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ataraxionlogs2015-09-14 12:15 pm
metempsychotic) wrote in ataraxionlogs2015-09-14 12:15 pm
Entry tags:
Mandragora
CHARACTERS: Iezabel Sadonna and Harry Potter
LOCATION: The jungle surrounding base camp.
WARNINGS: Ruthless extraction of plants.
SUMMARY: A botanical jaunt.
NOTES: A day after the last jump.
In her youth, Iezabel spent long hours perambulating in the woods that hemmed in her family's estate in Lorith. When she first developed this habit, she would return browned with mud and reddened by the sun. The mud came off easily enough, but the tan she acquired was more persistent, and caused more trouble. It gave the wrong impression, you see - that of a field worker or laborer - one that, combined with the hue of her hair, suggested too much the lowlier blood that, to be fair, is intermixed with even the best of Syl houses. Unable to keep her cooped up within the house, lacking the authority of generally-absent parents, the steward gave her a parasol as protection and left Ieza to her own devices.
Today, though she lacks the parasol, she has her hood to cover her pale face instead, though more to shield her from the patter of precipitation drizzling in through the dense canopy above. She's clutching a stave in one hand, clearly something she snapped inexpertly off of some unlucky tree, making the most ad hoc of walking sticks. With its help, she picks her way across the tangle of roots that competes with underbrush to make the going as hard as possible. But Ieza is not discouraged, no more than she was back home in Lorith.
She should by all accounts be uncomfortable, her thick wool robe wards off the worst of the rainfall, but in turn it traps so much of her body heat that she is perspiring heavily within minutes. She still aches from the rigors of her arrival, and her stomach has not yet acclimated to the peculiarities of the camp's improvised diet. So yes, she should be uncomfortable. She is uncomfortable. Quite uncomfortable.
It's wonderful.
Ieza stops by a fallen tree, prodding it with the end of her stick. The way the wood gives so easily, crumbling into spongy ruin, disqualifies it as a resting perch. She makes her way around it, pausing when she spots the cluster of fungus growing in the creche of the tree's unearthed root system. They're beautiful, and unlike anything Ieza has ever seen, so she stoops to get a closer look, squatting in her voluminous robe and setting her stick aside as she peers at the cluster of pearl-like growths nestled within a ring of minute thorns. As her shadow falls across them, a faint pink luminescence asserts itself, giving the fungi a warm, inviting appearance. Her curiosity is obvious, as is her caution, two sensibilities at war with one another- though traditionally, victory has always gone to the former combatant.
LOCATION: The jungle surrounding base camp.
WARNINGS: Ruthless extraction of plants.
SUMMARY: A botanical jaunt.
NOTES: A day after the last jump.
In her youth, Iezabel spent long hours perambulating in the woods that hemmed in her family's estate in Lorith. When she first developed this habit, she would return browned with mud and reddened by the sun. The mud came off easily enough, but the tan she acquired was more persistent, and caused more trouble. It gave the wrong impression, you see - that of a field worker or laborer - one that, combined with the hue of her hair, suggested too much the lowlier blood that, to be fair, is intermixed with even the best of Syl houses. Unable to keep her cooped up within the house, lacking the authority of generally-absent parents, the steward gave her a parasol as protection and left Ieza to her own devices.
Today, though she lacks the parasol, she has her hood to cover her pale face instead, though more to shield her from the patter of precipitation drizzling in through the dense canopy above. She's clutching a stave in one hand, clearly something she snapped inexpertly off of some unlucky tree, making the most ad hoc of walking sticks. With its help, she picks her way across the tangle of roots that competes with underbrush to make the going as hard as possible. But Ieza is not discouraged, no more than she was back home in Lorith.
She should by all accounts be uncomfortable, her thick wool robe wards off the worst of the rainfall, but in turn it traps so much of her body heat that she is perspiring heavily within minutes. She still aches from the rigors of her arrival, and her stomach has not yet acclimated to the peculiarities of the camp's improvised diet. So yes, she should be uncomfortable. She is uncomfortable. Quite uncomfortable.
It's wonderful.
Ieza stops by a fallen tree, prodding it with the end of her stick. The way the wood gives so easily, crumbling into spongy ruin, disqualifies it as a resting perch. She makes her way around it, pausing when she spots the cluster of fungus growing in the creche of the tree's unearthed root system. They're beautiful, and unlike anything Ieza has ever seen, so she stoops to get a closer look, squatting in her voluminous robe and setting her stick aside as she peers at the cluster of pearl-like growths nestled within a ring of minute thorns. As her shadow falls across them, a faint pink luminescence asserts itself, giving the fungi a warm, inviting appearance. Her curiosity is obvious, as is her caution, two sensibilities at war with one another- though traditionally, victory has always gone to the former combatant.
hello i am harry potter
Despite the broom, he's dressed in a style that's much closer to the contemporary Tranquility crew. Black jumpsuit, very utilitarian, the sleeves rolled up past his skinny forearms, boots on his feet. She'll have seen any number of her fellow passengers wearing nearly exactly the same thing. It's a little inconvenient to pee in, but convenient in most other ways; especially with regard to the number of pockets. On either side of his legs, the little sewn-in pouches are already puffed up from the seeds he's been gathering. Contributing to the survival and gastrointestinal discomfort of the camp.
