we_bring_hell | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Ahh--no, I think I got it wrong."

"Perhaps I can try to hold it? So you can work on the notation?"

"Very well," Moiraine says.

"Place your hands against mine, like to like, and thread your fingers through the weave while I hold it."

She inhales, then carefully extends her hands to touch Moiraine's fingertips. She forces her mind away from the fleeting human contact and focuses on receiving the thalergenic magic.

She can see the fizzing corrosive edge where her own necromantic magic slowly converts the weave, and focuses, trying to pull it back or slow it. It feels like artificial respiration on a tiny living creature.

She shifts her hands, slowly pulling back and allowing the threads to slide onto Harrow's fingers in place of her own.

Rather than tie it off completely, she laces a maintenance thread of braided light from the edge of the weave to her left hand, keeping the flow of saidar steady as she studies the diagram.

Moiraine picks up the orange pencil and begins to alter the notation for the points of Fire - overwriting the ones that match where Harrow had written, and adding others where they do not.

She watches this thoughtfully; the steady flow of life into the dying weave.

And isn't this how life works? she thinks. How an organism lives? Always dying, always being renewed. Life isn't just growth. Growth alone is cancer.

She begins to feel it again--the warmth of the Light of Creation on her skin, through paint and black gloves. She can feel the nosebleed starting--and then healing, drying uncomfortably. Her jaw trembles; she knows if she says anything she'll lose it.

"There," she says, after several moments. "I think that is it."

The Aes Sedai glances up from the paper, at Harrow.

"Do you wish to pass the weave back, and check my markings?"

She nods, extending her hands.

The weave transfers without incident, and to her surprise the feeling of Light does not pass; not until Moiraine's finger tips draw away.

She clears her throat again, and bends her head to study the markings. "Yes--I think this is very definitely a starting point. I believe I can read this. Let me try something."

She grabs another sheet of paper and rapidly sketches a copy of the diagram, but this time inverts the Fire weave relative to the lattice. She imagines, based on nothing more than the intuition that suggested the mechanism of the invisibility weave, that this should return the light rather than bending it around the object; a perfect mirror.

She might be wrong; but the more interesting point is if Moiraine can even see what she was trying to suggest.

Moiraine looks back and forth between them for several seconds, frowning slightly in concentration.

Then, she drops the weave that she has been holding, and begins to construct another one.

She shifts the threads of Fire slightly and settles it around the water glass, watching as the glass vanishes behind it -- and the space in front of the glass is reflected back.

"A variation on the Mirror of Mists, I think," she observes. "Invisibility and reflective illusion created from the space around it."

The Aes Sedai slants a glance at Harrow, and a slight smile curves her lips.

"Is that what you intended, with your revision?"

Harrow never laughs, and rarely smiles; she does now. It is a savage and brilliant thing; the last time Moiraine saw it on her face there was blood on her teeth. This is substantially less creepy, even with the paint.

"Indeed! Truly, I primarily wanted to see if you could read a new diagram I created, but I must admit I am pleased to see that my intuition was correct."

Edited 2020-09-17 13:53 (UTC)

"I am, as well."

"If the weave is fully inverted, rather than in part," she adds, "it is also possible to hide the weaving itself."

She's not sure she understands that. "So that it cannot be seen that magic was done?"

"So that the weave itself is not noticed by others who might otherwise be able to detect it, yes," she explains. "Although I do not think it likely that I could invert myself, so the process of weaving could still be observed."

"Once you are behind such a shield, could you make other weavings unobserved? Or would that be visible to other adepts despite the visual shielding?"

"I begin to consider how I could adapt this to be invisible to another necromancer," she explains, "who could otherwise sense the energies I carry in my body, even in darkness. But I think even if I was obscured that way, they could sense a theorem in action."

"It is similar in the world where I was born. An Aes Sedai can sense the ability to channel in others who have it, or who are near to developing it. The act of channeling, of weaving, itself is even more apparent."

She hesitates for what feels like a very long time.

"I have been made aware of ways to hide certain abilities among channelers," she says, at last. "I do not think that something that would be able to be adapted for use here. But preparing weaves in advance might offer some options."

She nods. "It is no great matter at the the moment," she says. "Only trying to understand the limitations of what you had described."

"There are so many preliminary questions to be answered first; I cannot generate differentiated thanergy, nor weave it, nor am I sure that it will have the same effect," she says ruefully. "But progress continues."

