The Words Between - Interlude

The first time Kyn glimpsed the future, he had not known what he had seen. Concentrating hard on what form was supposed to come next in the choreography his sword instructor had just taught him, he had reacted instinctively to block the sudden swipe of the blunted practice blade from the side - only to meet empty air. He barely had time to blink in surprise before his instructor finished his overhand swing to rap him sharply over the left shoulder, ending practice for the day with a dislocated joint. When Kyn had diligently recited what had happened to cause his distraction, the man dismissed the incident as inattention, and Kyn had readily agreed, knowing little else that could explain the apparent hallucination.

The second time occurred over a month later. Master had asked him to retrieve some books and glassware from an upper floor, and having had trouble locating some of them, he had hurried down the stairs, conscious of the time that had passed while searching. There were still a dozen steps left before he would reach the ground floor when he saw his Master suddenly swing around the blind corner - too late for him to avoid running into the man as he took the last step off the staircase, sending the both of them and his burdens tumbling to the ground. Kyn had reacted before conscious thought could catch up - that he was still halfway up the last bend in the staircase rather than at its bottom. Jerking aside, he missed the edge of the next step and sent himself tumbling the rest of the way down anyway, albeit missing Master this time when the man, forewarned, stopped short of the mess of books, broken glass, and Kyn rolling by. That was when Master found out about Kyn's developing talent.

While others taught Kyn his physical skills, Master oversaw his mental development personally, and the lessons in history, writing, deportment, and other subjects were neatly reshuffled to include training in Foresight. Kyn was taught to recognize vision from reality, to track what tended to trigger a foreseeing and what its range in time was, to learn where and when to act upon it. Beyond the most predictable exercises that arose in an attempt to control the Gift's more disorienting aspects and to help him draw as much useful information out of it as possible, there was one other experiment that they frequently conducted, but which they were never able to develop a full-proof technique for - to consciously trigger a foreseeing. They knew that it concentrated solely on events that affected Kyn personally, that the visions tended to fall in the short-term, with extremes being between a week or a mere sliver of a second. They knew that the Gift was infuriatingly fickle, dangerously undependable, and that it should never be considered with any sort of pre-conceived expectation. Master had once remarked with a dark, sardonic chuckle, that it was a blessing Kyn could not grow too bored from always knowing what was about to occur.

Still, they had managed to garner enough information to know that, if something momentous was about to occur and if Kyn focused on the right associations - much like how repeating a refrain will sometimes bring the entire song out of memory, or how a well-known object can draw the distant vision of Farsight - sometimes a foreseeing would cooperate and grudgingly release some hints of what was to come, if not unveil completely the vision that would have fallen upon him later. Perhaps it was merely coincidence that timed the glimpses with the efforts, but Master was not a man to admit that something was completely beyond his ability to control. And so they had tried various substances, methods, and meditations, and while they never found an ideal combination, there seemed to be enough success to goad Master into continuing the effort.

The pond - the grounding - had, in a way, made the approach easier. When Kyn could not hold tightly enough to the train of names, links and occurrences for the time it took to coax his Gift out - which was more often the rule than the exception these days - the calm was sometimes enough to push a foreseeing into the open. It was for that anchor that he had reached for in the pool, that freedom from the chaos of outside stimuli and his own scattered thoughts that he had hoped would be the last ingredient needed to free his erratic talent.

Instead, it had freed something else, and as Kyn froze for that one horrifying, heart-stopping moment, gazing into Master's face - he suddenly realized that perhaps Master's lessons on how to utilize the Gift had not been based solely on extraordinarily lucky guesswork. That, perhaps, the man had not always required pure magic to keep tabs on Kyn's activities - that they might share more than just blood.

If Master possesses Foresight too...then what has he Seen?!

:Chosen, why is it we can never seem to carry on a serious heart-to-heart conversation without you or the rest of the world trying to put an end to it?:

...what?

:My apologies for this sort of...'brute force' handling. It's just that I have grown tired of the constant circling, and it has become quite obvious that this matter will never settle on its own.:

What...what happened?

:What do you remember?:

There was...I was...disoriented. I couldn't think clearly. I was looking for the garden...Master! Master had found me!

:Peace, Kyn. Your master is not here.:

I saw him! You can't keep me from him; where is he?!

:Keep you from him? Or keep him from you?:

I...stop changing the subject.

:You have to make a decision, Kyn. Several decisions, actually, but this is the most important one right now. Will you continue to merely be an extension of your master, or finally accept the gift of life that you were given?:

You are using loaded words.

:Can you blame me for trying to make sure you lean my way? Regardless, you are an intelligent individual, Kyn. Everything you have done up till now has shown me that. If you weren't, you wouldn't be caught in this quandary in the first place - you would have blindly followed whatever you felt your master wanted you to do and never felt a single doubt. But, however despicable I think the man is - I have to admit that he has prepared you well.:

Prepared me for what?! Did he See this, is this why he set up such an elaborate plot? I know of nothing! He has told me nothing! None of this is of any consequence anyway...he has no more use for me.

:On the contrary. He does not seem to be a man who would invest so many resources in someone only to abandon them at the very end with no contingency plans to salvage all that effort. And have you never wondered why he insisted that you study literature alongside blades?:

...I do not understand.

:No, you are just being stubborn. Stop avoiding him, Kyn! If you can't even confront him in your own mind, how do you ever hope to accomplish anything?:

What if I do not wish to accomplish anything more? What if I wish to be far away from here and let you all rot in your own schemes?

