Solo The Sight of Suffering

[Alses]

Timestamp: 16th Day of Summer, 513 A.V.
Location: The Catholicon, Tenten Peak

Alses was excited. Her novices were coming along well, under her supervision – indeed, they couldn’t really be called novices anymore, no longer having difficulty with the simplest of auristic tasks. There would be examinations soon enough, in front of a panel of the other instructors, but for now she saw no reason not to move them on from the simpler matters which they’d all grasped and onto the more complex applications of auristics, the sorts of things that might conceivably have an impact, an effect in everyday life that would be useful.

It was, therefore, time to demonstrate some of the more practical applications of the discipline. Commercial negotiation was still, perhaps, a little out of their league, the continual flickering dance of one-upmanship, deception, lies and half-truths in a whirling charivari as merchants tried to get the best deals out of one another being highly confusing to those unused to the deeper mysteries of magic.

That said, there was always a use for auristics at the Catholicon, helping to separate the truly ill from the merely mildly unwell, or in more precisely locating the medics’ efforts. Even besides that worthy cause, it would be a good experience for her charges, to see and hear and taste and feel some of the less-pleasant emotions and states that they would, undoubtedly, be exposed to at some time or other in their lives.

Lhavit wasn’t entirely safe, secure and serene atop her peaks, after all – much though the Shinya worked for it to be so and however heartily the citizenry wished it. And, as Alses knew only too well, danger could come from within as well as without.

Bearing that in mind letters had been written, permissions negotiated for and given, students informed – and now all that remained was to actually navigate through the shining streets of the city and take charge of her group at the Catholicon. That was a slightly more difficult proposal than it seemed at first, since the cloud layer on which Lhavit generally appeared to rest had risen in the night and now shrouded the normally-sparkling city in dense, damp fog.

Even that dreary weather feature, which in other cities made them uncomfortably damp and gloomy and all-around depressing, Lhavit managed to turn into a thing of beauty and delight: each and every sparkling skyglass building was mantled in shimmering mist, a cloak of glowing rainbows that bent and refracted the emanating light until brilliant coronae arced and danced between spires and domes, brightening the gloom even as it destroyed silhouette and substance, making it hard to navigate.

Even Alses, longtime resident of the starry city, found herself getting disoriented once or twice, turning and turning at a mist-wreathed crossroads in momentary confusion, heavy outer overrobe glittering with beaded moisture like tiny prisms and exhaling clouds of dragonsbreath.

It twisted and curled away from her parted lips in prismatic whorls, curling and kinking in the stillness of the morning air, borne by the force of her exhalations against gravity to rise and curl amorously about her crown-of-horns and to be lost in the greater banks of fog all around.

Occasionally, other citizens or Shinya guards, each and every one of them wrapped to the nose in the foul-weather robes so signature of Kalea’s mountains, would loom out of the fog as she made slow, painstaking progress towards the Catholicon’s white domes and spires, swelling into substantial shadows, bursting into colour as they emerged from one lazily-drifting bank only to be swallowed up by the diffuse nimbus light of another. Greetings were muffled and quick if they occurred at all; this wasn’t the sort of weather for pleasantry.

Alses could feel the damp chill worming its way with insidious little fingers inside the strata of her clothing, temporarily baffled by each new, warm, dry layer but always, always gathering its forces for a relentless assault that slowly saturated and chilled, sapping away the residual warmth from her bath and leaving her shivering, trying to maintain the furnace-like heat of her own body temperature against the world and its endless supplies of cold.

Not for the first time, and against her principles, she wished for some knowledge of reimancy. Just enough to let her call up a fireball, or a mantling corona of heat, to help beat back the invasive, inquisitive fog and its cold caress.

Instead, she shrugged her overrobe tighter about herself, shook her head – sending moisture flying everywhere –stamped her feet and set off resolutely into the lambent fog, soon finding herself, with some relief, on the wide, gently-sloping boulevard that led through the Zintia and up to Tenten and the Catholicon, whose white towers colonized a large spur of rock rising up from the terraced tiers, a visible beacon and signal to anyone who’d been in Lhavit for any length of time.

