Youngest Channeler: The Second Arch
by viggen
Shivering and wet, Ghedlyn followed Rayanne Sedai around the ter'angreal to the next arch. She was so frightened she could hardly put one foot ahead of the other. She did not want to walk into the arch again, but she wanted badly to measure up. She wanted to be as brave as Sildane. She struggled to remember the crossbow bolt and the pain on her friend's face, but kept flashing to the image of her mother dangling over churning waters. What would the second archway hold? Not one of the thousand possibilities appealed to her in the slightest.
Rayanne Sedai's ice blue eyes clenched slightly in concern, but she stood tall and her voice was clear and controlled, "You must be ready to go on, child. You alone cannot turn away. Have strength and prepare yourself."
Though unable to meet her mentor's eyes, Ghedlyn managed a faint nod.
"It is time then," the golden blonde Aes Sedai declared. She gestured to the silver arch beyond which lay indiscernible mist, "The second time is for what is. The way back will come but once. Be steadfast."
Ghedlyn bit her lip. Her knees knocked so sharply that they threatened to buckle. Her arms and legs refused to budge. She did not want to discover what lay across that forbidding threshold within that gateway which led nowhere good.
Sildane would go on, she knew.
"Child," Rayanne Sedai said to her quietly, "if you do not enter, you will be made to enter. I know you will not be happy with that."
The prospect frightened Ghedlyn all the more. Failing in such fashion would be a humiliation. She heaved a stolid breath and commanded her legs into gear. The ensuing rebellion of body against will almost emerged as physical sickness. She did not want to go on, but she could not afford to fail. No matter her fear. No matter that she did not like what inevitably lay ahead.
"One!" she croaked, "Two!" She dredged out the steps from a body that refused to cooperate, counting each time one of her feet rose and fell as a source of comfort. She crossed the cool stone floor in six paces and stepped through into the cloudy abyss beneath the thrumming silver curve.
She continued to walk, "Eight! Nine! Ten!" Roused to motion, she stepped and stepped ever forward. The veil did not part. Mists without scent or substance swirled past her feet and legs, hardly detectible, barely tangible. Gray stretched away in all directions and gave no sign of pattern or structure. She stumbled once in the miasma, tripping over herself rather than any concrete obstruction. Her jitters made standing upright a chore.
"Fifty seven, fifty eight..." Ghedlyn continued on what seemed like a straight path, though she had no reference point from which to measure. She walked in the silence and wondered that the surface supporting her did not have a texture or a temperature. As always, she counted the number of steps she took even though the start now seemed hazy. She counted aloud until her voice weakened to nearly a whisper. She had no idea where she was headed.
Absolutely nothing happened.
She continued to walk. And walk. And walk.
Still, nothing happened.
How could that be possible? Something happened right away the last arch she entered. What if she had gotten lost and was at risk of never reaching the test? If she never got to the test, how could she escape after? What if the silver arch appeared and disappeared before she reached it?
Her alarm rising, Ghedlyn stopped and stood. No images of her past materialized to assault her, but her fear mounted. There was no up or down, no left or right, only a naked, wet, black-haired little girl who could see and hear nothing but an infinite stretch of gray.
She stooped down to touch the ground and reached and reached and reached. There was nothing to touch, as if her feet were standing on an absence. She reached through nothing, into nothing and contacted nothing. How could that be?
She tried to sit down and fell literally until she was standing up again. And she was simply standing. When she tried to jump upward, the gray abyss shifted so that she by default came back to standing. When she attempted to fling herself flat onto her stomach, belly-flopping forward in a spread eagle, she found herself upright. The axiom made no sense: from a standing position, there needed to be some coordinate for up and down, yet there were none that remained constant.
Ghedlyn took a deep calming breath. This was not correct, totally not correct! Without any means of marking either position or orientation, she did not know what direction she was headed nor how far she traveled. She had never before been so lost that she could not even determine the orientation of her body. She wanted to sit down to ponder, but knew she would only find herself standing upright again if she tried.
Randomly picking a direction, she started walking. She immediately collided with a surface. The uniform gray mist coalesced momentarily as a solid wall that she crashed into face first. Her balance upset, she stumbled and fell over backward until she found herself standing again. When she stretched out with one hand, she found no surface anywhere within reach. Nothing there. A pane of glass could never be so perfectly clear.
