(no subject)

[we_bring_hell]

The Bar has not relented in her attempts to get Harrow to eat something with slightly more calories than air. After many false starts, she seems to have struck gold with potatoes, a vegetable Harrow has never had before.

Mashed was a success; soup went well, too. But chips--ahhh, chips. Hot, salty, taste like almost nothing at all. Harrow may never eat anything else again. After several false starts in the dipping sauce area she has made peace with a light sprinkling of vinegar. The only problem is they make her gloves and her papers greasy.

Therefore, find Harrowhark Nonagesimus at a table with her journal and a skeletal hand, drawing spirals and... God help us... eating chips with a fork. It could be worse. The hand could be feeding them to her.

Comments

[acrookedpath]

Slowly, Wei Wuxian's eyebrows rise.

This could be a way, he thinks. He will not share anything with Moiraine for his own safety; if, at the same time, he studies her cultivation, enough to counter anything she may attempt on him?

It is not trust. Quite the opposite. But at least he would not feel so hunted whenever he spots her blue robes across the room.

"I would be grateful," he says. "Can you think of anything that may work for me, knowing what you know of my own cultivation?"

[we_bring_hell]

"Nothing comes especially to mind at the moment," she says. "I have learned little enough about the portal magic as yet."

"It is a very different magic from either of ours; almost as different as yours from mine. Yours seem to take the form of making statements to reality as to what you wish to do, with the necessary precision and information. I have a single tool--thanergetic conversion--and must wield it like a scalpel using precise knowledge of the physical sciences. Moiraine Sedai's magic differentiates into elemental energies that she must assemble in complex weaves, but their action seems almost more metaphorical, than anything practical."

[acrookedpath]

He nods. Flipping to a blank sheet of talisman paper, he begins to scribble a few notes.

"She mentioned a 'True Source' to me," he says as he tries to cast his mind back to their first conversation, before Moiraine revealed her true colors. "It sounded broadly similar to how I work with resentful energy -- taking energy from outside the self rather than generating it from within."

[we_bring_hell]

She frowns. "I would not compare them in that way. Your resentful energy is like a more emotional, personal version of thanergy. Both of us gather energy from ambient sources, although I benefit from inhabiting thanergenic planets."

"But Moiraine Sedai simply opens a channel to a vast source of energy. She does not... scrounge, as you or I may be forced to. It is waiting for her, like Lan Wangji's qi, but external."

"I made contact with it once, when we were doing a shared working, and I collapsed on the spot."

[acrookedpath]

The pen slows for half a heartbeat at the mention of Lan Zhan; in short order, he returns to himself and resumes scribbling.

"I see," he says. "And -- you mentioned elements. I assume she is able to divide the energy somehow, once she has retrieved it?"

[we_bring_hell]

"It seems to be an intrinsic differentiation of the energy; there is no such thing as a neutral weave, so to speak. To use it, it must be in one of these forms, and they are all equally available from the... stream, I suppose. She spoke of it as a river."

"I find that deeply interesting, because thanergy has, as it were, only one form. It kills and decays, as it did your paper man. Yet with her assistance I have been able to explore, perhaps, different ways of thanergy."

"She calls her power also the Light of Creation, and although she has been uneasy about necromancy before, I believe we have come to understand one another; that life and death are both facets of Creation itself, and that all things must move from one state to another in their time."

[acrookedpath]

Moiraine has always seemed so focused on light and shadow -- and more than that, the inherent goodness of light verses the inherent evil of shadow. To hear she may have begun walking in the grey space between is... interesting. Perhaps even promising.

(Not nearly enough to get Wei Wuxian to trust her, though.)

He adds another note to the paper. "So her source is more a bundle of silk, with different cloths as different elements," he muses aloud. "I suppose that fits with her calling it weaving. So you have been able to -- not channel it, but differentiate your thanergy the same way? How?"

[we_bring_hell]

She pauses, very deliberately, to draw the sharp edge of her tongue from its sheath. She lays a hand on the paper.

(Nothing she has said so far goes beyond what Moiraine Sedai shared freely in their first conversations. That necromancy can kill thalergenic magic as it killed the paper doll--that is something else.)

"I will tell you that, if you can tell me how that, or any of your other notes, will help you improve your own practice. If your reason for asking is to prevail in a conflict I deeply wish to see avoided altogether, I will not help you, Wei Wuxian."

[acrookedpath]

The pen stills. Slowly, he raises his eyes to Harrow's; he does not speak right away.

"I will not lie to you," he says at last, quiet. "I do ask in part for my own protection. But it is protection only; I want nothing more than to spend my afterlife in peace. If she does not strike at me -- truly strike, with more than words -- then I will not strike at her."

He sets down the pen and straightens in his seat.

"But it is not only that, Harrow, and I do not lie in this, either. I want to know as much as I can about the energies of this place and the ways it can be used. To know that thanergy is not a single thread, but can be split into many?" The familiar, earnest curiosity has sparked in his eyes. "That is something I didn't know was possible. And when I still wish to know if I can safely use thanergy, or tap into the energy of the body as you do to raise skeletons or carve into your very bones -- " He shrugs, with a faintly helpless smile. "I have always wanted to learn new ways to cultivate, beyond the boundaries of what I was taught."

