Room 99, Frozen Prior to Ch. 30

[we_bring_hell]

The room is spartan; sufficient to her needs. There is a single painting on the wall, painstakingly straight. It seems to be a mounted jigsaw puzzle of a tower at sunset. There is the faintest smell; some kind of organic ash, mixed with the oil of a mechanism. It's not unpleasant.

Her robe has somehow transitioned to the closet, and there's a skeleton on a stand in the corner; she recognizes the ribs. It grins at her familiarly. In the closet there are rows of long-sleeved shirts much like her usual habit, and some other shirts she frowns at. In a drawer there are trousers and spare niqabs and gloves and socks. Her journal is here on the desk.

This is all burying the lede: perpendicular to the white, crisp bed is a second one. There is also a set of free weights in one corner for some reason.

On the table by the bed is a device she only vaguely recognizes the function of, but it seems to be active. She presses the universal glyph for play. After listening to the strange yet familiar apocalyptic hymn, she lets the songs keep playing, but only the second one holds her interest.

She finds another CD in the drawer and puts it in; the first words send prickles up her spine; it's about running away and checking into a spartan room to hide from loss.

Half the words she hears mean nothing to her, but the other half pierce her through.

I write down good reasons to freeze to death
In my spiral ring notebook
But in the long tresses of your hair
I am a babbling brook

She plays it all the way through, and then again, and then again, and then again, and then she listens to the seventh song until she knows it word-perfect, even the words that are gibberish to her.

---

A new Milliways day finds Harrowhark at a table in the bar, studying her notes, black trousers and shirt and niqab. The key to room 99 is on the table before her, and she sings tunelessly under her breath, when that day is coming who can say, who can say. In Canaan House, time is frozen.

Comments

[blue_ajah]

She leans forward slightly as Harrow works, studying the diagrams with great care.

"And each symbol in this drawing, then, would represent an element and its position in your spell?"

Moiraine glances up as Harrow pauses.

"Weaves can be tied," she says. "As I did with the one we tested, before. It helps to keep them stable until they are unraveled, broken, or dissolved. However, the art and skill of embedding a weave's effect into a more permanent artifact was long thought lost, and even now is still limited to only a few."

[we_bring_hell]

"Yes. We call these elements ganglia. A ganglion can even be a notation referring to another simple spell, representing a sort of junction. But more often they are a simple change in the flow of energy."

"We also cannot form truly permanent artifacts. Bone is the best medium for anything long-term, and it is hard to shape, and will still grow depleted in time. And as a ward it is more... vulnerable, than blood."

"Of course, great circles and spirals are unwieldy for notation purposes. What I record in my journal is a sort of mathematical shorthand that would allow me to reconstruct the spiral and its ganglia. The formula must record the starting elements as well as the rate of decay, as measured by the tightening of the spiral. Once the starting elements are in place, you must only notate future ganglia and the length of the intervals between them."

"It sounds complex when I say it aloud, I suppose, but I have been reading spell diagrams since I could read English. At first you translate from notation to diagram to energy flow--drawing the spiral can help--but in time it becomes just a second language."

[blue_ajah]

"Is it more vulnerable because it is more brittle, or less flexible, perhaps?" she asks.

It is strange to be talking about spells woven with decay and death and parts of a physical body, but it is as they have discussed previously - Harrow's work draws from the power released at the end of the natural process, rather than at its creation. Even Ages both come and pass with the turning of the Wheel of Time. For the time being, the Aes Sedai is content to learn more.

"I can see how it would be something to which one could become accustomed," she adds. "If the pattern at the heart of the spell remains similar, then it may be only a matter of adjusting the parts of it."

She is already thinking how she might try to adapt this type of notation to describe the basic weaves taught to novices in the White Tower.

[we_bring_hell]

"No--because it is less individual. A blood ward, tightly constructed, cannot be penetrated without the blood of the creator or perhaps one of her descendants. A passive blood ward, once dried, can lie in place for millenia and only react to thanergy brought into the system, extending its life."

"The Sealed Tomb has one such ward, drawn by God Himself to contain what is buried there and protect the sepulcher from tampering. The potency that lingers in the blood is of course incomparable."

