[pfsb] investigations and explorations

[blue_ajah]

Two days after Moiraine brought Wei Wuxian's talismans back to Twin Peaks, after she has taken the time necessary to review all of her notes as well as the histories she has been collecting, she calls Dale Cooper, who is still in Olympia, now, rather than Seattle.

All things considered, the conversation could have gone much, much worse.

She is well aware that they are going to have a much longer discussion after he returns in a few weeks, but he had agreed not to ask her to wait. She, in turn, had agreed, as before, not to go to Glastonbury Grove alone, or at night. She also agrees not to approach the pool closer than necessary to place the talismans, or to test it with her own weaving - not at present, anyway.

Hawk had been her next call.

A few days later, after he has had time to consider and to consult with the Bookhouse Boys, Hawk knocks on her apartment door and agrees to her request.

* * * * * * *
When Moiraine returns to Milliways, she leaves a sealed note with Bar, addressed to Wei Wuxian.

Master Wei--

I made the trial of your talismans according to your instructions. When I activated the one at the northernmost point, glowing red energy swept inward from the circle in a wave focused on the pool at its center.

The pool absorbed it all. It vanished into the depths without a ripple, and without a trace.

Nothing else has happened. Yet.

--Moiraine Sedai

That task completed, she settles at her preferred table with tea and begins sketching something in a notebook.

Comments

[we_bring_hell]

"No," she says slowly. "But... she has. Been with me. In times when I was desperately lonely."

She looks down. "Perhaps I was only mad. But if I was not... she was kind. I do not understand how she can be..." She shakes her tight-shorn head, not looking up. "Perhaps I am everything the Ninth is feared to be. Heretic. Shadow cultist."

"That is why my parents..."

She trails off; her stiff-backed recitation of history, dispassionate and controlled, has deserted her entirely.

[blue_ajah]

There are many questions she will likely need to ask, she thinks, in the wake of that particular revelation. Moiraine does not let her alarm show by so much as the flicker of an eyelash.

But first—

“Your parents?” she prompts, not unkindly.

[we_bring_hell]

Inhale. Exhale.

"Gideon told them where I had gone. She could not have known..." She breaks off. Tries again.

"They were... gentle with me. They did not yell, or reprove. They helped me tie the noose when my hands shook. But."

She gestures, encompassing herself; her living body. The proof that she let her parents down right up to the very end.

[blue_ajah]

"They sought to kill you?"

[we_bring_hell]

"No, no," she says.

"They simply expected me to join them, as their cavalier did."

[blue_ajah]

Silence, again, for several moments this time.

"They ended their lives rather than live in the knowledge that the Tomb had been opened, is that it?" she says - certain that she is right, but seeking confirmation all the same.

"That would seem to be exceedingly foolish of them, then. I am sorry if it is hard for you to hear that."

[we_bring_hell]

She shakes her head. "There is no insult you can offer them worse than what I did and have done. I can only say I recognize the impulse to give up. If what I had found had been different..."

She looks down.

"They were gone. And I had to rule Drearburh, alone. I knew if word got out, I'd be married off to some son of the Third or daughter of the Fifth and in a generation... there would be no Ninth."

[blue_ajah]

"You were ten?"

She looks to be considering something.

"And now you seek to restore the Ninth through Lyctorhood?"

[we_bring_hell]

"Yes," she says, her composure restored. "I was ten."

She hesitates. "I seek to restore the Ninth, as I have all my life. Gideon and I left behind no one under sixty years of age."

"The trial to become a Lyctor was an order from the Emperor, and a tremendous opportunity, and I would've obeyed either way--but I would be a fool not to see that it is perhaps the one chance I have to gain the influence I would need, as well."

[blue_ajah]

"Perhaps not the only chance," the Aes Sedai observes, "but certainly a clear one."

She taps her finger against the side of her teacup, thinking.

"Has anything else changed since you opened the Tomb? Anything at all?"

[we_bring_hell]

She shakes her head. "The Tomb is not open -- that is, I did not remove the seals. I passed them."

"The Tomb is as it ever was. In my life, and none of the dedicats who have kept it for many times my life have observed anything."

"In the days just after my parents' deaths, she was with me often. It became hard to... trust my perceptions. I saw her less in time."

[blue_ajah]

If it is madness, the Aes Sedai thinks, there may be little to be done. She will have to send a note to el-Nynaeve, and prepare herself for an exchange of favors should one be needed - although she suspects that will not be the case.

(It has been too long since she has visited Malkier, she knows, but all of them understand why.)

"The Wheel weaves," she murmurs, considering. "She remains sealed asleep in the Tomb, but she spoke to you, after you entered it? And continued to do so? Did she ask you to do anything for her, or on her behalf?"

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow shakes her head. "She rarely spoke. She was simply... a presence. Sometimes not even seen. Sounds in the distance."

She make a small noise; not quite a sigh. "I have considered seriously that I am mad of course."

"As I got older, it was less. After my first menarche," she says this as awkwardly and stiffly as if confessing to a crime, "I stopped seeing her altogether. Only the subtler signs."

