Inevitable

Inevitable

Postby Glenn » Wed Jan 08, 2014 7:25 am

Ariane,

I find myself at a crossroads. On the one hand, I could watch everything I care still care about wither away and all that I have worked for fall to dust and darkness descend upon us and the inhumanity and incivility and wildness and pain and death of years ago to seep back in, or I can man up and face you and all that is unsaid between us, so that necessary business can be done. I cannot make all of this work through letters alone. Thus, with this letter, I move and you and not I, find yourself at a crossroads instead. What worse map could I send than one that takes me away from where I do not wish to be and drops you there instead?

Come and see me.

Glenn


The Governor's office was clean. That was, of course, the first warning sign. Where there should have been small domiciles for large imaginary beasts made out of stacks of paper and files and what not, there were a few small, neat piles. Even when he was at his least human, the messiness and sprawl of the paperwork belied whatever self remained. Now that he was something else entirely, it was all rather sparse.

So was he, though less so than before. Meat was finally returning to bone and flesh. Muscle as well. He was training. Not everyone could tell and it was almost certainly premature, but slowly, ever so slowly, starvation was turning into lithe strength. He still had quite the ways to go, however. His clothes were three years out of fashion and still a bit baggy on him. There was a sword leaning against the wall. He sat in his chair full of a temporary vitality. He would use it while he could and even now wrote feverishly.
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Carnath-Emory » Wed Jan 08, 2014 1:05 pm

If you're Ariane Emory, you enter this room knowing that it will speak to you long before its Governor has uttered a single word.
And discover, on first glimpsing that sterile interior, that the question of whether he realises this or not is perhaps least amongst your concerns.

It's so quiet in here. No precariously piled papers to crowd and chatter at her eyes, no labyrinthine excesses of lettering and diction and phrase. No featureless tomes balanced upon their peaks, silent guardians against the scurrying escape of all those teeming words. Fourteen months ago, the feverish industry of his office had jostled and shoved at her senses. Today it whispers softly to her sight, and what it speaks of is something other than calm.

Now, as then, she takes her time with this. With this spartan interior; with the Governor that's seated at the heart of it, this man who was once a boy, who was once a student and the occupation of her every morning for most of a year. What had been a silent shape at the doorway is a quiet wanderer of this interior, and she does not precisely approach the young man at its center; not with anything like directness. This is a series of obscure trajectories as performed by a thing that's all blackened suede and finespun russet wool; one which imagines, perhaps, that the colour's autumn warmth does something to temper the cool monochrome of her features. She'd kept herself well distant of him for fourteen months - as distant as can be managed, between two people whose duties obligate them to sometimes share a single building; it had been letters back and forth since the hour she first left his office, except for the day, the only day, in which he had insisted she not be present, and even now she allows him something like a little freedom from her presence.

"The problem with crossroads, I think, is that each one crossed leads you immediately to another."

But not from her words.
And not, when she's spoken them, from something that is not a smile; that speaks of more silent warmth, all the same, than her words could have possibly managed.
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Glenn » Thu Jan 09, 2014 1:47 am

His chair had padding. Her chair, were she to decide to take it, had it as well, but his was a little different. His posture, for what it was worth, was terrible. As she entered, the word entered being somewhat subjective, he shifted. As she spoke, he shifted even more. The padding was massed at the top and that's where he leaned his head now, somewhere between slumped and reclined, crook of his neck into that padding, nose up, chin up, left hand at the side of his neck, the whole enterprise of his head turned to a slightly askew angle.

He was thinking.

"I don't know. I think that when we pass through a crossroad, the main consequence isn't in where we're heading but in what we're leaving behind. Tracks, ruin, a collapsed crossroad. Beware those that follow in our footsteps. Something like that."

That was quite enough thinking. With something of a sleepy groan (or pained. It could have been pained, at which point hiding it with sleepiness was a fool's errand. Ariane Emory was terrible when it came to all languages but two. One was somehow both flowing and guttural. The other was a physical thing, and of its dialects, she knew pain best of all), he shifted to a more sociable sitting position and looked her dead on again. The eyes were crisp and clear. There was no smile. False sleepiness, however, was traded for slightly detached fondness. The pain remained.

