The Doom That Came To Myrken

[Carnath-Emory]

It is the story that she has already had - piecemeal - from two different sources, one exceedingly better-informed than the other and each with their individual perspectives. Prejudices. Interests. A certain narrowness of focus: one direction or the other. There was no denying the necessity of that question. Nor the way in which it scathed her heart to ask it at all.

Sometimes it is hatred which makes us merciless. Sometimes it is simply devotion.

For you, begins the Governor, and she closes her eyes to it. Perhaps she cannot bear the sight of that smile. Perhaps it is just the way in which she defies the longed-for and unattainable. Eyes closed, as the young man lounges in his chair; swirls his wine, smiles his smile, says so bluntly a thing which she would hear said no other way at all. "You had the beginnings of it that first day." A glance now; no, it lingers. "But that was another time, another circumstance. Incomparably different: necessity, negotiation. Three lives depended on accomplishing that exchange in a day, an hour, and so it was barely an exchange at all. Just a recitation of things that were valuable, and things that would persuade." The edge of a hand separates one thing from the next, resolves into some simpler gesture as:

"It was different, between you and I. But you know this very well, I think. Yes? How different a necessity that was. How much easier it might have been to hide from you what was hidden from everybody. It could not have lasted; you were too clever for that by far, you and your questions," and it is the most fleeting grin, sudden and bright and already gone. "And perhaps by then the passing of time might have blunted its sting. It could have been that way - "

And very much wasn't. So that with this small incline of her head she's easing back in her seat again. With the wine-glass half-balanced upon one knee and her lips fallen still again; the manner which best suits. It endures through Jirai, it endures even the mention of a monster gutted, for here is a satisfaction which echoes his own; it does not reach the mouth but lights some quiet, pleased thing in the eyes nonetheless. But when his tone makes this transition, when he speaks the words which are piercing in their familiarity, the lips slightly part, almost hesitate. Almost and never quite.

"You hope to do better. To make the cost intolerable. A loss is still a loss. But wh - "

No. No. No.

"But these are things that both we know," and there is this small motion of the fingertips. Continue.

[Glenn]

There it was again, that flash, that look, that.. anticipation. "I was one thing, you were another. And as the days went on, we became different things still." A hand, raised, the free one obviously for the other had wine. "You.." The word fights its way out, despite his best attempts and it brings forth a small laugh. "But we are talking about me, at your request." And there it was once more, the words that belonged to that look. "We will get to you later."

Continue, she indicates. Continue, he does. "I had developed a certain narrowness of vision. Rhaena had yet to recover from her maiming, of hand, of spirit. Cinnabar had retreated to his family. Dulcie, hers. I'd alienated Roschen and Jirai, if we are to talk of scraping the bottom of the barrel. Seth, Tebrin. Agnieskza. All gone. You were off having things that were most distinctly not adventures which you have not told me about." Resentment? Not hardly. Just simple facts. Perhaps if it was one of them that had been gone or two, but when everyone leaves you, it is suddenly no longer about them, is it? "Left to my own devices, I became smidgen obsessed, perhaps. It blinded me to reality.

"She had a coterie. Mages. Cutters. Whatever else. I gutted her. They assaulted me, killed the Constables I kept nearby for the contingency. Both of us woke beneath the ground, but hardly had I wanted it, for either of us. She awoke healed. I awoke her guest. Mainly, I wanted my sword back." The one by his desk was not the same that she had given him years before. "For some reason she wouldn't cooperate." He felt this unimportant and had told her as such. There was no attempt to craft a narrative here save for what was natural. He wanted done with it. For her, though. For her. A finger went up. "An illusion was placed upon me. I looked a drow. Dark skin." Another. "I was to live down there until I bent to her will, a prisoner of her house." A third. "My eyes could not see as they do." A fourth. "My ears could not hear as they do. I was helpless, lost, and blind. Not dumb, though. Not mute. I learned the language from Jirai, from Vanidor's ... lady, shall we say, but certainly the rest."

