Intro to Saidar (Attn: Jesabel and any others)

[Quibby]

OOC: Any of the other female-type Dreadies who need to get started, go ahead and PM me, then write yourself into the thread.  Thank you.  Have a nice day/evening/night/whatever.

 

IC: Liadin had never really liked having to deal with the new students.  It required patience, an ability to troubleshoot any issues the student was having, and a general willingness to be helpful.  She had some issues with the last.  Ergo, upon being asked to take up this new student, a girl who'd only named herself as Jesabel, Liadin had originally intended to decline the offer, and made herself clear on her reluctance.  Her superior then informed her that it was non-negotiable.  She'd accepted the task with a smile on her face and a plot for revenge in her heart.  However, that was neither here nor there.

 

Everything about Liadin seemed to sing of rank, from her garb to the way she stood to the way she looked at people.  Right now, that look was trained upon a notably shapely woman, her black hair glistening as she stepped out of the shadow cast by the Fortress and into the sunlight.  So this was what she was meant to work with.  Typical.  The child looked like she'd be better suited to business in a place of ill repute; it would not have surprised Liadin if that was the case.

 

Catching the girl's eye, she waved her over to the shade under the tree upon which she was leaning, waiting for her to finish whatever examinations she was making before saying, "Welcome to the Fortress, Jesabel.  My name is Liadin, and I'll be handling your training for awhile.  Before we get down to business, I want make something perfectly clear to you."  Liadin met the child's eyes, blue eyes trying desperately to bore into the mind behind the child's brown eyes.  "Whatever life you led before now, whatever station you had in the world, whatever you were before stepping into this Fortress means absolutely nothing now.  Today, you start over, and if you survive- and I really do mean 'if'- you will be a Dreadlady, sworn to serve the Great Lord."

 

Liadin gave the girl a moment to let her words sink in.  Some did not like the idea, and they often ended up irritating the older Acolytes, or even the Adepts.  They often didn't last a week.  When the girl looked as if she understood, Liadin bid her to sit down upon the grass.  "Since we already know that you can channel, we can skip that part of the training and move right onto the actual work."  Joining her on the grass, sitting cross-legged across from her, Liadin said, "I want you to close your eyes.  Now, leaving your eyes closed, I want you to picture a rosebud in your mind.  Nothing else, just the rosebud.  Imagine every detail, everything about it, picture it as if you were looking at it right here, right now."  Liadin gave the girl a little bit to allow the image to fully coalesce in her mind.  "Good, now I want you to imagine sunlight shining upon the rose, warming it, giving life, inviting it to open up.  As this happens, allow the rosebud to open at its own pace.  Do not try to rush it, just let it happen.  Don't worry if you do not succeed the first time, the second time, the fifth time, or even the tenth time.  This will become easier with time."

[Guest Estel]

The Fortress was disappointing.  Somehow Jes had pictured it as beautiful as the White Tower- except all in black which made it so much better... or would have, were the Fortress half as impresssive as the little she had seen of Tar Valon on her way through.  All the same though, this seemed to suit her far more than Tar Valon with its gleaming white tower had.  After all, black was her colour.

 

Nestled in the Blight, one could hardly expect the Fortress' gardens to be spectacular but Jes was impressed by the lack of rot in the bit of surrounding plantlife.  It seemed even the Dark Lord in all his destructive power kept servants who had not shed all afiliation with things good and beautiful.  Good thing He had her then.  The gardens were otherwise lost on her as she focused on the thing striding towards her bring with it a cloud of menace.  The thing must have been her teacher and waved its hand amiably over for her to sit in the shade of one of the most-definitely-not-rotting-trees.  Like beauty, amiability was lost on the murderess whose only response was to smirk.

 

That smirk was stuck on her face throughout the speech biven by her teacher, who named herself Liadin.  Jes was particularly amused by the veiled threat her teacher thought would frighten her.  If anything, the Black Widow had proven herself a survivor and held no compunctions against using whatever means available to ensure that she was not the one who died.  Silently, she swore to laugh while she proved it to this Liadin.

 

A rosebud?  The woman wanted ehr to imagine a rosebud?  What kind of washed down childrens play was this?  Jes was here to learn how to use this Power- mainly for the purposes of torture and death.  Anything that would get ther to the top and earn her an eternity to avoid everything she had done.  She had waded too far into this river of blood to wade back out again and must continue on to whatever the other shore should hold.

