Hiding in Plain Sight

[Thalia]

Miraseia

She’d wedged herself between the crenellations, body squeezed tight, arms wrapped about her knees. The stone was still warmed, and no torchlight breached the heavy shadows, just a questing ripple of wind. It was a commonly sought perch when she disappeared in the night, and a route less frequented by guard patrols given the inhospitable cliffside the walls overlooked. Not that discovery was a fear to plague her; none would remember her if she did not choose it.

The sky was a dark and empty canvas above, the stars covered by cloud no matter how hard Mira peered for a particular one. Over her long years the world had reformed innumerable times around her; from the Tarandrelle’s foamy shores, to the vast halls of the White Tower, and yet that great vista of constellation always remained unchanged. She desired to spy the anchor of it, but it stayed elusive, leaving only the shuttered dark. Tonight Mira was reluctant to sleep. Pressure built like a promise behind her eyes, and she was wary of the tells in herself. She’d startled awake frequently of late; filled with a panic she could not explain, and which lingered long after the frenetic scribbling had stopped. The first premonition she had ever had, unknowingly so at the time, had occurred decades before fruition revealed it as such, so she could not say it meant anything imminent. Only that it disturbed her.

And Mira had good reason to fear. It wasn’t chance that brought them to this particular fort all those years ago. Whether Val truly believed she'd never asked, nor wanted to know, but she'd never had a name for the face until he told it.

Mira never repeated it; not even in her own thoughts, as though it might be akin to a summoning.

She’d long ago found a room in one of the neglected towers to stuff the papers she did not destroy. They were not hidden so much as she simply did not want to look upon the images of the man that haunted her, yet could neither abide watching it curl into flame and smoke in the forge or the hearth, like most else. Mira did not value isolation, but like as not the tower room was where she’d stay tonight, until the worst of the feelings passed like a bad fever. Sleep was a long way off though. For now she was content to hide in plain sight.

[Adrian Kane]

 

Arikan & Valtin

Continued from Consorting with enemies

+++

Later, he met Valtin at the base of a dilapidated tower. The dreadlord was still wearing his blacksmith clothes minus the filthy apron. He was a fallen version of himself, but the brightness in his eyes and the hunger by which he bowed his head upon encountering his former master said he would soon be restored to glory.

“Lord General,” he said in greeting.
Arikan didn’t correct him. Without an army, he was a general no longer, but he’d required the honorific last time they were together. Valtin and the other lieutenant dreadlords were quick to adopt similar allegiance. Which was precisely why they were all dead. All except Valtin.

Which led Arikan to question how he escaped a sure death sentence when all his equals were cut down.

The answer was a mysterious woman that Arikan himself was eager to meet.

“Lead on,” he said, ordering Valtin to begin the ascent. The stairs were narrow. This part of the fortress was older than the rest. Various states of disrepair suggested it wasn’t worth the effort to maintain. The woman was a recluse, and Valtin’s description suggested she was half-mad, but some talent bid that this precise location was where they should hide these past few years, if she was half-mad, then the other half was surely valuable. 

At the door high above, Valtin knocked. "It's me," he called out gentler than Arikan would have imagined possible.

[Thalia]

No-one knocked on the door to a reputedly haunted tower. Admittedly, by now Mira was rocking half on the edges of a doze, and might have imagined it but for the timbre of a familiar voice on its heels. Her shoulders ached. She leaned over the dark space beyond, morbidly curious for the fall that would have waited, before the vertigo whooshed the blood in her head and she gripped the cooling stone for balance. Then she slipped down from the crumbling fortifications.

The tower’s adjoining chamber had little to commend it for habitation. Likely, it had been a sentry post once, before peace made a view of the inhospitable landscape a redundancy to waste soldiers and resources on. A fortress as old as this was filled with such secrets, and Mira’s solitary explorations probably knew them better than the family whose crest emblazoned the flags on the ramparts. As such this tower was not the place she spent most of her time, just where she hid for the worst of it.

