Chapter 2
"So yes, now we know, there's no air on the moon and it's incredibly cold and we'll have to figure out how to deal with that. But we're going back, right? We have to go back to the moon. You saw those big white round things! Your ma was absolutely right, that has to be the moon city." Bode kept up a steady stream of exhortations as they tidied Talaan's room for the second time that day, covering up the chaotic debris of their adventure.
"I told you, we'll go back, but I'm not going to get caught out like that again. What other things are we only going to find out about when they happen to us? What if we can't react in time?"
Bode pouted but conceded the point, barely. "Fine. What would make you feel more prepared?"
Talaan took the opening. "We need a way to keep air and warmth with us. We need to be able to create a gateway immediately back in case something happens to our first one or we're in danger, so that means learning the area quickly."
"Oh, that one's not a problem," Bode cut in. "I know a trick for Travelling – once you've arrived, create another gateway within eyesight of your first one. You don't need to know the area to Travel within eyesight of it, but making that second gateway teaches you the whole area well enough to Travel anywhere else from it."
"That is useful. Ok, so air and warmth, and I should clarify that we need a specific kind of air. I've seen vessels and armor designed for exploring underwater, and getting more of the right kind of air, and getting rid of the air that you breathe out, is tricky." Talaan paused. "I think we can probably figure out how to do it with weaves- like a big bubble of Air and Fire, and maybe Earth to strengthen it, I don't like how many craters I saw in the ground – but there's a lot of complicated arithmetic involved in figuring out how big a volume of air we need for any given timeframe. I don't know all of it."
Bode waved away the concern. "I'm good at complicated arithmetic, and Astrelle Sedai can help me with anything I don't know. She likes me, as far as Whites like anyone, and I think she's still hoping I'll choose the White Ajah." Her smile looked a little guilty. "She should really know better, but people see what they want to see. And she'll genuinely enjoy talking about the arithmetic, and won't ask questions about why I want to know it." She shrugged, a little too casually. "What else?"
Talaan felt a little uneasy at this manipulative streak of Bode's, but set it aside to worry about later.
The rest of Talaan's moon-related concerns mostly involved suddenly being unable to channel, whether because there might be steddings on the moon or something might happen to make them suddenly lose consciousness, and not being able to hear each other. Bode proposed a solidified flow of Air and Earth that they could sweep or poke ahead of them to detect gaps in access to the Power, and was finally convinced that only one of them should explore at a time, and the other should wait and watch nearby, through a gateway with a shield of air over it.
Bode also suggested some simple hand signs for concepts like 'danger', 'help', and 'retreat', saying she'd seen Maidens of the Spear using them in situations where they couldn't speak aloud. And they both agreed that they should actually touch down on the surface and test all these things out before trying to enter the city, assuming it was even possible.
/
Two weeks later, after a lot of planning and several more observation gateways, Talaan finally declared them ready to actually set foot on the moon. They flipped a coin for who got to be first. Talaan won, which was clearly an enormous disappointment to Bode, but she bore up well enough, especially after Talaan promised her they'd switch places in a quarter of an hour.
Talaan was nervous, but in an excited way, the way she was after she knew she'd done her best to prepare, and if she just trusted herself it would all come out right. She loved that feeling, and one of the best things about being part of the White Tower was having it regularly again.
Bode set up a weave to keep the air and heat from escaping the room, and opened the gateway vertically inside it, biting her lip in concentration. It wasn't the first time either of them had practiced this, but it was the first time anyone was actually planning to step through it.
Talaan and her surrounding bubble of Earth-Air-Fire stepped through the protective weave and the gateway and onto the surface of the moon- and then almost tripped, as her tentative first steps still sent her bouncing startlingly away from the drifts of dust on the surface. It was utterly strange, but Talaan gained her balance quickly—you didn't spend almost your whole life on a ship without knowing some tricks for that—and turned around to sign "I'm fine" to Bode. Bode nodded.
