12-08-2016, 10:02 AM
Angles. Windows. Steps. The beat of hooves. The pace of forms. The logic in an equation. All orderly; all predictable. All reliable. All stable. For that, they were soothing. Softer than any hand on his shoulder. More grounding than the most confident of eyes. They could transform the fiercest chaos into a cocoon of peace. And that was where he needed to hide. In peace. And not for the first time did Jai appreciate the humor that his only addiction beat in anthesis to such an obsession for calm fueling his life. Saidin was not exactly a soothing essence. But a maelstorm once entered, it was hard to care.
Black infinity stretched tight as skin overhead. It was so..unpredictable. Angles in their tangible dimension were everywhere. Crafted by the hand of men today or born in the long shadow of the taint’s initial curse an Age ago. Up there, the world was lifeless. Flat. Random. Given any horizon, and Jai would find the marks. Every time. The charred studs of an abandoned building read an alphabet uncovered by fallen walls to his eyes. The symmetry in flagstones created glyphs around a fountain under his boots; but this was not the first night frustration rained from above. Making a mockery out of attempts toward order. A few minutes memorizing squares of light cast an enormous grid across his eyes, geometry spidered long spokes like like the heavens connected points pinned down with string on a terrain map. Only to return to the first point and their interpretor found everything shifted. The keystone star had changed in intensity. Dustings of new lights imperceptible before flared disruptions to his map. Suddenly the strings across the sky would snap as though the map were warped unrecognizable. He had only to scrap the old system and begin again but hours later find the same result. Every time. All the way to sunrise. Every single time he tried.
He knew what he was doing while he did it. He sacrificed many a tight back when exchanging a cot for the ground to delay the horrors wakened in men's sleep. He regretably scratched at the scrub of growth the next morning when insect bites made an overnight meal of his face. All just to lay under that grid and attempt pattern building all night. It never worked. The endless piles of ashes from burnt sketches could attest the same frustration. Their world was a neater story.
He listened to Nythadri’s steady breaths fill the gap between the sounds of water pushing onto the sandy slope and the farer crash of breaks in the distance. The wind seemed duller now, or perhaps Jai had stopped listening for it. He just laid there in the quiet, lidding the memory of any other noise from intruding on their moment. He was not aware of how long the awkward lack of response lingered in the air between them, but he didn’t take it as a good sign.
Regret started to worm its way in. The thought skidding a bare back over gravel. She must agree: one man was not worth so much a cost. The math was pretty straight forward; he didn't blame her.
He knew his own responsibility. Quite clearly. He knew a man could be brought back from the clutches of death if he had the will to hang on. He knew the length of his recovery was exponentiated by guilt. That while every little progress toward strength as one recovering soldier of the Light thumbed the Dark One a curse but also broke free another tear for someone grieving the dead back home. He was a mathematician. Not a soldier. Certainly not whatever he was now: some amalgamation of an asha’man’s penchant for gore and the glue holding together the middle-man world of espionage. But absurdly, that’s exactly what he was. At least Tar Valon was spared one embarrassing recruit; he would have made a fantastically terrible Guard.
He didn’t blame Nythadri her silence, but neither did he seek it out. It was better than knowing what she saw now. Lids slid down. Closed it all off: the capricious geometry he grappled to control, the waiting for a reaction from the unreadable creature beside him. Instead, the Oneness welcomed him in. The sand under his back lost its itch. The shoulder slowly numbed. The flame absorbed the rest and he lingered on the decision of going to sleep.
Only to be pulled back by a touch on his hand. This time, he followed, roles reversed. Shock rippled outside the dark cavern he’d wandered into. Almost as strong as the surge of saidin, and almost as provoking. Control, hard-won during those crushing, early days in training wizened the decision to not seize it now. But he was tempted in a decidedly more dangerous way than to use it for enhancing more advantageous effects. Practice and strength determined his kind’s final rank, but it was demonstrating control that won the footrace toward the pins in the first place. And Soldier Kojima got there fast. He drew on that discipline.
