MPP SL: The Consolation of Philosophy, PG (#81)
Sept 7, 2016 23:03:56 GMT 10
Seek and mistrali like this
Post by max on Sept 7, 2016 23:03:56 GMT 10
Title: The Consolation of Philosophy
Rating: PG
Prompt: #81 (Choose a Side)
Summary: A Rosethorn Battle Magic AU.
Warnings/notes: I apologise for the screwy tenses and how inexplicable and cryptic this fic probably is. It’s kinda urgh. It’s like when you get unfit and then workout and it’s awful but you know you’ll get back into it. I haven’t written anything solid in over a year. This isn’t even very long. Omg..
Title and end quote are both Boethius. He has my apologies too, man.
I.
In the end, it is the thought of Lark that steels her. Lark, who made her believe in love. Lark, who wakes, still, with the tears cold on her skin for the children she lost in her first life. Lark, who would deplore the taking of any child into the hell traders do not name.
But their boy – still a boy, for all that he is taller now than either of them; still a boy, for all that the medallion has hung from his neck three years now. Still a boy, in spite of all the horrors he had seen of this world before ever he was theirs – Rosethorn knows, with the clarity of water, Lark would never forgive her for losing.
It is a thought to break the ebony heart.
It is the reason their children were able to bring her back from the garden at all, when Briar would have stayed.
Half a world later he faces her now, eyes paled to the tenderness of new leaves by the pain burning in them. To the back of the wagon Evvy weeps – silently, as a lifetime of slavery and survival has taught her, her hands trembling where they are buried in the soft coats of her cats, and Rosethorn feels the weight of the instant upon her, the greatest test of her faith she has yet known.
‘My vows,’ she repeats again, and does not allow her voice to falter. ‘To protect everyone who seeks the sanctuary of my temple. You will allow me to protect you or you will make an oathbreaker of me…’
It isn’t enough, of course. Not for children such as these, unable as they are to understand her decision as anything but rejection – until magic, there had only been abandonment in their lives. Her insistence they return to the faraway safety of familiar shores evidence not so much of her care for them, but of their inadequacy.
They threaten (‘I’ll just follow behind you anyway, see if I don’t!’), and they curse (‘Lakik take your bloody vows!’), and they beg and argue while grey light passes into darkness, indistinct behind the rain, and Rosethorn knows they will not go quietly, will not go at all, and she knows it is the one thing she must ensure.
-------------------------------------------
II.
Dokyi had said, ‘You made gods speed here, for your path was true,’ and then enfolded her in black fire.
The God King had said, ‘All children should be so beloved,’ and caressed her cheek to stem her tears.
The gods had borrowed the body of a child, whispering with thunder, ‘Thou art the shadow and the devotion, vowkeeper.’
And the terrified ignorance that had plagued her for weeks – war was coming, she could not imagine the shape of it, could not divine what it might take from her – had given way to sudden, awful joy.
Thine the road enlightened, the thunder said.
The sealed eye, said Dokyi.
The Drimbakang Lho, where even the sun may hide, said the boy who was vessel and king, and in the globe of black fire, she had taken possession of the box of peachwood.
Inside the box of peachwood, the world.
-------------------------------------------
III.
In a far, green country, a girl called Nivalin Greenhow sleeps enchained upon a bed of wildflowers.
Aboard a trader ship, no larger than a seed on the belly of the Storm Dragon Ocean, a young man with eyes green-grey as olive leaves awakens from enchantment as the last of a potion that has held him two months in thrall finally wanes. Heartsick, amidst the distilled trees, and hens who are cats, and sailors of his sister’s people unsettled by the bewitched children whose hidden passage has been bought twice-over with diamonds. Beyond any chance of defection – his fingers carding desperate through the night-black hair of the girl, safe asleep in his lap – not yet awake to the revelation that, in that safety, they have been forsaken.
Deep in the mountains where the soul of the world flows through her, a river of wind, in the west, the shadows tug at the shadow of her body and Rosethorn looks through the eye that has been unsealed, and beholds the way before forsworn by her four children.
