ꙮ Salme’s room, in Emberlight’s shelter. Or is she wandering the sietch? Or has she ventured, already, far afield of the comforting and the known?
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#saint
kneels next to the pool she found on her way up from her trial. The stones below glitter strangely, and she watches as their light refracts when she runs her fingers through the water. She is wearing her diaphanous silks. This is the easy way down. This is a hard thing, but it won’t be hard on the body. She thinks.
ꙮ Like a spilling box of jewels, every time your fingertips disrupt the surface.
thinks she’s seen much beauty, but this is a different kind. She takes a moment, just a moment, to gather herself, and then she straightens and walks deeper into the caves where before she tested herself and found that she could be darkness. Almost without thinking, she gathers shadow into herself, becoming shadow herself. “Λύσιος,” she whispers, voice a soft susurration over the deep flute-noise. “Loosener of knots and snarls, dissolver of bonds and cares, are you here with me? Please be here with me.” Shadow, or wind, she slides around crystal pillars, scrapes along stone. She asks. She can only ask. “Tuuli, who I listen for everywhere I go, τί εἰμι? τί γίνομαι?”
ꙮ You are darkness within darkness; you are the gust of wind you feel, toying at your braids, howling through tight spaces in the rock. Free. Free, certainly, to ask the question. Free, and not alone, never alone. Have you ever been truly alone, with your constant companion, to whom you would reach and recognise, and run towards rather than fear?
: “I have felt alone,” she says, and she is the breeze fluttering the silk around her body and she is also her body. “But feeling is not being. There are many things I fear, but I would never fear something that could be loved instead.” The wind that is her falters for a moment, churns in a strange, half-articulated cyclone. “Or. No. I fear myself. I fear my own power—to do, to change, to build, to break. τί εἰμι? τί γίνομαι? I do not fear the becoming, but I fear the result of that becoming.”
ꙮ The wind is always in flux, always forming vortices, always singular. A field mapping every point in space and time to moving movement. Never stable, never certain, often still. In this moment, it is not still; it reaches out, it tosses Salme’s braids around, almost playfully. The howl is a whistle, briefly, and then it dies down again.
knows, or does not know. There is not certainty, here, but she does not want certainty. Or—she would not trade this for the illusion of certainty, not in a million years. She laughs at the wind through her hair, hums along with the whistle. “DO WHAT YOU WISH. The most terrifying thing you could have said.” She picks up speed, and leaves in her wake a deep howl as she circles the room, lets part of herself split against one of the pillars to rejoin on the other side. Darkness and shadow. Wind and air. “I too love things. I too have power that might crush the things I love. It is power I am grateful for. It is too much, it feels, sometimes. Not a god, no, but something more than what I was. τί εἰμι? τί γίνομαι? Or were you always thus?”
ꙮ Do we ever end as we began? And are we not, always, exactly who, and what, we have always been? From the moment you open a book to its foreleaf, you know the fact, if not the contents, of its final page. And yet.
does not want to accept that.
must accept that.
ꙮ Convenient, then, that what she accepts is both the statement and its antithesis. A scholar once put forth the idea of a book whose final word was not on its last page, such that you could not know, could not ever know, where the story had truly been meant to end. This is not that sort of story, and yet - in all the Mask’s memories, is there a single meant ending to be found, or just– what happened to happen? In any event, the wind could still to the barest breath, and nothing at all; that would satisfy the laws which govern its evolution in time, from one moment to another. The world would be peaceful and still, that way, perhaps, you think.
ꙮ That is one answer.
: “I have little use for a peaceful, still world,” she gusts. “And I do not think not knowing an ending makes it any less an ending.”
ꙮ Your constant companion, indeed. You are comfortable with it. And so comfortable, the wind asks: why not change, then? Change feels like dying, because it is.
: “I am not afraid to die,” she murmurs as she weaves between the pillars, “I am afraid to harm when I do not mean to harm.”
ꙮ There was an eight-word law, about this, once, the wind whispers. Another thing once whispered and whispered now again in spirit if not in text by you and your companions, an echo of what was. Are you careful? Do you care? Would it be fair to demand more from yourself than that? Your hands are so small. For all that you reach towards the world and it melts like wax under your grasp, your hands are so small. They cannot encompass the world entire. ⁂
ꙮ Almachadta remembers this, does it not? For the predator to live, its prey must be eaten. Grass is trampled underfoot. And yet, the world continues.
laughs and it ripples through the cave like the softest clap of thunder. “Who cares what is fair? What has fairness ever mattered even once?” She skims along the edges of the cave, a thing that contains her because she lets it contain her, but then she slows, and she steps onto the ground, solid and herself, and she says, “But you are right. There is always harm. There’s only harm that I can live with inflicting, and harm I can’t.” She looks at one of the pillars with its jewelbox-light. “I can’t believe I forgot.”
ꙮ Fairness always matters; that’s why we invented games of chance. The pillar sparkles with wolf-light, and something about the precise way the light refracts off its internal facets reminds you, suddenly and vividly, of something you saw once, before, elsewhere. Chiaroscuro leaves and a crystal tree. ⁂
ꙮ The wind whispers through the cavern. 🙧
smiles a bit, and reaches out, almost as if to pet a creature that is not there. Instead, her hand finds the crystal pillar. “I hope this won’t ruin the lighting.” And then she tries, she tries to draw radiant gnosis up into herself. ⁂
thinks, she thinks, of her Clan. Emberlight. The name that Luĉja gave that had felt less like a naming and more like a revelation. She thinks of her small hands clasped with Wolf’s or Aurelius’ or Awoken’s or Luĉja’s or Archie’s, each of them making the other stronger. She thinks of promises spoken and promises implied and the keeping of them both. She thinks of burdens borne not alone but together. She thinks of light but she also thinks of solid things—stone and bone and rock. Not inflexible, but things which shelter, things which protect. 🙧
ꙮ Invoke Radiance, DC 6.