Talaan put Bode out of her mind, then, for she could barely keep up with all the new sights and sensations as it was. For one thing, the horizon here seemed much closer than it did on the ocean. On a clear day, the line where water and sky met was around 3,000 spans out, but here the ground and the starry blackness seemed to meet much closer, about half that distance, maybe. That, and the strange lightness she had here, made her feel a sort of vertigo, like if she bounded too fast in any direction she might fall off the edge of the world. When she looked down to steady herself, the ground beneath her was blanketed in grayish-white dust, like fine, powdery snow, and occasionally pockmarked with craters or scattered with rocks.
She looked up past the horizon and gasped to see the world she'd come from, impossibly large against the moonscape but also impossibly small against the velvet sky. It shone with a blue-white radiance. She could see huge banks of white clouds swirling above the surface, see an enormous expanse of blue ocean, see the edges of the continent that she now lived in the center of, off to the right. That meant that great ocean was indeed the Aryth. She gazed at it and felt tears form in her eyes, which proved a problem, as the tears clung more stubbornly to her eyes than she was used to; she had to scrub hard at her eyes to clear them. Everything had different rules here! She gathered herself and set about the next task. With Bode waiting her turn, and only a limited supply of good air, she couldn't dawdle.
The gateway had set her maybe 25 spans away from the great white domes and spheres, and she created her own gateway to halve that distance and quickly learn the area. Looking back at Bode, she waited for the nod before she stepped through. Watching Bode's original gateway close was terrifying, even though the replacement showed up almost immediately just a span behind her.
She walked towards the domes and spheres, noting that some of the spherical ones appeared to be floating in midair and slowly rotating! Others were banked in the ground, reminding her again of white puffball mushrooms. And there, off to the side, was a large sort of sculpture made out of angular arches that cast sharp shadows on the dust. The material it was made of was the same color as the dust, but the shadows made it pop.
She'd seen it from above in one of their many preliminary surveys, and at the time she'd remarked to Bode how much it looked like a compass rose; a four-pointed star with a round center and four smaller arrows at the interstices, surrounded by a decorative, swirling border. She drew closer to it, fascinated by how it looked from this angle, and then suddenly stopped, realizing the other thing it reminded her of – the ter'angreal she passed through to become Accepted. It wasn't the same design, but the arches, and the sense of something immanent in the structure, were the same.
Talaan felt a strange compulsion to touch it, even to walk through it, which frightened her. It was a ter'angreal for certain, and she knew better than to just walk into an unknown ter'angreal, somewhere around 50,000 leagues and a world away from home.
She turned away and started a gateway back to the room, to confirm that she'd learned the area well enough to do so. In her disquiet, she almost forgot to set the protective weave around it, but she remembered before it was too late. She stepped through and let it snap closed behind her, and Bode followed suit by closing the remaining gateway.
"You barely looked at the city! But I guess that means more for me to see." Bode was bouncing on her toes again. They'd agreed to debrief between visits, but holding Bode back for more than a minute or so was going to be impossible. Talaan gave up trying to brush the very clingy moon dust from her skirts and focused on the only slightly less impossible task that was dissuading Bode from doing something impulsive and dangerous.
"I was distracted by the ter'angreal. It's that sculpture we saw from above, the one that I said looked like a compass rose? It… it felt like it was still active. Like it wanted me to walk through. I don't trust it. I think you've got the right idea, focusing on the city. So don't get too close to the ter'angreal; we have no idea what might trigger it."
Bode looked very thoughtful for a moment, and then studiously neutral, which made Talaan's stomach drop. But Bode nodded and agreed to, if not outright avoid the ter'angreal ("We should at least see if it does the same thing to me") at least not get any closer than Talaan had.
Soon Talaan was the one maintaining the gateway and Bode was literally hopping around the surface of the moon, like an enormous rabbit. It made Talaan smile, even as she expected at any second to have to evacuate Bode and Heal a broken leg, or worse.