Gloom chased the little room’s corners, unlit because she did not like to look upon the marks she’d made on the walls over the years. There was no real furniture, just storage. Ink was hard to come by in the quantities she needed, and this was where she hoarded the precious bottles. Bundles of charcoal stacked alongside them, easier to acquire but messier to use. It was preferable to alternatives, though. There were scars on her wrists; she feared running out.

Lastly, pushed deepest into the shadows, were several chests storing the old drawings, banished from sight if not mind. Among them were other things Mira had stolen over the years; books, in the main. She padded bare footed past it all without looking. Valtin wasn’t expected company, but he was not unwelcome, and she didn’t pause to question the odd hour. When terror woke her on bad nights, leaving her disorientated and afraid, it was to the smithy she would retreat even in the early hours. Not because she expected a dreadlord’s sympathy, but because she did not want to be alone. It proved foolish sometimes. But she was still alive for all her oddities.

“Did you do something, Val?” Mira had no inherent cruelty to her, despite the things she often drew on the reams of parchment she fed to flames on a daily basis. Despite the things she had herself done. But morality was little hindrance either, and she didn't ask in judgement, only in offer of her help should he need it. She didn’t fault his nature. It was hard on him here; harder than it was on her. If Mira lived as a ghost, it was only a reclamation of old habits. Knowledge seeped through her curse whether she willed it or not, and the rejection of her childhood home had never really left. It was easier not to be known by these people than to risk the scrawl of a dragonfang on her door when she inevitably slipped up. Easier to have no door upon which to scrawl it.

Easier still, of course, would have been for her to flee years ago. Sometimes she told herself it was the Black Oaths that kept her at Valtin’s side these long years, but the truth was there had been ample opportunity to slip away had she ever chosen to. Many had died in the battle, and she imagined she was considered among them in the Tower’s ledgers – if her disappearance was indeed noted at all, even among her own Ajah. Nor did the Shadow hunt her for her allegiances, as they did he. Val had saved her life, as she had saved his; simple necessity and survival at the time, but still a balanced scale to which neither of them owed more. Yet she had cleaved to his company ever since Tar Valon. Maybe it was the simple fact he was outcast and friendless that forged a link she had never cared to break. Though maybe it was better to ask no questions. The answers were rarely pretty.

The door wasn’t latched. There were no wards. When she disappeared entirely, he knew well enough all her haunts, and he was the only one who did. She opened it in complete trust.

At a glance Mira was easy to dismiss. Her face had slowed long before it took on its preternatural ageless qualities, but most rarely looked at her long enough to notice. Very few would have seen her and thought Aes Sedai, not least with her sleep-shadowed eyes and wild hair. Rosene’s death had cracked Mira’s head open of all self-imposed repression, the tenets of routine and control by which she had lived almost her entire life, and she had never been quite the same since that loss. She was akin to a river finally overburst its banks, though there was none alive to mark the difference.

She saw Val first, and the face behind him second. Her eyes widened, and every sensible thought in her head abdicated in favour of a terrible and inexplicable panic, like the bolts that tore her from dreamless sleep. Her feet slipped backwards, silent and horrified. Instinct reared, its only instruction: run. To that Mira heeded; she turned with a fear-soaked breath, completely unthinking, for there was nowhere to go but back the way she had come and a fevered plunge over the crumbling battlements.

[Zixin Kao]

Valtin

Valtin wasn’t sure what sort of state he would find the lonely tower’s occupant. He specifically avoided disturbing her when the gloomy trances took her faculties. He gave her space mostly because he didn’t know what else to do, nor did he enjoy pushing her deeper into the trenches of her mind. When she sought him, he was receptive, usually. There were times when the snap of an annoyed remark bit, but not often. It’s not like he came to actually care about protecting her out of some sense of honor. She saved his life. It was level-headedness; they were safer together. Or so he told himself.

A grumble bit his lip at the sudden flight. She practically soared across the room like an arrow loosened from the string. Only she wouldn’t land innocently stuck in the grass.

He half-turned to Arikan.
“Just.. hang on,” and he plunged into the darkness after her.

