ꙮ Early in the morning of the day after you got to the Apostates’ sietch. But Salme’s not resting in her room – her ivory-and-gold statue is curled up in a corner, somewhere in their current space, touching the Library. Inside the Library itself: Where does she awaken? Or where did she rest, if she’s already woken up?
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wakes up in her atelier, curled up under the facsimile of the Centrelight. She’s arranged enough of the floor pillows to make something approaching a bed, and she’s slept more roughly for a large portion of her life anyway. For a moment, just a moment, she’s confused. With the Centrelight on her, her hair unbound and long and heavy, and no one beside her, she wonders, just for a breath, if she’s been dreaming for a long, long time. And then from high on the frame of the countermarch loom, Heli shifts and says, in her voice, “I cannot falter here.”
ꙮ And then the light’s not quite the light of the Centrelight, and the air, while quite pleasant, isn’t quite the rolling-in misty morning-in-Almachadta air. You did sleep quite well here, though, modulo the ad hoc bedding. A pile of pillows is pretty nice to curl up on, if you’re the Sword-Saint!
huffs, something close to, but not quite, a laugh. “You’re fond of that metaphor, aren’t you?” She stands up and stretches, and then goes over to her growing rack of clothes and pulls on the practical clothes she’s used to wearing on Almachadta. Where she’s going, she wants things that are practical and functional.
also wants things that are familiar.
ꙮ Comfortable, too, in the sense that they don’t get in the way in any sense. There’s a time and place for the diaphanous silks.
braids her hair up into the crown braids she’s kept her hair in for most of her adult life. This isn’t a time where she’d braid flowers into it, but she does miss that, the chance to even do it at all. Odd, to feel homesick when it’s been ages since she’s had a home. Not useful, either, but—
appreciates your point, anyway. There’s a time and place for the diaphanous silks. Most times and places, she’s finding, but not today. She walks through the annex, through the library, like she’s certain and focused on her path. As she slides back into her skin in the room she picked for herself, she lets herself acknowledge the slight constriction in her chest.
isn’t going to kid herself about that.
ꙮ The threshold crossed, and you step back into the waking world in more senses than one. There’s no shame in that, or in acknowledging it, if there was any doubt.
thinks that there’s always doubt, for her. And there’s no shame in that; she knows that, at least intellectually. She’s trying to convince herself of it emotionally. She admires the others, with their certainty. She always had. But she’s a creature of doubts.
hopes there’s a place for doubt too, even if it’s not maybe a quest for saving everything that can be saved.
steps out of her room, into the common room, and then goes looking for an apostate who can give her direction.
ꙮ Luckily, even this early, there’s apostates milling about. There’s still work to be done - vats of some kind of grain-mush that’s very much like the City’s oatmeal, but with a nutty flavour to it that’s a bit rough, but not in an unpleasant way. Fewer syrups here, though - but there’s breakfast for everyone who stops by, or will be soon, and where there’s breakfast, there’s directions.
knows exactly what she wants to find, even if she doesn’t know if it exists. She asks, as she eats, pulling out some more dates and figs to share as toppings, and a little flask of maple syrup from Almachadta to share with everyone at the table, where she can find the quietest, darkest, smallest part of the caverns.
ꙮ The flask of maple syrup is wildly popular. You overhear that the big metal guy who chopped EVERY PARSNIP IN THE WORLD last night also shared a bunch of really delicious spices and sauces, and there’s just general buzz about all of you – apparently, someone found a vault!! because of their cat-fiend!! who may not be a fiend! It’s all very exciting, but also people are respectful of the fact that it is damn early, so the excitement is at a reasonable low ebb. ⁂
ꙮ But, people are friendly, and welcoming, and happy to share with you as you’ve shared with them, is what I’m getting at - and you get directions, after a little while, from a much older woman who seems to see something in Salme’s eyes; colors of luminescent moss to follow, and floor-light patterns, and then directions by eye out a little ways past where the caverns are guidelit.
is happy to share and hear stories and she is sure to ask about the vault and the cat-fiend who, she is certain to inform them, is not actually a fiend, and you should ask her tall metal companion Luĉja about their coeurl kitten, Ĉasid, because both of them are delights, and Ĉasid needs a lot of play, and Luĉja is one of the kindest people she knows, but she is there for a reason, and she knows how to not get lost in the stories and gossip of a community, even if she wants to, even if she’d rather, and after eating her meal and cleaning her plate and leaving the syrup and the fruit for whoever comes after, she’s off, walking with purpose.
wonders if you’d like to know a secret, silmät?