It was wrong! She wanted to cry out and scream, register her frustration with whatever power made this place incorrect. If only there were an agency to which she could appeal, but she was completely alone. Breathing hard, Ghedlyn forced herself to calm. She could remember many screaming fits when something turned wrong, but this would not be one of them. Had a screaming fit ever altered the contents of reality? She wanted to survive and make Rayanne Sedai and Sildane and Papa and everyone else proud. She could choose when to be offended or hurt.
When she started walking, she again crashed head long into a barrier that prohibited forward progress. Ghedlyn shrieked and swung a fist at the surface, only to find nothingness. Sputtering for breath, she took several slow steps forward with her arms outstretched. Why had something blocked her just then but not when she looked for it before? What incurred this?
She carefully took a few more steps, searching for the obstruction which twice barred her path. She had not actually wanted to go that direction, had she? She did not understand. She wanted to find the silver arch and get on to the next part of this horrible test, but what if this selective barrier blocked her from finding it? She continued forward and found no signs of the obstruction.
She turned a quarter turn and, with arms outstretched, walked directly ahead. Nothing blocked her way. Satisfied that she could continue --at least for the moment-- she walked straight on with her arms projected in front of her. However large this place was, the way out needed to exist somewhere.
Ghedlyn walked and walked and walked. Eventually, her arms grew heavy and she needed to let them hang at her sides. The endless gray did not ever change, no matter that she counted ten thousand two hundred and thirty one steps. The measurement lacked any meaning except as a source of comfort, though the comfort grew rarified as the number of steps continued to increase. Several times, she lost control and sought saidar before she could stop herself. Rayanne Sedai told her not channel within the arch, but she found that the power seemed dampened to the point that it barely reached her as a trickle even when she did accidentally embrace it. She would not have the strength to stir a hair with the power in this place and the heightened sensory while embracing saidar did not feel any different from not embracing it.
When she reached twenty nine thousand six hundred and eighty nine paces, she finally collapsed. Her quivering muscles simply would not carry her farther. She fell off her feet and found herself returned to a standing position thirty one times before she recovered enough to continue standing, though she could not stop wobbling. If only sitting down were possible. She wanted to take a break so badly. She tried to rest standing up, but her knees quaked incessantly.
Unable to halt herself, Ghedlyn stumbled forward and collided with a solid surface. She fell over at a complete loss for orientation and landed with a grunt on her back.
She found herself resting on a firm plane that lacked either temperature or texture and stared upward at she knew not what. Was it up? Maybe she was lying on a wall or on a ceiling looking downward. She did not know and for once could not summon energy to care. The gray infinity seemed invariant. Why now? What made now different from when she kept falling over when her legs stopped working? The only possible conclusion was an internal one: I am different somehow.
Then she realized: that final step she took before the collision with the wall was one of the few she left uncounted.
The possibility frightened her. The other times she collided with something, she had been in a pause between counting. Uncounted steps were the reason. It meant either that she could proceed only if she were counting or that this strange space lacked any features if she tried to measure them.
But why was she lying down now? She had been unable to even sit before. If this place responded to whether she was counting steps or not, maybe she did something similar every time she tried to sit or lay down. Her restless mind postulated a dozen different models to account for the bizarre observations, but she was simply too exhausted figure it out.
Up and down mapped to up and down only when up and down could be discriminated from right and left or forward and backward and only then when... if...
Coordinates for a geometric space often need a topologic space to be mapped upon and stationary states could pick minimum and maximum type paths.
Only min and max against a field with imaginary coordinates...
Ghedlyn startled, "Wah!"
She had been asleep.
An electric charge of fear leaped through her. She had no way of knowing how long she slept. Her arms and legs flailed when suddenly she was no longer lying down, but not standing up either. For a dizzying moment, she felt as if she were falling off a cliff with nothing below to catch her.
The gray remained perfectly unchanged and she was standing exactly as before on her own two feet.
The way out will come but once, be steadfast.
Swaying, Ghedlyn was forced to take a long moment to find her bearings. She fell over once, crashed against an invisible ground and then spontaneously returned to standing. Surprised to smash into a surface when she fell now, she managed to keep on her feet instead of falling over a second time. The muscles in her legs felt as if she had walked on them for years without rest and the wool stuffed in her brain suggested she had been dozing for a very long time.