"Hello!"
He drops a few feet in altitude, thinking that that reduction of distance is necessarily polite. "I don't mean to interrupt. You look a bit like the people from back home, where I come from." The robes. The stick, I mean, too large to be a commonplace wand, but he has encountered less commonplace foci too. The way she's prodding around plants. Herbology really wasn't his strongest subject, but the keen interest that witches and wizards took in the green and the growing was far apart from Mrs. Dursley aggressively wielding her hedge clippers. This woman's demeanor is more like the first thing than the other.
no subject
"You're flying-" is a statement of the totally obvious, but such is Ieza's surprise. Flight is a praxis longed for, dreamt of, often discussed and never achieved outside of ancient legend and wild rumor. The mushroom, however lovely, however exotic, loses all interest for Ieza, and her makeshift stave feels even more of an embarrassment.
Though perhaps what he is doing has to do with wormwhatsits and interdimensional somethings-or-other, or one of the various totally foreign praxes she's heard about since her arrival, and as of yet failed to understand. Her auracular sight hones in on the young man, prepare for disappointment, but what she sees - the fractal fringe of his aura - makes her face light up. She rises to her feet swiftly enough to send her hood tumbling from her head, revealing a healthy-looking but not terribly well maintained mane of red hair. She offers a low bow.
"Iezabel Sadonna, of Lorith-country and the Calith Academy," is an introduction made with every expectation that all of what she just said will make sense to him; he did say she looks like someone from back home. Perhaps she is- and thus, transitively, he might be from her home. Such is the eternal springiness of hope.
"Sanctissima- it is a relief to meet a fellow practitioner. Where did you study? Where did you learn to do-" she gestures towards the broom between his legs, "-that?"
no subject
"Only graduated a short while back. Things got a bit off the rails when we had a war." He swings one leg off the broomstick and squares himself upright, smiling at her and coming forward. There's no hesitation at all in the way he brings up his, uh, cleaning implement for her to examine. Holds it up on his hands rather than asking the thing to hover on its own enchanted power. However unfamiliar her school and mode of greeting were, he automatically gravitates toward certain assumptions about us scholastic magical types. She'll want to have a look at it, surely.
And he's had enough of his brooms examined, actually, not to be overly worried that they will come to harm.
"If you've met Sirius, Remus, or Hermione, we all went to the same place. Nearly all the girls and boys in Britain do." Harry smiles at her. He isn't very good at noticing when someone needs a brush applied to their hair, so he thinks hers is uh, really nice. And red.
He doesn't have a type shut up
no subject
"I've not heard of it," she admits, "but it sounds charmingly provincial."
Guess which house she'd have been sorted into.
"Perhaps Britain is somewhere across the western sea, or over the eastern mountains. Tutor always said-" her voice takes on the cadence of recitation, "we invent a world, but never exhaust the world."
But even someone as stubbornly set in her ways as Ieza is coming to understand that this is wishful thinking. Enough, maybe, to have met a fellow practitioner. Enough to know that there are others. Enough, perhaps more than, to have a fascinating new praxis at her fingertips. Her own disappointment is blotted out, not by the sun but by the proffering of the flying device. She takes it from Harry, and despite her having seen him wield it without kid gloves, her own handling is delicate at first, as if she were dealing with something of tremendous value and comparable fragility.
"This resembles a broom-" she remarks and then, in case anyone was wondering how an fine institution the Academy must have been: "it... is a broom."
She looks up at Harry.
"How does it work?"
no subject
"It's a very specialized craft, making flying brooms. There are whole books about just upkeep, which is keeping things trimmed and polished and that kind of thing." Saying this makes him suddenly self-conscious about the fact that he has very much failed to conduct the usual maintenance on the thing that Ieza is currently examining. Despite that she's rather unlikely to notice-- Elizabeth certainly hadn't-- he suddenly rather wishes that he had a prime specimen to show her. "After the enchantment, there are some basic commands.
"I've only ever seen wizards and witches from my world to have the hang of it, though." Which is to say that he doesn't think that Britain is over the Western sea. Even the wizarding world has some concept of geography, which is precisely how he knew, upon waking up inside the Tranquility's architecturally anachronsitic belly and hearing all the accents, that the situation was more akin to the speculative physics of Dudley's video games than a matter of stretching a Portkey far enough.
