Hiding in Plain Sight

[Zixin Kao]

As soon as Arikan left, Valtin exhaled. “Well that went better than I thought it would.” His smile was pleased, pondering their good fortune for the future.

They were left to moonlight, which was quite useless to actually see anything. So he spun up a flicker of flame with the One Power. It wasn’t as swift nor as elegant a source as the doused one, but it did the job.

He rounded and gave Miraseia a quick once-over, but upon finding her in her usual state, albeit a hair more frazzled than usual, he nodded in satisfaction.

Then he promptly began to rifle through topmost sheets of present papers, searching for the requested images. “Any suggestion on where to start?” He scratched at his face upon issuing the question, and wondered if they had any lanterns by which to properly illuminate the space. “Maybe we should wait for daybreak,” he mused to himself. The sun would assist the process, but Valtin was too excited for sleep.

[Thalia]

Miraseia

Her eyes were wide as twin moons, but she was unable to look away from the terrifying pits in his. Mira could barely swallow for how dry her throat had parched itself. She was very afraid, and utterly rooted to the spot. But it was the incandescent lure of a moth to flame, too, beckoning secrets and pain.

The moment folded in on itself, and time continued ignorant of the threat which passed. Or at least passed for now. Arikan tightened the reins of his self-control like an ordinary man would adjust the collar on his shirt. She did nothing at the instruction but blink a little in surprise, as though suddenly recalling where she was. But she accepted the instruction too. After a glance shared up at Valtin, it was him who asked the obvious question.

The plunge of darkness at Arikan’s departure did not disturb her. She wondered if Valtin might be angry with her for riling his master, not that it had been her intention, but the moment he released his breath she knew that he was not. In fact she could hear the grin in his voice, and it leveraged out her concern with something lighter. She didn’t pause to imagine what worse would have looked like.

“I’m surprised one of you didn’t shake me by the ankles to see if anything else fell out of my head,” she said as he gave her a glaring once-over. But she laughed as she said it, in apparent forgiveness of the ambush they had made at the tower door. She did not like that in the end Arikan had been so ungrateful for the loyalty laid at his feet, but if Valtin was content then she was too -- and where he set their path, Mira would follow if he let her. After so many years left waiting, she had never even considered what life outside the fort even looked like.

Now that Arikan was returned it was unlikely he had a cosy reunion in mind, but such was the way with the Dark Lord’s favourites. She ought to have been trembling at the implication of being caught in the crossfire, but for all Mira’s frailties, it was not the kind of thing she feared. “I don’t know what any of the Chosen look like,” she said with a shrug. Tendrils of saidar reinforced the light he made above their heads. She didn’t know if Valtin would recognise any of them either – he had been far higher up the chain than she had ever been – but if not she supposed they ought to just look for faces that neither of them recognised from the fort. Truthfully it seemed pointless and boring work though. The important things always repeated themselves again and again, albeit those answers were locked tight in her head. Preaching patience was probably a mistake when Val was a ball of energy, but there had to be a better way than this.

Mira didn't argue though. She joined the search mostly because she did not think Valtin would be dissuaded otherwise, despite his suggestion they wait for the sun to rise. It was a sensible notion, really, but her biggest motivation was that she didn’t want to be alone, and she didn't want to fall asleep. There was a fair bit of dust. Some of these piles had not been disturbed in years. He was perhaps the only one she'd never minded rifling right through her brain like this, for even with Rosene she had been circumspect about revealing the full extent of depravity that apparently existed inside her.

With the distraction, purpose, and company, she was companionable and chatty. She sang to herself, and tried to cajole him into telling her stories when she spent more time yawning than holding a tune. The bloody ones always lit him up, and he was bursting with impatient and excited energy. She felt frazzled herself, though for different reasons. She hadn’t slept in two days.

[Zixin Kao]

Val paused what he was doing. The idea of upending Mira and shaking out her loose change amused him greatly. “I still can. Then afterward, string you up by your ankles and paddle your bottom.” The coy smirk that tugged his lips suggested he was completely serious and had done as much before.

Eventually, he tossed up his hands in frustration. Not only was he tired, now hungry, but he had no idea what he was looking for either. He basically lay aside any sketch that included some sort of person because he didn’t know what they were looking for either. “I don’t know what they look like, either. I once saw Beldragos, but he was too far away to recognize a face.”

“Come on. Let’s go to bed,” he interrupted Mira’s own’s sorting, grasped her hand in his, and all but tugged her out of there.

[Thalia]

Miraseia

She only laughed at the comment, a little river of a giggle as she continued to make some passable attempt at sorting through the old sketches that mostly only achieved a swarm of dust and very little actual progress. Her eyes were burning tired, hysteria a bubbling companion alongside her resolve to stay awake. At some point defeat would coddle her senses, and she’d go under, but she’d planned to be alone when it happened. Or, more importantly, alone when she woke.

When he grabbed her hand, Mira's immediate impulse was to shy back. Not to wriggle free, but to halt his progress like a boulder tied on a drowning man. Valtin was always a force you swam with, not against, but usually he avoided her when the insomnia was gnawing her eyeballs into oblivion. Unless she sought him out first anyway. But she had scars from the forge, when her addled waking mind reached for whatever madness told her was the easiest thing to draw with. It was astounding she had any skin left on her fingers actually. Not that Valtin had ever let any true harm befall her in that state, but she hated it being seen.

Mira's pulse surged shallow and fast in her head at that prospect. She stumbled a few steps after him before acceptance won the moment of fear, and her fingers fell willing into the grooves of his. Probably he only intended to haul her into movement, but she had no intention of letting go. Her stride quickened to keep pace with the tornado of his pace. After a decade of stagnation, the world was rushing again, and maybe it would all go by too quickly -- she knew too much of where it ended for Valtin. “Better move all the sharp things,” she said, yawning, and scratching a tease into the crook of his elbow with a fingernail. “In case you wake up as a canvas.”