He didn’t move but to roll his face toward hers and slowly, mirroring the movements of her hand, forged an exploration of his own. His wrist lifted first, then the rest of his arm. Pivoting where the elbow perched in the sandy cushions beneath. It was mindless movements. Automatic from inside the Oneness, where he watched their fingers mingle and interlace like the sensations surged toward another body than his own. Rhythmic, but charming in the seduction of mindlessly going along with it. Was this truly the same hand he’d pulled down here however long ago that was? Her slender wrist was mostly obscured by his own, but the milky smooth skin contrasted so firmly with the dormant calluses woven around her fingers, he knew their implications beyond what music strings. He kept the observation to himself. His ignorance of White Tower training already showed itself once tonight, he was not keen to explore that hole any farther. But these were not a Lady’s hands. He certainly knew that much.
No. The trail ended at her ring. On her middle finger, lethargic and suspended as its living, stalking equivalent. His eyes landed on it eventually: the barrier that shielded their roles. Was it a cage for her? Or was the serpent the key out of a cage? Or was it the same as the pins were to him? Something to polish and obsess over as her last remaining symbol of identity. And all that it represented. No. Not a Lady. Something else. An Aes Sedai.
Or at least, she might as well be. He never really thought of it that way before, but suddenly recalled yesterday's thought . Aes Sedai weren’t women: Fate’s amusing laughter trickled around the edges of the Oneness. They were something else.
He found the pins fall the collar under their own weight again.
“Do you want to know a secret, Jai?”
Attention effectively won; he settled on her eyes for the first time since he’d broken away. And braced for what he'd find there.
The void kept him unreactive to her story. Expression making up the intensity that was absent from hers. So chillingly blank for one who watched their life fall out from under them in what should be the most promising of ages. He appreciated her position, though. Being only a few years older himself when he was moved south overnight. He also appreciated what it meant to walk a long path toward a dark ending. He wondered if her extraordinary pale eyes was an eternal gift of those days before her Healing. If they’d ever been another color. At least he assumed she was Healed. That she wasn’t still walking into that fateful hole. He couldn't help but search her eyes as she had his scar, but likewise, did not ask about it.
So many more questions arose. But suddenly. As her story took a cold and brutal turn, her dispassion made sense. He imagined she must have screamed for mercy. Unless the attackers worked her over as well. Then she likely begged for her own. Or perhaps they exacted a crueler penalty in the same essence of retribution as they gave her brother. Only they left her alive afterward.
Just looking at her, and he had nothing to say. Except to notice the hell of memory blanking her face white as stiff parchment. The ghost flew by, fingering its clammy hands at her face, catching its boney knots in her hair, enticing her to join it on the other side. She must hear its song. Sick and seductive; as he heard his own. She must know the taste of guilt for living when she’d led another to his grave. Did the howl of it fill her music with its forelorn haunts. It must; guilt was a heavy burden on so frail a shoulder. Wealthy Lords of any House never so much as pissed without their men around them, but to stalk toward disreputable streets to follow a beloved sister. He likely forbade their accompaniment to protect her honor. Or took his most trusted companion. And what could one or two do against a group of hired professionals sitting on a payday?
He stifled the growing curl of surprise from his brow. Her tale was given indicidentally as a duty report. She didn't let herself feel it, even now. The shock of it parted his lips. How many times had he seen that same expression ghosting her with a mask? How often had he mistaken the pain of her reality for the mystery of a playful taunt. Light! He had no idea. Whatever she held back now, he had the impression this ghost was her only one. Or maybe it was hopeful wishing that her soul not be so plagued with multiples. Still. A powerful, singular entity might be harder to handle than an army of faceless ones.
Tomorrow, he would remember how emotion coarsed his veins after simply deciding to switch from merely thinking about it. And just feel it. Tomorrow, he'd likely regret shattering the walls of the void he walls like sand through his fingers. But for now, he pulled her close with both arms, splaying his free hand gently through her damp hair. Then, without letting go, he flexed enough to sit up and press his cheek to her forehead. This was emotion. This was peace. Why had he never realized it before?