Why had she hit the ground when she fell this time? It had to be internal, she knew. No other possibility made sense. Either she had not been anticipating hitting anything when she fell this once, or she had been too dazed from waking up to understand her own physical state.
That was the key! It had to be!
The act of counting was a form of modeling, as was the act of expecting to hit the ground when falling or sitting down. Features in this world existed only as long as she did not try to understand how they existed or the nature of their form. Maybe that was why she always came back to standing position: she never anticipated standing up because she took it completely for granted and therefore did not try to model or predict it.
She breathed in and out deeply several times to help prepare for the obvious trial. In order to get anywhere in this... space... she needed to clear her mind of any intent to do anything. Plotting, planning, predicting and anticipating would get her nowhere here at all!
She visualized herself as a pool of water and every dancing unresolved thought as a pattern of ripples spreading across the surface. Rayanne Sedai's training with visualizations helped somewhat. She smoothed the pool, silenced the rote drills and pattern preoccupations and forcibly made herself think of nothing but an unbroken plane of water. After several false starts, once she finally managed to become completely blank, she dared to put one foot in front of the other with no direction or path in mind. She squinted to see only the gray infinity and forced herself not to place any patterns upon it. Gray mist could be perfectly acceptable as a featureless nothing in and of itself, without need of any underlying design.
Her slowly extended foot bumped a toe into the smooth intersection between a textureless wall and floor. Holding nothing firmly in mind, Ghedlyn allowed her foot to trace along the invisible barrier. If she went slowly enough, the obstruction guided her progress: she did not know where this path would lead and stubbornly refused to care.
Mind a smooth pond, Ghedlyn went and nothing more.
As she traced the obstruction, step by step, she soon found she could rest her shoulder and arm against the featureless surface while she walked. She did not see it as anything but more dimensionless gray, but she could at least follow it. When she began to anticipate the next stride, the surface would become ephemeral, as if prepared to vanish at the first sign of a measurement.
She proceeded for a long while, sliding her foot along the intersection between the invisible horizontal and vertical faces. She wanted badly to count the steps, but could not. She wished for anything to break her boredom, but understood what would happen if she began to count. She went on and on. Her legs stiffened from effort and her muscles knotted into intractable bunches. Worse, her hollow stomach began to gurgle and her mouth turned dry; she had not eaten or drank in what now seemed like days. She needed sustenance soon, or she would be at risk of never escaping the test. She endured for as long as possible. When she could go no farther, she collapsed bonelessly and lay panting, wrapped around her empty middle.
"Sildane..." she wept, "Papa..."
Ghedlyn cried herself to sleep and experienced an eternity of horrible dreams walking without end across an expanse of true nothing. The sensations of saidar floated into and out of her, though the one power seemed a dampened, distant, useless trickle.
She awoke gradually to a groggy mind. The world was the same gray infinity of formless mist. Her stomach gnawed inward on itself. She lay naked on her back staring up, wishing Sildane or Papa would suddenly appear to hug her and tell her everything was all right. She could hardly stand being so completely alone. For a long time now, she understood that to be alone meant to risk dying, but she had been given no choice here. She would tolerate Alibet taunting her if only to fill the vast nothingness. The goal of escape lagged where she did not know if she could ever reach it. She shied from resuming her journey out of pure dread, pain and loneliness.
The sound of something skittering, tiny feet on tile, reached her ear.
Ghedlyn held her breath. She was uncertain she had actually heard a sound. Was it in her own strained, breaking mind, or was it in this enormous empty world from which she was unable to leave? She could not tell. The noise was gone.
"I am alone, am I," she croaked, mostly to hear a voice after so long in silence. The noise had to be locked inside her skull.
With a numb worry, she creaked to her feet. The depth of her exhaustion and hunger and thirst excluded most of her higher reasoning--she no longer needed to struggle to blank her mind, it stayed blank all by itself. She found the invisible wall surface and began to shuffle along it again. The only thing she knew was that if she did not continue to move, this nightmare would never end.