:But you are here. Of your own volition.:

I can just as easily change my mind!

:You would not. You are like him in that respect. Once committed, you would not abandon a task you had set yourself. Now let us return to the original question: are you your own person, or will you remain your master's shadow?:

I...I don't want to make anymore decisions.

:You have to.:

I can't choose!

:You can, and you will.:

And what if I choose to remain faithful to Master?

:Then I will mourn. And I will wait. And when I feel you are ready, I will ask you the question again.:

...why. Why would you do such a thing. To wait...hopelessly...

:Not hopelessly. You might have the Gift of Foresight, Kyn, but I know you. And, if you would only allow yourself to admit it, you know me in the same way. You should know better than to try and convince me that I should behave otherwise.:

I...you shouldn't have Chosen me, Sianni. What you are asking of me...the bond you wish to have with me...I can't grasp it. I can't understand it. It is like...like when I was standing in that corridor, staring at that painting - that was my father smiling back at me. My father! He looked like a kindly man, and the baron seemed to confirm this...and I felt nothing. I couldn't even begin to imagine what this 'love' that a child should feel for a parent is like, what all the books say and imply. I did not even feel anger at knowing he had most likely been murdered by Se'Fannouel. What drives me to stop the duke is completely extraneous to that event. What sort of son can be so empty?

:And you cannot imagine how relieved I am that you are not charging recklessly forward, blinded by hate and revenge. You should not base your reactions on what other people's are, or what you think they should be. I would imagine that it is hard to find attachment for someone who is, essentially, a stranger, especially when you have had as dominant a figure as your so-called 'Master' in your life.:

...Master. My uncle. He told me to call him 'Master'. And I obeyed him as if he were one.

:It is in the nature of people to find comfort in the most stable elements in their lives, regardless of the healthiness of the attachment. It is especially hard when all other sources of comparison have been taken away, as in your case. The man knew how to keep you under control.:

I...I can't betray him, Sianni. He...perhaps, in your mind, he might have done evil things. But he saved my life -

:For his own purposes.:

- he saved me! He saved my life, and gave me another one. One that might not have been as happy as some others, but I was content.

:It is not hard to make someone more than content, Kyn, at least some of the time. He did not even try.:

He may not have, but he could have left me behind! And no matter what he has done lately, no matter what I have discovered, I know who he is, I know the man that raised and taught me for as long as I can remember, and I will never replace him regardless of what future affiliations I might make...stop feeling so smug about yourself. You were waiting for me to say that, weren't you?

:Not exactly that, but close enough. It's not a betrayal, to learn to think and decide for yourself. The only betrayal - to him, and to yourself - would be if you were to forget the lessons you learned from obeying him...and defying him. And if that man is half as smart as he acts like he is, then he would know that it would be useless to try and hold you back at this point.:

...this could all be pure speculation.

:Does it matter? Do we read books and study history for what the message the author or enactors 'might' have intended when they were recorded? Or do we read and study them to enlighten ourselves? In the end, they only have as much meaning as we choose to give them. Otherwise, they are merely a collection of symbols drawn in a regular order.:

It's still hard.

:I would be worried if it weren't. In your mind, though you never called him one, and he would never allow you to think of him in that respect...your uncle acted, in part, the father to you. He was unnecessarily cruel, but he made sure you would be able to survive, even without him. You said you didn't know how a child should feel toward a parent? The attachment you feel and the reluctance to leave it...that is very normal.:

What of your parents, Sianni? What do you feel toward them?

:...that is a difficult question, Kyn. Emotions are never easily described.:

Then show me. Who are your parents, Sianni?

:You should not linger upon that question; you are in a unique position that few find themselves in. You can choose who to accept as part of your family, rather than having them chosen for you by the happenstance of birth.:

And you are avoiding the issue.

:I am not.:

Yes, you are. I know you.

:Ha! Think you're so smart now once you've got your little domestic dispute sorted out? ...what is it?:

Where is he? I remember seeing him, feeling him grab my hands...but now...

:It was only a hallucination, most likely caused by the withdrawal.:

I have not hallucinated before.

:Nadia says it can happen. Those that frequently inhale the powder made from a cannus stem and try to stop suddenly have been known to hallucinate. Since we know nothing of the mixture the duke gave you, it seems the most logical explanation.:

Despite a single dose?

:You've been drugged nearly all your life. It is hard to discern exactly what effect something would have on you.:

And Nadia has...?

:She said, if you really wanted to, you could stay up the entire night skulking about like a burglar or yodeling to the moon with the latest healing session she just gave you. But she also mentioned that she'll be sleeping in due to said healing session, and will be in no mood to pick up whatever pieces are left when you crash in the morning. That was not an exact quote, by the way.:

I would have been disappointed in her otherwise.

Yes, it might seem horribly out of place. Yes, it most likely doesn't make any sense. Yes, some things might appear to have been explained a little too patly...but have you ever known me to take the easy way out even if it were shoved down my throat? =P This *does* have its own place - and as the 'title' suggests, we'll be heading back to our irregularly scheduled programming next chapter.

P.S. I'll be lumping the responses to the reviews with the next part! (Well, except that I do have to mention that the idea for all this sprang directly from SCWLC's comments - I'll respond in full in the next part when I'm more coherent.) This literally sprang out of nowhere at 2 am after 4 hours of sleep, and though I don't think it likely to happen - who knows? I might read it again with my head screwed on straight and decide to delete the whole darned thing. =P