A Light in the Darkness

[IamLEAM1983]

"To this," he said, encompassing the room with a wave of one hand. "I hold in my hands the keys to pleasures your fellow surface-dwellers would believe to be impossible. There is no real need for violence or bloodshed, not when my guidance could bring peace to both civilizations. Similarly, your people and those of all of your surface's cultures have so many things to teach us all."

Judging by the look of sudden passion he gave her, he was about to spill the simple and effective core of his entire personal doctrine. "As I've said, the Black Books are open to interpretation. They all speak of the end of one world and the birth of another - but so many species, mine included, also believe that the world dies each night and is reborn at dawn! If you read between the lines, ignore the layers of hatred that are the works of our myriad translators and of my fellow interpreters of Their will, everything that is tied to our culture - renaissance shines through."

His tone grew hushed. "Say this to no-one, understand? There is potential beyond the rending of the Darkhallow's barriers and the potential of us having completely misunderstood the Void and its purpose. We do not know, however, and to know, we must study. We must try and grasp what so few have attempted to.

I dare not speak of this to any among my Speakers; they would all rebuke me. What I need, Meris, is a nurse, yes - but also a research partner. If there is nothing for us to find, I will attempt to find a way to, er, facilitate your escape. If hope is in our grasp, then I would also release you - but as an envoy between our species."

Eyes darting around the room, he lightly tightened his grip on her hand. "Fifty mortal years, by your count. Give me this much time. Cure me as fast as you can, and we will be free to honour the exact details of our arrangement. I will teach you, you will train yourself - and we will both see if there exists a means for us to coexist, if the hatred we believe the Others expects us to hold as a shield could be a misconception or a miscalculation on our part."

[TennyoCeres84]

Upon hearing his plans, the young selkie gave him a brief, but slightly giddy smile. Thankfully, her veil contributed to hiding her display of enthusiasm. "Aye, I will help ye attain this goal, Augur. It shall remain a secret 'tween th' two o' us," she whispered.

[IamLEAM1983]

He smiled behind his tendrils, his dimples cheerfully narrowing his eyes. "I would bend and kiss your hand in thanks, if I could."

The Augur gave the room a resolute and thoughtful look, followed by a fitting sigh. "Now, let us say we start by getting me out of these sheets? My lungs need airing and I could use a good walk."

As had been the case before, he wasn't so uncharitable as to let the young roane carry his entire weight. Using his own telekinetic powers to mostly prop himself up, he tended to rely on Meris for his first few steps and as some sort of a guide, to maintain his balance. She'd feel the strong field of his willpower gripping his own mass as he mostly helped himself to shift his legs over the bed and from there, to stand straight. As he did so, he let out a self-deprecating sniff.

"I should call for a basin," he noted. "My fever has not entirely dropped but I cannot stand my own smell any longer!"

As far as she was concerned, the Augur had never weighed more than a frail adult, while in her steadying arms. He was too large to offer easy handholds, but he did always keep an arm within easy reach.

His concern for cleanliness was another odd duck in his application of Void Weaver customs - or his lack thereof. Her previous masters hadn't cared if they wore robes stained with the previous day's egg-spawning, filth frequently encrusting itself on their legs, arms and faces. The Augur and his staff stuck to a luxuriously stringent schedule of baths and showers, however - both as a way to release their minds' harboured tensions and better Her influence, and as a means to stay true to the House of Sin's prescriptions. If pleasure was a core tenet, then no rank smells could be allowed and no swath of skin could be left coarse and unconditioned. For comfort to blossom into gross excess, it had to start somewhere, after all. There was no better place for this than Dalarath's private bathhouse, located just inside the perimeter of the Augur's residence and seat of power.

Meris would have been there before and would know what to expect. The Augur had his own large basin of steaming water and it was connected to a descending honeycomb pattern of cascading smaller basins. This meant that the chest-high walls offered everyone personal levels of privacy and decency-preserving visual limitations, while keeping the act of bathing an unusually social experience. She'd frequently been called to bathe in one of the small basins adjacent to the Augur's, given her space thanks to sculpted soapstone walls while still able to partially see him. Sounds carried well in the bathhouses, and they'd handled their initial weeks of mutually leery small talk while wrapped in the calming and rejuvenating cocoon of precisely dosed saltwater.