He gathered her in, shocked yet again at the stark, cold glass echoing from her blank voice against the warm gesture of her cheek nestling affection on his shoulder. Finding silent solace in one another. The heavy cloak of her mystery was frustratingly hard to lift, but he liked the difficulty in solving her. When he stroked her cheek with the back of his hand he felt like he stroked the very stars he couldn't pattern had gathered on his chest. Her breathing rose even and steady against his and he fingered her hair from her forehead, trailing down to tuck behind one ear. Lingering the stroke of fingers in the same place his lips had explored like he knew this would be the last time. He could feel his own heart pulse under her arm which draped over it. Every moment now so much slower than it had been in the water. Where anticipation building from a lifetime of foreplay without a face funneled both toward raw release. When hands explored one another as the passing seconds etched acid into the raw steel of their control, but at the time he hadn't cared. He remembered the flood of a chest trapped tight with fury when events collided right in front of his eyes on the hunt. He remembered when it beat out of control that morning and surged to a stop the moment he met her. He’d dropped his hand instinctively for that. Light, what a bloody fool.
He rested his hand across hers with the swelling hope she could not tell by touch alone what stormed outside the black walls of the void, distant and foreign as those stars above. Her fingers curled under his, narrow and elegant as arrows. He pressed them into his chest. Hoping to selfishly block out the intensifying pounding within. His throat treatened to go dry. The shards of released void shook, but in the strong vice of his grip, feebly lost the engagement.
Talk of Daryen slammed the vice on his jaw. Pulled the harness of tension between his eyes. Balled his fist across Nythadri's delicate hand. For a moment, the narrow bones inside her flesh curled down like the pages of a ledger until he knew nothing but anger damned the book from slamming all the way shut. Saidin blasted at the door just to hear his comrade's name, then kicked back at the reminder of brotherhood. Jai's eyes darted across the stars overhead as he had Daryen's face when he'd wrenched him from the ground after having nearly rent an innocent man inside out. Then shot fast to Nythadri upon her hinting at rumors.
Blood and bloody ashes. Was there anything left in Arad Doman that everyone didn't already know?
She hadn't missed a breath. He released his.
"No."
He mouthed the whisper of his shock. "I hadn't wondered."
Then absorbed the rest of her logic. Unsure of what to do with the information.
He mirrored her half stirring by flexing halfway to sitting himself. The question inked plain in his eyes. How the hell did she know all this?
"Suaya cast one of the votes that elected him. Why ruin him now? At their most prosperous. Their most.. peaceful?"
He grit his teeth on that last word, tasting the crimson price it took to win their peace. "What is there to do Nythadri?"
He pushed her away to sit up. Sudden as the call to attention as he searched her tousled outline for guidance. Which his smoothing hand did little to improve. Which was not so bad a thing.
"I don't think there's anything left to do."
He laughed at the deep resevoir of feeling sloshing underneath. At being so hurt. "I left, but we know how that worked out."
He attempted a grin. It soon faded with a shrug. "I begged him."
After having tried everything else.
However they held onto one another, he let go of Nythadri's hand with one lingering stroke between allies before turning away to scrub the tension from his hair. A hard-fought attempt at seeming playful finally lifted him back up.
"Blood and ashes. I don't particularly look forward to dying Nythadri, but i'd take an axe down the back any day over suffocating in a field of games."
He dug heels into the sand, perched both arms across the table created by his knees, and let his forehead rest there. Despite the rumors, he had little actual power. Under ranked and assigned to a post he wouldn't abandon twice. One on one he could see the moves. Nisele's, Fate's, the merchant's daughter; but standing before a broader window revealed nothing but shapes moving in the fog.
"You ever see one? A Damane, that is. You know she'll beg for mercy for the hand that beats her before even her own?"
The situation simplified his reasoning with the obvious. "If they had them, which they probably do, they'd slap a collar on Daryen's neck as fast as they would yours. I won't see it happen. I don't particularly like the idea of being broken like a dog and enslaved for however long we all will be around. He has to see reason eventually, right?"
Resolve settled; managed to pluck a grin from his gut. "I'll think of something."
Then the blow of epiphany might as well struck him dead. "Light.. That's it."