But the near-familiarity of her is different. "I'm sorry, I didn't say. I'm Harry Potter. Auror," he adds, recalling abruptly that she had some regional specifiers and title-like words appending her own introduction, "of the British Ministry of Magic."
no subject
It's true that she doesn't appreciate just how raggedy-ass the broom is, though she is visibly frustrated at not finding whatever it is she's looking for. "No runic inscriptions. No foci I can see. Does it have a core of bird bones, or something?" Ieza holds the broom up to her ear and gives it a little shake, then a little tap with her knuckle. As you might imagine, it sounds like a broom.
When it is implied that she may just not have the necessary knack, Ieza frowns, clearly deciding if it is worth taking Harry at his word. The temptation to try and use the broom is clear as day, as would the prospect of flying for anyone with a remotely human soul. Ultimately, however, she admits: "I suppose it would at least require me to understand your tradition-" but only as a preamble to the suggestion that "-you might be able to teach me?"
She looks about ready to press Harry into an impromptu tutorial, when he has the good manners and bad luck to introduce himself and his title. The name - 'Potter' - sounds about as provincial to her as 'Hogwarts', suggesting as it does that he is descended from people who were making pots when the Imperial Census came along to tax them. But that's really neither here nor there amongst the fraternity of practitioners, much less while on an alien world.
What sticks out is that it sounds like he has a government job - that much translates in the world 'Ministry' - and while Ieza once held her own hopes of a position in the hegemony back home, those hopes were thoroughly quashed- and with it her faith in government practitioners.
Her inquiry toes the line between curiosity and suspicion.
"What is that an Auror does for the British Ministry of Magic?"
no subject
Harry Potter, who might well be descended from people who worked with ceramics a long time ago, but has certainly diverged from that line of work, can tell when he's being squinted at about the Auror thing. It's a bit of a deja-vu, actually. He got a lot of squinting coming into it as the youngest Auror of the Ministry in ages, not because anybody questioned the credentials of the Boy Who Lived (which confers infinite credentials) but because the Ministry was so recently out of a period of terrible paranoid corruption, fraught with all kinds of unsavory intelligence-gathering. Wizards and witches of both sides had reason to be concerned they might be 'found out,' wrongly or rightly of wrongdoing.
He taps a forefinger on the stem of his broom, between where her hands are placed. He looks to be trying to think of his answer, which is true. Her Slytherinishness hadn't escaped him, but he has more tolerance for that particular House than most Gryffindors for respectable reasons. Certainly enough to realize that peculiar, reminiscent gut feelings oughtn't be enough to go all negative on a nice lady.
"It means I was like-- a copper. Police. For catching Dark Witches and Wizards, for performing the Dark Arts," he says. "Focusing mainly on the leftovers of Voldemort's lot, in the aftermath of the war. All of his wanted to end all the bloodlines that had Mugg-- er, non-magical blood in them. And then dominate the world of non-magical people after that." He smiles at her. It looks a bit cautious. He's not very good at lying about anything, not to himself, not to pretty girls, not to anybody.
"But I can teach, too. I'd definitely give it a go, if you fancy it."
no subject
It is not that Iezabel is a magocrat. And she is far from a proponent of political programs premised on the cessation of bloodlines, impure or otherwise. She may have been but a squalling infant during the Rose Riots, but she grew up in its long shadow, and her parents had always warned her of the dangers of political extremism- a tendency they linked to Republicanism, that government of Ministers and Ministries. But Ieza did not inherit this particular shoulder-chip. At worst it left her with certain associations. In general, politics bore her.
No- it's the moralizing attitude about magical practice that gets her goat. Especially when dispensed by a government agent.
"And what, precisely," she asks in a tone that is, if not chilly per se, rather less warm than it was moments before, "distinguishes a Dark Witch or Wizard from the alternative?
This question alone might not be inappropriate in light of the aforementioned aftermath of the Wizarding Civil War. Work in magical law enforcement could easily lead one to beg just that question. The followup question, however, may appear less benign:
"What, in the eyes of your Ministry, makes a given Art 'Dark'?"
no subject
"An Art is 'Dark' when it causes direct harm to people," he says. "The most obvious -- broad category of all that is curses. I mean, we all used them, during the war." He's trying to be even about it. Use of the Dark Arts does not a Dark Wizard make. "Dueling is a lot about the Dark Arts, really, and plenty of wizards and witches do that for fun and learning. But the cruelest ones, for murder, torture, madness, mind-control, and things like that-- well. Anybody who's focusing on that, we consider a Dark Wizard. It's nasty business.
"Of course, there's also wizards who do horrible shi-- deeds, without using Dark Arts all the time. That was less my area." A furrow appears in his eyebrows, a half-dozen names and faces sidling through his mind's eye, none of them worth mentioning or explaining out loud, for reasons somewhat more objective than his weird quick-step to self-censoring a moment ago. His eyes clear and he looks at the witch again. Reaches over to set a hand on the shaft of the broom now, not to pull it back out of her grasp. If anything, to highlight that he isn't. He isn't assuming anything.