[blue_ajah]

"Of course you would have," Moiraine tells her. "And I cannot answer that question for you. But I am not at all certain that matters are that simple."

Her gaze is steady and clear.

"I have more questions, if you are willing to answer them. I realize that you have confided a great secret in me, with this."

[we_bring_hell]

" I did not tell you to ease my own mind," she says quietly. "But because I want you to make your choices in full knowledge of who and what I am."

"You must decide when we are finished."

[blue_ajah]

"What choices do you expect me to make?" the Aes Sedai asks.

[we_bring_hell]

"To trust me or not," she says. "Or how far."

"You speak of teaching me dangerous techniques; of showing me your home, which you have guarded closely."

Her composure has returned, but it is fragile; she is faintly vibrating with the anxiety of offering herself to be judged. But if she must be honest with her cavalier, she must also be truthful with a mentor.

"I am a crime," she repeats. "A sin. For seven years, I steered and controlled the bodies of my parents even as they withered. Another sin. In my grief I tormented a child who was entirely within my power. Another sin. Because Ortus Ninegad would not come to Canaan House--because I allowed him to cheat his duty--my beloved marshal killed him and his widowed mother. Because I misjudged a situation in my pride, two more children are dead."

It seems impossible to believe Wei Wuxian has done anything worse than the crimes she wears on her skin.

"I am steeped in blood and secrets and heresy. I want your knowledge and..." She licks her black lips. "I confess I crave your good opinion. Your--your kindness. But I will not have it falsely. Not... for myself. For the Ninth, I might do worse. But not for myself."

"Ask your questions and be satisfied in me. Or not."

[blue_ajah]

"Lady Ninth," Moiraine says, gently. "Harrow."

You are a hard woman, Moiraine Sedai, Lan Mandragoran had told her once. She had not disagreed then, and does not now.

She is who she is, and she has always been as hard as she has to be.

"I made my decision in this long ago. Nothing you have said here today has changed it."

Would the younger woman think differently of her if she knew everything that the Aes Sedai carried with her, done and undone, in her own past? Perhaps. A flicker of guilt whispers through her and she shoulders it as she has every other burden, then pushes it away.

[we_bring_hell]

"All right," she whispers. She is trembling; she hates it.

(She looks horribly young. In this light it is clear; the formidable skull of the Ninth is just paint on a seventeen year old girl, pushed to her limit and held there without hope of relief. One who is neither as hard-boiled or as damned as she believes herself to be.)

[blue_ajah]

She hesitates, considering, but only for a moment.

Moiraine holds out her hand to Harrow, palm up, clearly expecting her to take it.

[we_bring_hell]

For her part, she hesitates as well; when she reaches out her gloveless hand, it is not in the manner of one seizing a lifeline, but anticipating a smack with a ruler or at least an examination. Nevertheless she takes comfort in the warmth of Moiraine's skin on hers; delicate hand in delicate hand, pale brown skin on pale pink.

Something in her chest that's wordless and primal, very much a part of the meat she controls so unkindly and not the trapped and angry mind above, takes comfort. The body remembers, as well as the mind, and it lays this memory in a pathetically thin file of such comforts. Crux's rough old man hands leading her gently through the caverns of the Ninth when she was most lost. The illusion of the Body's cold hand when she was most alone. Most buried and most cherished, her father's firm hand, flinching from her even then but still supporting, as she took her earliest teetering steps alongside a construct's.

[blue_ajah]

She closes her fingers around the younger woman's and rests their linked hands on the table.

"I do not intend to turn away from you for this," she murmurs. "Instead, if you will allow, I will work with you to seek further answers."

[we_bring_hell]

A gasp escapes her black lips before she regains control. "Yes," she says, eyes gleaming.

"I mean... I would appreciate... I do not know how I could ever repay it."

[blue_ajah]

"Let us not speak of repayment for such things now," the Aes Sedai tells her. "We will talk of it later, if at all."

"I have spoken to you before of those who are ta'veren. I do not have the ability to see ta'maral'ailen forming, but I would be surprised if something were not approaching, some sort of change or culmination. It says much, I suspect, that you were able to enter the tomb at all."

[we_bring_hell]

Moiraine does not define the second term, but Harrow has the bright child's horror of asking questions she can possibly solve through context clues. "It has been ten thousand years since the Emperor needed new disciples," she says. Her voice is quiet, but the vibrato of heavy emotional weather is calmed. She no longer fears to shatter or embarrass herself before the Aes Sedai.

"And it is the myriadic year; the exact year 10,000. I do not peddle in numerology but I admit feels... significant."

"I had the sense," she says slowly, "that the wards were more to... keep out, than keep in. They were powerful wards--From the first time I entered to the time I reached the Body was six months of patient unravelling--but if a ten year old girl, no matter how powerful or ruthlessly tutored, could breach them... If she is so powerful that God fears her, then..."

"When she visited me--if she visited me--she walked through them like air."