DISCLAIMER: I do not own The Wheel of Time or any of its characters.
A/N: Hey all! Back again with a Wheel of Time fic. I started writing this in February and figured if I don't post it now I never will!
This fic began as a series of conversations following on from the end of season one, and they culminated in this angsty thing which is a bit slow but hopefully soft with room for healing in places. I haven't read the Wheel of Time - yet! - nor do I know much about Robert Jordan's world (except what I've researched whilst trying to avoid book spoilers). I'm simply elaborating on the Amazon series.
Please read and review if you have the time. I would love to know what you think. There'll be more chapters to come soon. As always, enjoy :) x
POWERLESS
It should not come as a surprise when her body fails her. When she sinks to the ground beside the rotting foliage and considers letting exhaustion embrace her bones. Overhead, the ever-creeping skein of gnarled branches scatters what scarce daylight remains, the warmth of the desert sun fragmented into a shallow breeze.
Lan is some way ahead, sword in hand, quietly re-tracing their footsteps. Confident, resigned steps that now, in treacherous hindsight, appear arrogant and foolish.
Dragging herself forward over the twisting roots, Moiraine pushes herself to her knees. Finds a feeble handhold and hoists herself up. Considers, for a time innumerable, the prospect of allowing the Blight to swallow her whole. As if perishing here in this disorientating labyrinth of corruption might be easier than facing what lies ahead.
For her mind still burns with what the Dark One has done. The indescribable fate he has sentenced her to.
The unthinkable.
She might have remained there, forever inanimate, were it not for the movements of her Warder. A man whose mind and heart she has come to know as intimately as her own. A King with neither crown nor Kingdom. A friend who has never once left her side these last twenty years. Even now, after all she has done, and failed to do, he is there, forging a new path for them both.
The second time she stumbles she does not rise. The dry air bids her sink further into the dust, the weave of the Pattern thin and untouchable as she contemplates the shell of a life she must now persuade herself to live. Here, in the tangled, unforgiving maze that is the Blight, there is only the cold grime beneath her palms, the looming darkness at the corners of her mind, unguarded now against the invisible threats of this world, and an unbearable silence where Lan had once lived.
It will be a miracle if they ever find their way back to Fal Dara without the One Power to guide them.
His hand settles on her arm, forcing her to look on him, gaze soft and stern and inexplicably unreadable as he lifts her from the ground.
"We cannot rest here, Moiraine."
Arm about her waist he pushes them onward, the growing night quickening their pace. All the while the ground threatens to give way beneath their feet, sickly vines promise entrapment, and the distant howls of fell things declare the Dark One's growing power and the demise of all that dares to stand in its way.
Doubt rushes in. A flood of questions that have no answer tug at her conscious, demanding thought and consideration she has no wish to give. The path leans and curls through creaking thickets and ensnaring brush, disappearing beneath thick patches of mud. Already the Blight has surged forward, obscuring their previous tracks.
Nothing is familiar.
"It can't be much further." Lan swings his sword through a canopy of slippery vines, consolidating his words carefully. Optimism here is dangerous, companion almost to folly. "Three hours, at best, before we reach the edge of the Blight. And then on to Fal Dara."
If the city still stands.
He does not know the way, and she is no more capable of guiding them to safety. The One Power feathers around her trembling fingertips, a relentless, taunting pull to the Light. Her skin is ablaze with its presence, its ghost-like embrace, held forever beyond her touch. Forever out of her reach.
They cannot afford to be hesitant, nor can they hasten to misjudge. All is grey and still, unnatural in the extreme. The sparse light that illuminates their surroundings is vague and slivered, leaving no tell of its origin, and there is no sun to guide them. Neither moon nor stars.
How she misses those cold winter nights spent in her saddle traversing plains by starlight with Lan at her side.
How simple life had seemed back then.
Again comes the howling, the shrieks of shadows unseen, spawning from the Dark One's seat. Lan's steps are quick and steady, traversing the unpredictable ground ahead with skill, anticipating any upcoming dangers, no matter how insignificant. Hers, in comparison, are a burden.
The power of the darkness in these lands weighs heavily, poisoning the air, engulfing all that lives and breathes. Each movement takes every ounce of concentration she has left, even with her Warder's hand to guide her.
She wonders if he can feel it. The Dark. Tearing apart the Pattern piece by piece and unweaving what should be. His arm about her waist tethers her to the present, pulling her thoughts away from the Eye, but nothing, not even his warmth, can draw away the cool emptiness embedded in her soul.