And Harrow walked past it when she was twelve but she doesn't want to talk about that!

"Exactly--it is a case of establish baseline parameters and then saying, 'do such-and-such until a criteria is met.' The notation itself does not need to record loop after loop of the baseline parameters. To invoke the power, of course, you must hold those details in your mind for the duration, executing the changes at the key moments. That is the difference between reading a notation and casting it." If Harrow knew anything about musical notation she might make a comparison here, but she sure doesn't.

She finds a fresh sheet of paper and begins to transcribe the notation from her incomprehensible code to a (currently still incomprehensible) mass of numbers and symbols. It is an improvement insofar as the glyphs are recognizable, though.

[blue_ajah]

She thinks of blood on the rocks at Shayol Ghul, but no hint of her thoughts reaches her expression.

"The process of invocation that you describe is not unlike constructing a weave," she says. "A difference, perhaps, is that I manipulate the flows of power into configuration rather than holding them in mind only - but it may be a minimal one."

Depending on how Harrow handles thanergy, of course.

[we_bring_hell]

"A notation of your magic would require indicating the type of energy, I imagine," Harrow murmurs, busy drawing. "There are five types, correct?"

"Many practitioners use compasses--a bit of a traditional gift for the young necromancer," she adds, as she free-hands two large circles in order to blatantly show off.

"Much of this notation refers to the two fields overlapping--that part is not really what matters--although if you are interested in entropy or senescence fields, they are archetypal examples of their kind. Ultimately, however, we want to abstract out the way this casting neutralizes the interaction without requiring a moment to moment intervention."

[blue_ajah]

"Correct," she confirms. "Spirit, Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. Most common weaves use only one or two flows. Very few use all five."

She tilts her head, considering the drawing that Harrow is rapidly and skillfully rendering.

"In the usual manner of things, what requires such intervention?"

[we_bring_hell]

"In theory, if I were casting two spells at once, if I foresaw two conflict elements, I would simply adjust it on the fly. Like directing traffic," she says, although the Ninth House's tiny spaceport could not accommodate more than one shuttle at a time if it had ever needed to, which it had not. "But in two overlapping fields, those moments of interference crop up everywhere, and of course the point of a field is to not require intervention, to create a standing pattern within in an area rather than a specific target."

She lays one diagram over the other and holds them up to the light. "Do you see? Where the patterns would cross and disrupt each other? The heart of this theorem is solve that problem, not just for these two spells, but systematically for any two spells.

[blue_ajah]

"So a spell itself, then," the Aes Sedai observes, "is in some way antithetical to being placed close to another spell, unless actively accounted for in your working... or through a method such as this one."

"That does seem to be a difference in my weaving and your spells, but I wonder if something like this might be used to make a tied weave more stable and less prone to dissolution."

[we_bring_hell]

"Yes, exactly," she says. "It isn't necessarily going to create disruptions--simple spells might simply miss each other--but two standing fields in the same area would inevitably conflict."

"Unfortunately, this solution proposed by the Lyctor of the Eighth requires me to either have two brains or a large continuous power source," she says dryly. "But I believe Silas Oktasiron siphoning his great hulking battery of a cavalier could not manage it."

[blue_ajah]

"Not to mention the effect on the cavalier," she notes. "Given what you have told me before."

Moiraine studies the diagram a moment or two longer, then asks,

"Do you have no way to link powers among multiple adepts?"

[we_bring_hell]

"Siphoning is a specialty of the Eight," she explains. "Adept and cavalier are matched carefully based on genetic similarities to smooth out such difficulties."

"And--not to explicitly link powers," she says. "Although..." She looks at her journal. "The spell I used to link my consciousness to Gideon's might allow two necromancers to link as well." Her brow furrows thoughtfully.

(In the near future she will do so with Palamedes Sextus to create a key...)

"But it would not solve this problem--it is the issue of casting them such that they don't interfere, not just casting them both. At first I thought the split focus allowed them to... flicker, out of phase with each other, so one is present when the other is not. But both fields remain unbroken."

"I believe that the theorem actually passes control of each spell back and forth, moment by moment. Like juggling lit torches."