[TennyoCeres84]

Meris helped him out of the sheets and supported the Void Weaver, aiding him in his trek to the bathhouse. Since her transfer from her previously cruel owners, she had to admit she relished the change in hygiene habits. Culturally, selkies tried to keep themselves clean as well and had their own form of bathhouses. These areas were generally not as private as the Augur's, but families would generally take turns to use the facilities. Those circumstances partly explained the casual nature toward nudity. Still, she was grateful the many basins had walls in between them that would prevent being stared at.

[IamLEAM1983]

A few minutes later, they both lowered themselves into their respective basins, the Squid's mass displacing additional water into Meris' and from it to the other basins below, in a sort of soft little cascade. Of him, she could only see the head and upper torso, his belly's upper curve dipping into the water and out of view. At first, he rested both his arms on his basin's soapstone rim, eyes closed, taking in the rising steam and the relief it brought to his lungs.

As before, however, she'd be able to tell he hadn't fallen asleep. Silence had settled in as a means for him to collect his thoughts, and perhaps further plan what lay ahead for the both of them. A few minutes of this passed, after which he lowered himself deeper into the basin, so he'd be able to rest the back of his head against the rim. Now mostly out of sight except for his head and upper tentacles, he creaked one eye open and canted his head in Meris' direction.

"We never did consider comparing notes, didn't we?" he observed. "I should have asked, maybe under the pretenses of determining if you were a threat to us," he said, rolling his eyes as he spoke. "You can sing my pains away, this much is obvious..."

He coughed in an almost professorial manner. "Let us pretend for a moment or two that our auspices are entirely different. I am a rich landowner from the surface seeking a healer, a mage and potentially a schoolmistress."

The cheerful dimples returned.

"Impress me. Tell me tales of your training. Do well, and I shall try and show you how our juveniles tend to entertain themselves, when their Arbiters aren't looking. I believe the surface-dweller word that best qualifies their illicit plays would be cute. Unfortunately, childlike minds only prosper here if they stand underneath my direct protection."

[TennyoCeres84]

With her veil removed, Meris' wild hair seemed even curlier than before, due to the steam. Given that she was much, much lighter in weight than the Augur, she floated in the basin's water. When he looked to her, she rested her head and arms on the edge of the basin wall, looking rather like a child.

"Well, when I was a wee girl, me parents would hae tae keep an eye on me when they occasionally brought fish tae th' market. My father would notice when I sang to meself an' me doll, more customers would show up at th' stall. He had me hawkin' people in shortly thereafter. When I had brothers an' sisters tae look after, me voice was useful in keepin' them in line.

When I was older, me parents saw that I had talent beyond jus' helpin' them earn money. They took me tae th' local practitioner o' seraphic magic. He told them that it was my third ability minglin' wi' whatev'r knack I had wi' magic, an' that it needed temperin', like a sword. I needed a focus, somet'ing tae believe in. He gave me an example o' how th' bards in Wales used it tae bring about awen. He said it has tae come frae inside me; that would be me Ephiphany. There was only sae much he could teach me an' sent me back to me family.

When I returned, me family was in trouble. Selkies hae always had tensions with th' humans, given th' competition ov'r fish. They had injured me mither an' I came home tae that. I cinno' describe it, but somet'ing jus' happened. I placed my hands on her wound, an' it healed. Took a while, but she recovered. Me focus was me family. Afterwards, I sought th' advice o' th' cantor. He told me I should start makin' me own songs fer whatev'r I needed a spell fer. I was shaky at first, but I learned as I practiced."

[IamLEAM1983]

A few seconds in, the big man shifted his posture again, turning in the basin so that he would face her directly. That more or less exposed his less-than-flattering physique down to his navel, but like selkies, his kind didn't think much of nudity. He didn't even think much of the fact of idly scratching his innie as she talked, looking as though he were very cautiously considering her words.

"How odd," he then mused, shifting again and adopting a posture similar to Meris', leaning forward and resting his chin on his folded arms. "In some ways, the Black Speech is functionally identical to this Seraphic magic of yours. We... unmake things while you make them. Or, as the case may be, remake them entirely. Heal them."

He gave her an inquisitive frown. "Does this ability come with the need to understand the makings of what it is you're altering?"