And dark it was. There were no lights but for the moon’s distant orb. He channeled a wall of air to plug up the window just in case she thought to actually fly. “Mira, just wait a second,” irritation cut the command and his steps were swift and direct. Yet when he came near enough to present himself again, he slowed to a trickle like water finally chased to flatlands with no where else to go.

“You knew this day was coming. Be not surprised it actually came,” he told her. While Valtin’s silver voice coaxed her back, the moon caught the excitement in the depths of his eyes, and he held out his hand.

Arikan

Arikan sniffed the musty air, and entered tentatively. His gaze roamed the space, and was all but surprised to find there weren’t holes in the bloody roof. Papers littered trunks and crates. Broken quills and pen nubs were scattered underfoot. Charcoal dust came back on the pad of his finger when he wiped the nearest surface, an annoyance of dirt which he rubbed mindlessly away.

He took the opportunity to channel as well. Valtin’s wall of air was given a short study as Arikan mused to himself over whether or not the Aes Sedai might actually have lept from it to escape his presence. It was a satisfying reaction to seeing him, and he would relish the fear that rippled the surface of her face. Nythadri and Talin ought to learn from their sister.

Regardless, with the One Power, he coiled into existence a flame by which to see. It floated overhead, pooling down its yellow dance upon all their faces. Such was when he observed the chaos strewn on the walls. Curiosity pulled him to the nearest pile of papers, which he examined unabashed.

[Thalia]

Her Oaths tightened like a fist. Mira gasped at the pain, and half stumbled over her own feet in the effort to stop, hands bracing against the nearest wall. If her pace slowed it did little for the tumbling terror in her chest, but the reprieve did at least pierce her with confusion. She couldn’t explain why she was so afraid, not just because she lacked the words, but because she lacked the comprehension. Mira did not fear death. Not her own, nor the Dragon’s. If this man heralded the Wheel’s slip from its axle to spin no more, so be it. If he led the Shadow’s armies to reform the world in its image, she accepted it. She didn’t know why she ran; only that it was primal, like a riptide, and she had been helpless in its current.

In her disorientation she turned towards the only sure thing around her, and grasped Val’s offered hand, reeling herself in tight enough to steady her forehead against his chest. “I’m not surprised he’s here. I’m surprised he’s here,” she hissed after a moment, stung with a little betrayal for the ambush. Light blossomed above then, and she winced. He was looking at things, and she did not like the way it felt like fingers crawling all over her brain. She wanted to close her eyes against it, but didn’t want to look away either.

In truth she’d always assumed that when his master returned for him, Valtin would simply sweep away on new and long-awaited tides. He exalted this man, had served him with both faith and fervour in such lofty echelons it’d been a hair’s breadth from the heights of Chosen. She knew, because she’d coaxed every story he’d willingly tell just for the way it animated him, especially those times when Rosene’s absence felt like a chasm riven into her chest. Mira liked to talk. She liked to listen. And she did not like being alone on those days. Val was no philosopher, but he was as ambitious as Rose had been. Only where hers had been a cool and collected charisma, cold and cruel as starlight, Valtin’s was vibrant and violent. The kind that burned its path through the Pattern.

Mira had no such desire for power, and no such skill to offer. And for all her prescience, she had never imagined a future in which she would actually have to meet the face that haunted more than half her life. She considered what it meant as her shuddering pulse slowed. Curiosity was tangled with something else by then. Beside her Val smelled like sweat and the forge. She’d seen the look shining bright in his eyes. If heat stung her own for a moment it was only because she knew something of the destination, if not how long the path would take. But nothing good came from binding a beast in chains, and even less from knowledge of the Pattern’s tapestry. He was happy, and there wasn’t an ounce of her that would steal it from him.

[Zixin Kao]

Valtin

She fell into his chest easier than he expected. Valtin didn’t push her off, but he was an unnatural source of comfort. He pat her back, but the seething accusation made him frown above the crown of her hair. He bit his tongue from snapping short in return. What did she expect? That he tell the Lord General to wait until Mira graced them with her presence once more? Who knew when that would be, and Val wasn’t suicidal. Lord Arikan wasn’t known for patience.