 

However, as the woman didn't appear to be giving ehr any alternatives, Jes closed her eyes obediently and attempted to imagine a rosebud.  Rosebud.  She was the rosebud.  Nothing but the rosebud.  Nothing but her stamping on the bloody rosebud.... Rosebud.  She was the rosebud.  Every petal, every leaf, every thorn.  She was stabbing stupid Liadin with those thorns...  Rosebud.  Nothing but the rosebud.  She was the rosebud.  The rosebud opening itself to the sun.  The sun burning the stupid bloody rosebud to a crisp.  Stupid bloody rosebud.

 

"Is something supposed to be happening?"

 

ooc:  did I mention Jes has a block?  she can't channel unless she's panicking and well...that's not easy.  so, be as cruel and twisted as your able mind is able to be.

[Quibby]

Well.  This was certainly unusual.  Liadin had been responsible for training a few students in her day, but this was a first.  Not even able to sense the Source, this girl must not have been concentrating very hard on the task at hand.  Or she has a block, Liadin thought, her eyes immediately returning to the girl seated across from her.  Wonderful, she thought sarcastically.  "So you don't sense anything at all, child?"  Liadin waited for her negative before continuing.  "It seems, then, that you've built a kind of barrier between yourself and saidar; we call it a 'block.'  It means that you are generally unable to draw upon saidar unless the situation in the world allows you to bypass that block."

 

Sounding calm and collected, Liadin's mind was working in overdrive.  She did not know too much about blocks, and the only person she could think of in the Fortress who could help her was Thom Malard, the librarian.  She'd have to bring him along to the next lesson for his input, but for now she'd try to bypass the block the only way she could think of: by fulfilling what was needed to make it so.  "Tell me, how did you feel when you channeled?  What caused you to lash out with that power that you never knew you had in you?"

[Guest Estel]

Jes bit back a very scathing remark; something along the lines of "sensing the stupidity" but even crazed murderesses are in need of some prudence should they wish to survive.  So she kept her big mouth shut while her overactive inner commentary prattled on.  Said inner commentary wasn't exactly usefull or productive, generally being counter-productive by nature, but it did lend an excellent form of amusement to the Black Widow's otherwise dull situation.  All this talk of blocks and roses- damn the woman, she wasn't here to learn philosophy, Jes had had her fill of philosophy and dogma back in the Fortress of the Light, she was here to learn how to channel the bloody One Power so she could control the bloody world and live forever!

 

"How did I feel?"  Her snort made Liadin glare.  "Let's see, first time it happened my father was beating the tar out of my husband-to-be and I though he was going to kill him.  The next time, one of the Children was torturing me.  Oh, and the last time, I was trying to kill a Dreadlord with a knife, but when that didn't work I hit him with the Source to keep him from killing me.  How would you feel in those circumstances?"  Sarcasm dripped from Jes' too-sweet smile.

[Quibby]

Nodding to herself, Liadin bore the hateful girl's sarcasm until she had what she wanted.  Then, without further ado, she embraced saidar, weaving Air around the girl, then hurled her against the tree, making sure to avoid hitting her head against anything.  "Be careful how you speak to me, girl," she said coldly as the girl tried to stand, obviously winded.  "I don't have the patience to deal with your arrogance."  More flows of Air began raining down on the child like lashes from a whip.  "You came here to learn, and in order to learn, you must be able to listen and obey.  We don't coddle our students here like they do in the White Tower.  With a block on you, you're likely to die because you're unable to defend yourself from your classmates."  The beatings stopped, and the flows of Air formed again, this time encircling the girl's throat as they heaved her from the ground.

 

Watching the child struggle for air brought some amusement to Liadin.  "Mistake me not, girl.  I have no qualms about killing you.  If you want to live, you'd better do something about it.  You're not going to last all day."

[Guest Estel]

One moment Jes was sneering condenscension, the next her ego lay as shrivelled as she tried to make herself.  Blows rained down on her body and no matter how she tried to move away, they found her.  Stopping herself from screaming, the Altaran fought for enough self-control to grab one of the knives from her sleeve.  However, the constant struggle to avoid unseen blows threw off her aim and the knife went well wide.  'Damnit Jes!  You're better than that!  You've taken worse than this!  Get a grip on yourself!'

 

As she reached for the next knife, a momentary respite made her hesitate.  Was it over?  Stretching bruised and stiff muscles, the Black Widow played with the blade of the mini-seax.  Would the Dreadlady notice before the knife could find its mark?  Or would her attempted murder end with the wrong side dead?  Jes preferred to know her victims would die, rather than guess.  Guessing tended to be risky and risky tended to cut short the lifespans of murderesses.  Besides, this woman was supposed to teach her saidar.  It'd be much easier to kill her once Jes could command the One Power.