But he is a touch wary. "Your laws were different, I take it?"
no subject
The uses of magic for murder, torture, and - worst of all according to her ethical upbringing - the suppression of the will seem inarguably objectionable to her. This comes as something of a surprise. Iezabel had expected a lot of talk about sanctity and transgression, about what realms are exclusive to the gods, and which can be tampered with by mortals- the kind of pretense that those lacking magical gifts have used to persecute practitioners across time and between worlds. The constitution of Harry's world isn't one she can't easily imagine, with Witches and Wizards comprising their own independent society. She thinks of magical law as dictates handed down by the unmagical- and thus often the fearful and resentful.
"That strikes me as a very reasonable definition- if rather narrow. The laws I took issue with back home were ones founded in superstition and misunderstanding." For some crazy reason, people found the idea of magic users reanimating and repurposing the dead to be troubling. "Though I still don't care for this 'Dark' rhetoric. It seems to me that the real concern should be in how a praxis is used. It has to be a question direct harm? Isn't that hair-splitting?"
As quick as that she's no longer on the defensive- quite the opposite, really. She's lost the aura of awe that came along with her first impression, her astonishment at the miraculousness of the broom praxis, but she is still very engaged- eager, even, her pale eyes avid as she launches into what can only be full-on academic debate mode. A special irony, then, that she is accusing Harry of splitting hairs.
"You yourself said- you can commit terrible acts without using what you call a 'Dark' Art. Would an Auror be called upon to counteract any other sorts of abused praxes? What is it that makes a given practitioner 'Dark' enough to demand the intervention of an Auror- the specifically Dark Arts they possess, or a propensity to do harm with any of their Arts?"
The battery of questions would likely go on, but it is interrupted by a sudden coughing fit. Ieza lets go of the broom and buries her face in the crook of her arm, short sharp hacks muffled in black wool. When she lifts her head, she somehow looks both flushed and pale, as if struck by a flash of fever, and her brow is beaded with perspiration.
no subject
"We've got other departments to deal with those kinds of abuses of-- praxis. We've got the Improper Use of Magic department, the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol, and a separate Investigation Department—" but Harry is not very good at recitation, even without watching a woman suddenly double over as her lungs try to turn themselves inside-out. His eyes widen, and he reaches over to touch her arm, immediately pre-empting a fall or some spell of weaknesses. As we all know, Harry Potter is a good guy; the kind of dummy who, even under prospectively lethal attack by verifiable Dark Arts, whips out stunning spells, loses his owl, feels that this is the difference between us and them. Even before Iezebel stamped her approval for the Ministry's working definition of Dark, he was taking care not to leap to eleven-year-old conclusions, the likes of which rendered cruel judgment on Severus Snape's greasy hair. "--oi." Not a terribly couth way to speak to her, but it is the product of surprise.
"Are you all right?" Big green eyes peer into her face, analyzing the flustered sprout of sweat on her forehead now, trying to see if there's anything off about his eyes, even though he's hardly been trained in that particular science. Frankly, healing magic has always been a weakness for him, too. This recollection occurs to him rather abruptly, digs a furrow in between his forehead. "Bloody Hell.
"Do you know what's happening to you?" His hand tightens slightly where he's touching her. The broom, he lets drop to the forest floor without real care.
no subject
It is wonderful, and she does not want it to end.
"I'm well-" Ieza lies, rubbing her brow hastily with one voluminous sleeve. When she become sufficiently self-possessed to notice that Harry's hand is on her, she withdraws in a manner than doesn't quite meet the definition of 'recoiling', but definitely has an air of avoidance.
"I'm well," she insists, a touch defensive once more. It's with effort that she summons a smile that is clearly supposed to be reassuring. "Have you any water? My river must be running dry in this heat. I can already feel my rose wilting. And I want my faculties to be clear when you explain the fundamentals of your tradition."
Her interest is sincere, and the jungle heat real, but there is more than a touch of nervousness to her chatter.
wow i accidentally turned u into a him in my last tag. remind me to tag stop rushing
"Well hang on here," he says, a little loudly. "You know, I'm really not--" about to judge you, he means to say, speaking as a man who bore a crimson fragment of a maniacal mass-murderer's soul around inside of him for the better part of his childhood.
But her query about water seems so reasonable that he stops short for a moment to retrieve the canteen from his belt, and then she gets all metaphorical in a way that makes his eyebrows climb and climb on his forehead for a long, precarious few seconds, before he realizes. She's probably just referring to the heat, still. By then, he has the cap off the water vessel and is holding it out to her. The combination of activity and confusion create a lull that is long enough for Harry to remind himself that he really doesn't know her well, that medical problems are often of a private sort of nature.