She thinks of Lark.
She closes her eyes...
-------------------------------------------
Love is unto itself a higher law.
Rating: PG
Prompt: #81 (Choose a Side)
Summary: A Rosethorn Battle Magic AU.
Warnings/notes: I apologise for the screwy tenses and how inexplicable and cryptic this fic probably is. It’s kinda urgh. It’s like when you get unfit and then workout and it’s awful but you know you’ll get back into it. I haven’t written anything solid in over a year. This isn’t even very long. Omg..
Title and end quote are both Boethius. He has my apologies too, man.
I.
In the end, it is the thought of Lark that steels her. Lark, who made her believe in love. Lark, who wakes, still, with the tears cold on her skin for the children she lost in her first life. Lark, who would deplore the taking of any child into the hell traders do not name.
But their boy – still a boy, for all that he is taller now than either of them; still a boy, for all that the medallion has hung from his neck three years now. Still a boy, in spite of all the horrors he had seen of this world before ever he was theirs – Rosethorn knows, with the clarity of water, Lark would never forgive her for losing.
It is a thought to break the ebony heart.
It is the reason their children were able to bring her back from the garden at all, when Briar would have stayed.
Half a world later he faces her now, eyes paled to the tenderness of new leaves by the pain burning in them. To the back of the wagon Evvy weeps – silently, as a lifetime of slavery and survival has taught her, her hands trembling where they are buried in the soft coats of her cats, and Rosethorn feels the weight of the instant upon her, the greatest test of her faith she has yet known.
‘My vows,’ she repeats again, and does not allow her voice to falter. ‘To protect everyone who seeks the sanctuary of my temple. You will allow me to protect you or you will make an oathbreaker of me…’
It isn’t enough, of course. Not for children such as these, unable as they are to understand her decision as anything but rejection – until magic, there had only been abandonment in their lives. Her insistence they return to the faraway safety of familiar shores evidence not so much of her care for them, but of their inadequacy.
They threaten (‘I’ll just follow behind you anyway, see if I don’t!’), and they curse (‘Lakik take your bloody vows!’), and they beg and argue while grey light passes into darkness, indistinct behind the rain, and Rosethorn knows they will not go quietly, will not go at all, and she knows it is the one thing she must ensure.
-------------------------------------------
II.
Dokyi had said, ‘You made gods speed here, for your path was true,’ and then enfolded her in black fire.
The God King had said, ‘All children should be so beloved,’ and caressed her cheek to stem her tears.
The gods had borrowed the body of a child, whispering with thunder, ‘Thou art the shadow and the devotion, vowkeeper.’
And the terrified ignorance that had plagued her for weeks – war was coming, she could not imagine the shape of it, could not divine what it might take from her – had given way to sudden, awful joy.
Thine the road enlightened, the thunder said.
The sealed eye, said Dokyi.
The Drimbakang Lho, where even the sun may hide, said the boy who was vessel and king, and in the globe of black fire, she had taken possession of the box of peachwood.
Inside the box of peachwood, the world.
-------------------------------------------
III.
In a far, green country, a girl called Nivalin Greenhow sleeps enchained upon a bed of wildflowers.
Aboard a trader ship, no larger than a seed on the belly of the Storm Dragon Ocean, a young man with eyes green-grey as olive leaves awakens from enchantment as the last of a potion that has held him two months in thrall finally wanes. Heartsick, amidst the distilled trees, and hens who are cats, and sailors of his sister’s people unsettled by the bewitched children whose hidden passage has been bought twice-over with diamonds. Beyond any chance of defection – his fingers carding desperate through the night-black hair of the girl, safe asleep in his lap – not yet awake to the revelation that, in that safety, they have been forsaken.
Deep in the mountains where the soul of the world flows through her, a river of wind, in the west, the shadows tug at the shadow of her body and Rosethorn looks through the eye that has been unsealed, and beholds the way before forsworn by her four children.
She thinks of Lark.
She closes her eyes...
-------------------------------------------
Love is unto itself a higher law.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!