The Aes Sedai smiles, very slightly.

"There is much to be said for that."

She reaches for her journal. "I have learned a theorem to share the perceptions of another," she says. "I used it to see through Gideon's eyes and guide her in fighting a monstrous construct. She was able to see the thanergetic structure that bound it. I was able to speak to her mind."

"I was not able to read her thoughts; it was far more biological than that. I sensed the flex of her muscles and the adrenaline in her blood, the chaos of the temporal lobe."

"Would you consider allowing me to use such a thing? You could see the thanergetic and thalergetic signatures of the world around us, and I could perhaps experience Channeling from within. It might be educational for both of us."

Edited 2020-09-17 14:58 (UTC)

She thinks that over, her dark-eyed gaze resting on Harrow as she does.

"Does your theorem allow you to control the actions of the one whose vision you share?"

"No," she says. "Indeed, in the past, I have struggled to even understand what I was perceiving. The human sensory apparatus is vast and complex and--overwhelming, when approached from outside."

"But that is output. I do not believe the theorem even allows for input. That is; it must, since Gideon was able to see energy signatures. But no input under my control."

The Aes Sedai inclines her head.

"Very well," she says. "Then I will allow it."

In some ways, it may not be entirely dissimilar to the experience of a Warder's bond, in terms of transmitting sensation and emotion. There is little risk, she thinks, if both her thoughts and control over her actions are protected... and she has always been curious.

She inclines her head in pleased assent. "In that case... I have only used it a few times, allow me to consult my notes."

She reads her own code, extracting the mathematical notation, and mentally reconstructing that into a spiral floating in the darkness of her mind; floods the spiral with thanergy, triggering the spell. She gnaws her lip as she ponders, then closes her eyes.

"You must focus on what you're doing at each stage--as an adept I believe you will find it simple enough, but you must remember the absolute chaos that lies behind even the calmest heart, on a biochemical level. If I am overwhelmed I will have to break the connection."

And then she reaches out for the tight, coiled bundle of thalergy that is Moiraine Sedai's brain. Biologically, fundamentally, Moiraine is a living human and Harrow and Gideon and everyone she has ever met are descended from Resurrected ones; there are differences, and the feeling of thanergy settling under the Aes Sedai's skin may be cold and unwholesome.

For her part, Harrowhark has definitely begun to sweat.

Her lips part in a soft gasp, and Moiraine grows very still.

It is like ice spreading through her, but not entirely. Like being immersed in the shade-cooled, slightly oily water of a swamp, feeling the alien sensation spreading throughout her. It is instinct to struggle against it -- but it is an instinct the Aes Sedai suppresses through long years of skill and experience at embracing saidar, which requires the channeler to allow it to flood over and flow through her without resisting.

She breathes, in and out, slow and steady, letting herself settle into the chill as it reaches for her bones.

"I will channel now," she murmurs. "It will seem like a river, rushing. Do not be alarmed."

Moiraine opens to saidar, and in an instant the power rushes through her, flooding her mind and her being with Light, warm and golden and shining.

Threads spark at her fingertips as one stream within the golden storm brightens, flowing faster and more clear, sky-blue and white.

Her calm is preternatural, and helps enormously. Nevertheless, like all living things, under the surface Moiraine Sedai is a raging storm. As she brushes aside unnecessary sensory noise, she becomes aware of pillars of magic caging the Aes Sedai's mind; the Oaths of which she has spoken, she assumes. Chains run through her verbal centers, the adrenal glands that recognize threats, through other centers she doesn't quite recognize the function of.

These same centers light up, though, as Moiraine begins to channel. She dials into these particular senses, and what floats up in the darkness behind her eyes is the image of a rosebud opening to the light. It is an altogether unfamiliar image--very little grows on the Ninth House, and none of it is ornamental--but the blaze of light and cascade of energy metabolizing in the (wholly notional) cells is indeed familiar.

"I see it," she says says slowly. "The rosebud. Can you... channel a particular element?" How does this rush of energy become Air or Fire?

"Yes," she says. "I will weave a breeze around us by stirring Air."

The sky-blue and white thread in the center of the golden stream brightens further, widens, and floats to the top of the torrent, settling into Moiraine's hands. She twists it into a small spiral, and the sensation of cool air against skin surrounds them.

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.