( it's an uncomfortable feeling, drifting slightly. everything around her in unfamiliar, a place she's neither read of nor recognises. but that somehow doesn't manage to be the worst of it. she's alone. and disconnected. oh, moiraine can still feel her power there, can feel it at the edge of her fingertips but unable to call it, to hold it within her? it's the most terrifying thing that she's felt since she first discovered that she could channel.
it ends up becoming somewhat of a focus, first finding a quieter place to sit that's away from anyone else, trying to do the simplest of weaves that moiraine can think of.
but none of it works. she can't even grasp the source never mind form the weaves themselves. and even though moiraine sits in the dirt for a while... nothing happens. leading only to frustration, a little downfall in her expression. and her head resting in her hands.
she didn't have lan, wouldn't be able to find him and then the two rivers youths, the dragon-- )
( Steeped tea, bathing waters, and fistfuls of blanched rice — these dregs of hospitality even beggars know to offer, but Lan Wangji comes lesser and wronged, hands gristled to white knuckles and barely a cup of hot water to spare her. His bones still clutch and breathe, a syncopated whisper of trembling; farther, away, the whorl of the beacon's strength coils and coagulates and slows, like a sea storm uncertain of itself.
There is a nameless, animal quality to the breath-bated wait, like burrowing. No footsteps, only the slack and distant drift of the crowd, sundered from its spectacle. The great, ruined belly of the urban beast spills and spoils in petty tangles of road-intestines. Lan Wangji wonders if he should intercede for the gateway's mercy kill, or let it bleed out. What use? He has no say.
Power billows and curdles, scratches air like steel nails and stoked the hard, unflinched beat that has danced his temples for the past shi's wait. He breathes. Grits his teeth. Waits out the aches. Stone walls strain and groan under a sky vast and greyed like the toothless mouth of a road-side crone, mourning her children, and how they passed them, trotting and trampling to war, how they sold their near and dear for shallow-water glory. He was young then, they were all young then. How their fists came bloodied and emptied, and he is sickly, he knows, contorted and deranged and unstitched from himself, if he wanders streets like a famine, lost to campaigns of sunsets long gone by.
He stumbles on the woman — upon and nearly into her, step uncertain — more than he encounters her. He has forgotten, for a moment, that the face of their failure now wears the marks of atrocity and theft: they did not merely fault their escape. They abducted innocents. Whatever migraine his head houses now is careless, earned. He slips, white silks shrouding debris, on the crumbled rim of a dried-out spring fountain. Saves the landing, at the last moment, from collapse into artless sit.
Then he offers the woman — a pale face, barely glimpsed when she broke through the beacon's veil — the cup of water he'd intended for himself. As solace goes, a poor showing. We stole you, we may as well nurse you. )
Apologies. ( That we have you. That you do not have yourself. ) You require a pail?
( For her stomach, should the journey have brought sickness. In truth, they know nothing of what the transport entails, only that the sorcery of wakening the beacon alone soured Lan Wangji's stomach. If he must move to accommodate her...
( she manages to offer him a smile in return, though it's one that speaks more of politeness than truth, an appreciation of his gesture than anything else )
That's kind of you but not necessary.
( the cup she does accept though, lifting her head properly, letting it sit in her hands for the moment )
I just needed a minute for everything I've heard.
( given that outside of her ring or power there's no way to visually identify and aes sedai she keeps quiet about what she'd really been doing, about the lacking of her power. that she wants to figure out more first. or accept, silently )
( A moment, he suspects, for the truths of her arrival. Half a shi for those of her body. To be the subject of foreign sorcery is a difficult invasion, violating, skin-cutting. He feels the whip and scratch of absent hands and nails with each breath. Perhaps one devoid of sensitivity to magic and thrall suffers lesser hurts. He doubts. Ever doubts.
But does not ask. Sews his lips shut, dry and tepid, and waits out the next wave of his temples' aches, as if it is the new year visit of a particularly gregarious, thrice-removed relation. An uncle, perhaps, given to drink. Large families never lack for their occasion. And it occupies him enough, the brief exercise of constructing this fictional relative — which branch of the family might have born him, how the main family would have shuddered and shooed him, on what part of the Cloud Recesses' estate they might have paid off his time in generous, regal seclusion — that he nearly deflects the sore pangs of his migraine.