The hand went down to his lap and he sipped at the wine. "Two days in she summoned me again, offered me my freedom and my sword, if just I bed her." It was a damn fantasy tale, didn't she see? Something some bard would come up about a well-hung, virile hero of old lost in fairyland, one who used his manly wiles to escape from the queen of the fae. Burnie told it rather deadpan. "It's no testament to me. Sarayn, in the end, is but a child of her people. The damn things age differently. Younger than I likely if you care to do the math. She merely wanted what she couldn't have. I leaped out of her tower window, shattered my leg utterly, and crawled away, out of her house, into the... darkness proper. That was the start of my month in Underdark." Finally, a little pause, before he placed the glass down. More than five fingers might well be necessary moving forward. "I suppose we can't just skip to the end at this point, Ari?"

[Carnath-Emory]

We will get to you later.

Something Renne might have said. Bromn at his worst; a cold-eyed Helstone. A thing associated not with madness but with authority at its most disdainful. In the wake of words which had balanced upon the edge of things; You - , as if she were the focus of some particular, wrenching thought, a thing so searingly uncommon that the whole of her had meant to sweep it away more than forcefully. But continue he does, and -

It changes everything.
And it changes so little.

It is the fleshing out of the thin outline with Cinnabar had given her; it is a hint of what had led to the conclusion which Jirai described. It is hauntingly cruel, which she weathers well enough: a once-student's well-ordered description of the weaknesses of a human fallen amongst drow; tactile things, practical things, understood so very well even before she's begun to nod her acknowledgement. It is grotesque - much later, and entirely too soon. Fantasies. Fairytales. Stories for children that aren't really children at all. It has made a thin, crooked line of her mouth, and there comes the slightest flinch when he describes the cause of a limp she'd never seen.

How lightly these fingers have held the glass he'd given her, and with what particular care when he asks the question she'd known he must. And even knowing, she has hesitated; even anticipating this she has paused, lips parted. Already he has said so much and still it's now that her cheeks have drawn pale; now that her eyes set like this upon his own. Quiet and certain; pale with regret and gratitude and a dozen other things when she chooses as she must - because this, too, she'd promised herself days ago, weeks ago: that there would be no flinching from this, from any of it; that she would have no less than the whole of what was to come. And still, when she speaks, her voice is not a whisper but how it wants to be...

"No. I'm sorry. We can't."

[Glenn]

"Of course not." He had wanted to get to her immediately, had almost done just that, but here they were instead, and look, there would be no mercy from Ariane Emory. He did not look hurt or surprised, not even that put out. Resigned. That would be the word. He'd take his time for another long sip of wine. Resigned and just a little petulant. Only a little though. Whine and wine.

"It gets a little blurry after this, I'll warn you. Oh the first few days are rather clear. Believe it or not, the weak, male, and friendless are not treated well down there. Beaten quite often, just because. Violated in all sorts of other ways. Humiliated." Now he was put out. A little put out but not at her. "Very likely I would have died there were it not for Roschen." An open admittance, but he backtracked almost immediately. "No, I imagine I would have thought of something. There was always appealing to Faeryl or Sarayn." No, he probably would have died down there. It's not something he spent much time thinking about. "Jirai came to gloat. Suede gave me a bit of help. By this point I was rather deranged, you realize, but he has no more love for them than I do, and we'd been through some small horrors together, so he gave me just enough to hang myself for old time's sake. Not even to hang myself. Enough to put the noose on but not enough to hang it over anything. Thankfully, that's generally all I need."

And there went the rest of his wine in one fell swoop. "It's a rather sordid story from here on in, Ari. I had enough to get oriented, enough to make some contacts. Enough to betray those contacts. That's really what this story is, a downward spiral of lies, betrayal, more violations, some violations of my own, and a bit of murder. Can I just tell you the worst of it or do I have to run down the whole list? I think the worst of it rather well encapsulates the lot, and I only have so many fingers, after all."

[Carnath-Emory]

It is something other than hurt - which she would have read easily on a face that had been her study for months upon years. Under any other circumstances this would have been a chilling knowledge, but then that had been what their work together had become, a thing which started with a mapmaker's unique answer to her desperate need and swiftly became something else entirely. Edged things: swords and more than swords; a wonderful excess of words, of ideas for which there were no words at all. Inevitably there was hurt. Because a teacher was sometimes clumsy and sometimes cold; because a student sometimes just needed to press; because the thoughts into which they fell struck so close to his heart or hers - over and again - and again - and again -

