Kekura din Anor

Windfinder

Kekura din Anor was a windfinder of the Atha’an Miere, the People of the Sea, of Clan Catelar. Her husband was Cargo Master of another ship in the Clan. She was the mother of a young boy, Tayigi.

When the Seanchan attacked, many ships in her clan were decimated. Her Sailmistress sacrificed herself in order to protect Kekura the Windfinder from being captured, and so Kekura escaped in the arms of the sea, the sole survivor. She believed her husband and son were both among the dead.

She survived thirteen days in the ocean before drifting to shore. On the second day at sea, she cautiously utilized the One Power to flow the current and sweep the breeze and steer her body toward the Catal Islands. At dusk and sunrise, the One Power fluttered little knots of light to lure schools of fish or small sharks close enough to catch and eat with her bare hands. For water, she sucked on the eyeballs of her prey, caught condensation on the oiled breeches, or pulled water from the air straight to her tongue. She wrapped her clothing around her eyes to keep from blinding them in the unforgiving sun, but eventually her skin boiled and cracked. The pain of salt etching into the open wounds was excruciating. When she washed ashore following a storm she was too weak to control, the Amayar nursed her back to health, but only long enough for her hatred for the seanchan to churn to new purpose. The people of the sea could not defend themselves against this evil horde, and she believed the White Tower would be their last hope. She was in her 40’s when she entered the shining spire.

The White Tower

She was a novice only long enough to learn the rules of her new station. Even the Mistress of the Ships may be demoted to the lowest tier, and so Kekura was not abashed by the incrementally diminished station in which she found herself.

As an Accepted, her loyalty to the Tower was tested. The Sisters would not raise an Aes Sedai only to abandon them, and Kekura was a closed book on her inner motivations. Her salt name was New Moon, something bright and powerful that is hidden among the black night. So, Kekura’s aspirations were similarly obscured.

Mistress of Novices

Promptly after joining the Red Ajah, she was appointed to a position as Mistress of Novices, and she found herself in charge of women with whom she once wore the white alongside. The sudden promotion did not bother her, given her comfort with jumping rank. She knew her assignment was meant to anchor her in Tar Valon, though, and she resented the Amyrlin for it. However, she was perhaps the best mistress of novices in hundreds of years, for her stern guidance and dispensation of wisdom. Kekura was quite lonely in the Tower. As such, she focused on her purpose and calling for greater good, even at great personal sacrifice.

The Hall of the Tower

Upon being released from mistress of novices, her work for the Red Ajah focused on channeler rights, both the freedom from Seanchan capture and the regulation of male channelers. She disapproved of the Black Tower’s methods and lack of oversight, as evidenced by their constant turnover of M’Haels. Most of all, she disapproved of the Dragon’s truce with the Seanchan, which allowed them to retain the lands already captured and keep the damane already enslaved. She wanted them to be overthrown and driven back across the sea, or better yet, eradicated completely and thus freeing the lands they held hostage altogether.

When it became clear that the politics would not allow such goals, she aspired to change the politics herself. Old resentments churned, and she delved into great game, seeking to overthrow the current Amyrlin, a Blue-raised woman who was a strong ally of the Dragon Reborn and enforcer of peace.

Kekura wanted the Seat for herself.

The Black Tower

It was on a rare but fateful journey to the Black Tower when she bore witness to the only other Atha’an Miere she had seen in years, a young man of great prowess and impressive strength. She quickly identified him as the son she thought was dead, and he identified her as the mother he thought was gone. She was reunited with Tayigi.

Tayigi was married to Kaliyani din Hai Sweeping Tide and the father of a boy, Tao and a girl, Saga.

Kekura had been in the company of Asha’man Lennox Orander when together they discovered a cove of objects of the power on the islands of the Amayar in a region of the sea controlled by Clan Catelar. One object in particular was a ter’angreal that seemed to respond to both saidin and saidar, and Kekura brought it to the Black Tower to consult with their male channeler colleagues. While investigating the ter’angreal, Tayigi volunteered to test it, and its true purpose was identified. It was the object used to turn channelers to the Shadow against their will, binding their very souls to the Dark One. When Tayigi was compelled into being a darkfriend, he attacked his brothers in an effort to escape. They restrained him, but when Kekura and Asha’man Kentrillo Orander attempted to undo the compulsion, he did not survive the reversal. The ter’angreal ultimately ended up in Lythia Sedai’s hands, as it was the same one used to originally turn Asristin Kyrineus Somneus to the Shadow in the Age of Legends, the previous life of the dreadlord Arikan. This same ter’angreal was tasked to the high ranking darkfriend Zahir to retrieve, but it remains in Lythia’s possession for now.

Kekura has since turned her focus to matters of the Hall of the Tower, leaving the remainder of the work to others. The rediscovered objects and treasures are being retrieved and catalogued by Asha’man Auden Thayn and Marjolie Sedai of the Red Ajah.

The Amyrlin Seat

For many months, Aes Sedai were sent to Bandar Eban to advise the King of Arad Doman while a controversial treaty was drafted between the coastal nation and the Seanchan. Peace between the westlands and the Seanchan was the order of the day, clearly blessed by both the Dragon and the White Tower. It was a concession that Kekura could not abide, and she found many within the Tower who agreed that the overt policy of Seanchan tolerance went too far.