ꙮ Hard for me to imagine any circumstances where the answer to that would be ‘no’, for anyone willing to share them.
asked, because she mostly wanted to hear you say that. The secret is: sometimes, when she’s really uncertain, when she doesn’t know what way to go, she imagines that she’s Aurelius. Or, more precisely, she imagines what Aurelius would do, the way he always moves forward, despite the obstacles. And then she does what she thinks he’d do, which right now means walking, with certainty, toward her destination.
ꙮ I think that’s a really good strategy, honestly. When you make each other sharper, when you illuminate the dark corners for each other - why wouldn’t you borrow his strength? Eventually, you get to the part of the caverns where the floor-light cuts out. There’s still the luminescent moss, though.
is able to borrow that sharpness until the floor lights cut out, and even then, though her steps slow, there’s still the luminescent moss. It isn’t the dark, not really, though it isn’t not the dark either.
it is the only dark place she had ever known, though, before.
ꙮ A shame you can’t borrow his trick with taking your sunglasses off and your eyes start glowing and the dark just isn’t a thing. The moss gets patchier and dim as you go, and – smoothly, a descent from ‘not quite the dark’ into somewhat more darker than that, and somewhat darker than that. You’re to keep your left hand on the cave wall, here.
sets her left hand on the cave wall, which is stone and not root. Did he do that? He does like the glowing eyes thing. But the darkness is, at least, in part, the point. Once it gets darker she stops, for a moment, and lets herself breathe. Lets herself feel that her chest rises and falls the same amount it did under the Centrelight-facsimile, the same amount that it always has. She sends a pulse of gnosis into the stone, to see if it’s alive like the not-cave in the Tangle was alive. Pellucid—she asks a question. She desires clarity.
ꙮ Many of these caves have been made habitable, or at least navigable; lit with floor-lights and moss. Go far enough in this direction, though, and there’s no light to see by at all, nothing for your eyes to even adjust to, try as they might. Two relatively sharp corners, and your fingertips, your breath, the sound of your own footsteps are all you have to go on. And yet, you breathe as easily; your gnosis reaches into the stone. [Take Half] The rock’s as alive as most other rock, which is to say, not at all, its gnosis simple, dormant and unsung.
remembers that the cave-that-is-not-a-cave, that the shrine in the tangle, was alive. That place was alive down to its heartwood.
ꙮ It was. You could feel it in your fingertips, even without asking the question. All of the tangle seemed to be, but- that, especially.
finds that there is comfort in that, in the dormant and unsung nature of the stone. In the roughness against her hand that is different from the roughness of the ancient and gnarled roots. ⁂
walks, and as she walks she doubled—herself, not long ago, nails digging into Aurelius’ arm, inevitability hanging heavy on her shoulders. And then she is tripled—herself, wearing the Mask, Wolf at her side before he was her heart-brother, walking to a shrine that has called to her since she was eighteen and first held the Mask. This is a special way of being afraid / No trick dispels. She knew, had known, still knows, will always know. She is herself in the moment and she is herself in the past and she is herself in the foreign past when she was less herself than she is now and it is not the cave, not really. It was never the cave, not really. ⁂
takes another step forward. Most things may never happen: this one will, she thinks and she takes another step and she is not just herself, cast across three spans of time, she is two hundred and sixteen people and she moves the heavy legs of her roots and her swift paws and her small steps and her booted feet forward, forward. There is only one answer to this question and it is forward. Courage is no good: / It means not scaring others. Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood. She is all of them, nameless but counted, kept, honored if not known. She is all of them, and she is herself refracted, and she is only herself in this moment. She takes another step. 🙧
ꙮ Forward, a fathom within yourself, then. You don’t need to keep your hand along the wall, any more - you can feel the presence of the stone closing on you on your right. Single-file through the crevice in the rock, single-file and two-hundred-odd strong side by side. The most important step to take is always: the next one, after all.