"You would have thought of something," she echoes him; it is unthinking certainty, and for a time it is the only words which she can speak. He has her in mind of Lenore, of little songbird Lenore lost down in the merciless black for hours, for days, and even that was far too long. Of the hours she'd spent in that girl's company, when the two of them were the tavern's attic-dwellers; when she herself was nothing but Myrken's newest refugee and as lost as any of them had ever been. They'd sat upon the second-floor staircase, she and Lenore, when the hour was so late that the tavern had fallen quiet and still; in perfect silence, braiding the girl's long, dark hair; listening to the soft sound of nighttime birds. Little mouse Lenore. How the shrieks had wracked her tiny frame when they dragged her out of that pitch-black horror and it was only for days, it was only for hours; it was only Lenore, who fought and who clung to the hands of a Duke which so gently held.

It bears only the dimmest likeness to what Glenn Burnie describes.

She does not flinch. But neither does she accept this description easily; 'sordid', he'd said, and it is only the half of it. The eyes have not veered from his own, not even through the worst of it, but neither are they left unchanged; the coldness which marks the whole of her has its origin there, arctic and unyielding; she'd set the glass aside long ago, and only because the other choices were to drink or else to crush the thing beneath a fist which wanted to hurt. He asks this thing, the boy who was once her student, whose features instead of hurt register something like disaste, and it takes her two tries before the words have some sound; the throat is unwilling, the throat is as tense as the rest of her.

"Just the worst, then."

[Glenn]

"I don't remember her name."

Glenn Burnie had a memory on him. Yes, they were surrounded by notes but that was hardly a mark upon his memory. There was simply that much information to manage, that many connections. The important things, though? The big moments, the little ones, those he remembered. Names. There was a glance to the wine bottle, just a glance, but then it'd be back to her eyes. The floodgates had opened before and they seemed to continue to allow egress now, no longer a torrent but a steady river, intense, but he did not shy away. "Young, as young as I was when I first arrived to Myrken." He tapped his forehead there with his free hand, taking that moment to place his glass down as well. She knew what that meant. All of what it meant.

"They are sudden in the way of passion, drow, but not in the way of decisiveness. They react in the moment, but we, we act in it. That's our eternal advantage over all of those long lived creatures that would stomp us down. And none of them realize it. It brought me success. I made a mark, quickly. Brazen. Unafraid of convention or consequence. Roschen had linked me with a resistance of sort, men." Did she know enough to know the significance of that? "I made a mark through quick and terrible deeds. Through plans. Quickly executed. I made myself instantly invaluable, and when I did, that's when I sold them out to her."

He would do well in the courts of Rasazan, that was what Kostroma said almost a year ago now. Glenn Burnie, truly unleashed, would do well in so many places, yet here he was. He did not turn from her gaze. "The daughter of a middling house, known for its piety, and don't get me started on the hypocrisy of drow piety." Scorn, not hatred, not pain, not disdain. Scorn. "She was the age I said, not unpretty if you like that sort of thing, I'm sure, the most pious of the lot. She saw me 'touched' for my weaknesses, a special being, a seer, perhaps. And she wanted nothing more than to prove herself to her family, to her goddess. So I gave her the means. I gave her my compatriots. She proved herself and thus I became a favorite. Matroned, as it was, though that wasn't nearly enough."

Finally, he would pause, his stare would waver. Despite all she might have heard, all she might have guessed at, here his gaze wavered. "They are animals, Ariane, devoid of mercy, of compassion, but that does not excuse what I did to them, what I was to do to her, for in that moment, after those weeks, I was an animal as well, with only.. with only sparse bits of myself to cling on to, all the wrong bits, the ones that prized survival and vengeance over all else."

[Carnath-Emory]

She knows what it means.
All of what it means.

And it is very much more than a name which he could not have forgotten and a girl whose youth involves significantly more than just her age. It is the measured manner in which he approaches this, it is the very deliberate way in which he has phrased one thing and then the next. It is not quite a confession. It is very much a signifier: Look closely, because here is a thing which you will detest and which you must nevertheless understand. It is very much the way in which she had explained not the slow and brutal deaths of eight cultists but the error which was the end of it all, but even this is bearable, she finds. Even this, until he nears the end of it all, and as he speaks those words his eyes ...

