we_bring_hell | (no subject)

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Harrowhark is in the bar, wearing the style of facepaint known as the Vanitas, with no lower teeth and sharp angular edges. It's good to be back in her makeup, even if the consecration was a greater undertaking than anticipated.

Although she is formally painted from the neck up, she is wearing some of the more informal clothes her room had supplied; soft trousers and a hoodie all in black. She is not wearing gloves today, because her palms are wrapped in bandages, but it is the kind of wound she is used to dealing with and it is healing quickly. The pinpricks of pain around her lips are worse, if only because it's been a very long time since she underwent the ritual of the Sewn Tongue.

She is diagramming spirals on paper, working in ink rather than blood right now. She can't spare any blood currently. She has refreshments to share, if you like faintly cucumber-flavored water and very bland, crumbly biscuits.

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She feels it--feels the breeze on her skin, on Moiraine's skin, and feels the breeze originating within Moiraine, from her breath and thought. It intersects with her biological senses of the other woman's body; now that she is aware of it, she can feel the Light of Creation in Moiraine's thalergy, and how it differentiates in her through different systems and interactions.

The bellows of her lungs; the furnace of her metabolism; the ground earth and stones of her bones, the flow and river of blood. And all of them dying as fast as they live, and being replaced; carrying toxins and wastes and charred remnants flushed away through breath and blood and lymph.

"Yes," she repeats. "I think I see it." She's not--quite--maniac enough to try and do anything else magical while she does this, but her palms itch in her gloves.

The chill of Harrow's thanergy wraps around her bones and tightens, and Moiraine blinks, then blinks again.

She looks past the familiar rush of the weave in her fingers at the tabletop in front of her, both solid and decaying at once, both states feeling balanced and right. People move around the room, and she is aware of them in ways that she never has been before, from the subtle patterns of death-after-life among the Milliways dead that differentiates them from the living (and yet dying, all at once) here.

"Strange," she manages, aware as never before of the burning brilliance of saidar in opposition to the avalanche of universal destruction outside the window. "This is so very strange."

"Yes," Harrow breaths again. "Once you learn to see it--you cannot even close your eyes. The world goes on living in the darkness. When I was a child, feeling the responsibility of every soul in Drearburh as the Reverend Daughter, I would close my eyes at night and feel them living and dying out there. They were so old..."

"When you know it better you can see everything... organs, systems, functions. My caretaker Crux, his heart was in dreadful shape. I used to scrub the plaque from it like I brushed my teeth, terrified to lose him."

If Moiraine looks at Harrow she may see that she is different; a thanergetic system, more like the living dead of Milliways than a living soul from outside. Her heart is weaker, worse; her muscles spindled not just from her lack of exercise but from the persistent wash of death energy over her form. The Aes Sedai can, if she can comprehend the detail, see the subcutaneous blood vessels begin to burst beneath the paint as sweat gives way to blood-sweat.

Carefully, she shifts her weaving, releasing Air and calling Fire to the forefront. The golden light burns brighter and condenses into flickering flame on her palm, a flame fed by red-gold streams of light that ripple like blood through the river of saidar.

Just as carefully, she turns to Harrow, and dark eyes go wide with surprise.

Harrow keeps her eyes closed, focused entirely on Moiraine Sedai's sensory suite and on learning the shape of Fire.

She does not see Moiraine turn to look at her, but she does feel the Aes Sedai's surprise run through her, like an earthquake shaking a quiet laboratory. Her eyes open and she immediately wishes she had not; looking at Moiraine looking at herself and looking at herself looking at Moiraine through Moiraine's eyes makes her stomach churn.

She exhales and gradually retracts the theorem, pale beneath her paint.

Impulse would have her channel more of saidar as the touch of thanergy leaves her, as if to counteract, but Moiraine sets her teeth and resists it.

The golden gleam of light around her fades. Her breath is a little unsteady.

"That was ... quite something."

Harrow takes out a black handerchief. checks herself delicately for a nosebleed. All good.

She blots her makeup carefully. "For me, as well," she sighs.

"I believe I saw your Oaths--there were chains in your prefrontal cortex and amygdala, among others."

Edited 2020-09-17 20:42 (UTC)

For once, the Aes Sedai looks utterly startled.

"They were visible to you? You could see the weave?"

"Not--my eyes were closed," she says. "I could sense them. Like pillars the structure of your mind has grown around. Architectural."

"Ah," she murmurs. "I suppose they would be part of the very structure of my being, at that."

"I have no standard of comparison," she says. "But they were deeply anchored in your lifeforce, to be certain. Fueled by your own biology, it seemed."

"And I believe I learned much about channeling differentiated magic."

She looks up to the window of Milliways and opens herself to the flood of thanergy; not a rosebud opening to light, but a wilting rose surrendering to time. She breathes in death energy, far too much, her body aching instantly, and she surrenders most of it.