The buzz of the One Power tugged at Valtin’s senses. His neck snapped around on instinct, almost as fiercely as it had the previous night when Arikan arrived outside the hut. What a jolt of shock that was; at the time, he assumed the assault originated from an assassin that somehow found them.

Light crowned them all; a flickering flame that suddenly illuminated Mira’s art. If it could be called that. Dark blood and bones but some of her pieces could make him cringe. When he conquered his own castle someday, he’d frame the best pieces and line the front hall with them just to intimidate his enemies. It’d work. Especially the more gruesome ones.

So this wasn’t the sort of thing that Valtin was accustomed to doing: presenting people like some sort of light-cursed noble. His lord expected manners, though, so Val tugged Mira along, all but pushing her forward. He stayed close though.

Arikan was looking through papers. Valtin glanced at Mira, wondering if he should interrupt or not.
“My Lord, this is Miraseia,” then after a moment, he added, “Breakwater.”

Arikan didn’t look up. Had he heard? After another moment, he added again, “Sedai.” It was obvious she was Black Ajah, right? One of them? He frowned thoughtfully. Should he say more?

Arikan

The moment the flame brightened the walls, Arikan was drawn over. The scenes flowed from one to the next. He studied a face drawn with agony before stepping aside to examine the skeletal ruins of a town left in oblivion. The dead walked in another scene, the living fleeing in terror. He recognized trolloc camps sprawling open fields. Only to find himself staring into the face of a victim being torn to pieces alive for the cookpots. Forward and out the scenes changed. Large scale images showed massive destruction, yet up close, the faces showed torture, mutilation and death in the worst of ways.

The walls were not the only canvas. He picked up a piece of parchment that showed a fortress overcome by shadowspawn. It was almost innocuous compared to the horrors on the walls. A city occupied another piece, all but normal except that it was an island whose walls held back the blight. A city of the dark. Were these all the product of a mind broken with madness? He wondered as he examined many such drawings in the stack. Then, something caught his eye. The scene was a farmstead. Sheep were featured in the foreground, but the severed head of donkey was scrawled in the center; tongue limb, neck bloodied. A bolt of lightning ripped the sky and the barn in the background was shattered. He was unblinking, staring. Placing it aside, the parchment below it widened his eyes. The same farmstead, but the focus was on a figure sprawled unconscious on the ground. Threads of the One Power circled him in what Arikan could only fathom was healing. The figure was him.

His gaze was stone when he lifted his attention. Valtin’s voice went unacknowledged, and it was the Black Sister that he focused upon.

The Shadow relied heavily on the omens of prophecy. The Dark Book was filled with pages of accounts: words scrawled in blood, direction coveted by the Chosen; by the Great Lord of the Dark himself. He showed her the drawing of the farmstead where Talin found him. Arikan’s voice was direct. Expectant. “How long ago was this drawing created?” he asked. The answer, if she even knew, would tell how useful a tool she really was.

[Thalia]

Val was annoyed and jumpy. Mira didn’t fight those tides, though the way he man-handled her for presentation reminded her of the way the Wise Woman had once marched her through the Tower for judgement. He pushed her forward, and she didn’t fight that either. Mira was often fearful, but it was the kind that soon nudged its hand into the care of curiosity. Whatever her appearance of delicacy, when plunged right in the deep end, of course she swam.

She didn’t cower, though she did squint a little in the light. The flickering shadows made the walls look squirming and alive around them. By Val’s stilted introduction even he was unsure of the reception she’d receive, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him uncertain like that. The smallest hum of laughter threatened at the addition of Sedai though. She squashed it down, that little bubble of hysteria. But the identity felt like a grotesquely shed skin. She did not wear the ring, nor carried it on her. For various reasons it had never felt earned. Though that was not why she had hidden it away.