Glittering silver rushes her skin; retracts back into the pores in a rush like something startled, but there is nothing like shock in her eyes. It is a gaze gone cold with anger, with furious defiance, a body so very nearly up out of its seat and shouting. You were right to, it would be, You were right, all for the sake of a man with uncertain eyes who would deem inexcusable a thing to which he was only driven. 'Conquest', Jirai had said, and even as her heart grieved still the rest of her rang with pride -

The moment passes. As it must, because she will accept nothing else of herself in this tenuous moment. And it is marked by the hard clench of her jaw, by a face gone pale with outrage as much as anything else but the swordswoman is nothing if tightly-marshaled - even now, most especially now. To exhale at all is to release one murderous breath after another, slow and slower still; it calms the tremble of hands which had become fists, introduces slow ease into a spine gone stiff like steel, and what is there to do but nod to this. To this tale of a girl who'd accepted lives like gifts, a girl for whom he still - impossibly - retains something almost like regret. As I was, he'd said, and every breath wanted to shout No, and No, and No, but what comes is his name, and very softly; what comes is this measured nod, this very tiny motion of the fingers.

Continue. Because having come this far we do not relent.

[Glenn]

There is a cost.

There is always a cost. Three times he asked. Could they avoid it altogether. No. Could they skip to the end? No. Could they skip to the worst? Yes, yes, that he could do. A small mercy, but one that shifted disdain to something else, something alive, something that would scald to touch.

Regret? For fooling an overeager drowess? No, not for that. For this, though? Perhaps. "A piece of her hair, a treasured object. A pet would not be enough. A pet would be a prisoner. Pampered but just as much a captive. Better off to sleep with flighty bitch and save my leg." The shake of his head was cool; his stare was not. "I invaded her dreams. I learned from my .. experiences, and instead of making her feel everything, instead of overlaying the entire human experience, I focused on one potent emotion. Infatuation." There was survival of the body and then there was survival of everything else. The lines he crossed for the latter.

"She had influence due to her successes. It was suddenly her greatest desire that I rise to a position of importance in the house. There was.." his voice drops, a slight frown tugs upon his face. "an initiation, a ritual, religious foolishness." Screams. Pain. A Severing. A recasting that no human could fit. A Sundering. An end to all he was. "She was pleased." His eyes, his mind, that gaze.. it had all moved on already, not lingering. Even the frown was gone to something steadier but far, far sharper. "I betrayed her at the first opportunity, used her obsession against her, gave her up to her own mother who had found herself suddenly threatened. That is the way of it. It is madness down there, Ariane. Intrigues, schemes, things that are planned for decades and then fall apart in a moment of reaction. Power and influence, but all within the vague religious order, all within a twisted set of rules."

Passion burst through in his stare, his body sitting up right in his seat; no more leaning. This was the passion of action, as he said before. "There's so much hatred there, but it's all contained. Houses in their orders. Hierarchy. People play by the rules because they want the power intact. Me? I didn't care. I began to tug, pull, inflame grudges, use hatred as fuel. If I couldn't get free, then I wanted the whole thing to burn. Every single one of them. There was nothing to gain in it so there was no protection from it." It wasn't conquest at all. Conquest would make sense to them. No, it was devastation.

[Carnath-Emory]

The way he sits as he speaks these things. As he describes one atrocity after another, each superceding what horror might have come before it: the way that the world is a crucible, a refining and crushing flame so that what is left when it's done is not the boy nor the man, but a livid thing which means only to consume.

The way he sits, as if the chair weren't enough to contain him, as if it were only a thing which he shapes to himself, a convenience from which he might at any moment burst, all fury and uneven edges. As if he would blister the very air with the words that he spoke, as if he might scald flesh from bone. Some part of him had surely longed to - then. And to think, to think, that this is the way he tells these cruelties when he is removed from them by the span of years.

How quiet she'd become, as they sank into the filthy depths of this: as sordid as he'd promised, as utterly vile. How very silent: a word here, a phrase there, and only what is necessary because what the heart longs to shout is surely everything that he needs least to hear, and when the lungs draw breath it is to whisper Good and that it should be No Other Way. So that over again the lips have clenched closed over terrible impulse and the breath choked to stillness in her throat as if he mightn't know these things simply from her eyes.