"It's a false analogy, I think. All roads lead either to crossroads or to nowhere. If you want to arrive at anywhere meaningful in life, you need to make choices."
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Carnath-Emory » Thu Jan 09, 2014 5:01 am

"Traps," she adds after a time. "If you're of a mind for that sort of thing." It's entirely possible that she's all but incomprehensible in her native tongue, as well. Who could know? "Did I ever tell you of the leshiy? A forest-thing; his feet are set backwards, and lost travelers who make to follow the tracks he leaves are only led deeper amongst the trees..."

This, though. A body's adjustment to its seat's unconventional contours; the quiet discomfort which prompted it. It's his eyes that she examines at first - a matter of habit in three different ways, a matter of preference in here and in now - but her own have allowed a moment's attention as well for the weapon he's leaned against his wall. A moment's consideration, time enough in which to weight the presence of steel against a body that's all difficult angles and very clear eyes, and draw some small conclusions of the man who sits so uncomfortably at a governor's desk.

"It's a false analogy. But it's not, not really. All I mean is that each choice immediately begets another - usually while you're still managing the consequences of the first."

A woman who'd never actually seated herself had drawn near enough, at least, to rest fingertips upon the top of the chair; here she stands when her eyes gently close, here as she draws a slow breath.

"I'm just so - sorry." That - which is something like consequences; which is something not nearly so impersonal, not nearly so detached. With a tilt of her chin towards the doors behind her, towards the Myrkentown which sprawls beyond these walls, and frowning eyes focusing back upon his own. "Of all of this. Of her."
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Glenn » Thu Jan 09, 2014 5:17 am

He let her speak. That was both new and unkind. This was a man preparing for a marathon, a one legged man, a man dragging himself along the road. Oh, he may be the best runner in the world, have the best technique, the best stamina. Even so, with one leg he would not be winning any races anytime soon. It doesn't mean he couldn't place.

So yes, he let her speak. He let her speak all the way to the end. Then his eyes shut and his nose cringled up just a little and as a shut became a clench, that look of pain massed between those eyes. It lasted for a few very long, excruciating moments, before he opened his eyes once more.

"We could have kept going. I would have started on about how you could avoid the road itself or how in the midst of a crossroads you could send off small woodland creatures or Inquisitors to go down the road for you to map each possible path or," a soft shake of his head, "well, I don't know. I hadn't gotten to the point where I thought about it yet. We could have built an imaginary tower of our words and plonked it down right at those crossroads and we could have climbed higher and higher in it until we could see the entire landscape, never having taken a step."

And instead, she said she was sorry, and what was Glenn Burnie in the face of that? "We could have spent all day and gone nowhere at all. It would have been nice." It was one last escape. An endless talk in a tavern about to go up in flames. Instead, he nods. "I'm sorry too. For myself, for her, for Myrken, for you. You only ever asked one real thing of me. You could have sooner asked me not to breathe."
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Carnath-Emory » Thu Jan 09, 2014 7:27 am

He lets her speak. Which hardly anyone ever does, not least because they're seldom in any position to; one does not put an end to what has hardly even begun. During the space of three months and some several days besides, the Lady that she'd been had proved terribly good for talking and not so much for anything else; in an hour such as this she might have filled the Governor's ears with an endless flow of words, each curious tale feeding into the stranger next; might have exhausted a weary man with fancies and trivia -

The swordswoman who was once his teacher has given him a myth, a disjointed conclusion, and an apology so abrupt as to be jarring.

His response is a flinch that tightens her fingertips into the back of the chair. His words are at once a reminiscence and a tempting variation on the theme of regret; well before he's finished, something like a smile's begun tugging at her lips, clinging even when her head slightly bows. It is a lasting quietness which follows the last of those words. With head slightly bowed and eyes gazing down towards nothing, really nothing at all, just so that the moment might pass through her, the wholeness of its sweetness and its want and its Long-Ago and Now -

"I'd have liked that." As her eyes lift towards his own again, and there's no shedding this smile, such as it is. Not even now. "I'd have liked that very much. Five years ago, it would have been that; five months ago I'd have made it that. But five months ago we were ink on paper; we were utility and - " A slight shift of her hand. "A year of this, and you ask me here today; I have to imagine that this costs you." To look at him, to spend the measure of two heartbeats looking at the sight his face wears, makes imagining wholly unnecessary. "I have to imagine that there's reason for this, and that you'd like to see it addressed."