Valtin was frowning; the kind of expression that usually sent others scurrying out of his way. His master ignored him, which Mira found she did not entirely like. But the silence itself she did not find to be uncomfortable, for hierarchy and expectation were not things to trouble her these days. She watched with disturbed fascination as he perused the locked secrets of her sickened mind. Fear thrummed her pulse cold and fast even now, and she still could not put her finger on why he felt like such a predator to her.

Arikan. She made herself think it, yet it sounded strangely wrong; spiky when it should have been smooth as wind rippling the riverbed of her thought. She was watching him unabashed, no help at all to Valtin’s concern over what to say, and so saw the moment recognition intruded like an uninvited guest, then flared his eyes wide. No one likes a prophet; she could have told Val that. Least of all a mad one. Cast out or chained; dead or beholden; coveted or feared. The road ever forked, and she did not much care for either option.

There was no trace at all of what Arikan thought by the time he looked up. His attention crushed with its weight, scoured out the rest of the world. How many must have trembled before that gaze? How many more would? He had eyes deep as the abyss. But the strangest thing for Mira was the sense of the abyss looking back. It zipped something through her spine that might have been thrill or fear. Few ever really saw her. She ensured it.

“I don’t even know what day it is,” she said. It wasn’t an evasive answer, just one spoken truthfully and without thought. She was staring at him thoughtfully, not yet at the image he bid her to identify. The urge rose unbidden to run her touch over features she knew better than her own. The furrow at his brow that suggested he rarely smiled. The careful sweep of curls that spoke of man who cared about appearances. The flesh revealed more than the page, she realised. What scars did he carry yet? But most people did not enjoy uninvited intimacy, and though that didn’t always stop her, she rather required her fingers to remain attached to her hands. Plus she thought Valtin might very well combust from the mortification of her doing something so embarrassing. So she only looked.

She would have left it there, but she was aware of Val close behind her. To prevent another flight from her treacherous feet, she imagined. Should Arikan decide Mira’s curse was a secret better left buried, it was not like he would be inclined to stop him. He might even be bestowed the crown of executioner. But she would not intentionally bring Val shame, so when she padded forward it was to better see the drawing Arikan held. There were hundreds of them here, and Mira did not keep them to memory. In fact she scrutinised this one for long moments, casting back a long way into dusty halls she did not usually tread, for an answer she was not sure she had to give.

“I haven’t drawn the farm in a long time,” she said eventually. Years, probably. Time was both inconsistent and nebulous, dragging like molasses sometimes, or plunging with the speed of a waterfall off a cliff. How anyone was meant to account for that she was not sure. Mira never tried. “So I suppose it must be in the past now.” She glanced back up at his face, but only for a moment. Something else occurred to her then, dragging her attention down to his torso. Because if the farm was in the past, she realised suddenly that so too was the leech.

[Adrian Kane]

Arikan

The Farm. His eyes narrowed, resenting this woman’s ability to crawl her eyes all over his life. Suppose he should flattered. The Wheel deemed it necessary to flash moments from his world into the mind of a stranger. She clearly did not grasp the enormity of what she drew or she would be cowering in the presence of greatness. Then again, she ran like a frightened child when she first glimpsed his face, and Valtin claimed she was of the Black. Perhaps she knew more than she let on. The way she looked at his chest as if she could peer to the bone beneath made him frown.

“Tell me how you see these visions. Do they come to you in your waking hours? In a dream? A trance? Do you black out and discover them?” he moved through more of the parchment as evidence of the many moments glimpsed unnaturally. Arikan himself was not the only subject, but he had neither the inclination nor the patience to search for faces of the Chosen. The farm was a pivotal moment when his life teetered on the sword edge of fate, but the outcome was fixed. There was little to manipulate in the awareness but that he had been at that location. Perhaps others may reveal past locations of the Chosen, but he may chase down leads that were years outdated if the Farm was anything to go on.

He considered Valtin then. The dreadlord would not recognize the same faces that Arikan would know. Yet as he studied his servant of the dark, a thought passed.