And frankly, a hazy recollection of a fair number of times that he or Ginny emphatically did not want to talk about it is probably bearing more influence on this situation than it properly should. "Um," he says, trying to latch onto what she's saying instead of inferring wildly from whatever's going on with the slimy skin tension around her (still pretty) eyes. "When you say 'rose' you don't mean there's an actual flower I ought to be watering, do you?"
Look, there is APParently all kinds of weird magic.
no subject
Ieza takes a long draw off the canteen, wiping her mouth with her sleeve before answering. "Ah- no it's anatomy. Metaphysical anatomy, really. There's obviously not real rose." OBVIOUSLY.
"The river-" she points to her stomach, using her finger to draw a curving line just under her navel, "is what sustains all life. Even things that do not think or speak need water. It represents the complexity in simplicity that is the nature of motive matter. The river is a singular, undifferentiated force but it has many currents, many eddies. Like all life, as life."
It's clear that giving this little tutorial brings her pleasure. She takes a visible glee in not just knowing, but getting to show that she knows.
"The rose-" she points to the hollow of her throat and draws her finger in a straight line up to the middle of her forehead, "is the capacity for reason, speech, and the generative potential of all arts. It represents the simplicity in complexity that is the essence of any art. The many petals, leaves and thorns of the rose still produce a singular impression of beauty. Like thought, which distills the essence of things beyond their material being.
"Of course I don't mean it literally. I don't even believe it, as such. It's a very, very old idea. But it's still useful, I think. Many scholars forget that without the river, the rose wilts."
She offers the canteen back to Harry, her smile palliative, as if to say 'see, I'm fine, it's taken care of, no need to worry'. It's a sentiment she's quite purposefully trying to foster in herself, and Harry's concern is a mirror ill-suited for that self-attitude. She is looking better, though.
"Now- you must show me how the broom works." This is not merely a convenient change of subject. Her interest in the possibility of FLIGHT has not flagged. "It may be difficult for me to learn the skill, but I've acquired more obscure praxes before, I'm sure."
no subject
Surely someone this enthusiastic about horticultural husbandry and flying on a broom has got to be mostly good. "That sounds quite important. We've got some old laws and limits in my world, too. I mean, not like Aurors gunning for Dark Wizards-- I mean, for example, Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration. There's a few things that magic can't make out of thin air, and food's one of them. Water, though, we can do. Right out of nowhere. Though I reckon it's less believable when we're somewhere as bloody muggy as this." He rather imagines that this tidbit will be of interest to her, that it'll buy her another couple seconds of peering at her face and wondering. Just wondering, though. Even if it's only dehydration or heart stroke, that seems like a bad time to be trying to achieve altitude with unfamiliar magic.
This is to say that Harry Potter will ultimately oblige! He takes a step back from her, giving himself a little room to work. Not that the first move is very elaborate, of course. Madam Hooch had started all of the First Years out the same way, which had been important given the mixture of those raised entirely by Muggles and relatively seasoned little assholes named Malfoy. Not that Harry's bitter, but being sensible.
He puts out his hand to his side, so that the sunshine bleeding down spreads a shadow over the shaft of the broom. He says, and he already has the snEAKING suspicion she's going to find this a bit crass if the name Hogwarts was, but, "Up."
The broomstick abruptly bounces up into his hand. His fingers and palm snap shut around it with the accuracy and timing that comes from having done it hundreds of times before, at this rate. He smiles at her and makes no attempt to attempt to mount the thing. Instead, he stoops over and sets the broom back down, but near Iezebel's feet this time. It settles easily, despite its antigravitational display a moment ago; a few native leaves are sticking out of its twigs, by now.
no subject
"The material parsimony paradox is one of the most vexing," she agrees, with a breathlessness that is probably due to excitement rather than respiratory distress, "I've always suspected that it has something to do with the complexity of the element you're trying to produce. You can conjure fire without too much difficulty, but creating even just a pile of wood has always proven an insurmountable challenge. Water is also a pure element, while making even a simple pastry involves a remarkable amount of distinct material, as any baker can tell you."
The joke about the ambient humidity doesn't make her laugh, but she smiles and raises her hand to her mouth as if she were hiding a guffaw, an outward acknowledgement that a joke has been made in the absence of actual involuntary cachinnations. It's a weirdly coy gesture, a courtly one in fact, somewhat at odds with her otherwise direct manner.
Directness prevails as the lesson begins, however; she observes with a focused intensity that is predictably startled at the simplicity of the operation and its attendant invocation. But she's not such a snob that she demands all her power-words be composed in the polysyllables of long-dead languages. Even if she were, she's far too busy being visibly delighted at the sight of the broom springing to life. She actually claps her hands, like a small child who has just had a silver coin plucked from behind her ear; and, to be fair, this is just about as inexplicably and properly 'magical' to her as sleight of hand would be to a youngster.