The narrow body slightly straightens; she hadn't sat, but had made a lean of herself there at least, against a chair reserved for better treatment than that.

"But I wanted that said; that, first. I wanted that known, and words on a page are no good for it - mine particularly," and the smile is fleetingly rueful. "There was every chance that this was the only opportunity there'd be. And Glenn Burnie -

You know. You know full well I always asked the hardest things."
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Glenn » Thu Jan 09, 2014 7:45 am

She speaks. He lets her again. This was not something that was going to last. For a moment she might wonder, for if something happens once it is a thing and if it happens twice it is the beginnings of a pattern, perhaps. Still, he is he and she is she. Even so, he lets her words flow once more.

Then, finally, uncoiled now, more relaxed, more at ease for familiarity is the easiest, if not best, balm for cold burns of time and loss. "If you don't understand them, they don't seem hard at all. That's why no one ever manages them, Ariane. They seem like anything else and become like anything else. It's far too easy to lose track of them, then. It's..." And he could go on. She knew that. He knew that. He knew she knew, and he said as much. "But we could spend all day refining what we already know, too." She would like that as well. New ways to examine the most familiar things. That made the world go round and it made her world so much larger. It did some very nice things for his as well.

It was not to be. "There will be no towers for us today, I'm afraid." Maybe a pit, but no towers. "Your approach is the correct one, however. There are reasons I asked you here, and thank you for coming. Before that, though, there are necessities, and despite their importance, this is going to be the opportunity for them, for they are about you and I and everything else is about everyone else. Once we take a step forward, responsibility will overwrite necessity." He smiled now, and it was a bright enough thing, defiance in the face of crossroads and everything else. "Would you like to ask a question or would you like me to simply give you an answer instead?"
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Carnath-Emory » Thu Jan 09, 2014 9:40 am

She'd wondered. And hoped against it. And all the same, when he spoke again he did not so much deliver her from that unspoken dread as re-introduce a more familiar sort in its stead.

Oh, the things she might have said, knowing this as she did. It was only three years after, she might have begun, and then it would have been Helstone that was suddenly their topic of conversation; Coriolanus Helstone, who'd fallen to drow almost as certainly as if the Underdark had swallowed him whole. Helstone, who'd suffered a scant fraction of what was to befall his successor, and still It was all those years, she might have said, before they could begin to speak again at all - because his wounds ran deeper than the trivialities of blood and meat and bone, and they'd dwelled in a choking cloud of doubt and confession and murderous unease, every question a lunge, a deflection of ill-intent. Poisonous, she might have said -

And instead listened quietly indeed.

"I'd like that as well." That, after a time, a handful of words inserted into the midst of his own. "I'm not sure that it's useful." It is. It's not. It's -- "And it's not about what I like at all." -- complicated. Correct, though, is simple. Reasons and thank you, the cooling courtesies with which a Governor is well to be equipped, and when he asks her this question there's no hesitating in her reply at all.

"Start with your answer. You'll get the questions after."

Kindling. Fire. The thin, acrid sting of acknowledging that a man who'd got half the death he'd deserved was ever right about anything at all.
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Glenn » Thu Jan 09, 2014 12:01 pm

That was very much the problem. Their last meeting in this room had been a fell thing. It had been downright dire. One wrong word. One wrong sentiment and everything could have fallen apart. As it was, who could say that what happened instead wasn't somehow worse. There was a pressure to the air that day, a tension. You could cut it with a blade, and perhaps one almost did.

Today, there was a looseness to everything. Today there was slack, almost too much of it. The talk could go so many ways. There were so many questions. There were so many answers. There was so much to say. Three years, but so many days. They used to have a casual luxury. A year, longer. Every morning. Now they had no luxuries, casual or otherwise, save, perhaps, a semblance of sanity. Anywhere else that would be a bare minimum. Any other time, perhaps, it could be a given.

Here? Now? Some luxuries were worth appreciating.

