was in the Anglophone equivalent of middle school, I was diagnosed with Asperger's (a label which today is falling out of favor, instead getting included in the autistic spectrum). In truth, I received the diagnosis quite happily. At the moment I was really troubled by how difficult it was for me to relate to my peers, and the only people outside my family who really meant anything to me were friends I had made online. The diagnosis not only made me feel validated ("I'm not doing anything wrong, the problem is just that my people aren't here"), it also introduced me to a very large range of descriptions and stories about people with Aspergers praising associated talents ("They're really good at math! And science! And programming!") which resonated with the vision I had about myself, so I embraced the label and the identity.

After the evolution in the public discourse on autism that's happened since then, it is clearly a very reductionist view: it draws a very clear separation between Aspergers and the rest of the autistic spectrum that is incredibly murky in practice, and leaves plenty of people who roughly fit into the label of Aspergers but can't make a reality out of the almost-mythical view of the Aspergers child as someone who will become a successful engineer or scientist in no one's land. Personally, I'm still happy that I went through that pipeline rather than the other one, because the other one painted a situation (and often still does) where being diagnosed as autistic as a child meant that you would always be profoundly disabled, always unable to take care of yourself, or make friends, or do anything of note in your life, and your parents were so unfortunate to have had you, and they deserve everyone's compassion, and did you know how terrible vaccines are? At least the first pipeline tells you that your life is worth living, that there are good things within your reach that are worth striving for. The second just makes people feel miserable.

But regardless, both are myths, reductionist tales created to help parents who don't know how to cope with the oh so terrible disgrace that their kids don't fit into what society expected of them. In the words of Dr. House: "See, skinny, socially-privileged white people get to draw this neat little circle and everyone inside the circle is normal—and everyone outside the circle should be beaten, broken and reset, so they can be brought into the circle. Failing that, they should be institutionalized, or worse, pitied." Well, you didn't manage to fulfill the most basic criteria for society to accept you as a person with full rights: being normal. But you are so lucky that you can still fit within this other circle where you comply with many of the demands of contemporary society: be smart enough to achieve high education, get a good job, make a lot of money, be very productive. You cannot do what people around you demand for their respect, but you can do what the system demands of you in exchange for social advancement, for material privilege. And if you don't? Well, then I guess you always were a failure after all.

Just because it was a better pipeline than the other one never meant it was a good one, because your worth as a person should never be defined by society nor by the political or economic systems that constrain your life. What makes you and your life valuable should be your own decision, the result of your own growth through the exploration of everything that life has to offer, and your own self-discovery, an act of radical self-determination where you define the terms of your own existence, and while the whole world might be too large of an enemy to carve your ideal life within it, no one other than you gets to decide what makes you or your life valuable.

And, after having been told for her whole life what she ought to be, what experiences and pleasures was she entitled to, and to what or whom did she owe her existence to, it is now Ate's time to make her own decision.

I think that intermission got a little out of hand. Regardless, I regret nothing. The point is that the Aiishen tribe culture represents the maxim "What you contribute is what makes you valuable", and Ate's character arc is a challenge against it. This commentary will be resumed in a later post.

Investigation

There are other plot lines that should receive minor development here: the ritual and treatment for the protagonist's mom, Eshir's fate at the Gaanidan tribe, minor discussions between Lainomia and Drishtya about the politics of the Valley, the protagonist's experience with Sheze and her trying to learn whatever she can about Varyonte. But the protagonism gets taken away by our special guest.

During her strictly scheduled regime, Ate escapes from confinement several times. Initially, it is due to her desire of independence, but she quickly starts declaring that there's a very faint song she has to find. If you have good memory for seemingly irrelevant scenes, you will remember that Ate has been hearing music that seemingly comes from nowhere since early in the game. This should ring Lainomia's alarm bells, but because she's convinced that Ate is trying by all means to avoid her duties, she believes this is merely a challenge on her authority.

If the other Candidates decide to investigate her claims, the character who will entertain their initiative the most will be Fufngu, the Aiishen priest who secretly stole treasure from his tribe because he thought it would help Eshir. He explains that, in the most charitable interpretation, these songs could be a leftover from someone especially gifted at magic, probably an Aiishen, when their soul was getting closer to the end of their life: footprints of their vanishing soul. When he's told that Ate also heard it at the Gleaming Caverns and the Passion Temple, he complains that that doesn't make much sense, but he nonetheless gives the Candidates small amulets in the form of polyhedrons with hundreds of faces. When coming into contact with resting, floating aether, they will shine in various ways depending on their nature, so they can identify the patrons of the leftover aether wherever they can find the song with far more precision than they could with their own ability alone, then seek those patrons elsewhere.

The end of their investigation should take the Candidates to a deep, sealed, ritual chamber at the bottom of the caverns of the Aiishen tribe. Which they can only enter with Lainomia's permission! So they'll have to enlist the help of as many important people as possible in the tribe to convince Lainomia.