[we_bring_hell]

"I will not ask you if you thought I was dishonorable, or simply a fool," she says, ice tinkling off each syllable.

"But if I must be drawn into this conflict, I will ask you instead: why do you fear her so? I thought at first she had given offense, and that was no great surprise. I myself both give and take offense quite easily, I find."

"But it seems to me that although you say you do not want an enemy, you are determined to make her into one."

[acrookedpath]

His throat works.

"You know what was done to me and those I care about," he says, no louder than before. "Anyone who will so cleanly divide the world into light and shadow, believing one good and the other evil, and call themselves righteous for it -- I cannot trust them, Harrow. Nor can I trust someone who will follow the letter of an oath but not its spirit, as she does with her edict to speak only truth. I have seen too many atrocities by those who follow every law and call themselves good, even as they slaughter the weak and persecute the helpless."

He rubs the side of his hand across his forehead, fitfully.

"And I am sure you will tell me she is different. It may be so. I accept that I may be too blinded by my own pain to see clearly. But I don't know what can be done to change that. I am sorry."

[we_bring_hell]

"I do not say you are wrong about her, Wei Wuxian; I think you are wrong about yourself." She shakes her head.

"You yourself believe in good and evil; it is in every word you say. To slaughter the weak and persecute the helpless is wicked. The people who slaughtered your people were wicked and deserved their deaths. My parents--were wicked. Were monsters. Monsters walk among us, Wei Wuxian, and you know it as well as I do."

"I have long feared I am one. The Eighth House, who carve the world with their tome in the way you describe, would say so. But Moiraine Sedai does not think so."

[acrookedpath]

Wei Wuxian frowns slightly.

"Of course you're not," he says.

[we_bring_hell]

She snorts. "You say that with such confidence."

[acrookedpath]

"You have not given me reason to think otherwise," he says, with the smallest shrug.

[we_bring_hell]

"When people say such things," she says quietly, "I feel tempted to prove I am."

"That was why I unburdened myself so fully to Lan Wangji, I believe. I was sure I could find a sin too far for him. He is such an upright fellow--even his colors remind me very much of the Eighth House."

[acrookedpath]

He cracks a wan smile. "He is," he agrees quietly. "But I think he has changed in the last three years. He has become better at walking the grey spaces between."

If his seclusion had done what his uncle wanted it to do, Lan Zhan would have struck down Wei Wuxian the instant they crossed paths. That he has not -- that he has, instead, helped him, comforted him, shared meals with him --

He wrenches his thoughts on another path.

[we_bring_hell]

"Yet he is not a man who does not care about the difference between good and evil," she points out. "Far from it. He has only learned to find the difference for himself and to have compassion for all; to offer assistance when something concerns him, but to acquiesce at a refusal and withhold judgment unless they do real harm."

She looks him in the eye as she says: "It is a quality I admire in my friends."

[acrookedpath]

Her words strike him like a rebuke; he looks away, shame twinging his belly, and manages a nod.

"I understand." He still cannot push his voice any louder. "But I am still -- wary. About what may qualify as real harm to her."

[we_bring_hell]

"It is your decision," she repeats. "But do not try to use me to plumb her abilities."

She worries her temple with a thumb, disturbing the paint. "I confess I do not understand how you could show 'the taint of Shadow' and not I. You are, I think, a better person than I in any moral dimension."

[acrookedpath]

"I do not understand it, either," he says, a little startled by her admission. "Perhaps..."

His mouth twists.

"The clans often said that resentful energy harms the body and temperament. Yet if it does, I would think thanergy harms the body just as much. It is the energy of death -- of course it would. But." A long sigh. "We both know it is different. I should fine-tune the energy talisman array soon, so I can continue researching how different."

Pushing the pen aside, he rips his sheet of notes free of the portfolio. Wei Wuxian folds them in half and slides them across the table to Harrow.

"Here." Low. "Do with them as you wish. I acted dishonorably in my fear, and I apologize."

[we_bring_hell]

She considers, and slides the paper back. "It is nothing more than I learned the first time we spoke. I do not think there is anything harmful in it."

But it means a great deal that he offered.

"After seeing you gathering energy, I am truly inclined to believe that resentful energy is similar to the poltergeist energy revenants wield."

"You can only wield the energy after it has passed through the hands of the spirits; the difference, perhaps, between these chips," she says, indicating the paper cone, "and biting into a raw potato, which I do not recommend."

[acrookedpath]

Midway through tucking the folded paper back into his portfolio, Wei Wuxian makes a truly impressive face of disgust, complete with a tiny blegh at the end.

"Indeed," he says -- but already, he's brightening slowly, the wheels of his mind visibly turning. "So if there were a way to 'cook' the raw thanergy, so to speak, transforming it into resentful energy -- but how could that be done if it is unattached to the energy of the spirit? I would have to attach it somehow, and figure out a way to do it non-destructively if possible -- "

He snatches up the pen again and turns to another blank sheet of paper.

[we_bring_hell]

"Or like bees turning nectar into honey?" she says, vaguely, because she's never seen a bee. "Perhaps that analogy is better."

She ponders, and when she speaks again it's slow. "The Ninth art of growing bone might be relevant here."

[acrookedpath]

"Oh?" He looks up. "How so?"