- Salme invoked their 🟡radiant gnosis [d4] -> 2.
- Salme spent 2 Arete and now has 7 remaining.
- Salme invoked their 🟡radiant gnosis [d4] -> 2.
- Salme spent 2 Arete and now has 5 remaining.
ꙮ Ascension!
- Salme‘s 🟡radiant gnosis has ascended unto the 6ᵗʰ rank.
- Salme invoked their 🟡radiant gnosis [d6] -> 2.
ꙮ And the thing is, you know roots, Salme. You know roots more than most who have ever lived, you know self-similiar patterns persisting through space and time, you know that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. You can reach, you feel, to this, from the Flourishing which is your natural mode; it’s not so hard, after all? And so you are, for a moment, the wind, and also the cavern that is its vessel, and you reach your hands out to feel on either side the intense and subtle curvature of the world’s surface. (But your hands are small. They cannot encompass the world entire, and this, too, is a mercy found only in shadows.)
: “But what if my hands were not so small?” She says, because she has to try.
ꙮ Then you would reject that mercy found only in shadow. Reject the fear of your own strength. And this, too, is an answer.
: “It’s been a mercy, the smallness of my hands. It’s been a balm, the idea that I am only human. It’s been a lie—or, no. An untruth. A partial truth. I’ve known it was a partial truth for a long, long time.” She takes a breath. She is tired of human. She is tired of boundaries. She wants to reach for as much as she can possibly hold, and if she fails—that too is an answer. “I reject the fear of my own strength,” she says, and she draws liminal up into herself as well.
ꙮ And it is hard. It is so hard, to hold that, as well as the other two. Hard enough simply to hold one at a time, let alone two, let alone the three. But, you do feel that you could hold the one. Invoke Liminal, please, DC 4/15.
- Salme invoked their 🌌liminal gnosis [d8] -> 3.
ꙮ You may [Take Half].
: “Not yet,” she says, and then does something very foolish.
- Salme spent 5 Arete and now has 0 remaining.
- Salme invoked their 🌌liminal gnosis [d8] -> 8! It ✨explodes!
- Salme‘s 🌌liminal gnosis has ascended unto the 10ᵗʰ rank.
ꙮ Ascension!
- Salme invoked their 🌌liminal gnosis [d10] -> 3.
ꙮ Yes! Yes! Eight directions revealed themselves before you, and you lean backwards, and firmly stride the ninth. A foolish and beautiful magic, even if performed for the audience of the self, for the self to know. ⁂
ꙮ And so you are the wind, ⁂
ꙮ And you are the cavern which contains it, ⁂
ꙮ And also you are the crystals of ἀμφιλύκη which shimmer with the light and with the shadow. The half-light, wolf-light, dark that contains the dawn. 🙧
breathes and whistles through the air and her ribs that are the vault of the cavern do not rise and fall but in the ἀμφιλύκη she is both at once. That is the key, at least in part, is not not? Thesis and antithesis—one answer is a synthesis. The other answer is holding both and accepting them for what they are. Light and shadow and the ἀμφιλύκη where they blur into one another.
ꙮ When one thing transcends its boundaries, and becomes another. When two things become greater than either was, alone.
: “A gestalt,” she says into the cave and shadow and ἀμφιλύκη that is her.
ꙮ One of several words for the phenomenon. The wind, the cave, and the crystal; Clan Emberlight itself. One that is many.
smiles a bit. Of course there are many words; she’s certain there’s one in Ancient. But gestalt is a word that was given to her in a specific context, and she will always turn to that one first, she thinks. She takes another deep breath, feels the triumph thrum through her bones which is also the riotous gusts of wind that howl through the cave and then, slowly, she lets the tenebrous gnosis fall from her grasp, leaving herself holding radiant and liminal.
ꙮ One final gust of wind, while it shares itself with you, and then you are the bones of the place, and the light refracting. Solidity and the space between.
as the wind leaves her, she’s left with the feeling of solidity and the space between and she says, “Pleroma. That’d be another word, wouldn’t it?” She doesn’t like this feeling, not quite; it feels strange to her, but she lets herself feel it before she drops the radiant and becomes wholly a liminal thing.
ꙮ And that feels natural, to you, doesn’t it? Hasn’t it always? The Sword-Saint never stays in one place for long.
thinks it’s, in some ways, the most natural thing in the world. The Sword-Saint never stays in one place for long, is never one person for long, is always collapsing time with memory and words. One way toward ἀλήθεια is to remember, isn’t it?
ꙮ Part of the path, a part that cannot be skipped. You ripple with it, very much yourself, but you see the cavern from multiple angles and perspectives, at once; you see every face of the crystal before you with the same pair of eyes. Once, you might have found that unsettling– or perhaps you would have always found it simply a startling joy?
thinks it is probably both. The answer is almost always both, for her. The discomfort and the joy. The parts of her that will always be a village girl and the part that is becoming—something. τί εἰμι? τί γίνομαι? The one guarantee, she supposes, is that she will find out.
releases the liminal with a sigh, and does not become lesser for it, but does stop refracting madly through the cavern. She picks up another one of the small bits of ἀμφιλύκη, this one for Wolf, and heads back towards her Clan’s temporary quarters.