Windmaster's Hill (Dreams)
It began, of course, as the Wind Tether near Kitty
Hawk, North Carolina: the place where on December 17, 1903 the Wright brothers
successfully tested the first fully mechanical, heavier than air manned flying
machine. The Tether did not immediately
form, however: it took some time for people to admit that the airplane actually
flew, and the combined belief didn't reach critical mass until 1919. Naturally, Janus stabilized it... and just as
naturally he did nothing much with it afterwards. The Tether survived under this benign neglect for decades - even
throve, seemingly - but eventually the Wind's unwillingness to support it
caused the Tether to slip prematurely into old age and accelerating
dissipation. By the late 1960s it was
barely functional.
It was at this point that Blandine requested that
the Tether be transferred to her, a move only surprising in that Dreams had not
done so a decade earlier. It was
readily enough granted to her - Janus and Blandine enjoy friendly relations -
and the Archangel has spent the last few decades nursing the Tether back to
life, assigning one of her Malakim (Fiona) to the task. The new name comes from the local SCA group
(Fiona is one of those angels that finds that membership in a historical
re-enactment organization is a useful excuse for keeping a sword around) - or
perhaps Fiona subtly encouraged the name of the Tether to be adopted by the
local barony as protective cover. It's
the sort of thing she'd do.
That should have been pretty much it; a Tether that
switched from the celebration of a particular flight to a Symbolic Dream of
Flight without too much fuss, a diligent Seneschal bringing it back to full
potency and another stronghold for Heaven on Earth. Not boring, of course - nothing about Heaven can ever be boring -
but not dramatic news. Except,
of course, for a quirk or two. It was
noted of the old version of the Tether that it showed some interesting
tendencies to shift its locus from one place (Orville's flight) to the other (Wilbur's
flight). There were even a few times
when it would apparently appear in both, simultaneously. Now, normally Janus would be interested in a
Mobile Tether (not to mention one that might have been a reverse Fork), but the
range on this was sufficiently small that it wasn't all that
worthwhile. Since Dreams took it over,
the effects have stabilized (the locus is now exclusively Orville's takeoff
point), so end of story.
Unless you're the Archangel of War, of course: he's
starting to become interested in reports of strange behavior emanating from a
certain American aircraft carrier in the past few years. Laurence's flat instructions for Michael to
mind his own business about said behavior have only whetted the Archangel's
interest - and heightened his resolve to find a loophole...
Nice person, good worker, both helpful and sweet,
can kill an evildoer (in any one of sixteen different ways) and render him/her
down to unidentifiable chunks of goop within an hour. Fiona is one of Blandine's... well, not 'killers', per se. She isn't any sort of sociopath, but she is
incredibly disciplined and has all the moral flabbiness of diamond. If Fiona needs to make sure that something
is done, it will be done.
Why on earth Blandine assigned her to this particular Tether is a very good question.
Windmaster's
Hill: Average (7 Forces, Regular Flow, Celestial Harbor, Quiet)