The source of the song

If Lainomia is not convinced in time, the gates of the ritual chamber will explode from within, followed by a whirlwind of aether that brings a storm to the Aiishen tribe. While the immense majority of inhabitants are evacuating the tribe, Ate charges in, with the other Candidates following right behind. They find a faceless, human-shaped, aether creature writhing in the middle of the air, directing holy attacks at random directions at first, then at the Candidates when they attempt to fight it. The battle is a scripted loss, and is followed by a sequence where Drishtya and other members of the Aiishen tribe attempt to contain it. Lainomia shouts at everyone to leave, staying behind to stop the final attacks of the creature, which ends up collapsing upon itself, but disintegrates the Aiishen leader in the process. Not even the magic of the Goddess can keep one's body together in front of such a sudden unleash of power.

Our battered group slowly walks back to the tribe. But they don't have the time to assimilate what has just happened: there are several Lizardlin scouts roaming the empty streets of the tribe, putting whatever valuables they can find in sacks. Drishtya leads the Candidates to push them out of the tribe, without letting anyone commit to a direct confrontation. They're too weakened to fight, and while the Lizardlins figure that out, they don't know when the rest of the Aiishen will return, so they quickly run away before getting flanked. They have, however, robbed plenty of artifacts.

If Lainomia is convinced in time, she will join the six Candidates, Drishtya and Fufngu in opening the ritual chamber. They do find a faceless, human-shaped, aether creature, although a very faint one. Everyone is equally surprised, but it doesn't look hostile. It doesn't respond to verbal language either. When Ate sings the song she has been following for months, the creature joins her, and Drishtya begins walking towards it. The regent recognizes her voice as that of Sanesh, the previous Aiishen Candidate, believed to have died during the war with the Lizardlins years ago. Drishtya, tears running down her face, asks her old friend where has she been. The creature, instead, projects a dream into the minds of the group.

It's an ugly, endless cave, barely lit by small fires coming from both candles and magic. There's an imposing Leirien next to the image, and behind her, a small, heterogeneous group, including people from most tribes. A few seconds later, another group slowly approaches them from the other direction of the cavern. They're all Lizardlins. They're led by a particularly old one, but you recognize one of them at the back as the one who injured Leap months ago. Rather than attacking each other, the Leirien greets the one at the front with a formal tone, and they begin talking about bloodshed, about grievances, and about peace. But the vision suddenly turns dark, shaking, and the voices shrink dim. The eyes of whoever we're seeing this through turn in various directions, and streams of aether begin flowing around her. The Lizardlins raise their weapons, and the Leirien gets ready to attack them, but then turns at the viewer, both scared and concerned. The viewer begins blasting holy magic, not against the Lizardlins or her companions, but against the aether surrounding her. Her actions immediately become uncontrolled, excessive, and brutal, and her attacks crack the very walls of the cavern. Some of the Lizardlins attempt to attack the viewer, the Leirien intercepts them, and the very roof of the caverns begin crumbling down.

The vision stops, and Claw shouts for her brother. A couple of tears are running down her face, but she suppresses it. She has seen her dead brother in the group behind the Leirien. Drishtya has a similarly somber face. The regent says that this is how they died, the previous High Priestess Flenya, Claw's brother, and Sanesh herself. The creature begins writhing, but Drishtya hugs it, and its pain diminishes. Flenya hadn't died fighting the Lizardlins, but during a peace negotiation, when something happened to Sanesh that killed people from the tribes and the Lizardlins alike. Fufngu suggests that, at the verge of her death, Sanesh might have attempted to decouple her soul from her body, a process which old texts mention but had been thought to be myths. Ever since then, Sanesh had been trying to acquire the aether and knowledge that would allow her to acquire a physical form, a means to communicate with others. During all this time, her soul kept fracturing, lacking a physical body that could keep its shape, only kept together by her experience and magic and sheer will, but she's at the edge of collapsing. Sanesh's shade begins writhing again, this time blasting aether in different directions, and provoking a storm from within the walls. Drishtya asks everyone else to say goodbye to her if they need to, and to leave them alone, and so they do.

When the group comes back to the tribe, the Aiishen have almost completely evacuated it. Lainomia orders the Candidates to follow her outside, but they voice concerns for Drishtya. So the Candidates, Lainomia and Fufngu wait at the tribe, and find the Lizardlin scouts right when they begin roaming it. They cautiously engage the Lizardlins in battle, and while they're capable of slowing them down, they don't have the numbers to achieve victory. The Lizardlins manage to steal a handful of artifacts, but retreat early, fearing being flanked by the Aiishen who left a short while earlier. Drishtya returns to the Candidates some time after the fight, exhausted, but alive. Whatever was left of Sanesh has finally found peace.

Conclusion

Regardless of the route, Drishtya decides that the risk of the Lizardlins having gotten a dangerous artifact is too large, and they must be confronted as soon as possible, even before a new High Priestess is chosen, as it was previously planned. If the truth behind Flenya's death was discovered, it might be possible to suggest negotiating peace again. Drishtya is clearly uncomfortable with the idea, having believed for so long that the Lizardlins killed several people important to her, but acknowledges that it might be an option, although only after meeting the Lizardlins in the battlefield. Thus, Drishtya sends messengers to the five other tribes, asking them to send as many warriors as they can to the Leirien tribe, at the center of the Valley. From there, they will seek and attack the Lizardlins.