freosan

So I guess I have DEATH on the brain, or something (promise I'm not angsting!). No wonder Hosi is screwed up.

Hosi, others, 772 words.

Warnings: ANGST and badly-translated fake languages.

On the trip out, Hosi stands in the bow and prays, head held high. Kali is silent, for once; paradoxically, these prayers are better left unanswered. For three days and nights, as the ship sways, she does not move from her post. Lirael and Sakli stand behind her, backs to her, keeping the profane from her as she readies herself.

Elsewhere on the ship, sailors talk in whispers rather than drown out the sound of her voice. Sailing is smooth, though the clouds promise a storm, and Irvine and Mahabra belowdecks can hear only the creak of the timbers, the splash of the waves, and the high, hoarse chanting in a language they can’t understand.

~

Kaa, Syaan, Maguen, Dasyoth, houka isoul, lensye isoul, thalye isoul, hyasen isoul, yaaler kath reth. Yaaler kath sunthe, houaal, leshuen, demoun syeth dalyen isoual. Yaaler kath gueryin thus isoual.

~

When the ship docks, Hosi steps out first, cloaked in three layers of wool and a heavy hood. Her clothing is white; her hands are white; her hair is white; and these are the only things that can be seen. Yohko, Lirael, and Ryoko stand near her, ready to press the spectators aside, but it is not necessary. The crowd parts before her like the sea below an oar.

~

Source, Peace, Circle, Absolute, one most pure, one most true, one most holy, one most high, save us. Save those whose souls are free of sky, sea, flame, and stone. Save those whose voices cannot be heard.

~

The first day is earth, and she digs a shallow hole in the ground and allows herself to be covered completely in soil. Unable to see or hear, with earth in her mouth, she prays to Kali and to Mearlek. She does not move at all until sunset, when she sits up

The second day is fire, and she lights thirty-six white candles in a close circle around her. Surrounded by steady flames, she prays to Kali and to Laeson. When a strand of her hair catches fire, she makes no move to put it out, and the flame goes on burning until the last candle finally burns out at sunset.

The third day is water, and she dives from the docks into the sea. Floating in the water, she prays to Kali and to Koreul. When she is retrieved, she refuses help, and resumes her prayers soaking wet and shivering.

The fourth day is wind, and she strips naked standing on the roof of the bell tower. With nothing to protect her or keep her from falling, she prays to Kali and to Devern. She steps back down only at sunset, accepting the white robes of death without a word.

~

The acolytes of Kali perform a death rite peculiar in its sympathetic nature. …
Of note is the manner in which the priestess to perform the rite prepares herself. For days before the rite, the priestess will neither eat nor sleep. … During the period of fasting, the priestess symbolically prepares herself for death, purifying herself with earth, fire, water, and wind.

- from Followers of the Four White Ladies, Feyuli, Lunesi 16.

~

The land where the Academy once stood is barren, grey ash on glass-black stone. Above, the sky is pre-dawn grey, stretching into infinity. Hosi stands at the edge of the former grounds and cannot breathe, her voice catching in her throat.

Though hundreds, maybe thousands, stand in a circle around the land, when she walks out she walks alone. It is only her, the sky, and the ashes of what used to be her home.

~

Sakel kath mafol idensal. Sakel kath densal mensyel lyenrek ikath taun. Geluer reth ril fuaner syer kath guern, len, lyenrek: yaaler kath reth.

~

This was the library; this, the lecture hall. After eight years living on this land, Hosi needs no walls or doors to tell her where she is. She tries not to step where she knows someone has died, but there were so many dead. In her mind – she can’t speak – she asks their ghosts forgiveness.

Standing in the spiritual centre of the inner sanctuary, she turns to the South; to the North; to the West; to the East. She bows four times and four times more. As the sun rises, she begins the final prayers, her voice small and scared and carried away by the wind.

~

Lead your daughters who have lost their way. Lead your daughters to join your soul.
By the voices and the minds and the souls you have given us, we call upon you: save us.