In the heat of this, in this terrible passion, it might even be so. But when she speaks, when she is able to, it is none of these things which she gives voice. But instead: "Was it then that Jirai had you - removed?"

[Glenn]

Look into his eyes, Aleksei River had said. Hollow, he had said. Soulless, said Lamai. Look into his eyes as he speaks these words, Ariane Emory, and see what you see. The torrent of emotion, of feeling, was more than enough to wash them both away, and really, were there any two in Myrken that could stand against the storm quite like the Governor and his former mentor.

"Apparently." An easy question, this, because it signified the end. The end signified a refilling of his drink. The wine tasted bitter against his lips today, more so than a few minutes ago, certainly. "I was beginning to break things too close to her heart, I suppose. I managed to take a good deal of loot and plunder with me and Jirai saw to my removal. My month in Underdark." Still, even bitter wine was better than none, given the circumstances. "I returned with a crippled leg, bruises, wounds, wealth, and a quickly reversed skin condition." He tries for a smile at that, tries and does not quite make it.

Instead, there is a self-aware pause. Control. "You'll want to know the rest, so I will give you a quick version now. I came back. I governed in Cinnabar's absence. I did... a great deal." Had the torrent stopped in the face of this control? No, but it was different now, focused again increasingly upon her. "At the beginning of this year, Rasazan demanded a governor. I assembled a Council to vote me in and here I am. It was the best of a number of bad options." Finally, a slow, cool smile starts to creep out from the wasteland that had been his expression a few moments before.

"There's more, of course, details, but there will be time for that, time for your three years, as well. This is not an ending, you coming here, to me, today; it is a beginning. For now, then, I wish to look ahead, to give it context, purpose. If me becoming governor was the best of a number of bad options, you returning here, now, in this moment, is a very good option, Ari, the best, the right option. If it was sooner, it would have been too soon. If it was later, it may have been too late, but today, today it's ready for you." This says the Governor without a Marshall, the Governor who had put Agnieszka and Kerrak upon a Defense Committee, the Governor without a bodyguard. All such timely things for this woman before him. "We need you for this, Ariane. We need you..." A twinkle in his eyes, some of that excitement from before, though now tempered by the darkness he just trudged through. "Will you hear it?"

[Carnath-Emory]

They had made this their business, all those years ago. This Governor who was once a boy, this swordswoman who was once a teacher of lessons that swiftly came to involve far more than swordplay. It should never have been that way. It was the condition she set upon those lessons that it never become that way. But Myrken makes its demands upon even the best-intentioned souls, and a sellsword who'd prohibited curiosity had begun to answer questions; one and then another, casual and not, never imagining that over time this would involve into a regular exchange, never guessing that within months it would all seem so natural that her own prohibitions could be all but forgotten.

Save for one.
Just one.

They had made this their business, these two: a woman very well-accustomed to the defiance of just such tempests, a young man whose very nature brought him again and again into the heart of those very storms. Alastir Savoy had gazed so long into the Ashfiend that the scathing horror of it had burned him all away, but not Glenn Burnie. His spirit - brilliant, hard-weathered - would not permit this; his teacher - furious in her regret for one lost soul - would not stand to lose another. This business might not have begun with the Ashfiend but it was there that it crystallised; If it goes this way, she had sometimes said, you must at least extract a cost; If it goes that way, she had mentioned and more than once, you must never flinch unless a show of fear will buy you an opportunity to harm. Words that should never have been spoken to a boy so young, except that Myrken was his home and what is Myrken if not a creature which preys upon the vulnerable?

And he had already fled so much. And his heart was so very good. And his talent was so very clear -

This stormy-eyed young man, vivid with a hundred conflicting passions; what is it to look into those eyes across the span of so many years? With a glitter to her eyes that has nothing to do with iron; with unspoken words poised and wanting upon her lips, and to look at him, to really look, is to understand that all those cautions she'd sought are so beautifully, terribly wrong.

His name. When his attempt at a smile goes so very wrong, and with just the slightest lean of her; with fingertips touched so lightly to the desk's edge. And:

"I should have been here." So quiet, these words. And For you, he'd said just moments ago and she might have said the same right now, must surely have meant to, and it's not his sudden excitement that surprises her but the words which have surrounded it. Which are so unlikely, and so impossible, and does it even matter? Because:

"Of course," she answers him, and what she means is

Anything. Anything.

