Fen Edit 1-20-24
Rplizer +1 qps : x
Extra meticulous edit +1 qps :
Length bonus +1-2 qps :
Part of a series +1 qps: 3
Summary: +1 qps : x
The following logs precede this story:
https://forums.wotmud.info/viewtopic.php?f=102&t=18397
https://forums.wotmud.info/viewtopic.php?f=102&t=18499
Further Lessons in Vocabulary
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Elmitsu hated waiting. In fact, she hated it so much that she considered herself caught in an another Aes Sedai web—perhaps a ter’angreal that revealed your greatest annoyances and then made you labor through them one by one; or, more likely, some pigeon from Keshara Sedai instructing her eyes-and-ears in Altara to test the fidgety Accepted’s commitment upon her arrival in So Harbor.
Elmitsu had spent the week before her departure tending the poor in Tar Valon as part of a penance set by Ashlynn Sedai. Not another annoyance, no, but Elmitsu could not find the word for this feeling that writhed like a worm in her gut, so deep and low, neatly curled around her sense of shame. She watched whole families beg in the dole line for their pittances in the most beautiful city in the world. She picked up trash—the detritus of battles, spent lanterns, apples rotten to the core—outside of fanciful Ogier-wrought buildings that depicted sweeping waves and far-fetched creatures lost to the annals of history and myth. Perhaps wards of the One Power kept shadoweyes from penetrating the White Tower, but Elmitsu knew evil when she saw it.
Best to keep busy though. Ever since finding the body in the Blue wing, sleep often evaded Elmitsu like a half-realized memory, a dream that only faded instead of sharpening into focus. Giving Neisa her name back had helped some, so too the preparations for her journey to visit the dead servant’s family. Elmitsu wondered if this was what purpose meant, another word whose definition eluded her, a girl who’d spent most of her time running from and not toward the thrust of her life.
And then. And then the Foretelling. She couldn’t remember what she’d said with her eyes reduced to whites in a voice that did not belong to her, but she’d never forget that feeling: held in Blodfest’s eyeless gaze, the unmovable certainty of violence yet to come. Elmitsu did not yet understand the difference between a Talent and a curse, but she hoped for further lessons.
“More tea, miss?” asked the waitress. The girl, likely the overweening Innkeeper’s daughter, had cheeks red as ripe apples, not yet rotten, and attended Elmitsu at her corner table of the Golden Barge solicitously. Any woman would be a fool to advertise her affiliation to the White Tower this close to the border with Amadicia, but the Tar Valon marks Elmitsu clipped down when asking after her room functioned much the same way.
“No, thank you, but maybe some more of that soup,” Elmitsu said. She needed something to push around on the table in front of her even if she wasn’t especially hungry. She’d followed Keshara’s instructions to the letter, marking the beds of blue goatflower outside the Golden Barge and identifying herself as instructed upon arrival. But still no one came to Elmitsu’s corner table. She worked on a letter of her own with several parchments arrayed before her and at least two books. Burn me, she thought to herself, but I look like I’m on assignment from the Brown.
Then the soup came, and Elmitsu, distracted as she was by the heady aroma of potatoes stewed in cream, almost missed the note tucked underneath.
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Elmitsu rode out the next morning to meet the ferry. Fog echoed from the banks of the River Eldar like the peals of a silent bell, not yet dispelled by a lazy sunrise that had only just begun to yawn over the horizon. She pulled her cloak close at the crisp morning air, still unable to reckon how the Aes Sedai evaded the temperature as easily as they seemed to the truth.
Elmitsu also couldn’t reckon how she recognized Neisa’s mother in the stooped woman exiting the little boat: she only knew, with a certainty that defied reason, that this was whom she’d come for; she could also tell, by the bent of the woman’s shoulders, that Retta Dromar suspected her daughter’s fate despite awaiting Elmitsu’s confirmation.
“Light keep you, Mistress,” Elmitsu said as she guided the woman back toward the Golden Barge’s stables and later the common room. “I hope the journey was not a difficult one.”
“Just tell me what you’ve come to, girl, and be done with it. I have work waiting for me at home,” Mistress Dromar said. Elmitsu could not help the deep well of—not pity, no--that reared up inside her like a cat on its hind legs. The woman hurt for her daughter, Elmitsu could tell, but without a proper language for it. Elmitsu flagged down the serving girl once more.
“I know that’s not why you sent Neisa to the White Tower . . . only to lose her,” Elmitsu said after briefly recounting the tale of the servant’s passing. Lose. That wasn’t the right word either. Neisa was not lost, for Elmitsu had found her body broken in the Blue wing. No, she was stolen, ripped from the pages of a story in which she did not even star. Elmitsu gathered her courage back to herself as if it were a bundle of sticks.
“I know that’s not why, but please—take this: a token of the White Tower’s appreciation and a gift that surely cannot pay for her sacrifice,” Elmitsu said, before adding, “I am sorry I cannot give you more comfort.”
“You came all this way to tell me she’s dead? A pigeon would have done,” Mistress Romar said despite tucking away the clinking pouch of marks Elmitsu had slid across the table.
“I thought Neisa deserved better than a pigeon,” Elmitsu said. She considered the woman before her, the faint purpling under her left eye that Mistress Romar would no doubt claim was the product of clumsiness or inattention. “It’s true—the Shadow can strike anywhere, and none of us is as safe as we should be. As we deserve.”
Elmitsu paid for the small spread of cheese, bread, and fruit the pair of women had—not enjoyed, no, no enjoyment here—shared over the course of their brief discussion. She’d settled her room that morning, anticipating this as her last day in So Harbor. She looked at Retta Dromar and thought about her own mother back in Arafel. She did not allow her eyes to linger overlong on the woman’s bruise as she rose from the table, for she was learning to be subtle.
“But if you have other daughters, you should send them to the White Tower.”
Further Lessons in Vocabulary --- && RP Award
Re: Further Lessons in Vocabulary
You have such a great way of writing, it was very enjoyable. I've enjoyed following along from the body being found and how the initiates were stirred up, using it as an investigative lesson with you, and seeing this part of the story played out this way.