This was going to be a drabble. It... grew up. They're in the House, to stop you wondering. I have no idea when this happens. For the benefit of those who weren't there when I invented this, there's a large room in the House with maps of (and gates to) every world in it; that's the teleportation room.

Why yes, Hosi is hanging around a lot lately, why do you ask?

Hosi, Leoran, and Kaos, G, 2 452 words.

The woman is… unnerving, Hosi thinks. It’s a good word, not least because the alternative is ‘fucking scary’.

She doesn’t talk. That’s the biggest problem. Hosi is half-certain she is a creature, with the wings and the wide-eyed staring and the silence. The two things holding her back are that the other one with wings, the man, acts perfectly normal if a bit uppity, and the fact that she refuses to allow that a creature could make her feel so frustrated.

It’s not just that, though. She’s small all over, with no chest to speak of and no hips and a very narrow waist. She has the bright green eyes of a Life Mage or a witch. She has the air of command, the stance and the stare that Hosi had to work so hard for. Even in a ratty shirt and trousers, with scars on her face and her breasts bound flat, she has a kind of graceful confidence that sets Hosi’s nerves on edge.

Standing next to her, looking down at the top of her graceful, confident head, Hosi feels eight feet tall, three hundred pounds and gawky as a lamb that’s just getting its legs.

Hosi is seethingly jealous.

The woman introduces herself as what sounds like “Kayohs”. Hosi looks it up in an Iguerisan-English dictionary and eventually finds it under ‘Ch’. When she reads the definition, she barks a laugh. No one that controlled should be labeled ‘great disorder’.

She meets up with Chaos’s man the next day in the library, when they’re both going for the same book. She defers to him, because it’s one of those chivalry things, and he defers to her because apparently chivalry works backwards on their planet. When she makes a sarcastic remark about his brain overheating he counters with one about being seen and not heard.

They spend the rest of the day debating magical theory and the little annoyances of being stuck in place with unnatural leylines, or as he calls them, warped threads. It turns out Kaos – spelled with a ‘K’, he says, from the Greek, which sparks another hour-long discussion when she fails to catch the reference – can see leylines. At all times. Including with her eyes closed. Hosi finds herself not quite so jealous.

Kali makes some comment about power and responsibility, and Hosi doesn’t catch herself in time to avoid responding out loud. The man looks at her oddly until she feels compelled to explain, her hand-waving ‘my goddess’ coming out at the same time as his confused ‘who were you -’

He grins when he hears the explanation and then goes off about his phoenix, which makes her stare in disbelief. Phoenixes, after all, are creatures of the sky, which can’t be tamed and which play merry hell with Saljerian airships. His phoenixes are different, and they spend some time comparing notes.

They don’t stop talking until they realize that the painted sky on the ceiling is changing, the black and blue of night replaced with a yellow dawn. He goes back to Kaos’s rooms, waving, and she remembers that she never asked his name.

Two days later they meet up again, this time in the kitchens. Kaos can’t cook, he explains, so he does it for them. She explains that she knows how that is, and digs out spices and meat from the cupboards. He’s interested – has never seen the herbs before – and she ends up teaching him how to make farm pudding.

He takes it back with him, and this time she gets his name. Leoran. Sounds Western.

It’s another week before they run into each other in the library and Hosi is completely sick of dealing with the people here. She tells him that his gender is full of idiots who think with their reproductive organs and he tells her that her country is full of cowards who never step outside a library. She cites six years of farm work and he counters with the fact of his ability to understand the large volume that he’s holding. She takes one look at the title and informs him that there’s no way he could understand it without the library’s translation spell. He says the language, yes, but she should take a good look at the concepts.

This distracts both of them, since it’s an Ancient Lfenmar treatise on the role of the menstrual cycle in magical ability, a subject both of them turn out to have strong opinions on. His, of course, are wrong.

She’d been reading an obscure manuscript in Imperial Aramaic involving the influences of the stars on those born under rising Leo. It all sounds ridiculous to her, but when she mentions that, she finds out why he’s got wings.