ꙮ Do you feel whiskers brush against the rock on either side of you? The air currents, channeled and bound by the shape of what you’re walking into, in your leaves? Pitch-black, and it ultimately doesn’t matter why you know it’s narrowing.
feels the stone against her whiskers and then pushing her fur against the grain, feels the darkness in her leaves that makes them heavier, the air staler that makes it harder to laugh, to speak. Feels the smoke from the fire constricting her throat, making her breath rattle—but it is breath she still has. Feels the narrowing of the space around her, feels the narrowing of possibility around to her. There was a chance to fight it, once, before they learned that fighting meant nothing. There was a chance to run from it once, even if running meant forgetting. There was the opportunity to choose an end of her own choosing—not much of a choice, but a choice people have made. In Almachadta there are ways of dying that are gentler and sweeter than sleep. There is no shame in that. There is maybe some shame in that if you’re the Sword-Saint—at least some of the others think so—but she, Salme, couldn’t fault it. There are choices that they all could have made, some of them did make. They aren’t the choices she made. There is only this: It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, / Have always known, know that we can’t escape, / Yet can’t accept. Sometimes, there is only one way a story can end. ⁂
is no longer walking, but is slipping forward. The space has narrowed enough she has to go sideways, though it doesn’t yet press against her ribs or her chest. Sometimes, there is only one way a story can end. She doesn’t think that anymore. She has chosen hope, and even if she hadn’t chosen hope, she still has to try hopelessly. Sometimes, there is only one way a story can end. That is still true, though. For a long time, that was the truest thing she knew. 🙧
ꙮ You think of stone, and things made of stone. It’s hard not to, here, surrounded by it. You think of the Beast and what they did with stone; you think of the Beast and their determination to keep stories alive in the only material they trusted to hold a story longer than a life. You think of the Beast and a basket-hilted sword melted into the Queen’s throne. You think stone, close enough to your face that you can smell it.
’s chest rises and falls and rises and falls and it is too fast. She tries to slow her breath. She manages to drag it slowly back to a normal pace. She came down here to ask herself a question, and that question is: ‘What are you actually afraid of, Salme?’ It’s not the cave, it’s not the cave, it is The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. But the cave means that to her, even if it doesn’t make sense, even if it it’s thread-crossed, overlapped, confused, even if it’s irrational. Rationality was never her strength. She wiggles forward, and the stone presses against her ribs and her back. She tries to take a deep breath, and the stone stops her chest from being able to expand. Her neck is slightly craned downward. The ceiling above her won’t let her straighten to her full height. For a moment, she doesn’t breathe at all. ⁂
breathes too much, desperate, shallow breaths, clamoring for air that she knows is there but she feels it isn’t. Terror, terror, blind, stupid, animal panic, and she cannot move, she cannot escape. She has put herself in a trap and found herself trapped. She thinks of Wolf, casting out fear. She thinks of Aury, who simply finds a new path. She thinks of Awa, who doesn’t bother to consider what is possible and what is not. She is neither of them. Still, though, she hears her own voice reflected in Heli’s. ‘I cannot falter here.’ That is all she knows. ⁂
squirms forward again. It is a game of inches now, and the stone catches at her hair, dragging one of the braids free and it pulls at her scalp and tears gather in the corner of her eyes. The passage narrows even more, this time below her feet, and she has to lift her legs off the ground to get over it and then she only has the shift of her shoulders against the stone to push herself forward, the subtle twitches of muscle. She thinks: what we know, / Have always known, know that we can’t escape, / Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go. ⁂
knows that the truth is she can falter. There are medicines and drugs to take the edge off, there are ways she could—probably hide in the tablet during this part while Aury carried her around in his pocket dimension. There are portal tricks. She can falter, if she can’t do this. ⁂
doesn’t want to.