[Glenn]

Not once. Not once did he say what anyone might have, this young Governor who could have turned his rage and fury against his friends, against those who he worked so very hard to save, who he gave up everything for, who left him for a fate far worse than death. Cinnabar received a much cooler experience, but an honest one. Glenn truly hoped that Cinnabar's apology made him feel better, made it easier for him. To hope or to wish for anything else, to feel anything else, would be to invite a fury into his heart and truly, that would not stand. Life was not fair. Myrken was not fair.

But... "Things are different here." The twinkle in his eyes was increasing, no longer fire but light, that excitement still present, an ebb and a flow as his heart beat, as breathe came in and out of his lungs. "Things are better. They have been good. We have made them good." What a strange, confusing statement to make about Myrken Wood, but there it was, firm and clear, and there was even a smile fighting its way back, bolstered by her presence, by her words, especially those unspoken. If there was a rehearsed element to this, it was lost in a sea of emotion. "We've rebuilt from the Ashfiend, the dragon, the poisoned lake. The harvests have been better than they ought to have been. I've made sure that we benefited from the troubles in Derry, that I've leveraged everything possible from the crown and Thessilane both. We've been smart with our money. We've been proactive. The Inquisitory. The School. The Foundation. There's been growth big and small. I swear to you that last month I even encountered a tourist, and..." And the speech stopped there. He shook his head, raised a hand. There was a bit about being an arse to the tourist when he had thought through this in his had, which was true, but really, it was unnecessary.

"We're looking to the future, Ari," and there he was, a man with a voice oozing youth and optimism, here, of all places, after describing his trek through hell itself. There was his sword beside him, leaning against his desk, always close, her legacy to him as much as anything else, no? "I need you at the school." Where else for a new Myrken? Where else did she belong but training the next generation of monsters and weapons? What else for her, the self-proclaimed mother of violence itself? To prepare them, her children in spirit, for their sacrifice, their doom. Why have one or two students, why have a handful of rich, useless lads when she could train a generation of lost children to leap into the flame, iron and steel in hand?

[Carnath-Emory]

How gently the world falls away. When she realises - and this takes time, for the words are so innocuous and her surrender so absolute. He's smiling as he says this thing, and for some terrible, wanting instant, her mouth begins to smile as well. He will know when she begins to understand, in the moment that the expression begins to falter. He will know when she has absorbed the implications of those simple words when she stiffens where she sits; when the hand left light upon his desk's edge grips, white-knuckled. And are these thin features drained of blood, pale and drawn? And lit with twin spots of hectic colour high across the cheekbones, and how can this even be? Five years ago, what he'd said wouldn't have meant anything. Just a sick joke. A pretty funny one, too.

Today it is murder.

How gently the girl falls away, so that the world can be left untouched. And it is only a trick of the mind, a child's trick, at that, as simple as a distance in the eyes, a hazy wandering of the thoughts until there are so few of them left at all. The world world rushes and falls away; what is intolerable drifts forwards and backwards and gone, until it is not quite there anymore -

What is a wish, but a Thought, a gesture of the mind toward something that Could Be; toward something that Should Not. What difference is there between the word Wish and the word Hope.

It is not impossible to shed so intangible a thing as if it were a cloak that smothers, as if it were flames that burn - and it does; oh, it does. It is not impossible to let this fall from her thoughts until it reaches a point from which it can be contemplated, a cold trickle the length of her spine rather than the killing cold that turned the breath in her lungs to so much brutal ice. It is not impossible at all to let the self fall away, and with it the weight of crushing, useless steel and a thousand attempts at more, until what remains is like a held breath, silent and waiting and a hundred softer things rush to fill that space; it is the taste of cool water and stormclouds; it is eyes filled with the brightness of sunlight upon ocean waves and distant orchards, and if she smiles it is not for her and it is not even for him.

Eyes for that sword. For the slow breadth of his smile.
Perhaps she does not realise that she has stood, that the hand which has fallen away from his desk is gauntleted in beaten old iron.
Perhaps the tears are slow to dry upon her cheeks and perhaps what shone was was only the glitter of steel. He would know. This young man, better than anyone else at all.

"A fine new generation of bloodless atrocities."

Because sometimes Anything means Anything But This.