[TennyoCeres84]

Meris tilted her head as she considered his question and then finally shrugged. "When I sang tae me doll as a child, I felt like I was invitin' her tae play wi' me. Bairns invent friends tae play wi', ev'n if they're no' really there. I treated it as a game. When I was healin' Mither, there was this sense o' urgency in mind. I deud no' want her tae die. I was born wi' th' ability an' it seems will is involved somehow. Dunno how else tae explain it."

[IamLEAM1983]

"So you do not consciously tap into Matter - but it does happen on a level you haven't consciously grasped yet," the Augur mused. "Are other forces conspiring to weave injuries closed as a result of your singing? I wonder..."

On a whim, he briefly looked back to her and then focused his attention on one of the unoccupied basins. In short order, its water bubbled and frothed heatlessly and seemed to rise out of the basin's crevice, coalescing into a blob of jellied water shaped like a humanoid figure. The details were scarce, as the Augur wasn't focusing on the mannequin's race or gender. He made the construct float towards them, and then raised a hand out of his own basin.

"This could be a typical selkie, Meris. Flesh and bone, blood and sinew. Yet, there is one specific fact which we Void Weavers have grasped, and that surface-dwellers have yet to encounter. It is the seat of our abilities, and the canvas we use in the creation or alteration of our servants."

Raising both hands, he curled his fingers and parted his hands, palms facing outward. A glob of water erupted out of the total mass, the rest of the former "body" splashing back into inert water in the surrounding basins. What he'd kept aloft was the reproduction of your average heart. He repeated the process, picking a ventricle and dislocating it from the model heart's total mass. He effectively "zoomed in" several times, showing her things only a modern-day physician could have grasped. The lattice-shaped structure of muscular cells and the few dendrites and axons that allowed the heart some measure of autonomous functionality, the nucleus of each cell, the chromosomes within, DNA strands modelled in watery form several dozens of generations ahead of the first efforts in gene sequencing...

When he stopped, there was nothing left but a simple sphere of suspended water, oddly quivering this way and that in a manner that felt chaotic, unpredictable.

"This, Meris, is Energy. At the simplest level, despite the Others and Their influence, there is no difference between you and me. What makes you a selkie and me a Void Weaver is of no consequence for the greater Universe, for all of us - all of Nature - is made out of What Came Before. Dead stars, the lifeblood of those former realms the Others ruled over during their prime. Even then, my people are taught to revere how unique life is, how fragile it is, as so much of what surrounds us is antithesis to this very energy. We call it the Void.

My people believe it to be a destructive force, but I am more inclined to measure my words. The Void is to Energy what heat is to cold, or north is to south, love to hatred. An opposite, yes, but a complementary force, as well. We exist in a small fraction of observable Matter, swimming in an ocean of Nothingness - but this Nothingness still has an energy all its own, a creative force waiting to be tapped."

He looked back to her. "What I believe is that somehow, through your songs, you speak to the quivering points of light that make us all. You - vibrate them at frequencies that favour increased healing, the very same way a skilled throat can produce different notes. In this, you and I could produce similar results..."

He cupped his hands and whispered as low as he could, making sure the roane's ears wouldn't be able to focus on his hushed use of the Black Speech. In response, the sphere floated forwards until it stood directly above the Augur's hands - and then seemed to evaporate. As it did, however, a small rain of salt crystals fell into his palms.

"Saltwater," he said. "Water - and salt. Separating the two only requires an understanding of the bonds that hold them."

Smirking again, he canted his hand forward and let the recreated salt pour into Meris' own water. "Even water could be broken into further simpler concepts. Air, notably, and a volatile compound that carries all of the sea's fury as well as its usefulness."

[TennyoCeres84]

The selkie nodded. "Aye, I imagine that's similar tae what elemental mages dae. I ken that arcane energy, especially when concentrated, is extremely volatile. That's what gave rise tae th' goblins an' then later th' orcs, after their city's pillars collapsed durin' th' days when ice covered most o' th' world. Of course, they then went an' did th' daft t'ing an' allied themselves wi' a demon. It's no' really me place tae judge, but I would no' want that fate," she mused. "Dealin' wi' a demon is risky business, an' there's mages that dae jus' that."

She then mentally backed up and eyed the saltwater. "What ye jus' deud wi' th' water? Is that similar tae what young Void Weavers dae when th' Arbiters are no' lookin'?" she inquired.