Come here, those shining spires whispered, and we will give you succour and aid.

Well. For a price, anyway – although Alses couldn’t imagine Rak’keli being too happy with any of Her Marked who turned someone away for want of means.

There were narrow, ancient stairs up to the Catholicon’s main doors, slick with moisture that obscured the doubtless-uplifting carvings generations of medics had had inscribed by the Constellation. There were probably pictures of people being saved by Catholicon skill, babies being delivered, happy, smiling people, that sort of thing – but under the mantle of mist wavering between fog and rain, all these were smeared out by rivulets of running water.

It was with considerable relief, therefore, that Alses attained the portico of the Catholicon proper, having passed through a water-awash tunnel that had perhaps once been the entrance corridor. She silently counted her blessings she’d taken advice and splashed out on a pair of truly excellent boots – they’d been all over the place and been subjected to all sorts of insults and, thanks to a careful regimen of polishing and buffing, they remained waterproof and protective and just as good as they’d been the day she bought them.

One of her wiser investments, certainly.

Shaking her shining head to get rid of the perfidious moisture that the mist had dumped on every available surface, Alses settled into the lee of a pillar to wait for her charges to arrive; best they all appear at once, her thinking ran, rather than annoy the doctors and medics of the Catholicon by arriving in drips and drabs.

Yes, annoying the people with powerful medicines and big, shiny needles was probably a bad idea.

[Alses]

One by one, arriving in sodden bundles of waxed fabric and with overrobes buttoned, tied and otherwise secured up to their noses, her students made their appearances. Soon, the portico was ringing with the sound of muffled chatter and the shushing susurrus of wet overrobes being shaken off, sending cascades of condensation to the tender mercies of the gently-warm skyglass floor, stippled and graded by some arcane artifice that made it grip and drain even under a continual rain of chilly droplets.

At least Lhavit didn’t have to worry too much about ice and snow clogging the streets or vital access points; the gentle heat of the skyglass usually saw to that – unless a djed storm boiled in with the occasional blizzard, at which point all bets were off and Lhavit hunkered down to weather the toxic tempest as best as it could.

Alses counted off her students as they arrived, grateful for the shelter of the portico and the strengthening, calming presence of their mentor. Shano, Tael, Robert, Erin, Alma…but no Malien, strangely.

Lips pursed, distracted by the absence, she peered out into the mantling mists, attempting to penetrate them with the power of her gaze – and just a touch of auristic power, lancing through the mists as though they didn’t exist, blasted into inconsequentiality by gentle, weaving djed.

Technique and finesse, technique and finesse, the Tower mantra – it had served her well so far; perhaps the Dusks truly did know what they were doing.

Still no Malien, though, no feel of his true-blue self crackling through the mists, just drifting mother-of-pearl shades and the delicate hues of the self-satisfied skyglass, breathing from the stonework all around.

Perhaps he was ill. A stranger to illness herself – poisoning didn’t count – she tended to err on the side of generosity whenever someone turned up to her classes looking like death warmed over, and most of her students had learned it was simply better to stay at home than deal with a nervous teacher jumping at every cough and sneeze and splutter, worried it was something far more serious than it ever turned out to be.

Alses didn’t mind it; her students had long ago learned not to lie to her when next she saw them, after all, so their absences were generally reasonable.

As the bells chimed the ninth bell of the morning, cutting through the desultory chatter of the students gathered around her, Alses rose, instantly drawing their attention – even in the mist and the diffuse, weak light, a radiant Ethaefal effortlessly drew the eye and the mind, even had she not been their teacher and a person quite capable of making their lives a living hell in a thousand little ways.

Perhaps a rather vicious way of thinking about it – Alses was quite shocked at herself, at the deep-buried undercurrent of vicious meanness that occasionally burst forth into the usually-sunny uplands of her conscious thoughts.