[Glenn]

"No."

One word. One gaze. One smile. Before his will, his insistence had beaten down hers. Now? Now it was something else. Now, it was Glenn Burnie unleashed. Emotion poured. She faced him with a force that no one in Myrken could stand to, no one, but this was her student, and what had she taught him? She taught him to parry, and more than that, she showed him the one sort of parry that could be effective against her, truth.

"No." There it was again, like a fly buzzing around her head. No what, one might ask? "No swords." His hand went out, reached towards that sword beside him and pushed. It hit the ground with a surprisingly loud clang. "Not. That."

When he looked up at her, and she was before there were no tears in his eyes, but there was emotion, cool, steady.... affectionate. "So much was a blur, down there, Ariane, but it gave me distance, time to... there was so much I didn't realize until you were gone, until I was lost. I was too close to all of it before." A student's blindness. "I was.. self-centered during our years of training, Ariane. I asked so many questions but I never saw what was before me. You told me so much about who you had been and I believed it, but I saw so little who you truly had become. I took it for granted. Myrken took it for granted." Something else was bubbling up in him again, something she had seen just a few minutes before. "No, Myrken denied it."

It was a quick flash, a flame that came and went, intensifying his voice, his momentum, but without the building rage. That lurked somewhere underneath. "Don't you understand? I am PROUD of you, Ariane, of who you have become. Awed by her, by you. The person I spent my mornings with was not a weapon, was not a monster, despite your warnings, despite your claims. Yes, she gripped the world in her hands, but to peer down its throat. She held it upside down and shook, but only to shake the answers from it, and this was so that she could learn to become something more. She circled it, gazing from every angle, at every side, watching, listening, caring. Monsters don't listen. Monsters don't care. Weapons can't care. She is endlessly more than Violence. Once it was an end, and then a means, and then, a shadow, a memory a ghost, a cocoon from which she emerged, from which you emerged."

The words came fast now, fast, even harsh, full of all the emotion that had refused to break through for a year, that could not break through for a year and a half before that. All saved up, all for her. "You think you're still violence. I can see it. Look at you, right now. That you are The End. The nightmare that they all saw you as years ago, but you're not. You are wrong. You're so much more. You are the most remarkable woman I have ever known, and you pulled yourself there, up from the darkness. I have words you do not, but you have ideas, curiosity. You want to know every single thing there is to know in this world, Ariane, and you made yourself that way, you let yourself be fostered, when you could have held your chin up, been untouchable, been strong. You chose to be something so much better.

"The school," back to the point. "We have young children but we have older ones as well. More and more every day, especially now that the harvest is over, and I'll make a call for more still. They learn their letters, their numbers, but the grounding for why they learn is missing. The spirit of it. The young ones learn because they are told it is good to learn. The older ones, though? The promise of a better life isn't enough, not for the Myrkenborn. Not to open their minds and their hearts to a new way, a new future, to ending the circle of pain. I want you to teach them, Ariane. I don't want you to teach them blood and steel, but what you strive for everyday; the questions you ask, the things you care about. I want you to teach them philosophy and teach them ethics, things you focus on constantly without even really knowing it. Your questions about life. To help them learn as you have." Five years ago, this would have been a joke. Five years ago they would have laughed. Five years ago, what he said wouldn't have meant anything. "Ariane, I want you to teach them to think, to want to. It has to be you. No one else could do it. "

Wet eyes. Still no tears, but wet eyes, a wetness that began to reignite the flame within them, something benign at first. "You're not what you think you are. You're not what they say you are. Renne, Dhrin, all of them, idiots. They tried to change you, tried to make you into what they wanted, something better, but you all you needed was nurturing, opportunity, people to speak with, to engage you honestly, caringly. An open exchange." Then why hadn't she truly gotten her chance? Why did it always come back to the same end? Life wasn't fair. Life didn't let her. Myrken wasn't fair. Not to either of them. Myrken hadn't let her be what she had become. Benign flame shifted into something else, something darker. The speed of it was uncanny, perhaps quicker than she had ever seen him, even after his months training with Jirai. It was not a swordstrike, no. It was a shift in his gaze. The fire from before, from his talk of Underdark, from his desire there. Devastation. The Governor was no longer smiling. "You didn't need to change, Ari. Myrken needed to change."

