Part 3 – The Shadowed Council

Chapter 11 – Sanctioned

She woke to blinding white and disjointed thought. The world was a blur, and it didn't move in sync with her head as she blinked blearily, searching with minute movements for a clue as to where she was. With everything fuzzy, she couldn't quite pick up on detail, couldn't discern where she'd woken, couldn't fathom how much time had passed. This was unacceptable. She had an instinctive drive to stand right now: now that she wasn't sure if she was safe.

Would she ever truly be safe again?

Now, one does not naturally think move, legs, or lift, torso, but instead, get up, now; and while her body knew which steps to take to follow that order, it didn't seem to be able to comply. Her hand groped blindly for something to push off of, but it felt numb and distant. It felt like lead, like her body was a powered-down shuttle and she its machine spirit, desirous to move, to serve, but incapable. She could barely pivot her head.

Weak: she was so very weak.

'Weak… subhuman… monster…' It was that nasty little voice in the back of her head, the part that whispered insidiously, that slung at her all the terrible things she imagined someone like her father would say if he knew what she was thinking. And oh, was it right. Monstrous for the abomination she was born as; for the obvious falsehood of her piety if it couldn't heal the taint she carried; that she believed that she could serve well enough to counteract the sin of her existence; that she could stab something in the throat and watch with satisfaction as it bled out on her.

The blood – her dress – she looked down stiffly to confirm that it was soaked like she remembered, that it hadn't been some mad dream, but moving made her as woozy as the guilt welling up in her belly did. Her dress was gone, and she was covered with a white sheet. Like everything had been washed clean. Like she was somehow innocent again. 'Never again.' She knew it was right. She winced, closing her eyes tightly against nausea; her chin fell to her shoulder, jaw clenched, knees curling up, fingers in fists. 'Don't cry,' that awful mockery of a conscience hissed spitefully, 'he'll take it worse than Dad ever did.'

Him… how had he ever become so important to her? She had let him and his whim rule her world without ever asking what right he had. He pushed her to exhaustion, he confused and terrified her, he barely ever found her satisfactory enough to even smile, he never hinted verbal approval, he didn't care one bit about her. He locked her into a room with some crazed animal and left her to die. 'No.' No that wasn't completely true. He had saved her from the Oriens and certain death, he had kept her warm and fed, he had taught her things she would've taken half a lifetime to learn, he had given her a purpose.

He had left her a knife and no choice. She wanted to hate him for that; but she couldn't. That hate wasn't meant for him. 'He wasn't the one whose hand got sticky with hot red syrup jettisoning a body that would never breathe again.' That was all hers.

Killing had been… wrong – it was… right – it was… permanent – it didn't matter. It saved her life. It wasn't worth the cost – she would have despised anyone covered in blood like she'd been. It was too much to cope with – but she'd done it – if she could go back and change it she would – she would have wasted a resource – it was too late, now, anyway. And she'd have to do it again. She thought with resignation that she'd learn to enjoy it. That thought alarmed her. That… that was something she couldn't live with.

Something new was growing in her. Its seed had been planted when the knife connected with her victim and fell on the fertile soil of her guilt. It had lain dormant as she slept and healed, but it could no longer be denied. It began as queasiness in her gut, a signal that all was not right with the world. Nothing was right with the world. It spread into her chest as a tightness that robbed her of breath. It was a feeling first. And somehow that feeling told her everything she needed to know. She was not – she would never be – good. Regardless of how badly she wanted it, there was nothing she could say or do or believe that could redeem her. There would always be the darkness in that corner of her mind, hiding in her skin, ready to hurt anything that got in its way.

She… hated herself.

Ellie Reiker loathed herself.

Despite her best effort, huge sobs began to wrack her as sharp little nails dug into her upper arms, desperately both hugging and flaying. There was nowhere to turn for comfort – no mother to hold her, no Doctor Trixie to soothe her, no father to brace her; she wanted to claw the monster out so she could be a little girl again. She wanted to be safe. She let herself cry until the count of five and then she sniffed hard, biting her lip, and she allowed that physical pain to guide her back. She still wasn't sure where she was, and this was something that one did in private. It wouldn't do to be seen like this.

"Giselle."

He had never called her by name before, and every part of her stiffened in reply, not daring to breathe, her mind an alarm of 'He knows.' She heard it in his tone. Had he… seen? It didn't matter. Her face was red and her nose running and her eyes puffy from her sobs. He was moving over to her. Was he… angry? She couldn't tell, but she felt guilty – as if she had sinned against him with her moment of weakness. Would he make her regret it? Her mind froze with the terrifying thought: would he send her away?