Her feet shuffled dully forward with one following the other in an infinite progression. She knew that the soles of her feet hurt. And her knees. Her knees hurt too. Her hip. And her stomach. The wall surface remained a constant, invisible nothing. The thought crossed her mind that maybe she had followed the wall the wrong direction, but she didn't really care. She had no idea how long it had been since she resumed her lonely trudge.
The mist ahead stirred and a shadow passed through it.
Ghedlyn paused. She teetered with her hand resting against the wall, her mind processing what she thought she had just seen. The fog actually seemed to swirl, as though something large had passed through it ahead of her.
When she glanced around, she discovered that this world was no longer just a slate of gray in every direction. Behind her seemed darker while ahead seemed brighter, though the slight variation could easily have been her own imagination.
The way out will come but once, be steadfast.
She did her best to continue moving. Minutes stretched out to a painful width and became hours. Or, hours did not swap for one another, leaving time to stand perfectly still, as if Ghedlyn had never actually lifted a foot in the first place. She felt as though she were stuck in the middle of one action and could not distinguish one repetition from the next.
Strange sounds sometimes came through the gray mist. Sometimes she thought she heard breathing, or toe nails tapping on tile. Sometimes clattering or sliding of something rough over something smooth. She could never quite disentangle the noises from the wandering of her imagination. She did not know if she were producing the weird array of aural sensations or if she were not as alone as she thought.
A faint breath of mercurial wind licked frigidly across her skin. It surprised her to realize she remained wet, even after a small infinity of walking. She had not felt wind in the gray mist before.
When she glanced up, a glimmer of light shined through the gray nothingness.
"Arch!" she murmured. It had to be the way out!
With the sudden hope that maybe the end was in sight, her pace quickened. She worried that if she wanted to go to the light too badly that maybe it would vanish into the mire, but she could not take the chance that her one hope of escape might be lost if she hesitated too long.
The shimmering glow twinkled and shifted, but did not evaporate. It came noticeably closer.
"The arch, the arch," Ghedlyn repeated to herself over and over. She hurried as quickly as her numb body would allow. It had to be the arch.
Gray mist began slightly to lift, stirred by gusts of wind almost too light to be felt. Eddies and smoky curls wafted around her.
A scaled and furry paw with silver claws the size of boulders planted itself right in her path.
The black haired girl shrieked and dove aside as a second paw slammed down right where she had been the split moment before. The mist was too thick to see where the thing was, except that paws kept crashing down out of nowhere and forms like the coils of an enormous serpent whipped about in fleeting shadows.
With a charge of nerves boosting her leaden muscles into twitching pandemonium, she ran tripping and scrabbling as fast as she possibly could. Her only hope was the light. Her initial scream had left her delicate throat painfully raw. The invisible surface stopped being flat, but became instead a series of jagged, fractured ripples like waves made of glass. She tripped and fell and slid, managed to dodge past a paw that smacked down right in her path, though the light seemed no closer behind the clot of meandering gray mists. The glass edges cut into her palms and feet when she fell, leaving her slick with fresh blood. A hundred merged forms chased her over jagged waste that she could not see or understand.
She remembered running recently, running for her life against she knew not what. This felt no different. She was running again for no reason that she fully understood through a maze she could not even see. She was too afraid to cry or scream. The gray reality spiraled with her exhaustion, as if up and down were debating a cruel transversion.
Something nipped painfully into her shoulder, prodding her to run all the harder.
The ground dropped out and she fell over an edge she could never have anticipated. Ghedlyn grunted when she dropped naked onto a grating surface and slid down an incline. She could see walls of gray that coruscated as though constructed of the mist. She slid down a smooth slope covered with curved serrations. Hundreds of feet clawed with huge silver hooks hidden mostly by gray mist paced in enormous shadows along the cliff lip down which she had fallen, their eyes seeking Ghedlyn out and watching her slide away.
She finally skidded to a stop at the floor of what seemed like an enormous valley made up of glass. Shadows crept over the valley rim and steadily began to descend in a waterfall of mist. If she did not move soon, she would be caught!
The silver arch stood on an incline so near that Ghedlyn wanted to cry with joy.
Though every muscle in her body protested against use, she dragged herself to her feet and forced herself to move. The way back would come but once and if she missed it now, she was lost.
A hunkering shadow languorously stretched itself and stood behind the arch.
