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rainbowfic2015-01-12 06:26 pm
crossfortune) wrote in rainbowfic2015-01-12 06:26 pm
Entry tags:
angels lend me your might;
Name: Mischa
Story: tales from the drowned world
Colors: dove grey (Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed), halloween orange (The past is a road where the bus doesn't run, and there's no station called "Yesterday."), white opal (solitude)
Supplies and Styles: seed beads
Word Count: 1019
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Implied loss of an unborn baby. All the implied murder that goes with court intrigue. Implied depression (observed in someone else by the narrator). Dying narrator.
Summary: Angels lend me your might/forfeit all my lives to get just one right. Old, sick women are always tired, but Sana, the Shining Empress, does not have the luxury of being tired, because until the day she dies she has a world to hold together.
Old, sick women are always tired: but Sana is not merely an old, sick woman, but the Empress who sits on the Shining Throne, the High Lady of broken House Solana. She does not have the luxury of being tired: it is enough that she, and everyone else, knows that her time is limited (time is as short as life is limited, was the prophecy that the broken, lost Valeth girl had given her). The layers of ceremonial court garb grow heavier by the day, and cannot cover up the weight she is losing, the makeup cannot hide the sallow, sickly pallor to once-deep, golden-glowing skin, and jeweled veils cannot conceal her thinning blond hair. She is dying, everyone knows it, but she still does not have the luxury to be tired, to spend months dying in bed: Sana rises in the morning, bathes, dresses, and walks to her throne room, because until the day she dies she has a world to hold together even while everyone else waits for her to die.
She has prayed to the Queen of Heaven, her foremother: she has prayed, and she has no doubt that the Just Blade will act. But gods move in their own time, much slower than mortals do: by the time Liora bears another child or children to restore her broken line, to fill the empty throne, the Houses will have been at war for years over the regency, over who protects the throne in the absence of anyone who can fill it. Prayers alone will do nothing, and if heaven cannot help her in time, then Sana will have to do her best. Stability and order run in her blood, and heaven help her (and everyone else), she will not allow all that she has worked for to fall apart once she isn’t there anymore to hold it together.
Sana holds the world together by weaving webs: she arranges marriages, fosterings, adoptions, trying to entangle the Houses in a web of kinship and diplomacy that they cannot escape. No Empress should ever have had to reign twice - she had abdicated the throne to her son when he’d come of age, and retired, happily, to Liora’s priesthood and vows. She can’t decide whether to be angry or sad when thinking about her son - about Lucian, who had never shone so brightly as she had, Lucian who she had never been able to quite reach, who had spent too much time looking into shadows that even House Valeth wouldn’t look into, strange and sad and perhaps, by the end, more than a little mad. She still doesn’t know - and will never know, though the pain has long since faded into memory and ache - if he is alive or dead, but wherever he has gone, no one has been able to find him. The spymasters of House Valeth and House Abjit’s necromancers alike have found no trace - and if they can’t find him, no one else can.
If he’d left a child by either his wife or her sister before he’d disappeared, if Yun hadn’t died and her not-yet-born baby with her, if she’d just had more children in the first place, even if succession had always passed to the youngest - but there’s no time for possibilities, for what-ifs, for what-could-never-be. She is the Empress, again, Regent for her son’s empty throne: too old to have another child, too sick even if she wasn’t too old, and no one else with the right blood. Authority enough to force the Houses in line while she’s alive but not enough to force them to cooperate long after she’s dead. She’ll make do with what she has, even as she can see the cracks, even as she coughs in private and her cloth comes away bloodstained.
Sometimes, she wishes, in fleeting moments of might-have-beens, that the Unclaimed Abjit girl was her grandchild: it certainly could have happened, and her heart aches remembering what was, of watching Lucian with the Abjit twins, his head bent towards Iseul and smile not melancholy for once, sweet Yun with her arm around him and all three laughing together. But there’s nothing of Lucian in Haneul’s face and she puts aside dreams of an easy solution to her problems and loves the girl for herself. No favoritism: Sana is fair, and knows that her favors don’t mean safety, but mean more problems.
And she has enough problems, more than enough problems: her fingers are clenched tight in the webs she has woven, and she hears the whispers of sea-cults, again: rumors and they slip out of her grasp, but Sana writes a writ, summons back Kyrion Taviot, the Stormbringer, from exile. If anyone can deal with them, he can, hunt them down wherever they’ve gone to ground, he’s fought them once already. And they’ve taken more than enough from him already: his fiancee, her twin brother- his best friend-, the vision in his right eye, she can’t imagine that he wouldn’t take the opportunity to pay them back. She sets him loose, a storm in the heart of her capital: she doesn’t have enough time to regret, only enough time for solutions that work.
Sana has no illusions that the peace she forges will be any kind of lasting: but it will last long enough. She’s tired, and sick, and heartsick, but she cannot rest, not now and not ever again: there will be time enough for her to rest when her ashes are given back to the river and her soul in the halls beneath the great river. But as long as she can work, can hold a pen, can sit upright in her throne and hear petitions, cast judgments, rule, she will work: she has given too much already to give anything less. She wakes, sometimes, coughing, in the early hours before dawn, and wonders only one thing.