She speaks, he knows before he understands he has shuttered his eyes again. Blinks them sharp and open, and turns: )
They will yoke you to their obligations. ( To flee east. To fall under command, to obey. His mouth fractures into a grimace, gelid. ) You have none.
( The hour is long passed that each arrival should decide their own fate, before others name that deed done. )
( though that's really the crux of it, whether they have a choice. she already has a mission, something world-shatteringly important and whilst she really isn't above helping people when they need it this is something she needs to do, needs to find a way back to. if she can.
but then again moiraine also things that she can't help, powerless as she currently is. she does have skills and talents, her time in the sun palace and white tower taught her many things but it's also been a long time since she's broken herself down to do something else. since she's had something other than her mission and simple... stopped )
They declare an interest. ( Vested, political. Worn, ostensibly, on their sleeves, as if shamefulness enhances and does not wound the cheek of sincerity. As if it is the way of honourable men and not tyrants to set out the course of navigation and suffer no estrangement from it, to broker no alternative. ) That we should travel east.
( Ever hidden, infiltrating like stray cats and vermin. How different are they from graveyard creatures? Swarmed shells and fresh chrysalides dusting Lan Wangji's fingertips. Birds of prey roil and circle the skies, their cries long. Men died here.
Men and brothers and fathers died of their own hand, however indirectly. )
They weaponise our presence to their advantage, intermittently.
( Ash licks the cavern of his mouth, hailed over his hair earlier. A city burned, and the breath of revolution stoked under clever, yet anonymous designs. He knows only this: they are pawns in a game long, their benefactor's magnanimity uncertain.
East, further from our own homes and this so-named beacon that we arrived through. Unless they failed to mention that there's another east of here.
( but that sounds like a promise that moiraine herself has made before, vague directions and half-answers that lead somewhere she wants without ever telling the truth of the matter. words that work for an aes sedai but ones that also make them suspicious )
I haven't heard what east may hold-- but I barely even know the name of this place.
( Though whether their awakening will prove as precipitous as that of the current gateway, no man will speak or pledge. It scratches his tongue, the inside of his mouth, like gravel — bleeds him, in gushes and rivulets, and the air is salted and cloyed with thick incense of lily to mask slaughter. It singes his wounds.
What will become of them, should the next refuge turn on them like a hungering animal? Should its beacon, too, fail?
Nomads, fatherless, their fortunes bound on a short string. They have tinkered with that which was not their own to meddle in, for ignorance, or sport, or misapplied fair intentions. )
They called this Taravast. ( A pause, gravel upturning under his shoe. Part and splinter of old bone, bird-picked. ) Calamity has struck. The name should be changed.
( To invite a better fate, a kinder rule, an end to fresh and festering disaster. Whatever protection that rites and superstition may yet grant, Taravast weeps for it, beggarly. Poorly enough they intend to flee the citadel like cravens, offering no resolution, leaving only the man who failed once to defend his people, to claim the throne again. )
Names often do change after calamities, though most don't. Stories are made from them, histories spun and people rising in the wake of what was left.
( it doesn't make any calamity that happened better but moiraine speaks as if she's seen this kind of thing before. really, she's read about it more, knows the stories but she has seen disasters strike and the strength people can have )
Whatever happened to them-- some help would not be terrible, rebuilding or finding a path out.
( Reconstruction, discovery. Mouth soft, her strength frail, mere moments ago born unto this world from her travels, yet this woman speaks tattered truths that the veterans of their contingent blind ignore wilfully. They owe. Their intervention, due or haphazard, was folly.
They have glutted themselves on the agony of a city left crumbed and bare at their feet, and how do they abandon it? Their tails meek and heads bowed, widowed of success but consorted to vainglory. )
We should not flee. ( As cravens do. As thieves in the night. Click-clack of his heels on fissured tile. Restlessness commands him up, raised, active. He fights it, fights himself, fingers broken in fists tightened like wet knots. Lingers down.
...this woman has earned better than this, his sickly teachings. She will learn her own mind; better he should not infect it. ) Apologies. I speak to excess.
( moiraine shifts in show she's sat, elbow resting on her knee, letting her head rest against her hand, curiosity in her expression. she's very familiar with people that say a lot when they say little but less so for those that apologise for it )
You've been here longer than I, seen what has happened to these people. You're in a better place than me to know what should be done.