She huffs out a breath and can taste on it the toxins flushed from her blood and carried out through her lungs; anchors herself on the dying alveolar cells and marries it, in her mind, to the images of air burial. The vultures pick her chest bare, and--

A breeze blows, ruffling Moiraine's hair; not a kind breeze, but chill as the jealousy of angels. It only lasts a moment, and then Harrow's nose is bleeding.

"They would almost have to be, for them to bind as they do," she says, quietly. "And they have been meant to bind unto death."

She blinks as her hair moves with the breeze -- and as Harrow's nose begins to bleed, Moiraine reaches into a hidden pocket of her gown and draws out a blue silk handkerchief, which she offers to the younger woman.

She takes it, as much for the kindness as the handkerchief, and presses it to her black-painted nose. "Ahh, the perennial problem of necromancy... the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak," she says wryly.

"Do all Aes Sedai have them? They aren't just about speech, are they?"

Moiraine nods.

"The Three Oaths are administered as part of the ceremony to be raised Aes Sedai, after one completes training and testing for the shawl," she explains.

"To speak no word that is not true; to make no weapon with which one man may kill another; and never to use the One Power as a weapon except against Shadowspawn, or in the last extreme of defense of her own life, or that of her Warder or another Aes Sedai."

"Ahhh," she says. "That explains the amygdala."

"Not being able to lie seems it would come up the most often," she muses. "But which one is the hardest? Do you secretly dream of having a forge and churning out swords?"

"I think different Aes Sedai may experience different challenges, depending on their own inclinations," she says. "I have never been especially interested in making weapons, myself."

Fortunately the Oaths do not restrict teaching people any number of destructive things.

"I have been accustomed to them for so long that I am very, very rarely limited by them. Possibly the third oath was the most recent one that I remember being particularly difficult in an exceptionally frustrating way."

"Yes, I believe that one would weigh on me as well," she says dryly.

"I've never actually ripped a man's bones out but the knowledge that I could is an ever-present comfort."

"Hopefully it will remain an infrequent, even nonexistent, need," the Aes Sedai says, dryly.

"But the wording of the oath is important. It is not to say that you cannot use the One Power as a weapon, but rather only that the circumstances in which you may do so are clearly defined."

She lets that stand for a moment, and then adds, with casual calm,

"Besides. There are often many other ways to accomplish what is necessary without weaponry."

Harrow considers this. "The Oath says nothing about what your Warder may do, and once she enters combat, her life may well be in danger," she observes.

Edited 2020-09-17 21:45 (UTC)

"For example," Moiraine agrees. "Yes."

Harrow nods in appreciation.

A thought crosses her mind, and she reaches for her journal while still holding the handkerchief to her nose with the other hand. "Moiraine Sedai, you have a wide-ranging field of knowledge and have been in this bar for a long time. I found this message on a garment the Bar chose to give me, does it make sense to you?"

Written in the journal (in plaintext, although Harrow has been at some pains to imitate some very tacky fonts), it says

𝕮𝖍𝖎𝖛𝖆𝖑𝖗𝖞 𝖎𝖘𝖓'𝖙 𝖉𝖊𝖆𝖉
𝓈𝒽𝑒'𝓈 𝒶 ＢＵＴＣＨ

Edited 2020-09-17 22:02 (UTC)

No matter the terms and cultural understandings of her own world, Moiraine Damodred Aes Sedai has, among other things, been a visitor and sometime resident of Milliways for several years, a resident of Twin Peaks, and due to her adoption-in-spirit as sister, rather exposed to the unquenchable personalities of Raven and Ace.

It has been some time since she has been this glad of it, where cultural context is concerned.

"I see," she says, and gives Bar a long, steady look before turning back to Harrow.

"You spoke of chivalry before, as I recall, when we were discussing Warders, so I will presume you have knowledge of that term. In the historical usage of it, in some worlds, there is an assumption that chivalry is a predominantly male behavioral code. There was a saying for a while in some worlds, due to a presumed or perceived dearth of politeness, that chivalry was dead and its tenets no more."

She taps the page in Harrow's journal.

"In these same worlds, 'butch' is a term for a lesbian woman, one who loves other women--"

Her Cairhienin upbringing attempts to strangle her to prevent her from speaking of such private affairs, but she suppresses it, although her color may be slightly heightened.

"--and who chooses to adopt fashion and mannerisms that might be more commonly observed among men."

Once again, Harrow's traitor ears give away her own heightened color.

"I see," she says, in a slightly strangled voice.

"It appeared in my closet when I took up residence in my room, along with the more standard items."

"Bar has a sense of humor," Moiraine tells her, and once again the serene tones are slightly dry.

"It may be a message of some sort, or simply a joke. Usually, however, her jokes are meant well."

"It isn't..."

She sighs. "Well, it's not wrong."

That's not the point, of course; the point is that wearing such a garment is an advertisement that either one is such a chivalrous person, or is fond of one. Perhaps in search of one.

"If the Bar thinks Gideon Nav is ever far from my thoughts... it is wrong."

Edited 2020-09-18 01:05 (UTC)