🙧
ꙮ You think of stone pressed all around you; you think of the way the grain of the rock presses against your face, has pressed against your face, will press against your face, pressed against your feet, pressed against your back. You think, wildly and irrationally, that it’s pressing in on you even when you hold -still-, that the gap is closing around you; that the cold stone that smells so different from anything you’re used to would keep you in its embrace, and shall, compensation for the life it lacks.
lets out a soft breath, and then something that might be a prayer and might be gibberish. She doesn’t have anyone to pray to, so maybe it’s a poem, but whatever she says with her mouth aren’t words she can decode with her ears and she thinks, maybe, despite all her hope she will die here and stay, undecayed, until one of her Clan probably finds her and hopefully they bring her back to Almachadta, or maybe the Beast. If they can get her body free of the stone—and maybe the stone will keep it, maybe she will be stone and the passage will be entirely blocked off, maybe it will be a relief, not having her around, not having her messiness and doubt and cynicism, and even if she wants to decay on Almachadta or burn on the Beast it doesn’t really matter except she’d like to be a part of one of the planes that she loves, but that’s a lot of work and it would probably be too much to ask and—⁂
stops. Not breathing, she keeps doing that. But she stops. This is not her. These are not things she believes. No one would be happy to find her dead here, and she isn’t going to die. That she knows. There are other things she knows.⁂
knows that stone is just stone and that fire is just fire. The shrine in the Tangle may be alive, but it is not malicious. The fear is not about the cave, not really, but there is fear of the cave. She is afraid, even if she knows she shouldn’t be afraid. She thinks, then, of stone, and of stone on the Beast, holder-of-stories when there is no one else to hold them. She thinks of her sword in Jae’s throne, a sign that she lived and that she fought and that she mattered. She thinks neither of these things wipe away the fear, but they mean something. She thinks of what she wants. She thinks, I wish to know / That which I wish. She remembers being fire. ⁂
, here and now, tries being darkness. ⁂
closes her eyes, even if she cannot tell the difference except in the perception of her body. She draws tenebrous gnosis into her body, weaves it with the tenebrous gnosis that is herself. She is her own favorite resource to spend, and here in this place she will spend herself down to the last breath. She thinks of her body one with shadow, without clear beginning or end in this dark place. She thinks of shadows that persist for nearly three hundred thousand years. She thinks of persistence. She thinks of tenacity. She thinks of surviving regardless of what she is challenged with. She thinks of ambition—was this not ambition? She could have faltered. She could not stand to be someone who did. She draws it into herself like she once drew fire into herself and holds herself still and tries to exist, tries to know, what it is like being the darkness that hangs between the steadiness of deep stone. 🙧
ꙮ It’s like this: Sometimes, there is only one way a story can end. But this is not your grave. ⁂
ꙮ It’s like this: You feel an inexplicable breeze against your face from the far side of the crevice, you feel it trying to whistle through the cleft in the rock, and it can’t, because even if you are darkness, you are still there, but you feel it. ⁂
ꙮ It’s like this: You reach out into the darkness beyond dark, you cannot see, and all you can smell is stone, and all you can feel is stone, but you hear something, and only later will you realise that it was your own heart that thundered, your own tenacious, tenebrous signal in the world, but what it sounds like is a response. ⁂
ꙮ It’s also like this: You are darkness, and darkness is that which surrounds you. Even if there were a tiny spark of light, a glint from the exit of the cleft in the rock, darkness would still be, vastly, what surrounds you. And you are it, and it is you, and there is nothing in the darkness that you could fear, the darkness which could not exist without the caves to carry it. You wear the stone like diaphanous silk. 🙧
smiles. Caught, here, like this, she smiles, and thinks of the breeze against her face, thinks of the wind that she loves, hears the answer to her question and then, you’re right: it is easy to move through the blackness around her that is also part of her. It is easy to love the rock the clothes her, holds her, gives her meaning and definition, allows her to exist. She slips through the narrow opening as deftly as she threads an eye of a needle and arrives on the other side.
