Scene Archives

called burning gnosis into herself on her walk through the Tangle; lit herself up like a beacon, became a dare, a challenge. Almachadta may end in fire—may—but she too is fire. She is wearing her clothes from the Beast with her cloak from Mu layered over it, because wearing her clothes from home felt wrong. They’ve felt that way for some time now—familiar, practical, but no longer quite right. She hasn’t had time to sit down and decipher what that means. It’s just clothing, after all. Still, when she dressed for this, she chose her clothes from the Beast.

walks into the Mask Shrine and her step halts once, twice, but doesn’t stutter. The dread it still there, curled up in her stomach, wired through her limbs, but it’s easier now, even easier than it was in the caves in Mu, to keep moving forward. She casts flickering firelight on the walls of the shrine as she steps inside. Then she stops and simply looks.

cannot deny that she has fire—plenty of it, maybe too much. Dynamism or Desolation, the potential for both are in her. But she knows, increasingly, where her edges are. She has many things to do here, but the first thing she does is go over and trace the ghost of a tallymark next to the 216th one. She doesn’t make it—not yet. When she at last sets the Mask in its hollow she will. She will find a way. But now she traces the Mark she has dreamed of making all her adult life, and maybe before that. An echo of an echo to match the others. “Hello,” she says to them, to those who left tallies and those who did not. “I remember you. Imperfectly, as all memory is imperfect, but I remember.”

stands there, for some time, casting flickering firelight on the tally-marks, finger set at the terminus of where her own mark might—should—will go.

people I’ve been. The easiest way to remember for her, in the Mask, is to let herself be them. She puts on the Mask now, and runs her hands over each tally. She doesn’t have time to dive and retrieve each name, but she will try, later. There are very few memories in the Mask of simply existing in the shrine—it is always coming or going. Beginning or ending. Here she wears the Mask and simply is. She takes in the tallies, the rest of the shrine, feels the twinned hope and doubt that she feels with every breath. She watches through the eyes of the Mask so she will remember. ⁂

, then, having taken enough time, reaches into her pack and takes out the fiend. 🙧

runs her hands over the metal shell, thinking. “From the advice of Jae Carver, using the armor from Rohsu Xilai, delivered by Duškomira to Arcs-Through-The-Depths-Towards-Truth’s-Light and his beloved Emissary, Caion. Shaped with the hands of the Awoken and Aurelius, carried to this place by Salme. What I ask of you is not a kind thing, but I ask it of you nonetheless. Of all that was, and is, and may yet be: bear witness, and survive, and one day tell your story to me.” Here she infuses liminal gnosis into the fiend, thus far woven so strongly of tenebrous and radiant gnosis. Here also she threads love around it—its lineage and task much like the Sword-Saint’s own. Fear and hope and love and understanding. The hope that it might transcend the fate that comes for them all—this is what she gives it.

reaches out and pets it, because she cannot help but do so. “Hello, Eloonjäänyt,” she says softly. “It’s good to meet you.” She has always been a big admirer of strange but durable insects.

goes over and sets a series of small, cat-shaped objects around the base of the Mask’s resting place. She had suggested their shape, though now she feels a little sad about leaving them here. Still—crystal, aurichalcum, the strange and formless sandlike pebbles that flourishing makes; pearl, rakaznar, obsidian; irrica and amphilyke. “At least you won’t be alone,” she tells Eloonjäänyt.

sets out also a folio from the library and a sealed and folded letter. The folio is loaded with handful of memories—nothing important, not really. The letter is—it will probably burn up, but it’s there for whoever might find the Mask next, if it isn’t her.

straightens and then pulls out the last item. An obsidian mask, the exact mirror of the Sword-Saint’s Mask cast in dark, glassy stone. Her hands shake, just a little, as she holds it. This she made, after much trial and error and with much advice from Luĉja, on her own. The strange mud on the Obsidian Road was kind to her in this respect, at least. “I am the hand that carved,” she says, voice steady, “and I will not crawl away from carving.” On the inside curve of this false mask are words—her words, in her same, careful handwriting. An inscription of intent—You will find your way back to me when it is time. You will trade places by his tenebrous hand. You are part of me and you are mine and we will ever know each other.

hesitates for a long moment, feeling like she might be committing sacrilege, and then she sets it in the place where, soon, the Mask will rest.

: “Don’t we all,” she says dryly, and then steps back and takes one last, long look. This place will haunt her, possibly always, but now it will also be a place of memory, a place where she inscribed her will and made clear her intention. “I can’t guarantee I will see you again, Eloonjäänyt. But I hope I will.” And then, still flickering with flame, she takes off the Mask and leaves.

smiles and offers the other half of an apple she gave it earlier. She’s dropped the burning gnosis for now, and there’s a burden that seems to have lifted from her shoulders—at least in part because she’s no longer carting around a significant amount of plate mail. “Ready to go find Badri?” she asks.