The fog started to burn away. And a shape took form, bowed down as a cowering dog to its owner. "He means to use the seanchan to clear us out. Prosperity for him. Imprisonment for Daryen. And Suaya's hands are clean." The face in the fog was his own. Jai felt like throwing up.
The fury of why burned the acid back down his throat.
Black infinity stretched tight as skin overhead. It was so..unpredictable. Angles in their tangible dimension were everywhere. Crafted by the hand of men today or born in the long shadow of the taint’s initial curse an Age ago. Up there, the world was lifeless. Flat. Random. Given any horizon, and Jai would find the marks. Every time. The charred studs of an abandoned building read an alphabet uncovered by fallen walls to his eyes. The symmetry in flagstones created glyphs around a fountain under his boots; but this was not the first night frustration rained from above. Making a mockery out of attempts toward order. A few minutes memorizing squares of light cast an enormous grid across his eyes, geometry spidered long spokes like like the heavens connected points pinned down with string on a terrain map. Only to return to the first point and their interpretor found everything shifted. The keystone star had changed in intensity. Dustings of new lights imperceptible before flared disruptions to his map. Suddenly the strings across the sky would snap as though the map were warped unrecognizable. He had only to scrap the old system and begin again but hours later find the same result. Every time. All the way to sunrise. Every single time he tried.
He knew what he was doing while he did it. He sacrificed many a tight back when exchanging a cot for the ground to delay the horrors wakened in men's sleep. He regretably scratched at the scrub of growth the next morning when insect bites made an overnight meal of his face. All just to lay under that grid and attempt pattern building all night. It never worked. The endless piles of ashes from burnt sketches could attest the same frustration. Their world was a neater story.
He listened to Nythadri’s steady breaths fill the gap between the sounds of water pushing onto the sandy slope and the farer crash of breaks in the distance. The wind seemed duller now, or perhaps Jai had stopped listening for it. He just laid there in the quiet, lidding the memory of any other noise from intruding on their moment. He was not aware of how long the awkward lack of response lingered in the air between them, but he didn’t take it as a good sign.
Regret started to worm its way in. The thought skidding a bare back over gravel. She must agree: one man was not worth so much a cost. The math was pretty straight forward; he didn't blame her.
He knew his own responsibility. Quite clearly. He knew a man could be brought back from the clutches of death if he had the will to hang on. He knew the length of his recovery was exponentiated by guilt. That while every little progress toward strength as one recovering soldier of the Light thumbed the Dark One a curse but also broke free another tear for someone grieving the dead back home. He was a mathematician. Not a soldier. Certainly not whatever he was now: some amalgamation of an asha’man’s penchant for gore and the glue holding together the middle-man world of espionage. But absurdly, that’s exactly what he was. At least Tar Valon was spared one embarrassing recruit; he would have made a fantastically terrible Guard.
He didn’t blame Nythadri her silence, but neither did he seek it out. It was better than knowing what she saw now. Lids slid down. Closed it all off: the capricious geometry he grappled to control, the waiting for a reaction from the unreadable creature beside him. Instead, the Oneness welcomed him in. The sand under his back lost its itch. The shoulder slowly numbed. The flame absorbed the rest and he lingered on the decision of going to sleep.
Only to be pulled back by a touch on his hand. This time, he followed, roles reversed. Shock rippled outside the dark cavern he’d wandered into. Almost as strong as the surge of saidin, and almost as provoking. Control, hard-won during those crushing, early days in training wizened the decision to not seize it now. But he was tempted in a decidedly more dangerous way than to use it for enhancing more advantageous effects. Practice and strength determined his kind’s final rank, but it was demonstrating control that won the footrace toward the pins in the first place. And Soldier Kojima got there fast. He drew on that discipline.