Kekura sought justification to depose the Amyrlin Seat, and when word reached her ears of an action so unbelievable, so horrific, she knew she had the legal recourse to unseat Kaydrienne from the throne. She only needed proof that Kaydrienne had allowed a woman of the Tower to be taken by the Seanchan. It was Lythia whose eyes and ears alerted the Red Ajah to the confidence likely shared between the King of Arad Doman and Jai Kojima. Few would otherwise have suspected the secrets shared between the two Asha’man but that Lythia’s attention had been turned to the Domani court following the deal she made with the then-Accepted Nythadri Vanditera, a pledge given to protect Nythadri’s interests, namely Jai himself, in exchange for her pledge to the Green Ajah.

Lythia was the one who alerted Haneyth Sedai, a Red that Kekura trusted, that Jai was in the White Tower unaccompanied. Kekura used the opportunity to meet him and convinced him to take action should the plot under suspicion came to fruition. That if Kaydrienne in fact conspired with the King of Arad Doman to surrender a woman, nay a former channeler, Trista Gaidar to the Seanchan, that a line would be crossed they could not retreat. Kekura knew that the proof she needed rested on a potential testimony from Jai, and she provided instruction on how to meet her should the worst happen.

It was Lythia herself that found Jai at their pre-arranged location in Bandar Eban, and it was her gateway that delivered him to Kekura whom was completely ignorant that he had been compelled to address her. Kekura had feared bringing an Asha’man before the full Hall of the Tower, so she arranged private audiences between him and the last two undecided Sitters: Esenya and Reloane. His testimony was flawless and convincing.

Later that night, it was Kekura who made the motion to unseat Kaydrienne for her crimes against the Tower. The decision was unanimous, Kaydrienne and her Keeper were deposed, stilled and executed, and Kekura was raised to the Amyrlin Seat the following day.

Unfortunately, the strongest Aes Sedai in the Tower, Fate Sedai, was loyal to Kaydrienne and the twin sister of the Domani king. The threat she posed may have been placated by an oath of fealty, but the oath rod disappeared, and she was a threat that not be allowed to exist.

Affiliations, colleagues and relationships

The Wheel of Time

Current incarnation – Kemala, Lady of Bali

Dewi Ratih, Hindu Balinese Moon goddess

Oyá, Yorùbá Orisha of Storms

The Dance

She prepared her muscles as she walked to the center of the deck, thighs twitching beneath the flowing creation of her skirt’s red chiffon, hips testing the bondage of the low fitted belt sitting straight across them, and everything above free to stretch in the open air as every part sensed the demand she was about to place upon them.  The collection of energy she next summoned she intended to liquify her bones with it, sacrificing it all so nothing remained but the movement and story about to be realized.  

She imagined her role to be the character of herself.  Of imagined seagulls lifting her arms on a gliding breeze she began, with herself darting across the imagined water beneath in elongated, pointed jumps.  Long minutes completely dedicated to the freedom of the skies above and world below, her feet carried her back and forth with the coasting freedom of innocent duty.  Then she suddenly came to stillness, lifting her face toward the scent of her beloved, the night sky, as a low roll began in her stomach, slowly gaining the movement of her hips like a tide caressing its lover, the shore, churning upon the shallows to rise higher and higher in passion, loosing her chest and shoulders into the waves, arms following as she stretched from its foamy crest to clasp both sides of the moon in her palms and cannibalize its light with her mysterious darkness.  

Then all that pent up tension to her muscles released like the snapping of a taut rope, flooding her in a flush of blood and arousal that when she looked upon her environment finally, she saw none of the audience, but only the world as it was draped in a veil of crimson blood.  The heat of it burned her skin, lifting the soles of her feet one at a time away from the embers underneath to lift and spin away, kicking at the air vividly and counterbalancing with the loops of her arms in the other direction.  Until she accepted the color’s painful consumption, but she dived into it rather than fight further. Tangling her hair between her fingers she brought her hands down her face and greedily into her center while bare-feet slicked with salt and sweat grounded herself to the deck below to seek balance in the calamity of what she just endured.  Feeling every inch of herself becoming heavier and heavier until she collapsed as into sinking sands.  She curved downward with it, every vertebrae rolling down upon themselves until the boneless sphere of her coiled shape rested close to the deck, accepting this new fate and unmoving except for the heavy panting of her chest and trickles of sweat beading down her skin, diverted by scar marks and wetting the ethereal bloom of the deadly creature climbing her ribs with its tattooed tentacles. 

But her story was not over.  The red mask faded from the world as she rose climatically into reality with palms flattened upon one another filling her with the deep loss akin to the expulsion of vomit registering the emotion of the kinesthetic feel of bile rising within that it made her body contort and twist painfully in the affect of such forlorn movements.  She wanted, but knew no way to stop her heart which pulsed with near overwhelming pressure inside all of her sharply splayed fingers and pleading with the heavens in beat with the music of the swirling stars above as their child spun beneath them in anguish, a whirlpool of focus in the great void of the ocean’s mighty breadth, fighting to continue onward.  She honored their glimmering points with every fiber of her being as each part of her body succombed to their Pattern.  Shoulders and hips and wrists and ankles pulsed in contradiction to one another, until the imagery of these points on her constellation pulsed in time and the entire picture came together into one conformed projection: a conclusive, beautiful image.  

Of herself.  Still and reverent.

She bowed.  The dance was ended.