Depths were depths for a reason, she’d decided; there was nothing down there she cared to expose to all and sundry in the scrutinising light of day – why people made admiring comments about ‘hidden depths’ was an enduring, abiding mystery to the eternal Ethaefal, something she chalked up to the flicker-life mindset and left at that.

“Time to go in, we think,” she announced, sweeping her eyes across her class, now attentive and listening as the echoes of her instructor’s tones bounced and rolled between the pillars, off down the entryway to the Catholicon before being swallowed and muted by the all-pervading mist.

Tael looked like she was going to say something about the absence of Malien, but then thought the better of it. Alses had noted with interest, in recent seasons, the growing closeness between those two, but, after taking advice from Chiona Dusk (who’d laughed a great deal during the consultation) she’d decided on benign indulgence. No sense in upsetting the boat, or in drawing undue attention to the fact of a blooming relationship – one of many in the Tower, she’d been assured, with a merry laugh.

It was apparently something of a rite of passage to fall for another student at some point in the progression from novice to master – yet another thing that had passed Alses by.

Ah well; she’d never really been normal.

So long as the relationship between the two didn’t start to impact negatively on their collective progress, there was no need to act – and if she sent the two of them off with the same assignment every so often, well, who was she to deny them their fun? Even a distant and perfect Ethaefal could show a little mortal empathy, now and then, without compromising any authority as an educator.

The entryway, a vaulting rotunda in polished marble, gleamed with all the colours of a philterer’s art – thousands of glittering phial-bottles, stacked as close together as humanly possible, interspersed with piles of colourful boxes, locked cupboards and much else besides. The paraphernalia of a medic who relied just as much on the natural and artificial nostrums, balms, unguents, embrocations, balsams, poultices, infusions that Mizahar and its population could provide as they did on the gnosis from the Healer on high was all laid out here. Everything was within easy reach, to support the deployment of healing magic or perhaps to simply spare the hardworking healers the arcane effort of dealing with minor injuries that were, in truth, perhaps better dealt with by a poultice and time, or failing that, a fizzing philtre bursting with stored health and a helping hand from some of the more exotic plants and extracts.

The air had that odd, antiseptic-and-sickness smell common to all good medical establishments (had Alses but known) and her nostrils thinned in response to its invasive burn, irritating her sensitive nostrils and plating itself claggily in the back of her throat, stimulating a cough or two before she managed to get herself under some semblance of control.

A coughing and spluttering Ethaefal would probably excite the medical staff here no end – her celestial race simply didn’t get sick, some paltry remnant of the grace the Goldenlands and Syna had afforded them still acting as an aegis against disease. Thus, an unwell Ethaefal meant opportunity and interest to a member of the medical profession, especially since the chance to clinically examine one of the divine patron race was something that came along but rarely.

Her students fanned out hesitantly, looking around with interested eyes at the soaring, barrel-shaped chamber and talking in low voices, producing a humming susurrus of sound that echoed and reflected back from the rank upon rank of bottles and phials and other medical nostrums, winding its way up the spiral stairs – surely there was another way for the bedbound to get up to the higher reaches of the tower and into the rarefied atmosphere of the doctors’ dominion.

Their…guide? Warden? Interlocutor? wasn’t present yet, but that didn’t worry Alses unduly. It gave her – and by extension, although to a lesser extent, her students, time to adjust to the environment. Her more than them, perhaps – most had been in the Catholicon at least once within the scope of their memories, and their skills in auristics were less than hers.

They, in all probability, wouldn’t be able to pull the faint impressions from the skyglass – burnt there by hugely emotional events repeated a large number of times – without vast expenditure of djed and a great deal of time, whereas she did it with a far greater facility.

Such power could be a curse as well as a blessing, sometimes – standing her ground amid a maelstrom of sickness and pain was hard, even though the occasional burst of joy or delight helped her.