He didn’t move but to roll his face toward hers and slowly, mirroring the movements of her hand, forged an exploration of his own. His wrist lifted first, then the rest of his arm. Pivoting where the elbow perched in the sandy cushions beneath. It was mindless movements. Automatic from inside the Oneness, where he watched their fingers mingle and interlace like the sensations surged toward another body than his own. Rhythmic, but charming in the seduction of mindlessly going along with it. Was this truly the same hand he’d pulled down here however long ago that was? Her slender wrist was mostly obscured by his own, but the milky smooth skin contrasted so firmly with the dormant calluses woven around her fingers, he knew their implications beyond what music strings. He kept the observation to himself. His ignorance of White Tower training already showed itself once tonight, he was not keen to explore that hole any farther. But these were not a Lady’s hands. He certainly knew that much.
No. The trail ended at her ring. On her middle finger, lethargic and suspended as its living, stalking equivalent. His eyes landed on it eventually: the barrier that shielded their roles. Was it a cage for her? Or was the serpent the key out of a cage? Or was it the same as the pins were to him? Something to polish and obsess over as her last remaining symbol of identity. And all that it represented. No. Not a Lady. Something else. An Aes Sedai.
Or at least, she might as well be. He never really thought of it that way before, but suddenly recalled yesterday's thought . Aes Sedai weren’t women: Fate’s amusing laughter trickled around the edges of the Oneness. They were something else.
He found the pins fall the collar under their own weight again.
“Do you want to know a secret, Jai?”
Attention effectively won; he settled on her eyes for the first time since he’d broken away. And braced for what he'd find there.
The void kept him unreactive to her story. Expression making up the intensity that was absent from hers. So chillingly blank for one who watched their life fall out from under them in what should be the most promising of ages. He appreciated her position, though. Being only a few years older himself when he was moved south overnight. He also appreciated what it meant to walk a long path toward a dark ending. He wondered if her extraordinary pale eyes was an eternal gift of those days before her Healing. If they’d ever been another color. At least he assumed she was Healed. That she wasn’t still walking into that fateful hole. He couldn't help but search her eyes as she had his scar, but likewise, did not ask about it.
So many more questions arose. But suddenly. As her story took a cold and brutal turn, her dispassion made sense. He imagined she must have screamed for mercy. Unless the attackers worked her over as well. Then she likely begged for her own. Or perhaps they exacted a crueler penalty in the same essence of retribution as they gave her brother. Only they left her alive afterward.
Just looking at her, and he had nothing to say. Except to notice the hell of memory blanking her face white as stiff parchment. The ghost flew by, fingering its clammy hands at her face, catching its boney knots in her hair, enticing her to join it on the other side. She must hear its song. Sick and seductive; as he heard his own. She must know the taste of guilt for living when she’d led another to his grave. Did the howl of it fill her music with its forelorn haunts. It must; guilt was a heavy burden on so frail a shoulder. Wealthy Lords of any House never so much as pissed without their men around them, but to stalk toward disreputable streets to follow a beloved sister. He likely forbade their accompaniment to protect her honor. Or took his most trusted companion. And what could one or two do against a group of hired professionals sitting on a payday?
He stifled the growing curl of surprise from his brow. Her tale was given indicidentally as a duty report. She didn't let herself feel it, even now. The shock of it parted his lips. How many times had he seen that same expression ghosting her with a mask? How often had he mistaken the pain of her reality for the mystery of a playful taunt. Light! He had no idea. Whatever she held back now, he had the impression this ghost was her only one. Or maybe it was hopeful wishing that her soul not be so plagued with multiples. Still. A powerful, singular entity might be harder to handle than an army of faceless ones.
Tomorrow, he would remember how emotion coarsed his veins after simply deciding to switch from merely thinking about it. And just feel it. Tomorrow, he'd likely regret shattering the walls of the void he walls like sand through his fingers. But for now, he pulled her close with both arms, splaying his free hand gently through her damp hair. Then, without letting go, he flexed enough to sit up and press his cheek to her forehead. This was emotion. This was peace. Why had he never realized it before?
