Mandragora

[metempsychotic]

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.

Comments

[metempsychotic]

That's the thing with athletics. No explanation in the world can make a klutz into a champ. And while there doubtless an art to broom-riding, art is also something that can't be learned by lecture.

"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."

[bespectacle]

"Oh."

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.

[metempsychotic]

Memory is the heart of Ieza's discipline, the art she sacrificed so much and more than once to master. To remember what was never hers to know has been her greatest longing since childhood, and while she once expressly pursued knowledge lost to history, a memory from a distant world is just as challenging and just as enticing. And under these alien moons, that power is only further augmented, the initial transfer requiring little to no praxic effort.

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?"

[bespectacle]

Harry is quite a patient teacher. He stands there and doesn't rush her, gives her a smile when it seems that her eyes are focusing on her face, watches for any inkling that trouble that needs talking has risen to be assuaged. Most importantly, he stays out of her way, having some faith in her willingness to try, if no certainty at all that the magics from their worlds are compatible in this particular way. The last thing she needs is for the Boy Who Lived to doubt her.

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.

[metempsychotic]

The expression of pride and self-satisfaction that floats onto Ieza's face is one essentially unchanged in the nearly three decades of her life, one that finds a comfortable home once that previous ambivalence vacates her features. Buoyed by this triumph, and by Harry's fulsome praise, she sets aside the borrowed experience, flexing her fingers and preparing herself for the next step. This time, she is sure, it will spring into her hand. Soon she will be soaring above the treetops, making memories of her own.

"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.

[bespectacle]

No, she probably won't. Harry keeps his face carefully neutral through the first "Up!" and the second "Up!"

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?"

[metempsychotic]

"I'm not trying to prove anything to anyone," Ieza says, testiness audible, putting pique in the peaks of her words, "I am trying to learn a new skill. No more and no less." And while this is the truth as she understands it, she sounds undeniably defensive. If she had the vocabulary for it, she might say that she resents being psychologized. As it is, she makes a move to shift responsibility for her failure.

"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.

[bespectacle]

Eleven-year-olds get a handle on this praxis, Harry doesn't say. The fundamental is, you have to want to fly. Sometimes it helps if you know why, and often enough, it doesn't hurt to be a little nervous, for example, about potentially humiliating yourself in front of Draco Malfoy. The fundamental is, you get up on the broom and fly, a reciprocal relationship between physical memory, innate magical talent and that enchantment which is imbued in the physical thing. Harry doesn't really think this will be helpful information, barely an elaboration upon his earlier remarks, but he opens his mouth to share it when she abruptly starts to heave out her lungs.

"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.

[metempsychotic]

She was supposed to be better. She was supposed to be well.

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.

[bespectacle]

At some point in the course of Ieza's objection, Harry thinks to interfere again. Possibly even to apologize. But he recognizes the temper burning in her eyes and the weakness boiling in her lungs, and it confuses him into a silence that he would have liked to be brief. The matter seems likely to be magical, if only because magic, surely, would have provided her with a solution otherwise, even with its limited... praxises.

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.