ꙮ Waiting for you, at the end of this crevice, the only way this strange path could have ever ended, after step by harrowing step and then an act as simple as reaching for her desire, there is an overlook over a cavern full of pillars of crystal, and each crystal glows just the tiniest bit, but the cavern is large and they are many, and the light from each reflects off every facet of each, and so it’s a softly-shimmering box of jewels spilled into the earth’s purse, and when you reach the overlook there is a wind blowing through the cavern, from some other near-invisible crevasse, no doubt, a breeze which whispers a secret, a wind which suddenly ruffles your tunic and the braid that got knocked loose, and it is marvelous.
: “Are you here, Tuuli?” she asks with a laugh. And her laugh is deeper, richer, than her normal laugh is. She has missed the wind like she has missed the soil of Almachadta, the stars of the Beast, the simple ability to go outside and sit and exist without feeling the oppressive glower of the sun. She walks to the edge of the overlook and looks down, looks at how far down the crystal pillars are, wonders at the jewels spilled out beneath her. “It’s beautiful.”
ꙮ It is beautiful. From the crevice it looks like the pillars go on forever; up at the edge of the overlook you see the floor of the cavern buried in facets of lightly-shimmering crystal. The wind comes and goes, after that initial gust, and there’s a sound it makes, in this cavern and this one only, unbelievably low and very soft, soft like Bahamut’s bassy growl, the deepest flute-note it’s possible to imagine, almost felt more than heard.
is still darkness, even if she is more shadow than darkness against the light of the crystal, so she slides over the edge of the overlook down the floor where the crystal shimmers.
ꙮ And you still wear the cavern like silks; it takes barely a thought, in this moment, to have been there, concealed among the crystals, stepping out from behind one.
is a shadow that was always there as she flows between them. She is all around them, but if she were not, if she were just herself, how tall would they be? What colors do they cast across the darkness?
ꙮ The pillars themselves stretch from the floor to the ceiling of the cavern. Around ten Sword-Saints, standing on each others’ shoulders like they always do, tall, actually, when it comes down to it, and they’re every colour and none - a dim, but brightly shimmering grey, a grey with facets and bright faces and internal lustre, monochrome but no less lovely for it.
reaches out to touch one, though she is darkness and they shimmer with light, so she is uncertain if they might be touched.
ꙮ Well, they shimmer with darkness, too. They couldn’t shimmer without having both, without the difference. They’d just glow. And that would be lovely, too, but these are shimmering, and they are cool and smooth to touch.
ꙮ It occurs to you, startlingly, that you have touched that of which they are made, once before.
closes her eyes and tries to recall when that might have been.
ꙮ It’s rather hard to forget. Although it was soft and textile, then, rather than cold and faceted; it was still the same stuff. You wove it yourself with great skill. Somewhere, beyond the strange paths, the Scorpion Queen is fondly regarding it at this very moment, even.
: “Oh. The chiaroscuro.” She sends a pulse of gnosis into the pillars, asking a question. What are you? Who, if you are a who?
ꙮ Low, shimmering chimes as the gnosis pulses through the crystal. Which is a lovely sound, like a wind-chime of the soul, but not an answer. It’s certainly a good thing, for them, that they’re not Lightdrinkers! But you do experience a brief and silly moment of regret that they’re not.
laughs a little, because she supposes there still is time for secrets here. She dances around them, still shadow, looking for small fragments she might take back, trying to feel through the air, which is also her, where the breeze is coming from.
ꙮ The world could go on forever, and there would still be secrets; We could know for certain that the end was near, and still have time for them. You dance, and there are fragments, here and there, and luckily, the darkness has pockets; you follow the breeze to a much less tight passageway leading out of the cave.
slides through the passageway, still enjoying, still glorying in being darkness, and stays that way as she flows through the wider passageway until she starts seeing floor lights.
ꙮ Before you see floor lights per se, you see an incredibly wide, well-lit cave with a smooth mirrored surface that you realise is water, that some of the light is coming from glowing crystals in the water, refracting through it to light everything, and only some of the lights were placed there later. One of the water sources for the sietch, you imagine, and based on the lights and the moss you think you definitely know the way back from here.
gasps with delight, and with that forgets to be shadow and is simply human again. And she goes over to the water’s edge, looking at the refracting and play of light and shadow, and cups her hands and takes a cool drink of water for her parched throat and is thankful, so thankful, that there is beauty in everything.