She heard him over her, and she tensed. He grasped her chin, turning her face to him, her cheeks burning with disgrace. She could've wept again from it. Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes. It didn't help – she couldn't read the expression with which he regarded her, but seeing him made her heart race with wild panic. He inspected her for a long moment, and she felt more tears building.

"Peace," he bade her in the gentlest voice he'd ever used.

…Where was the wrath? What happened to the harsh, barked words that came after displays of weakness like that? When would the blow for getting caught at it fall? She searched his face for the anger behind his mask of neutrality, but found nothing. She didn't understand this at all.

With extreme care, she wet her lips – how dry that pain medicine had made her mouth – and after careful consideration of what would least incite him, asked, "Where-?" Her voice cracked as she attempted to look around the room, but he guided her face back to him. His eyes met hers, vivid color in stark contrast to everything else in her world. She was drowning in them.

He entered her mind like a knife, a surgical gouge in the fabric of a consciousness swollen with doubt, all at once blinding pain and blistering relief. She could feel him, his awareness, his very soul, taking up space within her, pressing what had once been a tightly knit whole of her to pieces to make room for himself. His mind was vast, more than she could ever have expected it to be, lifetimes of knowledge and faith and pain breaking new ground within her and tossing up her ordered self into a haze of dusty debris. He caught a mote of her thought before it settled, holding it to the light to inspect it, and she felt as much as heard his reply, "I will make you safe. I will order your soul. I will Sanction you –" he pulled something from her memory: Doctor Trixie holding her, 'The only human life of any worth…', "– so that you may serve."

Sanctioning… she hadn't ever anticipated the process to be like this. She hadn't known what to expect at all. If she could have guessed, it wouldn't have been anything so… intimate. Everything that made him him was in her, his thoughts sliding against hers as he sought out things she would have never uttered, things she would have never shared, finding her, even the parts that she hid away to protect. And there was so much to that mental presence, so many impenetrable layers that took stock and measure of a cramped space without yielding to its obvious restrictions. It was dizzying.

She put her hand to her forehead, trying to ease the ache, and her breath hitched. Moderate pain was beginning to radiate from the area near where she processed smell. There was so much ozone. Biting her lower lip, she murmured, "You're... very big, Master." There was no use cringing away from him – even as her first instinct caused her to pull away and hide, his mind followed hers – continued to follow hers, no matter how deep she retreated. "This is... overwhelming." What she really meant was frightening.

He moved her hand away, back to meet its mate on her belly, and quieted her, though there was nothing dangerous in his tone. She could feel no anger coming from him, only concentration. He was moving inside her mind, exploring, leaving nothing untouched, nothing secret, nothing her own anymore. He was scouring her soul, seeking out traces of instability, of susceptibility, of insanity and corruption. He was testing her limits, delving deep, cracking through any paltry defenses and spreading her awareness, her personality, her most sacred beliefs open to vivisect. He wasn't particularly gentle about it, and she wondered briefly if one could be with something like this.

As if responding to her very thoughts, the hand at her jaw moved to her forehead, almost comforting, his thumb moving firmly at her temple. It was balm for the expanding pressure. His voice was still deep and gravelly, but quiet and there was a warmth in it she had never heard before as he gentled her, "Hush, now." Her heart gave a nervous tremor but he assured, "You're doing well, my girl."

This, of course, did not stop him from stampeding around her brain like her grox had throughout the training room. 'The grox…' the horrid little voice brought forward those memories, but they weren't what he latched on to. No, he brushed those aside and followed that voice back to where it lived, just on the edge of the dark corner, watching. He said nothing, but somehow she heard him as he identified it with a passing thought: self-criticism. And then he burst it open into an untold trillion pieces. He reformed it, but not with all of those motes. Criticism, it seemed, she could keep. Doubt she could not. The thought washed directly from his mind and she at once understood: it was a weakness she couldn't afford. He swept it away and left nothing in its wake but a pocket of space like a flesh scrape that would eventually close in on itself.

It was then that his attention turned to the dark corner. Half dream and half awake, she could see him approaching it; he took steps into the darkness, shadowed, and approached The Well with something almost like curiosity. He reached down and filled his hand with the dust of her memory there, inspecting it. She was four, with her mother in the nursery, reading a story with a wishing well. She turned the page. There was the picture of it, mason-stoned, beamed, and thatch-roofed, glowing with merry promise. The memory faded, leaving a dingy grey replicate of it, pouring forth darkness and chaos instead of light. He examined the bucket, suspended and swinging ominously, and then another handful of memory.

She was in the small workroom, staring at the feather, but all of her thought was turned inward. He seemed to have no trouble following the memory's thoughts: to make the feather move, she needed to use the power. She only used the power when she was asleep, and had no idea how to harness it when awake. But she remembered the dreams, and she followed those memories back to the dark corner. She explored it, fighting down the fear.