Only when Lan at last sights Malkier to their right does the future begin to brighten.
"We cannot rest for long," he says, eyes flitting over their surroundings, hand hovering over his sword, never letting his guard down for a moment.
It's all the permission she needs to sink to the ground once more and draw up her knees, absently observing the slow emptying of her energy reserves. Her nails claw at the folds of her skirt, clutching the fabric tight to prevent the endless shaking. For whilst her mind is beginning to understand, her body cannot yet accept the truth.
"I do not ask you to come with me," Moiraine whispers, the hollowness of the hour bidding her speak.
Lan turns, a curious look on his face as he comes to kneel beside her.
"You do not have to," he says. "You never have. I would follow you anywhere, Moiraine Sedai-"
"Don't-"
She bristles at her name, cutting him off, unwilling to let him purge himself further. But Lan is insistent, drawing her chilled hands toward him, opening her fists and threading his through, stilling the twitching of her fingers.
"Anywhere. The Blight. The Eye. The ends of the Earth and to hell and back, if you so wish. To whatever end the Pattern weaves. Wherever this mission takes us."
"You can't protect me if you can't feel me," she says, echoing his words from that night. "And I can't protect you if..." Her eyes close, searching for something unattainable, and when they re-open they are grey with grief. "I can't protect you, Lan."
"I'm not asking you to," he replies softly.
There will be time enough for his feelings to surface later. To understand the well of loss and anger that simmers in the pit of his stomach. She is not herself. His Aes Sedai. She is quiet, distant, her expression quavering with uncertainty even as he takes her hand and leads them onward.
Only when they have at last found the edge of the Blight does she stop, her face cast in shadow, gazing upon a horizon he can neither see nor comprehend. Her thoughts are veiled, the place she had inhabited in his mind quiet and still. But he recognises the subtle flickers of emotion that sweep across her features.
The strength of their bond, though masked - Light willing - remains.
"What is it?"
"I shouldn't be here," Moiraine says with quiet desolation. "I should be..."
She cannot utter the word.
"But you're not." Lan's fingers splay across her face to prove his point, to keep her, exhausted and disillusioned as she is, with him. "Your task is not yet finished, Moiraine. By a miracle, by the mercy of the Wheel, you are still here."
"The Wheel does not have mercy."
"Doesn't it?"
He holds her hand lest she should contemplate returning to the Blight, or concoct some unfathomably dangerous plan that holds little regard for her own life. One wrong step and he knows she will begin to push him away, believing him immune to all that she feels. And so he holds her hand, tethering her to him, to this reality, for fear she might relinquish her seemingly fragile hold on it.
He does not need her to admit or justify anything. One look at her resigned, unblinking expression reveals more than words could ever relay.
"Will you forgive me?"
Lan sighs inaudibly, refraining from reply until she steps out of the shadows and away from the threat of the dark, grey-tinged earth.
"There is nothing to forgive."
"Lan-"
He refuses to listen to any protest on her part, having neither the energy to argue nor answers to the questions that rest unspoken between them.
"I never imagined-"
"I know."
He has had hours to contemplate this. To decide how to deal with his anxiety and fear - but that had all changed upon finding her at the Eye. Alive. Bruised. Bordering on broken with her will hanging by a thread.
He knows that she would never have masked their bond with any other intention than to protect him. That none of this had been precedented, or borne from selfish need. He knows too that she never expected to return from the Eye of the World.
"I know, Moiraine."
The journey back is littered with the scars of war: jagged earth, casualties too numerous to count and a menagerie of unrecognisable shards where bolts of lightning had struck the sand. Only when the sun begins to dip beneath the horizon do they set eyes upon Fal Dara, seemingly whole and untarnished by the Dark. And so it is under the cover of restless night that they finally enter the city.
There is no joy in their reunion with the remaining Ta'veren, no words of comfort shared. All are exhausted, wearied by the lingering memories of battle. Here and there the injured lie, awaiting whatever treatment the Wisdom can provide. For whilst Fal Dara's walls may have endured, the days have not been without great sacrifice.
"Where's Rand?" is the first question that leaves Nynaeve's lips upon their return, her eyes as quick and sharp as any dagger. She refuses to look at him, to shew any relief at his return, intent instead on his Aes Sedai.
The torches in the stone hallway flicker under the watch of a shallow midnight breeze, telling of an unsettling stillness in the lands beyond the barred gates.