( Excess is a relative feat, wealth past the possibility of use and spend. Men love their voices too well, the reassurance that their thoughts hold water and weight, for their were heard spoken. Gusu Lan contrives defence against that arrogance — discipline, and Lan Wangji nods with her question. He spoke past measure.
Shifting, the woman appears to have eased, if not healed. Perhaps what struck her was a sickness of motion. He remembers the fevers that assailed him on arrival, the spearing aches of joints and how his mind unravelled, and the deathly, rotten cold of jutting stone piercing his hands and feet in the salt mines. They suffered no kindness in that travel. He doubts she was treated more gently. )
You ask my wisdom before my name. ( His experience, his instinct. ) I accept yours.
( maybe she should have gone with names first, though their conversation had been polite and she'd been curious -- interested. and moiraine still was, how else could she know anything about this place without asking the guidance and experience of others? )
( Moiraine. A strange affliction of a name, light on the tongue. He murmurs it mutely, as if it might galvanise him to learn it, as if the look of her who wears it is somehow insufficient.
Her price paid, the knowledge earned. How long have they whiled here? Mere days, and we have upturned the world. Perhaps there is yet pity in it, that he is king over ash and debris and dying birds, but not over a frozen citadel succumbed to the dead again. Perhaps they have improved the fever of their progress, leaving the living behind. )
Months, uncounted. ( And why? He hesitates, silence oily and seeping, disgusting in its cowardice. Excuses. ) Sickness and disaster distorted timekeeping. ( Not enough. ) We proved negligent.
( Subject to poison and assaults they could not deflect, and every manner of dubious offensive they should, by right, have predicted by now. )
( it's not an excuse but a sympathy. even in their own worlds so many could wish to act and be unable to or would fail to act as it was. here... they don't know enough )
If disaster happens, if you try to help it's more than they would have had.
( He hears her, listens. Would laugh, but he cannot condescend a woman who has surrendered the dregs of her compassion, freely, errantly given. Perhaps she too makes attempt to help.
But the ash in Taravast's sunset skies thickens, minutely ground and pale like mid-winter snow, when the cold beggars it of transparency. All around Lan Wangji, freedom burns, the ruling conclave, the city itself — poetry and metaphor and letter. )
We are not children, to pretend at false gains. ( To whisper to themselves, to ease their own sleep, that attempts have the weight of successes. ) We are not so vain.
[Seeing people come through the beacon is a new experience for most. Most of the time when new people arrive, they just appear out of nowhere with no memory of how they arrived. Allison herself woke up in a mountain cavern full of harpies.
Seeing someone just come through the beacon is something else. After checking on those who were returning, she makes her way over to one of the new faces, crouching down to meet her eyes.]
( she offers the woman a smile though it's in gesture more than anything, a smile without real heart behind it. not when she feels cut off, not in a place unknown to her )
I have questions if you're willing to answer them.
( had there been another beacon or had she travelled from somewhere. was this her world? she hadn't yet spoken to any other than the woman that had greeted her to answer any questions )
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► first thought
it ends up becoming somewhat of a focus, first finding a quieter place to sit that's away from anyone else, trying to do the simplest of weaves that moiraine can think of.
but none of it works. she can't even grasp the source never mind form the weaves themselves. and even though moiraine sits in the dirt for a while... nothing happens. leading only to frustration, a little downfall in her expression. and her head resting in her hands.
she didn't have lan, wouldn't be able to find him and then the two rivers youths, the dragon-- )
no subject
There is a nameless, animal quality to the breath-bated wait, like burrowing. No footsteps, only the slack and distant drift of the crowd, sundered from its spectacle. The great, ruined belly of the urban beast spills and spoils in petty tangles of road-intestines. Lan Wangji wonders if he should intercede for the gateway's mercy kill, or let it bleed out. What use? He has no say.
Power billows and curdles, scratches air like steel nails and stoked the hard, unflinched beat that has danced his temples for the past shi's wait. He breathes. Grits his teeth. Waits out the aches. Stone walls strain and groan under a sky vast and greyed like the toothless mouth of a road-side crone, mourning her children, and how they passed them, trotting and trampling to war, how they sold their near and dear for shallow-water glory. He was young then, they were all young then. How their fists came bloodied and emptied, and he is sickly, he knows, contorted and deranged and unstitched from himself, if he wanders streets like a famine, lost to campaigns of sunsets long gone by.