"No!" Ghedlyn bleated hoarsely, drawn short on her dash toward the gateway.
The misty thing had no eyes or mouth or face, but it leered at her and crouched, daring her to come on to where it could catch her.
If she missed the arch, she would never get out! Ghedlyn dashed onward toward the light. Sildane and Rayanne Sedai and Papa were all out there somewhere. She had to get through the arch!
The giant thing with silver claws like sharpened boulders leaped over the archway in a graceful, purposeful curve. Ghedlyn ran straight in, eyes closed, not wanting to see it. She felt fur and scales brush past, the biting tip of a blade so near to her back, but ran with no intention of ever stopping, even if she was running straight down a toothy gullet.
She ran with everything she had, throat too hoarse to support the wail she wanted to emit. The claws came so close, the teeth!
Saidar sprang into her in a clean, pure surge of strength. She filled herself to the limit and struggled against a weary mind to decide what weave to create first. She had never before thought to use the one power like a knife...
"Shield her!" someone cried, "She's going to channel! Shield her!"
Arms wrapped around her even though she still tried to run. She was borne flat to a floor of cold stone. She struggled to scream and fought with everything she had left. She fumbled and could not quite seem to wrap her mind around the appropriate flows of power.
"By the Creator! The blood! Hold her still. Shield her before she does something destructive!"
"Ghedlyn, calm yourself!" a familiar voice yelled in her ear, "You made it out. You made it through! No one here will harm you!"
Rayanne Sedai? Was she imagining even that? She shrugged away the annoying loops of power somebody kept trying to tie onto her.
"I do be unable to cut her off!" another woman said. "Meilyn, we may need your hands..."
"She will control it! Calm, Ghedlyn, calm!" arms wrapped around her body tightened to the point where Ghedlyn could barely breathe. "Release the power, release the power."
Ghedlyn could see Rayanne Sedai's face through a sheen of tears. "Aes Sedai...?" she whimpered hoarsely.
"Release the power," Rayanne Sedai hugged her tightly, rocking with Ghedlyn contained in the protection of her lap. Claws and teeth remained so close. Was this all an illusion? Was this something in her mind that she wanted to see? She did not know whether her hopes were becoming as tangible as everything else. Rayanne Sedai's warm arms seemed too warm, too real. If she did not decide what to weave right now, those huge claws would rip through her. She felt so tired of running away and she did not even know if she should not still be running.
This could not be real, could it? Maybe she died already.
"Calm, Ghedlyn, calm," Rayanne Sedai whispered. Her golden braid draped over Ghedlyn's naked shoulder, soaking up bright red blood. A color other than mist gray seemed unreal.
The gray stone dome reached up high over their heads. The Arches stood humming nearby, fueled by the three Aes Sedai sitting cross-legged around the ter'angreal. Rayanne Sedai held Ghedlyn close and rocked gently. This was no illusion.
Breathing hard, Ghedlyn allowed herself to gradually relax.
"Please Ghedlyn, release the power," Rayanne Sedai said again in her ear, more quietly as Ghedlyn began to calm.
"These cuts do be deep," the other Aes Sedai had crouched down to examine Ghedlyn, "but they do no be critical. A small Healing and she do be ready to go on. Stand her so that we may continue the ritual."
Rayanne Sedai nodded. "Come on Ghedlyn, we cannot sit here the length of the day. Please release the power."
Ghedlyn's legs remained inert. Her body refused to go any further. Her muscles shivered impotently. The power slipped away as if she had never touched it before. She could not move.
"Thank you Ghedlyn. You are safe now, but we must go on," Rayanne patted her head and stroked her back, her fingers avoiding those deep cuts.
The Aes Sedai needed to drag Ghedlyn to her feet. Her legs shook so badly that she could not put weight on them. She did not remember ever feeling so exhausted at any point in her life.
The yellow sister kept the small girl standing while the brown sister brought the silver chalice from the table, "You are washed clean of false pride. You are washed clean of false ambition. You come to us washed clean, in heart and soul."
When the brown sister poured the sparkling water over her head, Ghedlyn found her eyes fixed down on the floor at her feet, watching the whirls of blood in the shining pool that built around her feet. Her own blood: she could barely feel the injuries from which it spilled.