Egwene's hand curls tight around the Wisdom's elbow, her eyes wide with sudden anxiety. Perrin's eyes, in contrast, harbour a quiet recognition, greeting them only with a nod.
"Lan?" Nynaeve's unwavering attention fixes on him, desperation betraying her otherwise stoic countenance. "What happened?"
A gentle hesitation; the Wisdom's patience hangs by a solitary thread. He hasn't the words to convey such terrible truths, cannot give her the information she seeks. For he does not yet know himself all that transpired at the Eye of the World. Only that the Dragon Reborn, the one soul they had rested all their hopes upon, is now lost to them. And that he must somehow find the courage to tell the woman before him that he had failed.
"Tell me you didn't leave him there." Nynaeve turns to the sand-strewn Aes Sedai beside him, ignoring his pleading look. "Tell me he's alive."
But Moiraine, bound to speak only the truth, cannot do as the Wisdom bids. And so she gives her the same answer she had given him all those hours ago. In that same tone. Steady and broken all at once.
That Rand was gone.
The silence that follows carries all the weight of a brewing thunderstorm. The acute familiarity of unspeakable loss. It lingers as a stranger in their midst, beckoning ghosts from the brink of recollection. An intractable revelation that should never have come to pass.
Yet the Wheel had weaved, and the Wheel had willed.
"You said you would bring him back," Nynaeve seethes, but the accusation, he knows, is only a mask for her simmering grief.
In vain, the Warder tries to catch the Wisdom's unseeing gaze. Waits, in those few painful heartbeats, for the imminent outpouring of her unrivalled temper. But it does not come as he expects.
Bones shaking as fear merges with anguish, he senses how Nynaeve struggles to understand the onslaught of emotion and power kindling at her fingertips. And though he cannot see the tendrils of light that wrap around her palms, he observes their hasty dissipation as Egwene swiftly takes her friend's hands in her own. Quells, for now, the raging power of the sun.
Perrin, for his part, remains silent, his broad shoulders slumped, eyes ever-watchful, attempting to absorb all that has occurred. There is a strained edge to his voice when at last he speaks, a faraway glint in his golden stare: "What else aren't you telling us?"
An inaudible sigh passes Moiraine's lips. Where he should have felt her mind at work, where carefully controlled emotion might have warred with a valiant attempt to reign in a torrent of spiralling thought, there is a disarming emptiness. Only the whitening of her knuckles as she clenches and unclenches her fists, and the echoes of a persistent tremor gives him any true indication.
"I can no longer touch the Source," Moiraine answers, her voice clear and concise and devoid of anything but the calm tone of control they have come to expect.
Egwene lifts her face from her hands in shock. Nynaeve's frown twists into an expression steeped in surprised sadness, her inclination to heal and mend momentarily overcoming the demands of grief.
"What does that mean?" the Wisdom asks unsteadily.
"It means things are going to be very different from now on. For all of us." A shared glance; an indiscernible agreement. "You each have a long journey ahead, and the best thing you can all do, right now, is rest."
He should say something, should offer some form of small reassurance, but Nynaeve is already spinning on her heels, muttering something about returning to her patients, and disappears from his sight.
"Rand's not dead," Egwene stammers, blinking away tears that glitter furiously in the ebbing torchlight. "He... He can't be. I won't believe it. I won't!"
A breath later her voice breaks and she too flees leaving Perrin in her stead.
"What can I do?" the Blacksmith asks eventually.
"Look after them," is Lan's reply.
Only when they are alone does Moiraine attempt to move, forcing whatever strength remains into her muscles, but exhaustion will not allow it. His hand finds her elbow, supporting her weight though his thoughts remain far away.
"I should go after her," Lan murmurs, almost to himself, the words presenting themselves as a wondering question.
"No." Moiraine instructs. "Give her a moment." Her hand comes to rest upon his shoulder, eyes flickering shut. "She needs time to herself."
His focus returns just as her knees begin to give way, sweeping her up into his weary arms, head resting against his chest.
"I cannot help them, Lan."
Even without the bond he can read every faint line and crease, every flicker of suppressed emotion that crosses her pale expression. And he knows she speaks not only of the Two Rivers children, but of all those injured in the battle for Fal Dara.
It is but a mere matter of time before they will ask her - one of the Aes Sedai renowned for their healing powers - to strengthen and support, to weave muscle and sinew and bone. And she will be powerless to do so.