This answer was not one of them. "What she did to you," and could she pause this, stop it, now that it had begun? Likely not. She had the chance to aim them. She deferred: "without metaphor. It doesn't deserve metaphor. She had an end point in mind. She prepared. She inserted that end point into you and used your own memories to fill in the holes in that end point, to give it life and make it real. Who you were was to be mostly gone. All of the memories that made you would be used in the new you. Very little was to be wasted. She did it to the Brown boy. I came back. I realized it. I realized you were next. I went to stop her, Giuseppe with me. Why him? We had similar goals. They were not hers. He was near death. It was a chance for a better legacy. That mattered to him. More importantly, his mind was shielded from her. Obviously his needs were not. His life mattered to him more. He betrayed me. I could have tried to use my last moment of consciousness to try to stop her. I might have failed. Instead, I damaged what she meant to do to you. It was," in short, a Glenn Burnie Plan, "irresponsible. I'm no mentalist. I took a hammer to something complex and dangerous. It could have done worse to you. But then it couldn't, because there's nothing worse than no longer existing. I meant to stop it entirely. I failed. When I woke up, it was in Golben."

One answer. Maybe two. Maybe three. "I knew you had a chance, though, and I knew that was all you needed. It gave me some succor in the darkness."
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Carnath-Emory » Thu Jan 09, 2014 1:20 pm

Fourteen months before, the swordswoman who was once this boy's teacher had come to his office expecting that she would not leave it.

Could you best him?
They'd asked her that. If the fight was fair; if it was nothing like. If it was your sword and his, if it came down to nothing like steel but mostly just sweat and fists. Could you put him down? She'd answered, every time. It was the same word, every time. She gave them nothing but the truth, and at no point did she harbour any desire to add that their questions were absolutely moot. She'd left that room with her heart a chaos and her skin intact; he'd remained, with his sanity somewhat so. Knowing the stakes before she went to him, inhaling that tension into her lungs with every breath they drew, she'd left understanding how very improbable that outcome was; how easily any moment might have swung towards irrecoverable disaster. They'd parted ways with some fragmentary ability to function and this, too, was luxury.

Today, she lets him lead. Invites it - which she'd done the last time, as well, only to wrest it right back from him almost immediately. Not today. It is his, because a swordswoman whose talent is for brutality would have made it clumsily cruel; because he will use it well -

And he does.
Oh, he does.

It doesn't deserve metaphor. It deserves to be this: a fist to the face, ironclad and unrelentingly direct. This is the truth delivered so unsparingly that she can stand straight-spined in the face of it, can stare it in the eyes - which sometimes means his; which sometimes, when disgust overwhelms her, means some distant point just past his shoulder. This is explanation served in a fashion such as she can fight her way through - motionless though she may be, silent though she remains. Except that at a point deep in the heart of it -

but they've been here before: the moment in which a swordswoman's fingers tighten upon the chair-back, the moment in which varnish chips and fractures beneath biting steel. They've been here before, and it is nothing that he can't have anticipated: the cold tightness of her features, the small, unconscious violence of her hands. "Chush' sobach'ya!" she spits, and it's torn from her throat half-gasping. He betrayed me. But of course he did. "On'ebanatyi pidarazthe - " Her jaw clenches down against whatever might have followed, trembles with the need to restrain an anger for which she hasn't words. The pale throat swallows - twice, hard, and this too is nothing that he has not seen. Time passes, because time is what is required for steel to subside and for hands to become still; for a woman to swallow back an anger that had rushed at her, hot and hard.

"There's nothing worse." That, when her voice has become a thing which can speak the words quietly. That, an assent that is almost murmured. "I would sooner have died," and it is the truth that she had almost spoken to an architect just days before; almost and not quite. "Don't call that irresponsible. Not in that respect; do not begin to. You did everything right, as right it could be; a very few choices left to you then, mn? You were right to hit, you were right to take him - there was no-one else, and how were you to know that - "

A hand rakes back through the dark of her hair; the whole of her slightly turns, sets its eyes upon some remote feature of his office wall.

