Scene Archives

knocks on the door.

pokes her head in. “Is this a good time, Acting Scholar-Academician Caion?” She says with a bit of a wry smile.

: “Well, I’m certain you have very many important meetings to attend, and then important reports to read about those meetings.” She slips into the room, shutting the door behind her, and takes a moment to look at him. “You seem like you’re doing better than when we first saw you.”

nods, thoughtfully. “Something did happen at Cloudset. I wanted to … share it with you, in some way. Either as a story or … does the term ‘methexis’ mean anything to you?”

: “It’s … some sort of … thing, like Circling but more intense. Where the boundary between yourself and the other collapse and you. Can share in a memory. A seeming. Wolf can do it, apparently building off of what I was doing with flourishing gnosis. I was thinking … maybe I could try with you? To show you about Cloudset? It’s mostly a source of joy, not sorrow.”

: “Oh it was … there’s a folio in the library, {Bahamut, The First Sword-Saint of Almachadta} that will explain it, but put simply … in the Mask, if you dive through all the safety nets, to the deepest core, there’s a … memory-echo of the first Sword-Saint. And you can speak with it, and it can … it is more than just a memory, and less than a living thing.” She smiles at him. “He gave Wolf and I the term, along with the name Zosimos.”

: “I wonder if the same is true of the yeresh. I know having one visit your village was … usually remarkable. It was for me, the one time it happened when I was a child. I’d have to ask Wolf.” She looks at him, thoughtfully. “I should probably ask Wolf to help me do this, but what happened on Cloudset was my doing, and I wanted to share it with you. To see if I could manage it myself.”

grins back at him. “Yes. If … you would start? I think it will be easier to manage the flourishing if I can weave it into your pellucid.”

: “Did you know,” she says quietly, “that a lotus is also a kind of rhizome?”

draws flourishing gnosis to her, towards her, through the flower, drawing out the thick, anchoring roots that allow the delicate bloom to float on the surface of the water without being torn away. And she imagines those roots weaving together, sprouting pellucid lotus-blossoms in the space between them, rootstalks spreading, and then she imagines drawing one up from her heart—burning and flourishing and unbound by the rules this plane, all the planes, seem to want to impose upon them, and she imagines another drawn up from his heart—pellucid-clear but wrapped in dark, safe shadow, the will and the want to do whatever he must, and she draws the rootstalk that grows and spreads from him towards her. She invites him in. She thinks of fire, and growing things, and Melpomene, and the desire for witness. She things of singing forth a miracle. She thinks, I am fire. She thinks, understand me. She thinks, I want to be known.

thinks that maybe he is looking up into Melpomene’s eyes, because she is Salme too, and she is fiercely, impossibly proud of him—at seeing her friend come into himself, to steer the Academy through a storm, to still be able to love and laugh despite the tragedy that’s befallen him, to have survived when it would have been so easy not to. And she lets him see the pride that burns in her for herself too. She sung an island into being. It’s called Tulinsoajat, she thinks, A shield, a harbor, born of flames.

shifts the memory, thinks of exploring with Ksenija, the riot of flowers, none of them making any sense to be blooming together. The nasturtiums, which she had forgotten were her favorites, and then she cuts to the finishing of the library, the weave that brought the plan into being, Jory the Raven, the secret door that reveals the annex, her atelier. So much wonder, at the world and at herself. She shares it with him, and coursing through it is a kind of confidence he’s never quite seen in her before.

’You should come see it soon,’ she thinks. And then, because she has nothing else to show him, she instead asks, ‘is there anything you’d like? That I can show you, or you’d like to show me?’ she isn’t quite sure how she’d change the focus of this, but she thinks she could, quite easily, if she willed it to be so.

she doesn’t know, and isn’t that amazing? She has—plans, thoughts, half-formed hypotheses, hopes and fears. So many hopes, so many fears, but fear is an old friend these days and hope is—hope is something new she is trying to trust. You are a part of this too, she sends back, certain, unshakable in that certainty when she is certain about so very little. And then, Was Archie able to tell you about the new form the Dream-Whales took? and then, Would you like to see?

laughs too, warm, blazing with joy and humor and she, briefly, just briefly, shows him a moment on the Glass Ship when they all laughed, shows him Aurelius rendered speechless, Awoken proud and somehow unsurprised, Wolf braced against the Glass Ship as gales of laughter take him, Luĉja radiating their calm joy, and Archie eager and bright-eyed, excited to learn, to see, to understand. And then she lets the weave and rhizome go, lets the link between them dissipate, gently.

: “That was … not quite what Wolf did with Bahamut, but it was something,” she says, smiling at him. “But. That was Cloudset.”

: “I can’t wait for you to see it either. In fact I have … a plan that I wanted to ask for your help with.”

something about that combination of confidence and danger fit together and a couple things rapidly fall together. She blinks, and breathes out slowly, and then laughs a little. “It’s nothing very grandiose. I need help sourcing copious amounts of vegetables, some specific sauces, and I need to talk to someone who can make a very specific kind of … fluff bread?”

laughs. “Oh, I am not surprised by this at all. I’m also not entirely sure what all the sauces are—it will shock you that I’m relying on instructions from Jorule, who is very helpful but sometimes doesn’t quite grasp the depth of my ignorance on certain matters—so hopefully you have researchers equally interested in that.”

after a moment, adds, “I … think larger-scale, well. I don’t know precisely what I did that created Tulinsuojat. If I thought I could replicate it, I would suggest doing so here, to maybe stabilize the Academy. But.” She shakes her head. “I’m glad things are stable.”

: “You really don’t have to defend Jorule to me,” she says, in the tired tone of someone who’s done a lot of defending Jorule to other people. “I recognize I asked him a difficult question. I guess with the BBS—which is brilliant, by the way, thank you for that—I can maybe ask him to expand upon it. He gave me a couple other guidelines on the fluff bread. This Emelienne of yours sounds like she’ll be quite helpful.”

: “As for the rest … yes, let me know. I feel like I keep … figuring out how to do things, but I can’t always do them consistently. I’m not sure how to replicate whatever we did just now, even. Any thoughts there will be helpful.”

nods and then says, “one more thing, then I’ll let you be? Can I give you a hug?”

returns the hug, and she’s so comfortable and assured about it that the awkwardness almost vanishes. “We never did get our chance to sit around and gossip about boys. Maybe on the trip back?” She gives him a final squeeze before stepping away.

: “Good,” she says firmly. And then she slips out the door to go seek out Emelienne and explain the concept of ‘fluff bread.’