Liad
Trealla Fantrol

In which Nova Remembers.

We haven’t heard of Lady yo’Lanna since back before Nova was born; I wonder if this is still the same Lady yo’Lanna as it was then. It might well be; plenty of other people of the same generation are still around (as witness Mr dea’Gauss, mentioned in the same paragraph, or indeed Lady yo’Lanna’s kinsman, Ken Rik), and yo’Lanna is not as prone to potentially-life-shortening excitement as yos’Phelium or yos’Galan.

Another thing we haven’t seen recently, though more recently than that, is Nova in the throes of a Memory; we haven’t seen it happen since the very first time, back in “Heirloom”. It appears that, with the Healers’ help, she has gained some measure of control over the manifestation, though only enough to ride it out safely, not enough to prevent it. (I suspect that the Healers wouldn’t teach her to suppress it even if they knew how; it seems like the kind of thing where the only way is through, and pushing it down would only make it pop up harder at a later time.) They don’t seem to have been able to teach her to like her talent, either, which isn’t surprising if all her Memories are of high emotion, disaster, and death.

The message of this particular Memory is perhaps that sometimes the best thing one can do is to wait and see how events unfold, and not push too hard to see them ahead of time. Or it might, considering the description of the material Nova was reading when the Memory arrived, be a specific warning about trying to arrange some matters while missing important information, with particular relevance to her attempt to force a certain future on Shan.