He gathered her in, shocked yet again at the stark, cold glass echoing from her blank voice against the warm gesture of her cheek nestling affection on his shoulder. Finding silent solace in one another. The heavy cloak of her mystery was frustratingly hard to lift, but he liked the difficulty in solving her. When he stroked her cheek with the back of his hand he felt like he stroked the very stars he couldn't pattern had gathered on his chest. Her breathing rose even and steady against his and he fingered her hair from her forehead, trailing down to tuck behind one ear. Lingering the stroke of fingers in the same place his lips had explored like he knew this would be the last time. He could feel his own heart pulse under her arm which draped over it. Every moment now so much slower than it had been in the water. Where anticipation building from a lifetime of foreplay without a face funneled both toward raw release. When hands explored one another as the passing seconds etched acid into the raw steel of their control, but at the time he hadn't cared. He remembered the flood of a chest trapped tight with fury when events collided right in front of his eyes on the hunt. He remembered when it beat out of control that morning and surged to a stop the moment he met her. He’d dropped his hand instinctively for that. Light, what a bloody fool.
He rested his hand across hers with the swelling hope she could not tell by touch alone what stormed outside the black walls of the void, distant and foreign as those stars above. Her fingers curled under his, narrow and elegant as arrows. He pressed them into his chest. Hoping to selfishly block out the intensifying pounding within. His throat treatened to go dry. The shards of released void shook, but in the strong vice of his grip, feebly lost the engagement.
Talk of Daryen slammed the vice on his jaw. Pulled the harness of tension between his eyes. Balled his fist across Nythadri's delicate hand. For a moment, the narrow bones inside her flesh curled down like the pages of a ledger until he knew nothing but anger damned the book from slamming all the way shut. Saidin blasted at the door just to hear his comrade's name, then kicked back at the reminder of brotherhood. Jai's eyes darted across the stars overhead as he had Daryen's face when he'd wrenched him from the ground after having nearly rent an innocent man inside out. Then shot fast to Nythadri upon her hinting at rumors.
Blood and bloody ashes. Was there anything left in Arad Doman that everyone didn't already know?
She hadn't missed a breath. He released his.
"No."
He mouthed the whisper of his shock. "I hadn't wondered."
Then absorbed the rest of her logic. Unsure of what to do with the information.
He mirrored her half stirring by flexing halfway to sitting himself. The question inked plain in his eyes. How the hell did she know all this?
"Suaya cast one of the votes that elected him. Why ruin him now? At their most prosperous. Their most.. peaceful?"
He grit his teeth on that last word, tasting the crimson price it took to win their peace. "What is there to do Nythadri?"
He pushed her away to sit up. Sudden as the call to attention as he searched her tousled outline for guidance. Which his smoothing hand did little to improve. Which was not so bad a thing.
"I don't think there's anything left to do."
He laughed at the deep resevoir of feeling sloshing underneath. At being so hurt. "I left, but we know how that worked out."
He attempted a grin. It soon faded with a shrug. "I begged him."
After having tried everything else.
However they held onto one another, he let go of Nythadri's hand with one lingering stroke between allies before turning away to scrub the tension from his hair. A hard-fought attempt at seeming playful finally lifted him back up.
"Blood and ashes. I don't particularly look forward to dying Nythadri, but i'd take an axe down the back any day over suffocating in a field of games."
He dug heels into the sand, perched both arms across the table created by his knees, and let his forehead rest there. Despite the rumors, he had little actual power. Under ranked and assigned to a post he wouldn't abandon twice. One on one he could see the moves. Nisele's, Fate's, the merchant's daughter; but standing before a broader window revealed nothing but shapes moving in the fog.
"You ever see one? A Damane, that is. You know she'll beg for mercy for the hand that beats her before even her own?"
The situation simplified his reasoning with the obvious. "If they had them, which they probably do, they'd slap a collar on Daryen's neck as fast as they would yours. I won't see it happen. I don't particularly like the idea of being broken like a dog and enslaved for however long we all will be around. He has to see reason eventually, right?"
Resolve settled; managed to pluck a grin from his gut. "I'll think of something."
Then the blow of epiphany might as well struck him dead. "Light.. That's it."
The fog started to burn away. And a shape took form, bowed down as a cowering dog to its owner. "He means to use the seanchan to clear us out. Prosperity for him. Imprisonment for Daryen. And Suaya's hands are clean." The face in the fog was his own. Jai felt like throwing up.
The fury of why burned the acid back down his throat.
Only darkness shows you the light.