Out of idle curiosity she looks up a more current work with love horoscopes. He is not pleased when she points out that Capricorn/Gemini pairs are very rarely stable. She is not pleased when he informs her that since she doesn’t have a sign she will clearly never be in a relationship.

They veer off into a bullshitting session about destiny, which Leoran thinks is there as more of a guideline, and Hosi thinks doesn’t exist, in the face of all contradictory evidence. She asks what his girlfriend’s opinions on it are and he gets very quiet.

He tells her that Kaos has only followed destiny, her entire life. When he first made a move on her, she was confused, because her library – the one full of prophecies – had told her that Leoran was destined to be with someone else.

Hosi finds this creepy and tells him so. He agrees, and says that it was probably worse for Kaos. They both take the anecdote to support their own positions.

Hosi starts reading up on magical barriers.

Over the next week, she calls in favors from several of her more artistically inclined acquaintances. By the time she meets up with Leoran again, she has a working model of a leyline-avoiding blindfold. It’s green silk with black runes, and Leoran looks completely stunned when he takes it from her.

He can’t quite manage to get out his thanks, but she knows from his reaction that it’s there anyway. He puts it away in a pocket of the robe he’s wearing and makes a weakly cutting remark, and Hosi allows herself to be distracted, though she can’t resist taking the chance to hit him while he’s down.

The next day he finds her while she’s plotting leyline diagrams, full of effusive, thrilled thanks. Kaos slept well last night, he says. She couldn’t see a damn thing, the blindfold was so effective – no twisting energies, exploding stars, infinite distance to distract her.

Hosi tells him she knew it would work, she made it didn’t she, and hits him in the head with a scroll to get him to focus. They spend the day in a language lesson, as she teaches him the grammar of Iguerisan and he shows her how to conjugate regular verbs in English.

The day after that, Kaos shows up again, elegantly striding past the bookcases as if they were no more than brick walls. Hosi feels the hair on the back of her neck stand up but tries to be civil, since the woman is thanking her.

It’s surreal. Hosi’s never been knelt to before.

She ends up snapping something unkind, which she immediately feels guilty for, but Kaos just stands up, looks at her inscrutably, and walks out. This is when Hosi realizes she didn’t say ‘you’re welcome’. This, she suspects, is because Kaos isn’t.

Leoran somehow manages to seek her out every day the next week, and their verbal sparring reaches heights previously unknown. They also make a fair amount of progress charting the strange leylines that twist through the teleportation room. They want to find out if any of them connect at any point.

It would be easier if they brought Kaos in to work on it, but Leoran does not mention it and Hosi does not ask.

She doesn’t see him for two days and on the third, she makes Mahabra cry. Irvine says something derogatory about her parentage and Lirael glares at her, and she storms off to be a dog-sired cow in peace.

She happens to pick the wrong room for that. She’s opened the first door she saw without a nametag, and it’s turned out to be a gymnasium, padded floor and mirrors on three walls.

There is only one person in it and that person happens to have wings and a long black braid, though her other features are obscured by speed. Hosi is fascinated by the way she moves.

After a few moments the motion stops and Kaos is facing her with the same careless grace that Hosi cannot stand. The winged woman cocks her head and waits. Hosi says nothing.

Two minutes later: “He’s mine.”

It takes her a minute to figure out that she’s talking about Leoran. Hosi doesn’t want him and starts to say so, but immediately has to reconsider. Does she? He’s the only man she’s ever met that can think at her level. Kaos narrows her eyes at Hosi’s hesitation.

A moment later Hosi finds herself flat on her back, looking up at the woman from a much-less-flattering angle. It’s not helping her self-image any that it takes her a few minutes to get her breath back while Kaos stands above her with perfect confidence.

“Don’t try.”

She stands up, sputters something incoherent about him being too young for her, then finds her missing brain cells and tries to pull together an argument. She’s a Life Mage, damnit. She has a goddess to hold on to. She doubts Leoran’s enough of a purely intellectual being to stay for very long with someone who won’t put out.