[Carnath-Emory]

She leaves open so very few avenues for attack, and almost all of them are traps. Guide a man's blade by tempting him with a target, present him with a vulnerability so that you will know where the next blow lands. When it's swords, and even when it's words, for while she wields these so clumsily herself she has learned very well how to navigate the complexities posed by others; in this her experience has become vast, her defenses accordingly adept. So very few avenues except for one, and if this is a flaw it's not generally a fatal one. If the woman is a weapon, she is a weapon designed expressly to answer Myrken's challenges and exploit its failings, and really, since when are Myrken folk inclined to speaking the truth? Who, for that matter, knows her well enough to wield it murderously?

No, says this ferocious young man, and stills her where she stands.

His sword hits the ground like sharp thunder, and this, too, is only a herald for what is to follow. A flat disavowal, paralysing but not conclusive: the opening gambit of a long maneuver in which one pointed phrase flows into the next, a practical demonstration of how a word which is not a barb will nonetheless sting. It is a measured flow until it cannot be; until it has become a cascading torrent, one charge upon another, truth tumbling over truth as if words were a tool with which to peel back the skin, flay muscle to the bone. He would pry back the ribcage of a living thing, lay bear its heart and say Here, This and in the face of this onslaught a thing which was paralysed has staggered back a step and then another. Has met his sudden passion with a hard lift of her chin, hard like defiance, like a thing which does not mean to drown; but though the eyes do not flinch from his own the face is struck aside, and low at her side the hand has clenched into a gauntleted fist.

It is the worst sort of vulnerability.

It is the inevitable consequence of all the rules that she had set like barricades between them all those years ago; the rules which they had summarily defied, she and him alike. When he was permitted a moment's curiosity. When questions were not summarily turned aside - as she'd warned him they would be, as she'd sworn that they would be - but answered; encouraged; returned in kind until everything was mutual and she was a intrigued participant in conversations that were anything but one-sided. And oh, the things they'd spoken of, the ideas they'd explored - as he says; as he says with each stunning word, until the breath's gone light and swift in her lungs and the eyes fixed upon him still are so wide, so staringly wide.

"It was never," she gasps, and it is only a whisper of sound. The lips have parted, have shaped some soft thing in its wake; perhaps there is no voice for it, perhaps it is only lost in the maelstrom of a Governor's insistence. "No." And it is only a sound emerged from a thing left flayed and bleeding. How could it mean to defy? "No." What is she but what he's described? And so much less and so much more, abandoning and unwarranted, but -

His eyes. Oh, his eyes, which shine like hers. How the sight stills her. As if this, too, crystallises a moment into the thing which it must be, into sharp and certain knowledge. It is possible to step outside of herself. And, doing this, focus her attention on where it needs to be; where it should have been, in this moment and across the span of three unforgivable years. This boy, whose innate property lies in being a living demand made of the woman who was his teacher; whose nature challenges, needs. His eyes. As hers gently close.

There should be wine between us.
Ten seconds. You and I.

"You have no business doing that." A teacher's insistence. The voice is heartbreak and beauty, it is outright joy and an absence of absolution. "You have no business turning yourself towards the teaching of children - not like this, and no more than I do." The body is half-turned, desperate to turn its back on what is unbearable, turn its back and be gone. A fencer's posture, poised light upon heel and toe and natural as breathing but she has advanced one step and then another; has caught the heel of one hand up against the desk's edge and the whole of her suddenly leans. "What is it you'd think I'd teach them, Glenn Burnie. Philosophy." He'd said. "Ethics." He'd said that, too, and she does not spit the word but only lends it the weight which it deserves. "The sort which a New Myrken requires? The necessity of the occasional bloodless sacrifice? According to need, according to the moment; only the tiniest things, really just the smallest - would it be that? The ethics of well-managed atrocity. The philosophy of one need balanced against a dreadful other; everything a two-way choice, no room to talk, no room to breath; no room for impasse but only for decision - immediate, unhesitating; do you think it would be that?" His eyes are a blaze, but what quiet conviction colours her eyes; of a sudden and at last, what certainty. "Do you think I would teach them to flay open a monster's heart when there might yet be another way?" Giuseppe. Your words are beyond value. "Myrken needs to change. As we've always known, as we've always agreed.

"But not like this."