No. A glance back towards him, now. "Thank you. But don't, do not, tell me it was worth - Golben. This. Do not begin to."
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Glenn » Fri Jan 10, 2014 2:12 am

It was a simple bit of math, a simple bit of truth. It was one of those things that came to him instinctively and only truly made sense after the fact: answers were about her, questions were about him. Why was that? It was because she was not one to ask about herself. How is my hair today? Was my footwork as good as ever? Is my writing improving?

How did Rhaena Olwak sunder my very soul?

These were not the sort of questions Ariane Emory asked. It did not mean that she did not get at such truths in her own way, that she did not often prefer to get to them in her own way, though sometimes she never reached them at all. They simply didn't have time for her way, or even for his, or for any other. Cold hard truths, truths that he dreaded before the fact, that he lived through in pain and desperation, and that carried with him every moment in Golben.

Cold hard facts and so much left unsaid, unknown, with Giuseppe's motivations and prior knowledge perhaps the least of them. This was an answer and it was about her. That he said anything at all about himself and his own role was because he was he and she was she and frankly, it was weakness. It was extraneous. It was a plea and an apology. There were fates worse than death and she suffered them very much because he had failed her. She lived now, yes. He had a hand in that. He survived Underdark and Golben very much because of her training.

The difference between them was, perhaps, that she would not state that, ever. He, on the other hand, could not help but tell Ariane Emory that he had tried, even if it was clad in an apology. There were some things that even Glenn Burnie could not endure.

Frankly, she was far too kind to him, and not kind at all to herself except for, perhaps, in many small ways that had been tainted by what Rhaena Olwak had done and hopefully a few that had not.

She has a statement, an order, a command. He waves his hand, dismissing it. It was one thing for him to show that weakness, that one bit of all too personal humanity that she would never have recognized in him but that also was always there, even when things were at their worst. It was another for her to respond to it like that. That was not its purpose. He could not hear her words and not see the unworthy thing that drew them out of her. "No. None of that. This was my fault. I acted alone too often. I accepted too many sacrifices, of all things that matter, to accomplish my goals. I fostered this. I let it grow. I created an environment where there was power in the air and then failed to stop it from being used in the worst ways. I was fighting a war, Ariane, not against an Ashfiend or a Dragon or all of Burel's forces. I was fighting a war against ideas and eventualities and attrition. Against nature and everything unnatural. Against pain and loss and unfairness. The weapons you need for something like that?

"We can control fire. I believe it. There are risks though, and everything can go wrong. When it does, everything burns."
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Carnath-Emory » Fri Jan 10, 2014 6:24 am

Suddenly, very abruptly, there are people to do things for you. There's breakfast downstairs, if you want it; a hearth stoked into fiery life even before you wake, and you wake damned early, always have. Laundered clothes in your closet whether you ask for them or not; you might ask them to stop, and for a while they probably will. A pair of capable secretaries pen the letters you dictate; a clerk will run them to any address that you please.

There are - people. Sometimes employees and sometimes acquaintances; occasionally friends. It's never been this before. Convenient, sometimes; occasionally practical, and often wounding. How's my footwork? but there's no better judge of that than your own demanding eyes. How should this be spelled? but you'd sooner die than wither your pride by asking. You see to your own weapons because you know what's best; you see to your own horse because you are what's best.

You fasten the leash on your own problematic neck, because there's no grip that's colder than yours; because - if it comes to that - yours is the only hand you can trust to be utterly uncloyed by sentiment.

"There were circumstances." It is fourteen months ago again, one denial defied by another in kind. Realising a thing like that might have served to comfort - or at least amuse - if the subject at hand weren't her and him and this; as it is, there's little space here for anything like comfort at all. "There were complicating circumstances, and you know this very well." She is at his desk, a transition that might be jarring if it weren't so soundless; she is breaching the particular space that she'd maintained between them throughout this, but not without cause. A quill for her hand - ever in ample supply, when the office is Glenn Burnie's; a scrap page spread before her, and what her unpracticed hand sketches there is the shape of two overlapping circles -

"This," her forefinger taps lightly upon the page. "Aleksei River drew this for me near to a year ago. You. She. In tandem." Her eyes lift from the page; the lean of her hand anchors it there upon the tabletop all the same. "You were never truly alone, not entirely. But even knowing this, I set my thoughts upon you - but never her. We speak of questions, mn? You and I. But I spared none, not once, for what this might have meant for her." And it had been so easy, in the end. So easy - disliking the girl because she dreaded her skill - to disregard Rhaena Olwak entirely. "What this meant for both of you. I asked about you, and then I ignored what was half of you," and with a short shake of her head, the swordswoman straightens from where she'd leaned.