He stumbles on the woman — upon and nearly into her, step uncertain — more than he encounters her. He has forgotten, for a moment, that the face of their failure now wears the marks of atrocity and theft: they did not merely fault their escape. They abducted innocents. Whatever migraine his head houses now is careless, earned. He slips, white silks shrouding debris, on the crumbled rim of a dried-out spring fountain. Saves the landing, at the last moment, from collapse into artless sit.
Then he offers the woman — a pale face, barely glimpsed when she broke through the beacon's veil — the cup of water he'd intended for himself. As solace goes, a poor showing. We stole you, we may as well nurse you. )
Apologies. ( That we have you. That you do not have yourself. ) You require a pail?
( For her stomach, should the journey have brought sickness. In truth, they know nothing of what the transport entails, only that the sorcery of wakening the beacon alone soured Lan Wangji's stomach. If he must move to accommodate her...
...there are worse fates in this life, but few. )
no subject
That's kind of you but not necessary.
( the cup she does accept though, lifting her head properly, letting it sit in her hands for the moment )
I just needed a minute for everything I've heard.
( given that outside of her ring or power there's no way to visually identify and aes sedai she keeps quiet about what she'd really been doing, about the lacking of her power. that she wants to figure out more first. or accept, silently )
no subject
breath. Perhaps one devoid of sensitivity to magic and thrall suffers lesser hurts. He doubts. Ever doubts.
But does not ask. Sews his lips shut, dry and tepid, and waits out the next wave of his temples' aches, as if it is the new year visit of a particularly gregarious, thrice-removed relation. An uncle, perhaps, given to drink. Large families never lack for their occasion. And it occupies him enough, the brief exercise of constructing this fictional relative — which branch of the family might have born him, how the main family would have shuddered and shooed him, on what part of the Cloud Recesses' estate they might have paid off his time in generous, regal seclusion — that he nearly deflects the sore pangs of his migraine.
She speaks, he knows before he understands he has shuttered his eyes again. Blinks them sharp and open, and turns: )
They will yoke you to their obligations. ( To flee east. To fall under command, to obey. His mouth fractures into a grimace, gelid. ) You have none.
( The hour is long passed that each arrival should decide their own fate, before others name that deed done. )
no subject
( though that's really the crux of it, whether they have a choice. she already has a mission, something world-shatteringly important and whilst she really isn't above helping people when they need it this is something she needs to do, needs to find a way back to. if she can.
but then again moiraine also things that she can't help, powerless as she currently is. she does have skills and talents, her time in the sun palace and white tower taught her many things but it's also been a long time since she's broken herself down to do something else. since she's had something other than her mission and simple... stopped )
no subject
( Ever hidden, infiltrating like stray cats and vermin. How different are they from graveyard creatures? Swarmed shells and fresh chrysalides dusting Lan Wangji's fingertips. Birds of prey roil and circle the skies, their cries long. Men died here.
Men and brothers and fathers died of their own hand, however indirectly. )
They weaponise our presence to their advantage, intermittently.
( Ash licks the cavern of his mouth, hailed over his hair earlier. A city burned, and the breath of revolution stoked under clever, yet anonymous designs. He knows only this: they are pawns in a game long, their benefactor's magnanimity uncertain.
Their options, yet so. )
no subject
( but that sounds like a promise that moiraine herself has made before, vague directions and half-answers that lead somewhere she wants without ever telling the truth of the matter. words that work for an aes sedai but ones that also make them suspicious )
I haven't heard what east may hold-- but I barely even know the name of this place.
no subject
( Though whether their awakening will prove as precipitous as that of the current gateway, no man will speak or pledge. It scratches his tongue, the inside of his mouth, like gravel — bleeds him, in gushes and rivulets, and the air is salted and cloyed with thick incense of lily to mask slaughter. It singes his wounds.
What will become of them, should the next refuge turn on them like a hungering animal? Should its beacon, too, fail?
Nomads, fatherless, their fortunes bound on a short string. They have tinkered with that which was not their own to meddle in, for ignorance, or sport, or misapplied fair intentions. )
They called this Taravast. ( A pause, gravel upturning under his shoe. Part and splinter of old bone, bird-picked. ) Calamity has struck. The name should be changed.