: “What…” her brow wrinkles as her hair streams out behind her (not getting tangled, though, thanks to that trick with the gnosis she figured out on the Beast).

doesn’t think, not really. She stands on the swift and flings herself from its back, using its momentum to launch herself into the air. It’s like flying and it’s like falling. She’s done this trick before off the back of a swift, almost gave Badri a heart attack. She flips once, still in midair, marks the Canker-Gall with a shadowy dark of tenebrous intent, draws her scimitar and sheathes it in blue flame, and the cleaves it down the center with burning force as she lands.

steps back to avoid the gush of nectar. “Who else could it be?” She says. Her smile, though, is a bit tentative. She’s change a lot since she last saw him. It’s only been weeks, but she’s changed a lot.

: “It’s good to see you again too.” She keeps twitching forward, like she wants to hug him, but keeps stopping when she sees the sap. “You look tired. Is there anyone else who’s helping you fight?” she sounds. Slightly accusatory and offended on his behalf.

gives Badri a critical look. “You need to go easier on yourself, old man,” she says as she calls up burning gnosis to incinerate the remains of the Canker-Galls. She is very invested in getting her hug.

: “Thank you for carrying me and helping me find Badri, Väresielu” she whispers to her swift when she dismounts. “(If that name pleases you).”

returns the hug intently, longer than she normally would hug someone. She buries her face in shoulder and just, simply, is for a moment. And then she looks up at him. “I missed you.”

: “Do I?” And then, because this is how they’ve often greeted each other, but because she can do it without the Mask as an intermediary, she reaches out and invites him in.

does not share everything, but does share her happiness, her accomplishments, her growth—Aurelius boarding the train to hunt glass sharks, finally settled into himself, Awoken in front of the sunscope, having done the impossible, having gone above and beyond it, her and Wolf before the Heart in which the Heart is merely background noise, her song twined with his. Melpomene on Tulinsuojat, the weaving of all six gnoses for Jae and the giving of the gift. Her voice reciting poetry for Jae, on Mu, the original compositions still rattling around in her head. Discovering how to be wind and fire and all manner of things. Clan Emberlight, finally named, and the Void bubbling up with new buildings and new lakes and hope. So much hope. And under that—longing and doubt and uncertainty. The parts of her that are always there. Longing and doubt and uncertainty, and moving forward anyway.

is all amusement; he was quite the dashing figure when she came upon him in the forest. She was impressed, but she’s always been impressed by him. She loves him, even despite the things they couldn’t be to each other. She loves him, and she loves the choices she made, and she’s happy to be here. She pulls away from the link, because she does not want to show him if he does not want to see, and says, “I stopped in the shrine, before I came your way. I made a fiend to observe and left some things as tests and found a way—really, it was Jorule’s idea, but. I found a way to get the Mask to the shrine at the end. A way that doesn’t risk anyone.”

: “I really—I really, really hope you get to meet him. Jorule. He’s …” she swallows. “It’s annoying because I know he can review things that happen to me and that he’ll never comment on my complimenting him, but Badri—I expected. I expected that I would probably survive this cycle, but I didn’t think anyone else would. And we still don’t know what will happen on the Obsidian Road, but. It’s a chance, and he made it happen. And he figured out the thing with the Masked and talked me out of risking my own life and—I know he doesn’t want to be paid back or anything, but I don’t know how to thank him.” She laughs a little. “I hope you meet him. He’s been a great friend.”

shakes her head. “But enough about that. We have some time—not much, but some—and I was wondering if we could just. Be. Maybe play cards.” She smiles, a little sharply. Badri rarely wins at cards against her.

grins at him. “Let’s do it.”

missed the Centrelight. Missed all of this, really. Will miss it. She tries to inscribe it in her memory—hers, not the Mask’s. Not all her memories here were happy, but they were hers. “I’m going to open a second Gate in Oaretsch. I think—I think I can get myself there,” she tells him, when the shift in the light lets her know their time is running short. “I also wanted to get some of my things out of my—the guest room.” She doesn’t move, not immediately.

: “Well, it could be in a starless void when we next meet,” she says. She heads back to the house and stops in the guest room. There are 216 threads there, of varying length, in whatever embroidery floss she wanted to use up, knotted together neatly. There’s the old dried husk of a walnut, a letter she has never read but had read to her, a spindle that is Spoken-Wood made, a lyre crafted for a child. She carefully wraps and stows them all away in her pack. There are a few other things—flowers pressed between the blank pages of a journal she never kept, small gifts given to her as the Sword-Saint. There’s not much. She’s always traveled light. “Maybe it’ll be under the light of the true sun.” She hefts her pack and meets his eyes. “I’m going to go do this next thing not in the middle of town. Do you want to come watch? I might embarrass myself horribly.”