"I won't argue most of what you say." They've had that conversation, and clearly her part in it is no less certain now than it was then. "Ideas. Eventualities." Attrition, and she'd very slightly smiled when he spoke the word, this swordswoman who after everything else still finds her safest footing right in the middle of conflict. "A whole generation that would serve as - " the pale throat quietly swallows. "As the bones that - as - like for foundation upon which might be built - " a thin shake of her head; the eyes which lift to his wear a small, quiet smile. "Better days."

She might have asked of him, then: the man who'd given her those words, the man whose name had provoked her into gasping something truly vile in the Governor's presence just moments earlier. But here lies the very willful ignorance that she'd described, just moments earlier: it's so - not easy, never that - but possible, in the end, to insulate all that engulfing anger in the fact that dead is dead. "But the means," she continues instead - and pauses already, turning upon him a frown that is nothing but wondering.

"You realise - yes? How different you sound?"
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Glenn » Fri Jan 10, 2014 11:38 am

"In the end, Ariane," They called each other by name. That was something that had once been mutually unnecessary and then later been independently impossible, "we see what we want to see." There was a tangent in here. It was rather how he made his points to her. This one was about Gloria Wynsee and whether or not it was truth she argued for or hypocrisy she argued against. This was not the time for such examples. It was the time for plain language instead.

He looked at her with a little shrug, an understated thing that was half the slump of ashamed admittance. "You know how I feel about magic. She was magic. I've written pages about how she wasn't, how it was just a skill that a human could develop, like swordsplay," two fingers raised to halt everything in the room in anticipation, "and don't look at me like that, because even an unpleasant comparison can be effective, or mapmaking. There's talent involved, and maybe talent is magic too, or maybe magic is part talent, but that's where it ends. She had scales on her face, She was magic. You're magic. Half of everything we fight for is magic. Cinnabar is magic. Frankly," this said far more offhandedly, "I have abused my human talents as much as most of our beasties and monsters have abused their magic. I had my good causes. So did some of them. They caused damage. I caused damage."

Two fingers became a whole hand as he attempted to hold back all that might come. "I know that it's the restraint that matters, the discretion, the control, but I was hypocritical, because there's that fear of the unknown that nips at our hearts for damn good reasons, and we respond to the thing itself, not the thought behind it. So I lied to myself out because I wanted to be able to love her freely. I made the same mistakes again and again until I found ways to defy their very existence because I wanted the closeness, to never be alone. I spent years alone, alone in a way that only might be experienced if everyone around you dies again and again. With her I was never alone, not even for a second. So I was willfully blind. You were willfully blind, because if you weren't, you would have taken all that from me. You would have been right. It still would have been terrible."

He smiled finally, a wane thing. He was recovering but nothing was more taxing than hard truths. "Intention matters to me. What makes us human is intention. When we forget that, we become something else."
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Carnath-Emory » Mon Jan 13, 2014 4:58 am

"What makes us dangerous is intention unrestrained and unexamined."

She'd looked at him just like that. As he restrained her with the wordless language that both of them speak, and all the same her mouth might have silently laughed, if his allegation hadn't soured her so. An effective comparison is unpleasant all the same.

"But you're wrong. You're right and you're wrong - " This is not so much a hesitation, as a breath caught back before it can become words that have no place here. Tangents, he'd said, and she'd agreed: the question of whose hand holds answers is a triviality and a distraction, compared to the possibility that they might exist at all. With a slow shake of her head she regards the man, this very young Governor; closes her hands upon the chair he'd offered her, gently leans.