When he sets the broom back down, however, her face falls, not into misery so much as trepidation. What, she wonders, if it doesn't work for her? He's tried to prepare her for that eventuality, but the disappointment would still be crushing, a tutorial turned into mere display. She steps forward, lifts her hand, and hesitates.
"Is that all?" she asks, doubtful, "just- the word? Should I... be visualizing anything? What change am I willing in the world?"
no subject
"Visualize," he says, elongating the word slightly, possibly stalling. His mind scurries past a dozen Quidditch matches, the heat of dragon-fire flaring behind him, and falling back, back, all the way back to McGonagall's steely-eyed delight nearly indistinguishable from her steely-eyed recrimination as she led him down the corridor from Madam Hooch's class. Falling forward, in a jolt, to the green flash that took Hedwig when he'd had no broom of his own. Naturally, his mind goes completely blank at that point. It's not really shock or even specifically grief; just the absurd kaleidoscope of cognitive trivialities that comes when you're looking for genuine inspiration. Anyway, he hears the word coming out in his mouth, kind of distorted and slowed down, as if somebody had hit the wrong button on a Muggle tape recorder in the middle of replay, and he is powerless to stop it when he finds himself saying: "Flllyyyyingg."
A beat's pause.
Visualize flying.
"Through-- the wind," he says quickly after that, rather wondering if she's distracted by her hyperventilation symptoms or the possibility of failure, enough that she doesn't notice his problems with making words come coherently out of his mouth. "In your ears. The rush of it." The concept is catching. Though the memory of his first flight had not been enough to produce a full-fledged Patronus, but he remembered being excited when Neville had been addled with anxiety. Peculiarly, he would, he has found Patronuses rather easier to teach than this. "The trees falling away, and how... brilliant it will be. When you can fly.
"Let yourself be happy," he suggests. "Even if you're also afraid."
no subject
"Flying-" Ieza echoes, staring at the broom with a fixity that does not seem likely to facilitate visions of soaring. "But- how can I possibly visualize something I've never done? I can visualize fire, I've seen it, felt its heat- been burned. But I've never flown outside a dream. And the world is not a dream."
A nice bit of circular logic, and as nasty a trap as such loops tend to be. I cannot do what I have not done. Such a being's life is already over, even if they yet live. Ieza scowls at her own inefficacy, and then closes her eyes, concentrating. She will imagine flying. She will!
Then her brow clears, as something occurs to her. Her pale eyes find the center of Harry's forehead- that jagged scar. Rather distinctive. But it's what lies beneath that interests her.
"You know- I could borrow your memory of flying."
no subject
Harry thinks that she's brilliant, for having thought of that, for figuring to utilize these powers while she's in pursuit of learning new ones from a completely different universe. He also thinks that she's going to have a lot of problems, if she has to think about it this much. It seems like the same clash that Hermione had against Divination, except of course, that Divination was legitimately woolly and obscure and the worst the way they were taught it, but a fairly fat proportion of Hogwarts students could ride a broom. Incidentally, Hermione isn't the best with broom riding either.
Nonetheless, history has established that while Harry rather dislikes having his memories meddled with, broomsticks constitute some very happy ones. He doesn't tend to guard and hoard his happiness with jealousy. "That makes sense. Could help to bridge the gap between our uhhh," he starts generously, but his mind blanking now, only to sputter up only the recollection of Dudley's video game console, "systems." He reaches up to touch his scarred forehead, only now recalling how tremendously terrible he is at this.
Well, he's bad at guarding his mind. Maybe sharing's easier. He blinks hard a few times behind his glasses, mildly apprehensive. He doesn't think anybody's actually got the hang of these abilities yet. But in a moment, and without any further ceremony or flourish, it begins.
Or at least, in her mind, there's a shock of English sunlight, instead of green creepers. The wind picking up in her hair, brisk, chilly enough to numb even the worst memory of pain in her scar, and the lake shining like a mirror of burning silver far below. Hogwarts looked grander than its name would perhaps suggest.
no subject
The experience could be nearly as thrilling to Ieza as it was once to Harry. It is still terribly provincial-looking, Harry's school, with the only nearby settlement being the sleepy town of Hogsmead. Nothing like the Academy, which sits bold as brass in the midst of Calith's Old Quarter, its astrolocus peeking out over the roofs and gables of townhouses and mansions. But it is a magnificent structure, and one that calls to Ieza's own lifelong love of obscure and magically constructed castles, the very precipitation for her academic pursuits and the culmination of her troubled career.
And to fly- sweet Charity, to fly!
Indeed, it is only because Ieza is able to impose the rigors of her discipline that she is kept from being swept up in the memory's vividness. Instead, she captures it in a glass globe within her mind, holding it at arm's length, existing as much without it as within it, her experience analytical instead of purely immanent.