( To invite a better fate, a kinder rule, an end to fresh and festering disaster. Whatever protection that rites and superstition may yet grant, Taravast weeps for it, beggarly. Poorly enough they intend to flee the citadel like cravens, offering no resolution, leaving only the man who failed once to defend his people, to claim the throne again. )
no subject
( it doesn't make any calamity that happened better but moiraine speaks as if she's seen this kind of thing before. really, she's read about it more, knows the stories but she has seen disasters strike and the strength people can have )
Whatever happened to them-- some help would not be terrible, rebuilding or finding a path out.
no subject
They have glutted themselves on the agony of a city left crumbed and bare at their feet, and how do they abandon it? Their tails meek and heads bowed, widowed of success but consorted to vainglory. )
We should not flee. ( As cravens do. As thieves in the night. Click-clack of his heels on fissured tile. Restlessness commands him up, raised, active. He fights it, fights himself, fingers broken in fists tightened like wet knots. Lingers down.
...this woman has earned better than this, his sickly teachings. She will learn her own mind; better he should not infect it. ) Apologies. I speak to excess.
no subject
( moiraine shifts in show she's sat, elbow resting on her knee, letting her head rest against her hand, curiosity in her expression. she's very familiar with people that say a lot when they say little but less so for those that apologise for it )
You've been here longer than I, seen what has happened to these people. You're in a better place than me to know what should be done.
no subject
Shifting, the woman appears to have eased, if not healed. Perhaps what struck her was a sickness of motion. He remembers the fevers that assailed him on arrival, the spearing aches of joints and how his mind unravelled, and the deathly, rotten cold of jutting stone piercing his hands and feet in the salt mines. They suffered no kindness in that travel. He doubts she was treated more gently. )
You ask my wisdom before my name. ( His experience, his instinct. ) I accept yours.
( Some might even say, he asks it. )
no subject
( maybe she should have gone with names first, though their conversation had been polite and she'd been curious -- interested. and moiraine still was, how else could she know anything about this place without asking the guidance and experience of others? )
How long have you been in Taravast?
no subject
Her price paid, the knowledge earned. How long have they whiled here? Mere days, and we have upturned the world. Perhaps there is yet pity in it, that he is king over ash and debris and dying birds, but not over a frozen citadel succumbed to the dead again. Perhaps they have improved the fever of their progress, leaving the living behind. )
Months, uncounted. ( And why? He hesitates, silence oily and seeping, disgusting in its cowardice. Excuses. ) Sickness and disaster distorted timekeeping. ( Not enough. ) We proved negligent.
( Subject to poison and assaults they could not deflect, and every manner of dubious offensive they should, by right, have predicted by now. )
no subject
( it's not an excuse but a sympathy. even in their own worlds so many could wish to act and be unable to or would fail to act as it was. here... they don't know enough )
If disaster happens, if you try to help it's more than they would have had.
no subject
But the ash in Taravast's sunset skies thickens, minutely ground and pale like mid-winter snow, when the cold beggars it of transparency. All around Lan Wangji, freedom burns, the ruling conclave, the city itself — poetry and metaphor and letter. )
We are not children, to pretend at false gains. ( To whisper to themselves, to ease their own sleep, that attempts have the weight of successes. ) We are not so vain.
no subject
Seeing someone just come through the beacon is something else. After checking on those who were returning, she makes her way over to one of the new faces, crouching down to meet her eyes.]
Are you okay? You're not injured are you?
no subject
No.
( she sighs slightly, trying to shift her thoughts, to bring herself back into this moment )
Surprised, really.
no subject
[Arriving in this place tends to come with a lot of surprise, and not enough answers.]
I'm Allison. Is there anything I can answer for you?
no subject
( she offers the woman a smile though it's in gesture more than anything, a smile without real heart behind it. not when she feels cut off, not in a place unknown to her )
I have questions if you're willing to answer them.
no subject
[It's what she can do, in the face of everything else.]
I can't promise I'll know the answers, but I can try.
no subject
( had there been another beacon or had she travelled from somewhere. was this her world? she hadn't yet spoken to any other than the woman that had greeted her to answer any questions )
no subject
[So not as dramatic as Moiraine's arrival, but also featuring a lot less answers.]