"I saw what I didn't want to see. I looked for that. I'd had cause for years to distrust those who practiced such talents as hers," and she hadn't come here to speak of Rhaena Olwak in the presence of the man who grieves for her; there is also no avoiding it. You lance the wound so that it cannot fester further. You do this even when the chance of its healing is so very slight; you do this knowing that otherwise, that chance doesn't exist at all. "I'd have sooner had her dead than living, and I stayed my hand because she was what she was to you, and that mattered to me; because she was Agnieszka's only friend, and that mattered too. You might call this cowardice, and you might call it kindness; you might call it human, and that would just be a way to not choose at all." A shake of her head discards the consideration entirely.

"I stayed my hand, and years later a man comes to me, using the words he knows I will heed," a particular glance, "to tell me a thing that I cannot ignore. He puts a knife through my shoulder in hopes of killing what he can't persuade, and when I reach my home, all that I can see, everything that I have to see, is you." She does not straighten; there is no interval set aside here in which to lighten the moment with theatrics. "It would have been the easiest thing - the easiest, the most familiar, it would have been simplicity itself - to reckon it some, some poison of her making, seeping to and fro between your minds. I would have welcomed it - saving you by murdering her; really. I would have relished it, and that was exactly why I gave her hardly any thought at all. Too easy, and easy is almost always a way of blinding yourself to the reality you can't bear to face - "

It is the most improbable moment in which to smile. Even when the smile appreciates nothing but a moment steeped in irony.

"Once I began addressing the question of you - " A thin shake of her head. "There was hardly room enough left for anything else. You sent me to Aleksei, but I asked him about you." It is something like a quiet and measured confession. "Aleksei; Lamai." Magic, he'd said, and the word had flattened her lips; here she acknowledges the truth in it all the same. "Cinnabar." A pause. "Sylvius. Extensively. I asked questions. Sometimes I used your name; often I did not." Discretion - tempered by circumstance; perhaps this, too, is halfway a confession. "Every answer became a dozen more questions; a year passed like this, a year, looking at everything I least wanted to -

And nothing that actually needed it."
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Re: Inevitable

Postby Glenn » Mon Jan 13, 2014 7:03 am

You lance the wound so that it cannot fester further. You do this even when the chance of its healing is so very slight; you do this knowing that otherwise, that chance doesn't exist at all.

This was what he explained. This was what he was. Every decision he made was a necessity and ever necessity forced him to choose. How much do you sacrifice? How much can you hope to gain? Usually, it was a sacrifice of almost everything just for a speck of hope. That was Myrken. That was this world. It was what he did with her. He did not save her. He only provided, at great cost, perhaps too great a cost, a hope of a chance.

She spoke and he listened. He had held her back twice and there was no more holding that he could do, not yet. Such things needed to be earned in this conversation and stamina, for the still emaciated Governor, had to be recovered. Very likely, he let her speak thusly, uninterrupted, out of necessity more so than consideration or respect. Those things ran in very different directions between the two of them. Perhaps it was fine since both of them realized it openly enough.

"Three points," finally, because they had to find some way to weave through this forest of intention and self-recrimination. Three points and a slight pause before the first, because he had picked an arbitrary number and had yet to populate all of them as of yet. No fingers up in the air. Was that telling? He had resorted to that when he was at his worst, a crutch taken from her of all places. Right now it would have been jarring and unnecessary. "Point the first: I was fundamentally broken for a very long time, and we'll get back to this in a moment. Point the second: for much of that time, both in the beginning and then later on, until everything got twisted at the end, Rhaena Olwak was the best, and possibly the only, good thing about me. At first she was repentant, saintly. Then she was shallow but endlessly well meaning and far more restrained than you'd think for someone incapable of true examination."

Two points, one an easy truth to grasp, one a slightly harder one. The hesitation that followed did not need any sort of punctuation or emphasis. When you promise three things and only offer two, there's usually some patience built in to the exchange. After a long, careful breath, he would continue. "The third point is this; it's arrogant. You're welcome to snort derisively at any stage." Levity worked occasionally to prevent tears. "In all those stories I've read, I've.." He faded off there, snorting slightly himself. "I can't actually say that. We've had madmen in this seat before, Ariane, but I'm not sure I'd ever say their madness was constructive. I didn't seek to harm people without reason. You said it better than I could. My intent was not blind. It was not uninformed. It was not even unexamined, not from certain directions. It was 'good,' in most definitions of that word.

"It was also entirely unrestrained."
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