/
They went back again and again, taking their separate turns walking all around the silent white moon-city, looking for any kind of entryway or break in the walls. Neither one of them could spot anything. It was intact and apparently completely impregnable. They opened spy-gateways at various angles and levels above and alongside the structure from the comfort of Talaan's room, but even that proved useless.
Bode said that based on her affinity with Earth, she could tell that the city was built on top of a cave or tunnel of some kind, but they agreed not to try to open a gateway into the cave or into the structure- gateways were sharp, and there was no telling what they might accidentally destroy, or step into; they had learned some caution since that first gateway into the moon's non-atmosphere.
More contentiously, Talaan also argued against using the Power to try to dig into the tunnel from above or breach the moon city walls. Bode was stubborn, but surely there was some argument that would convince her. "I know it's safer than Travelling in sight unseen, but it just feels wrong. This place has been intact since the Age of Legends, and maybe even earlier. I don't want us to damage it, or possibly destroy it. What if we cause a cave-in and crush the underground part, and maybe the city above? What if the whole city shatters like an egg when we cut into it?"
"What if the moon was made of cheese?" Bode retorted. "We don't know what will happen until we try. I-"
"Bode! Please take this seriously!"
"I am! I'm not a child! I was trying to say that I can cut in really carefully-"
"It doesn't matter how careful you think you are! Look, you said when we started this that it was my adventure." Talaan squared her shoulders. "That means I am in command here, and I say we're not risking it."
Bode's expression was what Talaan could only describe as 'mutinous', but Talaan held her ground and her gaze the way she'd seen her mother and her aunt do. She hoped it would turn out better than those arguments usually did.
"Well, I don't see why you should be in charge if you won't at least consider all the options," Bode said, rather petulantly in Talaan's opinion. "Or don't you want to know what's in there?"
Talaan wanted to shake her. Of all the things to say- "Yes! I want to know! This could be more information about my ancestors – and about the Age of Legends – than anyone has ever found before! But if I destroy it, what am I going to learn? Nothing. And then no one else would learn anything either, and I'd never forgive myself, and they'd never forgive me." She clamped her mouth shut, willing nothing else to get out. She knew she was flushing again and hoped Bode would take it as anger rather than embarrassment. It was both, though.
There was a very awkward silence in the small room, then. Bode broke it, hesitantly. At least she looked embarrassed, too.
"I did think of… there might be one other way to find out what's in the city. But you're not going to like it, and so I didn't want to be the one to say it."
"For the love of the Light, Bode, just tell me."
"There's one thing we haven't tried." Bode took a deep breath. "We haven't tried walking into the ter'angreal."
"BODE. I cannot believe I have to say this. You are not walking into an unknown ter'angreal."
"Well, obviously! You will be walking into the unknown ter'angreal," said Bode, with a trace of her usual spirit.
"That is absolutely not what I meant and you know it," Talaan said, rolling her eyes. "Why are you suggesting I walk into the unknown ter'angreal, directly contravening literally everything any Aes Sedai has ever told me about interacting with objects of the Power?"
Bode opened her mouth and, uncharacteristically, shut it again immediately. First she wouldn't shut up and now it was like pulling teeth to try to get a word out! Talaan glared at her. "Tell me! You said we were friends, and furthermore, we made a bargain. If you have a compelling reason why I should risk my life, or my ability to channel, you need to tell me."
"Blood and ashes, Talaan! Fine." She shuffled her feet.
"I really don't want to get into how I know this, but I saw something like the moon ter'angreal in Rhuidean – the Aiel city – when I was in the Waste. That's why I'm sure that it's safe and also why I think it will only work for you. You going in seems like the only way that we're going to get any answers about this place." Bode paused and that guilty look Talaan had seen in their conversation about Astrelle Sedai came back.