 

Of course, those sane- perhaps sane isn't a good word, logical might come close if pathological killers were capable of logical... reasoning?  Much better.  All reasoning fled as the One Power began to crush her windpipe.  Instinctively, her hands darted up to fend off the invisble hand, dropping her knife in the process.  With nothing to grab hold of, she ended up simply flailing her arms desperately at her attackers, the pair of knives attached to her shoulderblades forgotten.

 

As her thrashing about came weaker, her panic grew.  Finally, there was a point when Jes was sure she was going to die.  With her eyes closed against the blurry image of what she was sure would be her last glimpses of life on this earth, Jes didn't have the satisfaction of watching her mentor thrown backwards.

[Quibby]

The small satisfaction of feeling saidar rush into the girl was slightly marred by the sudden lashing-out of the Power, a weave that wasn't so much a weave as it was a mass of the Source flung in a general direction.  There was no way for Liadin to avoid it.  The blow struck her like a hammer, sending her hurling like a rag doll through the air and to the ground in an unceremonious heap.  If the girl had been conscious, Liadin would have given her a sound thrashing for this outrage.  Fortunately for the girl, she was all but dead to the world, a faint bruise beginning to form around her neck where Liadin's flows of Air had been cinched tight.  It should serve as a reminder to the child to think before giving free reign to her tongue. 

 

There were no guards in the Fortress; in a sprawling structure full of channelers with no qualm against killing a person in the most painful way they could imagine, there was no real need for them.  They did have servants, though.  Striding into the Fortress, Liadin waved two of them to her, pointing towards the prone body outside.  "Bring her back to her room.  Leave a note for her to return to the same place tomorrow.  Make sure that it is stated that if she fails to arrive, or if she fails to perform as required, she will be left in the middle of the Blight to fend for herself."  There was no room for softness or kindness in the Fortress.

 

A fact that made Liadin's next stop all the more ironic.

 

Of every Dreadlord in the Fortress, Thom Malard, the librarian, was only one who was ready and willing to greet everybody with a smile and a kind word.  It made the bastard all the more unnerving to Liadin.  A man like that was one to step lightly around.  It did not help that his easy-going manner and cheery mood made him nearly impossible to dislike.  Finding Thom was not hard, and after a short conversation, Liadin had yet another weapon in the battle against a foe that could not be defeated by the Power.

 

OOC: Just post your arrival in the yard.  We'll make this up as we go.

[Guest Estel]

One might have describes Jes’ return to consciousness with the cliché “waking up on the wrong side of the bed.”  However, it was less an act of waking up and more an act of being rudely awoken by an icy bucket of water—and grumpy didn’t even begin to describe her fury.  Had the servant, whose misfortune it was to have been ordered to wake her up, been a few mere inches closer, failing limbs would have snapped his nose.  Luckily, he escaped the room with a barrage of curses instead.  As the door slammed behind his hasty retreat, Jes’ knife slammed into the door with a solid thunk.

 

Waiting on the bedside table was a scrap of paper summoning her to return to the garden for another lesson tomorrow.  Noting the setting sun, the Black Widow growled another stream of swearwords in no particular, coherent order and went off to explore the Fortress.

 

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"Good morning.”  The male voice received only a grunt.  “Do you want breakfast?"

 

Jes stretched and groaned again before blearily rolling out of bed to avoid a kiss.

 

“No, I have to go, ..."

 

He sighed.  “Derryk.”

 

“Right.”  Without further ado she pulled on the clothes scattered around the bedroom floor.  He tried to make small talk, to which she grunted, if she deigned to respond at all.  ‘Great Lord, I hate mornings.  Dumb bastard, can’t he take a hint?  THIS is why I kill the other guys before I wake up the next morning.’

 

“We should do this again.”

 

Jes’ “No, we shouldn’t.” was punctuated by her closing the door on his protests.

 

Back in her own room, she rubbed gently at the bruise across her neck.  Snarling at the washbasin and brainstorming how best to torture Liawhatsherface to death, Jes pulled on a pair of black breeches, threw on a black blouse and flounced back down to the garden.

 

Liawhatsherface didn’t seem particularly happy that her pupil was showing up a few minutes late to class.  Jes sneered as she made her way over, completely unconcerned with the consequences of her arrogance.