“Why have you been hidden from me? I searched for you in the dreamworld. I searched for all of you, and I found nothing but bones and dead souls. Tell me how you evaded me.”

Valtin swallowed, glancing quickly at the Black Sister at his side. He even went so far as to put up an arm as though to blockade the Aes Sedai from Arikan’s path.

“Do not be angry, Great One. I thought you dead. Everyone thought you dead. Had I heard even a whisper that you were not, I would have-”

He scowled. Valtin absolutely had a whisper that he was not dead. The proof lay strewn all around them. He left the papers behind to confront the dreadlord eye to eye. “You would have what?”

“Umm,” he started. “I don’t know how she does it, but-“ his gaze slithered to the woman at his side. The same woman he positioned himself to protect. Arikan followed his servant’s gaze to find Miraseia as Valtin finished his sentence. “She kept us hidden, and I kept us alive.” 

[Thalia]

Mira was slow to respond to the barrage of questions, adrift in the most surreal cognitive dissonance. Perhaps Arikan considered her simple. It wouldn’t be the first time. She glanced down at her hand, wiggled her fingers slowly, like she had never truly considered the question. But that wasn’t true; she had been White once, with a White’s sharp and enquiring mind.

By then Arikan’s interrogation had turned its razor focus. Valtin’s nerves should have driven the fear deeper, for Mira had never seen him subservient like that, and yet it burst stars behind her eyes. She did not like it at all. Her chest hitched like someone squeezed her in a fist. If she had always imagined Valtin would one day leave, she had never considered that it would not be to a received welcome and due reward for the staunch loyalty of a decade.

“Why are you angry?” she asked Arikan, surprised. The question blurted genuine, even as something inside shrivelled with foolishness. At which point she blinked down in confusion at the arm Valtin had stuck out, and which she had bumped into when she stepped forward. “We have been here,” she said, like it explained everything. Which to her, it did.

She swallowed in fear after, though. The slide of Arikan’s gaze felt like the dip of a firebrand against skin, hot enough to recoil from. Answers were not something she had in swift supply, and certainly not when he was looking at her like that. Though it was difficult to look away too, like somewhere in all that black space behind his eyes was the spark of a loose connection. Why him? Why all these years?

“I don’t see them,” she said carefully, to his earlier demand for answers. “I only wake up and draw. Sometimes I know they are things that will happen, but only sometimes is it that way. When the images stop, I know they must be in the past. Other than that, they seem to be in no order.”

[Adrian Kane]

Arikan

The Black’s question hung palpably in the air. Arikan slowly turned the level of his gaze to meet hers, and in it harbored a storm of anger accumulated over two lifetimes. He had endured pain as she could not comprehend, a torment that gnarled his very soul, and he contemplated, in that charged moment, to reveal it all to her.

A flicker of movement registered in his peripheral vision, and Valtin, like some sentinel, subtly shifted as if to shield her. The pleading in his eyes was mixed with courage, and in the end, the indomitable force of Arikan's will won the room. He loathed such fiery surges of emotion; hated relinquishing control, and so he kept it chained - for now.

A mere tilt of his chin signified his readiness to listen to her explanation, though so far, the disturbance of her foresight was unremarkable. All these gifts lay strewn around the room, and all of them were outdated intelligence.

He studied both of their faces with barely any discharge of the prior confrontation, and he judged them to be telling the truth. “You will not be here much longer. We leave within the week, once the individual I await arrives. There are dungeons in this place?” His gaze shifted to Valtin, who nodded in affirmation. “I may have need of them.”

Then he addressed the Aes Sedai. “Bring me whatever images you’ve constructed that aren’t yet ‘in the past.’ Every detail is of the utmost importance.”

Valtin exchanged a meaningful glance with Miraseia before licking his lips.
“What are we searching for?”

Arikan had approached the door by this point, and as he glanced back, the fiery glimmers from above danced light and shadow upon his visage. “For the Chosen.”

With a flick of the hand, the fire crashed into the stone, extinguishing itself, and darkness fell upon them both as he left them to their task.