"I'll be honest, if I thought it would work for me I'd have insisted on going in much earlier. I'm sorry. I should have said something when you first brought it up. Or after I'd gotten close enough to confirm my suspicion that it would only work for you." She added, almost to herself, "Some things just aren't for me. I do know that now."
Bode was often somewhat incomprehensible, in Talaan's limited but growing experience, but not usually this cryptic. Talaan was going to have to pry her open like a mussel.
"Bode." Her voice was blunt and firm as she stabbed it into Bode's silence. "What in the nine winds did you do in the Aiel Waste?"
Bode just looked uncomfortable and made a great show of picking at the fraying embroidery on her left sleeve, stubbornly clinging to her reticence. Talaan wondered what approach to take next, and decided on all of them in rapid succession. If one angle didn't work, maybe another would, or all of them together. "I accept your apology for not telling me earlier, and I won't tell anyone what you say here. I just need more context to understand."
Bode stopped fiddling with her sleeve embroidery, but still didn't look at Talaan when she finally said, "I snuck into their ter'angreal."
Ooof. Talaan had kind of expected this, but it was still a little shocking. And it definitely explained why she'd been forbidden to join the Atha'an Miere half of the exchange program.
"The Aiel had told me not to, of course. Not because it was unsafe, just because it wasn't for me, it was an Aiel thing, for the Aiel. But I was curious and no one would answer my questions about it, they all just clammed up and told me it wasn't any of my business. So I waited until no one was around and then I walked in. Nothing happened, but I felt really guilty afterwards and I was also kind of scared that I'd broken it somehow." She laughed, a bit more dryly than usual.
"The Aiel are really good at making you feel guilty, and they don't even do it on purpose. They just expect you to be your best, and they'll be disappointed in you if you don't, and after a while you start looking at yourself like an Aiel would and being disappointed in yourself if you didn't live up to their standards, or your own. I squirmed for three days and then confessed. They beat me within an inch of my life, but afterwards they also told me about their ter'angreal. Not anything really detailed, it's super personal and kind of political and really not my business. But they told me a little bit about what it meant to them and how it worked. Which, honestly, they didn't have to do."
She shrugged. "All of that to say: the moon ter'angreal really reminds me of the ter'angreal in Rhuidean. They don't look alike, but there are a lot of similarities in design all the same. That one was made of glass pillars that caught the sunlight, and this one is made out of ceramic arches that cast shadows, but they're both made out of the local raw material and built to catch the eye. They're both in ancient, relatively intact cities. And then there's the other things— it called to you, and not to me. And you recognized the symbol it made in the overhead view."
Talaan nodded. "Yes, it really does look like a compass rose design, especially at the center."
"That's another reason I think it's the same kind of thing," Bode continued, starting to look excited again.
"You see, the ter'angreal in Rhuidean was built to share the ancestral memories of the Aiel with their direct descendants. They used it to judge the character and mental fortitude of potential leaders, because the memories were very surprising. Now everybody knows about the big secret in the memories because of things Rand— the Dragon Reborn did, but it's a whole big dramatic thing and they still don't like talking about it with outsiders, and so that's really all I feel like I should say about it. I don't know much more than that, anyway." She looked at Talaan again, eyes briefly serious once more.
"What's relevant to you is that it's clearly Atha'an Miere work, since you recognize the symbol. And since it called to you, and you had family stories about this place? I think it's really likely that your ancestors lived here, and that means you can make the ter'angreal work."
Talaan was processing all this as fast as she could. "You think that if I'll walk into it, I'll, what, see my ancestors' memories?" Bode nodded.
Talaan's feelings about the ter'angreal shifted from distrust to excitement. She could barely wait to get started. This was beyond even the kind of experience that earned someone a salt name, this was the kind of thing that would make her famous in her own right. "That would give us… the history, what it looked like when the city was inhabited, what it felt like to be there…"
"Exactly," said Bode. "And I'm hoping that at some point someone will remember where the flaming doors are and how to get inside."