Would this be enough?
Story: tales from the drowned world
Colors: dove grey (Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed), halloween orange (The past is a road where the bus doesn't run, and there's no station called "Yesterday."), white opal (solitude)
Supplies and Styles: seed beads
Word Count: 1019
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Implied loss of an unborn baby. All the implied murder that goes with court intrigue. Implied depression (observed in someone else by the narrator). Dying narrator.
Summary: Angels lend me your might/forfeit all my lives to get just one right. Old, sick women are always tired, but Sana, the Shining Empress, does not have the luxury of being tired, because until the day she dies she has a world to hold together.
Old, sick women are always tired: but Sana is not merely an old, sick woman, but the Empress who sits on the Shining Throne, the High Lady of broken House Solana. She does not have the luxury of being tired: it is enough that she, and everyone else, knows that her time is limited (time is as short as life is limited, was the prophecy that the broken, lost Valeth girl had given her). The layers of ceremonial court garb grow heavier by the day, and cannot cover up the weight she is losing, the makeup cannot hide the sallow, sickly pallor to once-deep, golden-glowing skin, and jeweled veils cannot conceal her thinning blond hair. She is dying, everyone knows it, but she still does not have the luxury to be tired, to spend months dying in bed: Sana rises in the morning, bathes, dresses, and walks to her throne room, because until the day she dies she has a world to hold together even while everyone else waits for her to die.
She has prayed to the Queen of Heaven, her foremother: she has prayed, and she has no doubt that the Just Blade will act. But gods move in their own time, much slower than mortals do: by the time Liora bears another child or children to restore her broken line, to fill the empty throne, the Houses will have been at war for years over the regency, over who protects the throne in the absence of anyone who can fill it. Prayers alone will do nothing, and if heaven cannot help her in time, then Sana will have to do her best. Stability and order run in her blood, and heaven help her (and everyone else), she will not allow all that she has worked for to fall apart once she isn’t there anymore to hold it together.
Sana holds the world together by weaving webs: she arranges marriages, fosterings, adoptions, trying to entangle the Houses in a web of kinship and diplomacy that they cannot escape. No Empress should ever have had to reign twice - she had abdicated the throne to her son when he’d come of age, and retired, happily, to Liora’s priesthood and vows. She can’t decide whether to be angry or sad when thinking about her son - about Lucian, who had never shone so brightly as she had, Lucian who she had never been able to quite reach, who had spent too much time looking into shadows that even House Valeth wouldn’t look into, strange and sad and perhaps, by the end, more than a little mad. She still doesn’t know - and will never know, though the pain has long since faded into memory and ache - if he is alive or dead, but wherever he has gone, no one has been able to find him. The spymasters of House Valeth and House Abjit’s necromancers alike have found no trace - and if they can’t find him, no one else can.
If he’d left a child by either his wife or her sister before he’d disappeared, if Yun hadn’t died and her not-yet-born baby with her, if she’d just had more children in the first place, even if succession had always passed to the youngest - but there’s no time for possibilities, for what-ifs, for what-could-never-be. She is the Empress, again, Regent for her son’s empty throne: too old to have another child, too sick even if she wasn’t too old, and no one else with the right blood. Authority enough to force the Houses in line while she’s alive but not enough to force them to cooperate long after she’s dead. She’ll make do with what she has, even as she can see the cracks, even as she coughs in private and her cloth comes away bloodstained.
Sometimes, she wishes, in fleeting moments of might-have-beens, that the Unclaimed Abjit girl was her grandchild: it certainly could have happened, and her heart aches remembering what was, of watching Lucian with the Abjit twins, his head bent towards Iseul and smile not melancholy for once, sweet Yun with her arm around him and all three laughing together. But there’s nothing of Lucian in Haneul’s face and she puts aside dreams of an easy solution to her problems and loves the girl for herself. No favoritism: Sana is fair, and knows that her favors don’t mean safety, but mean more problems.
And she has enough problems, more than enough problems: her fingers are clenched tight in the webs she has woven, and she hears the whispers of sea-cults, again: rumors and they slip out of her grasp, but Sana writes a writ, summons back Kyrion Taviot, the Stormbringer, from exile. If anyone can deal with them, he can, hunt them down wherever they’ve gone to ground, he’s fought them once already. And they’ve taken more than enough from him already: his fiancee, her twin brother- his best friend-, the vision in his right eye, she can’t imagine that he wouldn’t take the opportunity to pay them back. She sets him loose, a storm in the heart of her capital: she doesn’t have enough time to regret, only enough time for solutions that work.
Sana has no illusions that the peace she forges will be any kind of lasting: but it will last long enough. She’s tired, and sick, and heartsick, but she cannot rest, not now and not ever again: there will be time enough for her to rest when her ashes are given back to the river and her soul in the halls beneath the great river. But as long as she can work, can hold a pen, can sit upright in her throne and hear petitions, cast judgments, rule, she will work: she has given too much already to give anything less. She wakes, sometimes, coughing, in the early hours before dawn, and wonders only one thing.
Would this be enough?
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And yeah, that is the tragedy of Sana's life - that nothing she's built will endure past her.