[blue_ajah]

She considers that for several seconds.

"So, if the theorem were connected to a source of power from which to draw," she says, slowly, as she works through it, "then it might be able to be cast so that the movement back and forth could be itself worked into the weave, powered by the connection?"

[we_bring_hell]

"Yes, exactly. The instructions here allow to create a... simulation, of the spell-casting neurons of the brain. A mirror of your own skill that is programmed with the spells. And now you are bouncing the lit torches off of a wall without extinguishing them, catching them and returning them."

"It would require unparalleled skill even without the energy cost of the simulation. Which is astronomical, and ongoing."

(Palamedes chuckled at 'unparalleled' when she said that to him. Nerd jokes.)

[blue_ajah]

The Aes Sedai nods.

"There is a novice exercise taught in the White Tower," she says. "Two novices will each create balls of light, and pass them back and forth to each other. It is intended to teach and refine the skill of transferring weaves to other holders without allowing them to become unstable and dissipate."

A beat of silence.

"Perhaps it could be used here in some way to test this theorem."

[we_bring_hell]

"Yes," she says slowly, because she's thinking. "It would greatly simplify the theorem to replace the two fields with something less complex."

"I imagine that if it were working as intended, the balls would... become one ball, twice as bright, hanging between the casters."

"I would be interested in trying it with you, but I know I have failed to successfully duplicate your magic before. I would understand more about the five distinctions you have described. The skein of thread you handed me--which type was that?"

[blue_ajah]

"Spirit, as I recall," Moiraine tells her. "Weaves of Spirit are used for many things, including to Delve someone to see what Healing is needed."

And to bond a Warder, but there is no need to speak of that, at least at present.

"Spirit is very often used together with other flows to enhance the whole."

[we_bring_hell]

She nods. It aligns with a thought--not even a thought, a sketch of a suspicion--she has been entertaining.

"Could I see another? Perhaps of Fire?"

[blue_ajah]

She inclines her head, and a golden corona of light springs into being around her as she opens herself to saidar.

Moiraine holds out both hands, and a tangle of threads made of brilliant red light forms into existence between her fingers. She shapes it easily into a ball of sorts, which she holds out for Harrow to examine.

It gleams like the flickering light at the heart of a flame.

[we_bring_hell]

"What are the... qualities of Fire?" she asks, reaching her gingerly towards the light. Her eyes are intent. "What is different in your conjuring of it?"

She chose Fire because fire has a sort of life; a sort of death, too.

[blue_ajah]

"I would not say there is anything especially different in the process of channeling, itself," Moiraine tells her.

She holds the weave steady, neither pushing it toward Harrow nor pulling back as if to warn her away.

"It is more a separation of the One Power into its components; isolating this flow from the others, distilling it into threads of itself alone. Channelers may be more skilled with certain of the flows, the Five Powers, than others. Men are often stronger with Fire and Earth."

"It feels -- vibrant, I suppose one might say, with a warmth to it that is more than that of saidar in general, quick and lively and energetic."

[we_bring_hell]

"Hm."

As she tries to lift the threads, she thinks of the deaths of fire; the snuffing out, the creeping chill. The cooling body. The light seems grey and sag at her touch, losing its coherency all together, and she pulls her fingers away hastily.

"No, that certainly isn't it."

She puts a hand to her fabric-swathed chin and thinks hard.

[blue_ajah]

Moiraine stabilizes the weave as Harrow draws back, and the red gleam brightens once more.

Dark eyes are thoughtful as she considers first the power she is channeling, then the younger woman.

"What does it feel like to you?"

[we_bring_hell]

"It feels like thalergy," she says. "But independent of a biological medium, and yes, a quality of warmth. Indeed, warmth is a quality of life that can radiate, as it were, from a body."

"I believe--I may be wrong--but I believe I had an affinity with Spirit. I changed it, yes, yet I did hold it, and of course spirit naturally transcends death."

"But converting all your weaves into Spirit is unhelpful. I am trying to conceptualize a way to flip it over into thanergy without losing that intrinsic quality of Fire. May I try again?"

[blue_ajah]

"Yes," Moiraine tells her, and lifts the bright tangle of threads closer.