Sadly, this very measure of control produces precisely the trouble that Harry predicts. In seeking to understand, she stifles the pure feeling, and when she extends her hand once more, the memory floating in her mind and between her praxic fingers, and gives the command - 'Up!' - the result is… underwhelming. The broom gives the most grudging of twitches, less levitating than simply leaping no more than two inches off the ground, before falling gracelessly back into the underbrush.
Ieza frowns at the truculent broom for a moment, betrayed. She then looks up at Harry, her expression clearly suspended between hope and disappointment, her pale eyes beseeching.
"Not such a bad start, is it?"
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And then she makes the broom move.
It's only now, belatedly, that his skepticism betrays him. His eyes pop out to golfball-size behind his glasses, and he actually reaches up to grasp his spectacles to the side of his head, as if he had expected to jolt so violently that he'd knock them off his face. "Blimey," he says, somewhat more loudly than someone who has seen hundreds of witches and wizards take off on hundreds of brooms before probably should be saying 'Blimey.' "You-- no, that was very good. Very good," he chooses this descriptor instead of 'brilliant,' realizing a moment too late that he might accidentally be causing offense.
"There are plenty of wizards starting out who can scarcely get it to do that. one of my good mates, Neville Longbottom," the awkwardly-managed names just pile up don't they, "it didn't move at all the first time. He was yelling for a few minutes before the broom went up. And Hermione's," he finds himself pausing, realizing perhaps that Hermione would not appreciate one of the very few areas of magic in which she struggles being highlit to a stranger. Even if, he thinks privately, that their similar results had similar etiology. "Some of the sharpest witches and wizards I've ever known had just that happen.
"You should try it a few times," he says quickly. It's not as if she looks tired, and he'd rather head off potential questions about his earlier surprise with something productive like learning how to fly.
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"Up!"
And this time, nothing happens whatsoever. Evidently the second-hand impression Harry's memory leaves doesn't have the power of the memory itself. Evidently you cannot master a foreign discipline in the space of five minutes.
This would be crushing, were it not for the promise implicit to her initial success. Instead there is a flash of annoyance and a flush of embarrassment. "These things take time," she proclaims, as if she were somehow already the pedagogical authority. She twists her lips into a lopsided knot of concentration and reiterates:
"Up!"
Still nothing. Ieza's brow furrows, her impatience palpable. It has been years since she was a student, forced to accept the day-by-day grind of education, and much of the power she has attained since has been by means of speedy (if costly) shortcut. And while the painstaking translation and interpretation that she has undertaken outside the Academy was hardly a swift process, it rewarded investment immediately, each moment dedicated to it producing discrete progress.
"Up!"
And yet nothing happens. It is as if the first accomplishment were a fluke, rather than a sign of her innate reality-spanning talents. This visibly displeases Ieza, who is even now suppressing a desire to kick the recalcitrant broom. Rather than risk damaging the praxis, and potentially upsetting her until-now extremely agreeable tutor, she looks up at Harry and asks a question:
"How long did it take you to acquire this skill?"
It's unlikely that she'll like the honest answer.
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The third one, he definitely doesn't smile, mind you, but a faint notch appears between his eyebrows, mildly concerned. Not because she's struggling, which is frankly a regression to baseline that can only be expected, but because he feels the pressure building, slowly, inevitably, the way that people with sensitive sinuses can sense impending storms or barf-inducing migraines. She's going to get on him, he thinks. Not that she means to, in that way, it's just going to feel like it, he thinks. And then the third "Up," her thin hand still sticking out at a scarecrow angle. He feels his eyes move to him.
Harry keeps looking at the broom when she asks her question. He feels a bit sweaty under his collar. Patronuses had come very quickly to many of his pupils in Hogwarts. The possibility of any hope at all for self-defense had seemed like a balm during the pain of war, no matter how uncomfortable individual failure had been. He got Ronald through tryouts when they were younger, and then Auror entry interviews as they got older, but he has neither Felix Felicis nor Belgian ale here.
He makes a quick scan of the ground. Reassures himself that there are no incredibly butch-looking beetles crawling on the grass or anything, to account for Ieza's initial success. And then his head snaps upright. He levels a look into her rather frowny-looking eyes.
"I don't think that's going to help," he says, as politely as possible, as honest as he can, inevitably rather understated in his objection. He shifts his weight onto one foot, and gently toes the broom over again, resetting it to its original position beside her. It gives him a second to think. "Why do you want to fly? Are you trying to prove something to the big governments and schools back where you came from, or... trying to get home? I can tell you really want to, but.
"Why?"
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"It would help if I could understand the fundamentals of your discipline." She's not quite there yet, but there is definitely the ghost of blame in her voice, a risk of rising petulance that sours the cant of her lips and puts strain at the corners of her eyes. "This is a fairly ambitious praxis. You can't expect me to acquire it without some context." Though apparently she was ready to expect it of herself.