It went on forever.

It opened into something that was not her mind.

The Warp. Even from within the memory she heard his thought. He watched on as she traced back to the edge of the darkness, unsure how to harness the energy she needed, but not invite the darkness in. She stared, and then concentrated, erecting heavy slabs of stone wall and floor to create a barrier, blocking it out. Then she built her well and its bucket, and opened the floor beneath it. She let the bucket down, down, down, and then drew it back up, full to the brim with the Immaterial energy she could use. Yes, her original thought echoed, this will work.

She fought her way back up to the surface, to the present to see him, staring down at her and still without expression. 'Not good enough,' the little voice hissed, and she knew it was right. There wasn't even a twitch to the corner of his mouth. She opened her parched lips to apologize, but his fingers covered them, stopping the sound. He knew the content of her heart now: he knew what she would say. He didn't care to hear it. There was no censure in that, though – his mind still cradled within hers, she could feel that, at least. He only cared to fix it.

He turned back to the dark corner, and this time he began construction.

It took a long time. She couldn't even be sure how long. She barely felt her body, and it gave her no signifiers, no hunger or exhaustion by which to judge the passage of time. There was only the sensation of him building and planting within her. He was everywhere, installing reflexes, barriers, defenses, coaching her back into his order after he'd broken her own down. She wasn't sure what it was that he was changing in her, what he'd programmed her to do at what prompts, but she implicitly trusted it was to better serve.

There was something so familiar with what he built in that corner of her mind. When he stood back within her mental scape to inspect it, she did as well. It was… like a ship. He'd made a series of airlocks, of docking ports, of emergency bulkheads that would slam shut to seal off this area from the rest of her mind if something that shouldn't got in. He made protocols for them.

There was a docking bay for using her power that could be opened when awake. Within, there was a port for moving things, a port for disappearing, a port for setting a match to burn, ports that she couldn't identify, or perhaps were reserved for things that she would learn later. Then there was a bay that would open when asleep, locking the other one down. She wasn't sure where it led, nor was she tired, but she knew she would find out later, and didn't fear that she'd set her bed on fire from a nightmare.

This was much better than her alternative.

Her hand fluttered up from its mate to touch his, still lingering at her cheek after who knew how much time had passed. She nuzzled into it, smiling shyly, and whispered, "Thank you, Master."

He raised one brow, but beyond that gave no reply. For a long moment it felt that he was merely staring down at her, and then a fingertip from his second hand traced the exposed section of her neck. "Here, I think," his voice rumbled as the finger stopped low on her throat, a few centimeters above her collar bone, having traced a straight line from the left corner of her jaw.

"There?" She searched his face, confused. "What's there?"

There was the ghost of a smile that passed almost before she saw it, and he replied, "Nothing. Yet."

A note from Your Friendly Neighborhood Geist:

Well, my dears, I'm back, after several weeks of fairly awful bronchitis (I'm still not completely well yet). So! Since it's been a while, important things to note:

Chapter 2 of that M interlude I talked about is up. Some of you may not know this, but there's an automatic rating filter on the list of recently updated stories, so the best way to find Burning Bridges is to link to my profile and find it there. If you want something fun and considerably lighter, go check it out.

In the author's note of that interlude, I mentioned that my sort of co-author-ish/sometimes-beta-reading guy has finally found his way onto fanfiction, so TurnoftheSoul is awesome. 'Nuff said.

Just Me: I don't know if you can see author profiles, but I mention there that I truly believe in constructive criticism. Unless you're flaming, I won't see flames. In my "defense," I had planned to slow the pace down and have our girl evaluate what happened in Chapter 10 here (though perhaps not so much before you said something), because in Chapter 10 I wanted to convey the dissociated thinking that accompanies shock. You've also made me realize that I've designed Ellie to have an intuitive mental process (not all my characters do), which is to say that the collection and collation of data happens almost instantaneously, leaving a feeling or realization in its wake without the thinker being completely conscious of what led to it. Because I myself am an intuitive thinker (I'm talking personality theory, not ESP), these leaps you mention are only natural. I've done what I could to try rationalizing. Let me know how it turned out.

Someone Took My Name: Thanks for essentially getting my butt in gear. As that you're writing your boy's story, I don't think I'll be borrowing him, but it spurred an interesting thought that'll happen later in this section, and I'll definitely credit you as inspiration.

The rest of you: Enjoy, and REVIEW! I can't tell you how much it makes my day when I get a little email that says I have a new review.

Getting a tattoo at six years old and more wacky adventures in the Tricorn Palace next time on Of Worth!

-G