: “I do like an audience,” she says, but she pauses. “Though this, I think, I’ll do on my own. I’d rather our last moment be a hug.” And she reaches up and hugs him again, because he’s there, and she can. Then she heads off to someplace well outwith the Courtyard.

nods to you. It does seem right.

has not returned to Oaretsch since she left, not even as the Sword-Saint. She’s found ways to avoid it—it’s grown so large there are satellite cities where she can meet anyone who needs the Sword-Saint. She has not returned to Oaretsch since she left, but she also isn’t quite sure she ever left. She thinks of the atelier in the library’s annex, which is not hers, not really, but a simulacra of Iikka’s atelier. She thinks of the story of Kaleva’s house, the taste of pomegranates—her favorite, or they used to be, before she found that pomegranates from anywhere else never tasted quite the same. She thinks of being very young and of Wolf and Diana coming to her village, and remembering that on the Beast with startling vividness. She thinks of the moment in Mu when she was performing, and then suddenly she was not performing, and she was left grasping for something and she didn’t know what. ⁂

kneels down and digs both fingers into the dirt. “Almachadta’s first lesson is death,” she says, “The second is what death feeds.” This is something she has always known. This is a truth that resonates down to her bones, and deeper—her cells, her very spark, she thinks. She is not Jorule or Aurelius or Awoken. She might fly, but it is always with wings carefully crafted from feathers and candlewax. She wants stars and the impossible, but her roots run deep. On Almachadta, she never found a home, not really. On Almachadta, she grew deep roots anyway. Context, meaning, what defines her and will always define her. ⁂

thinks of the dirt beneath her fingers, teeming with life-and-death. Thinks of the roots digging deep into the ground, feeding and spreading and living. Thinks of the espaliered trees of the house she grew up in, the rain falling into the reservoir in the center of the house, the beams of Centrelight filtered through gauzy curtains. Thinks of the smell of citrus that suffused the house, the emptiness of its unused rooms, and broader, the smell of the dyeworks down the street, the taste of the citrus-heavy foods and thick, dark breads they made in the communal ovens, the way the Centrelight almost seemed to float, without its umbilical, due to the angle Oaretsch was set at. She has been there, is there, will be there. She never left. ⁂

is a liminal thing, and space means nothing to her. A root system can run the entire length of Almachadta—why can’t her root system? She is outside the Courtyard. And then, in another breath, she will be in Oaretsch. 🙧

blinks, and for a moment almost laughs because, somehow, even knowing the house was filled with people, she hadn’t expected—well, she hadn’t expected. “Hello,” she says. “What’s your name? And is there someone I could speak to here?”

: “Oh. It’s nice to meet you Errel. I’d like to speak to Marjaana, if possible. I’m here to make your long trip a bit shorter.” She finds her breath coming a bit shorter, though that’s silly.

smiles, a bit, at the thought of Izaak coming through, warning everyone. She’ll have to tell Wolf. She’ll have to thank Izaak.

stares at her and stares at her and stares at her before she remembers Aurelius imitating the way her eyes bug out and then she bows, quickly. She maybe wouldn’t have worn such a skimpy outfit if she had known, if she had thought she’d encounter—but. That doesn’t matter. “Hello, Marjaana. The house is full,” she says. She can’t see but she can tell. The entire house thrums with life.

: “I. I apologize for the—oddness. But the gate that you need to access is on literally the other side of the world. I came here to make a second one on this side. I was concerned the people here wouldn’t be able to get to the one near the Courtyard, especially if travel by swift wasn’t possible for them. I could use some advice on where to set it up.” She glances around at the house, and then, forces herself to ask, “I’d also like to have some pomegranates. Any supplies—we’re setting up in the shelter, and food is the biggest concern. But the pomegranates would be. For me.”

nods. “Yeah. I know—I was only able to use gnosis to come here because I knew it so well. I am sorry for appearing in the middle of the house. It was the only way that trick would work. And I can directly contact Izaak—you won’t have to hunt him down.” She looks at Marjaana and she does smile, and it’s not her bright, confident smile, but the girl she was—the girl she still is—she shines through. “We should catch up, if we get the chance. I should have come back to visit before.” And she looks around her. She really should have. She tries to remember this, too. “I’ll set up the gate in the meadow, and then I have a little time if there’s anything you’d like to gather for me to send through first.”

pulls out the paper that Aurelius inscribed the runes on. She takes a moment to marvel at them, to run her hands over his handwriting, and then she begins to work. It takes longer than it takes him, and she finds herself holding too much tension in her body as she carefully draws each line, but eventually it’s done and touches it and draws up a Kinder, Gentler Path for the people on the far side of Almachadta.

: “There will be more,” she says, certain, and she means it with all her heart.