More whinging might be in the offing, more revelations as to the less attractive aspects of her ethos, but her body does her the service of interrupting. With little to no warning, Ieza descends into another burst of coughs, this time almost doubling over with the force of her hacking exhalations. It seems less and less likely that dehydration is the culprit. Something is clearly amiss, that much is clear from the worry that etches Ieza's brow, chasing away the irritation that was settling in so comfortably just moments before.
It is all the clearer when her sleeve comes away speckled with blood.
"Sanctissima…" Ieza wheezes.
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"Bloody Hell." He reaches and touches her shoulder automatically, which means he's close enough to notice the speckling of red on her sleeve when she peels it from her mouth. He is instantly concerned. Indeed, one need not be entirely familiar with Muggle biological sciences to figure that dehydration is not the problem. "All right, Ieza, we've got to get you to a healer." Harry doesn't like to sound bossy, but he's definitely edging into it now, a hard little core to his voice. He lets go of her in a moment, but he doesn't move away, pressing her with an insistent green-eyed stare. "There are a few different kinds back at camp-- if you don't know what's wrong, maybe there's somebody who can run tests as well, even with the machines down."
But that's the thing, isn't it? She knows what's wrong. She at least knows enough about it to have fabricated a lie recently. Harry, who has gotten away with many secretive and ill-advised adventures, nonetheless has a very candid kind of stare that he is now focusing expectantly on the side of her face. He'll be exasperated if he insists on cleaving to her story or fabricates a new one, but he knows she has the right.
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Ieza is too weak at first to shake off Harry's touch, even if she'd wish to. And she doesn't really wish to. In this instance of bare life human contact is welcome, the promise of support, the solace of the living. Who would reject a sincere offer in a state of such extremity? For when Ieza lifts her eyes to Harry, meeting his worried gaze, the look she gives him is something close to despair.
And then, with a thunderbolt's suddenness, it curdles into something like fury. If not quite a perfect storm of wounded pride and ragged desperation, it is still an impressive little emotional thundercloud. The flush in her cheeks burns brighter, drawn face tightening further. She spits out spite like she spat up blood just moments ago.
"No!"
No. No. It won't be that simple. It can't be. And that his advice is really quite good, that the hope he offers might be genuine, only compounds the insult. The very promise of a cure tastes like poison.
No bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, broom-riding teen civil enforcer is going to tell Iezabel of House Sadonna how to undo the consequences of her choices. No foreign practitioner is going to wave their wand or what-have-you and undo the legacy of an ancient empire, her proof, her burden, her gift, her curse. To behave as if she can be helped is an insult not just to her discipline, but to the imperious thing that sits, majestic and dark-winged, talons sinking inch by inch into her heart. Vakis needed no allies or aid. He bore the hegemony on his shoulders for years, no matter the cost to himself.
And what the steaming drek could this potter know, after all, if he can't even explain his own discipline with any clarity?
She utters just one more word, a sinuous flow of syllables that uncoils from her lips:
"Paratheōrēteon!"
As soon as it's said, she's gone.
Of course, she isn't simply gone. This is not an instance of apparation, another praxis should would find absolutely wondrous; something else to envy and covet and resent. Still feeble from the spreading infarction in her lungs, it is all she can do to hobble away.
But memory is the heart of her discipline, and attention is memory's handmaiden, its most loyal attendant. It is not so difficult to send away. At most Harry will sense a presence, fleeting and fleeing- soon gone.
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He isn't sure what to say, or at least, he has about three options fritzing around in his head, is trying to rank them in order of least offensive to most, when she abruptly starts to yell No.
No? "But," he doesn't understand, but he can almost. He remembers being angry before, the kind of rage that drove him into solitude and far away from Hermione's concerned stare and Ron's conversational backfire. It'd been a lot of different things— none of them involving blood in his lungs but the headaches, at least, were comparably painful in the physical sense. As for the other domains that a person can hurt in, he thinks of his name in the Triwizard Cup, the resentment hard in Ron's eyes, the green lights in his nightmares. He thinks about how stupid it had been, to have convinced himself that he could find the Horcruxes on his own, but he had been so sure of it.
He's trying to understand her, anyway. It's easier to do, or at least easier to think that sort of comprehension is even possible, when you aren't angry.
"Look, can I--"
But then she screams something else. She vanishes. His hand slips through empty air and he straightens almost violently in surprise, his head twisting to and fro. His immediate thought is that she Apparated, of course, or the equivalent. It means that he looks crestfallen, bushy tail deflating. It also means that he doesn't try immediately to look or call for the vanished woman. He can himself Apparate for miles and miles. His mouth makes a line of disappointment, regret already creeping into the lines around his eyes. He looks the wrong way, and sighs.