Kaos just stares at her, waiting for the point. Hosi doesn’t have much of one. When Kaos gets in her personal space again, Hosi hits her in the stomach.

It’s like hitting rock, but luckily Hosi’s trained for that. Kaos stumbles back, just a step. Hosi puts a bit more space between them.

“You’ll regret that.”

Yeah, sure, Hosi says. But Kaos will regret it more, she hopes. Kaos is still staring at her. She is, Hosi realizes, still waiting. She doesn’t know why Kaos is bothering. It’s not like anyone would leave Kaos for her.

“That’s true.” Hosi realizes that she has spoken out loud.

Then she parses the words. Of all the arrogant – and the woman is just standing there, face still in that perfect mask of blankness, eyes wide and curious.

She challenges her, of course. She steps forward, she shouts, she even gets another punch in before she’s sent sailing halfway across the room, her skirt ripping where it catches on Kaos’s heavy boot.

She takes three deep, deliberate breaths, grabs the skirt so the tear won’t show, stands up, and leaves the room, all without looking at Kaos again.

When she catches sight of the tableu in the mirror, she nearly hits it. It’s broken her illusions. She’s not the triumphant heroine of this story, that’s for sure, and maybe she won’t be one at all.

She sleeps for twenty-one hours and when she wakes up, she goes to the library and tears her research notes to shreds. Let him solve the problem with his perfect, ley-sighted girlfriend. She no longer cares.

When she hears from Lirael that the nice Southern boy has been looking for her, she heads to the library. Where else would one find him? She waits by their fireplace.

Half an hour later he turns up with a large plastic notebook in hand. He’s saved the research notes. He’s also talked to Kaos. That’s as far as he gets before she turns her back on him, not out of spite but because she’s doing her level best not to cry at the utter uselessness of it all. Unfortunately that looks the same as spite from the back.

He tells her that he had a higher opinion of her than that and she hears the swish of feathers as he leaves. He takes the notes with him.

It cuts deeper than she cares to admit.

She doesn’t eat for the next two days but spends a lot of time sleeping, leading to Irvine’s snide remark about hibernation and a screaming fight that lasts more than an hour. When she gets to her own room, Kaos is there, waiting by the bed, looking like she owns the damn House.

She’s out of energy, out of rage, so she sits on the bed and glares into Kaos’s impossibly deep eyes. Kaos stands with her weight balanced, her legs forming an isoceles triangle bisected by her plait, and looks as if she could stand there forever.

“Just fact. Not demand.” That’s how she starts. Again, it takes Hosi some time to find the same mental space that the woman inhabits.

It damn well sounded like a demand, is what she wants to say, but instead she spits out a curse and an insult and also a demand of her own, one to get the hell out and stay there. Kaos does not move. Hosi contemplates calling Kali.

“I did not want you hurt.”

Hosi stares, then stands up again, hands on her hips, forgetting in her anger how awkward she feels around the smaller woman. Once she’s on her feet, of course, she remembers, and the embarassment only fuels the fire. Kaos stands and listens as Hosi roundly insults her lineage, her intellegence, her appearance, and her ability to act like a human being.

“Projection.”

If that weren’t the most random single word Hosi has ever heard, she might be able to come up with a suitably cutting response. Instead she just stares. Kaos looks at her, head tilted.

“Of anger, fear, insecurity. I was like you. Once.”

It sounds like a goddess passing judgement and Hosi is momentarily filled with fear. Then she tries to mount an argument based on the impossibility of deciding what anyone is feeling once one has accepted projection, but deflates in the face of that expressionless confidence.

An alternate meaning of chaos is the disordered state before the universe. Hosi wonders how old the woman is, or her memories. While she’s busy forcing her neurons to fire, Kaos turns around and walks out.

“I apologize.”

The door is shut before Hosi can dignify that with a response.

Two days later Leoran is back in the library. They dive right into research and banter and it’s almost like they never stopped. Neither of them says a word about his girlfriend.