#there's an extremely cute motd moment (at the other side of this entire venture) when faye is on her mad little rampage bc chess refuses

[nerice]

Oddly specific q but what is the situation with belle & the tracker in her? Does Faye install it to be able to track her down? Did Jumie install it (into every child) so Belle never gets lost? Can Faye control Belle with it?

Red Hurting Sun & Dream Game sound like such painful but also intense(good) chapters! And Faye seems like the most complex and evil character while also being hurt and having her reasons if that makes sense????? Anyway ily your shadowblogging bye <3

GOOD EVENING ANON DEAREST I CAN FINALLY ANSWER THIS !!!!!!! PRAY THAT MY WRIST HOLDS OUT

uh so. the tracker is important. the tracker is like /the most important/ as far as central plot mechanics are concerned and the last time i did a comprehensive writeup on it this happened.....

(with the other writing linked in that document full length is closer to 35k. rip) SO THIS ANSWER WILL BE ABRIDGED for all our sakes.

the tracker is what pulls every single book together, even if it features in some more prominently (nerice, dream game) than the others. by the time it concerns belle, it has long ceased its original function. the first time it turns up is back on nerice, where eliada helps the warlords build a tracker for reina bc he himself is also sulking that she keeps refusing 2 talk to him. bitch behavior <3 tldr is that the swords of a tracker (the person, that eliada is) are the only thing able to pierce a true ruler's skin (a/s mechanics, dw abt it) and so thru him they're able to engenieer a mechanical dragonfly that upon contact, burrows under the skin of reina's wrist (if you ever wondered where her scar comes from... :^)) this is also what, ultimately, causes her to split her soul in an attempt to get rid of it, which causes the moons to break and kickstarts the entire fucking verse saga. with the end of her world, the tracker becomes inert but reina keeps it for unwise sentimentality reasons (hands u meme abt it) w

in old plot, eliada petitioned to get his hands on it during one of their roa deals (bonus points bc jumie wld be around for that trade, even if eliada n reina only euphemistically talk abt it as 'the dragonfly' and she'd only see a small box change hands) but lately i've been more inclined to move that event into lhnh where reina, from her end, volunteers the tracker to make eliada talk abt the soulless (gray) bc it makes slightly more sense thematically for her to refuse all his trades until then. either way, the tracker is back in eliada's hands by the end of the azra war era.

bc the tracker was not simply tracking reina. eliada's entire quest is abt understanding the precise workings of true rulers, so, given the opportunity, he made the tracker also collect,, not quite her blood? smth more vague and metaphysical, refined through an inner process into something more, something more essential. [true ruler essence] for the sake of meta terminology. he cannot actually do anything with it in his current position but plans on analyzing it and comparing it to true rulers of a/s once he returns home. which is the entire problem bc he is stuck as long as the verse is broken [PLAYED URSELF. <3] which brings us to. him & faye thinking long and hard forever abt how to fix the moons so they can both go home. yippee

which is ofc how we get to belle. how we get to the entire daughter con situation (skipping over many messy timelines that preceded arriving at this final, working solution) which, in tldr terms, is this:

a vessel whose soul is the tracker. whose very existence is linked the essence of reina before the split, before the fall, an essence from before the moon core broke. an artificial child, created for the sole purpose of burning this essence back into the moon core and thereby repair it. so you have belle, who thinks herself a descendant, but really is just a dead dragonfly with true ruler dna walking. faye connects her to the moon core by forcing her to swallow the eternal souls (chess's eyes that gray so generously removed once upon a time. <3 wld say the only good deed he has ever done but this shit was part of what broke the entire machine in the first place, it just happens to conveniently hand faye a way to also put it back together) and really all that is left to do then is set belle on fire via angel theory & fuse her existence into the moon core. make her the conduit through which the entire machinery can begin to work as intended again. just that 7000/10 times belle breaks under the strain, the weight of the universe, leaving faye to do it all over again bc the theory is solid. it's the daughter that's wrong :^)