The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legends fade to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the First Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long passed, a wind rose in the Himalayas. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
Thalia wants to take him home, but she's not sure she knows where that is anymore, or if she has a right to one. She would ask Zahir where he wants to go, but he hasn't said anything since his voice broke on the second syllable of She's gone and he only looks at her with a vacant stare which holds neither answers nor questions.
So she takes them to a shitty motel outside of what's left of Portland. Zahir has no complaints when she leads him into the dingy room and sits him down on the bed. Zahir is not currently much of anything at all.
Once she's sure he's not going to do anything--as sure as she can be, anyway--Thalia calls Zeyn.
"You and your brother are currently on every tv channel that exists," the other woman says in lieu of a greeting. Thalia makes a noise like a broken tea kettle, but says nothing. There's nothing to say to that. Zeyn knows that and barrels on, relentless. "You're the hero, apparently. Stopping him. Fox won't give you even that, but they're focused more on him as the villain."
Another broken tea kettle noise. Zeyn pauses for a moment, and then, softer: "Where are you? I'll come."
Thalia can't remember the address, but gives her the name of the motel. Zeyn hangs up without another word and leaves Thalia to stare at the yellow-splotched wall. Her hand itches for the tv remote and her mouth twists at the thought. She glances at Zahir, dull-eyed and motionless, and glances away. Not yet. Not yet.
Only one truth remained when Alya checked into the nearest lodgings within her vicinity. She should have bonded Sophia, even if it meant risking Alya’s own destruction in the process. That’s not what she wanted, but it’s only her loss that makes Alya realize that she values her friend’s life over her freedom.
The storm has passed, and there is no longer any point in putting up any more lightningrods. When she detects a trace of saidar, it’s clinical procedure that brings her to a motel room that isn’t hers. She raises a hand to knock before noticing that the door is not locked. She opens the door and blinks when she sees a haggard looking man sitting on the bed. Her grip on the doorknob tightens until metal and flesh may as well have been fused.
Alya slams the door into the wall so hard that it could have broken from its hinges. To her great dissatisfaction, it doesn’t. But there’s a different hinge that she wants to break. Namely, the Philosopher’s jaw. She sees Thalia, but she registers more as a physical obstacle than the Dragon, or even her friend.
One of the disadvantages of being a bubbly older sisterly figure is that Alya hasn’t learned how to harness rage. The adult in every situation is never supposed to be angry. There are no adults here. There are only children who have seen more war than they have earned.
“She believed in you, how dare you!” She doesn’t even recognize that she’s being unfair. Why should she? He had all the advantages that Alya didn’t. Advantages like the feelings of a woman that she would never have.
Now, no one will have her.
“She loved you.” She shrieks with uncharacteristic bitterness, loaded with all the anger that she could only ever direct at herself before now. If the man seems unusually quiet, then Alya doesn't notice. Not after he's taken Sophia and the city that she died in. "You’d choose the Dark One over Sophia?”
The thought makes her unbearably sad. She seemed to be the Healer’s better half. Consistency. Strength. All of the things that were always conditional for Alya.
Even her love, it seems.
She doesn’t bother with weaves. A punch comes faster than an arrow.
She's on her feet, a blur of movement the moment Alya raises her fist, but she's not fast enough to put her body between Zahir and the impact. She should have channeled, Thalia realizes a moment too late. That lack of instinct is going to get her killed one day.
But not today. The thought comes again: not yet. Thalia slams up a wall of Air between her brother and Alya. Zahir doesn't seem to have noticed Alya punching him, much less her dramatic entrance. Thalia envies him his disconnect and feels scraped over raw coals by it. If he would blink at least. If he would just look at her--
"What do you think you're doing?" She tries to keep her voice ice cold and fails miserably. She snarls instead. That's her brother with a bruise blooming on his jaw, to match every other wound she gave him today. "What do you think you're saying?"
With the Power coursing through her, every sense heightened, she can hear the delicate click of high heels making their way to the door. Her heart pounds for a moment, but she doesn't look away from Alya and the woman outside pauses at the door before making her way down the hall. Not Zeyn. Not that she could have gotten here so fast, but Thalia had thought, maybe, hoped--
Even through her rage, Alya can’t stand beating up a guy who won’t even punch back. That's his fault too. “Get up.” She snarls, as if he was doing this on purpose. “Get up so that I can hit you properly!”
The wall is an unwelcome obstruction that gives her space that she does not want. She claws at the surface, as if her fingers can find purchase in -- well, air. Once she’s calmed a little, Alya finds it more difficult for her to blame Thalia. They are both older sisters, and that’s not a kinship that needs to be explained in words.
Then again, Larsa isn’t public terrorist number one.
She’s not going to be an adult about Sophia’s death. That’s what’s been killing her all along. Not even the Healer can help someone who doesn’t want to be saved. Except she did. Sophia wanted to be saved more than anyone.
She picked this man’s promise, and not even Alya can see strength in what he is. She wants to be stronger than Zahir so that she can say that Sophia made the wrong choice.
“Aren't you gonna make some excuses? You’re just gonna sit there and let your sister protect you? After what you’ve done? How do you even have the balls--” Except he doesn’t, or they wouldn’t be in this situation right now. “You break half of Portland, Sophia gets to pay for your mistakes, and Thalia cleans up afterward?”
There's a wasp nest in her head, buzzing and buzzing and buzzing and Thalia can't think past it. She can feel the Power slipping away from her, water through her fingers, like it did in the earliest days, when she had no idea what was happening to her or why.
Thalia's head flies back like someone caught her with a solid uppercut and in fairness that's exactly what it feels like. Something slices through her wall of Air, the flows snapping into her and she's angry enough to turn on Alya and blame her, except for that she has no sense of what did it. Which means saidin. Which means Zahir.
He's on his feet. He looks dead on his feet, eviscerated, but he's standing and he's looking at Alya with the first spark of life in his eyes she's seen in hours.
"I'll fight if you want to fight," he says softly. She has to strain to hear. She also suspects his words aren't meant for her. "It might even be fair now that Thalia's thrashed me up and down half the city."
All that the Philosopher has proved to Alya is that she’s not fighting a corpse. There’s not enough satisfaction in that. She's not perturbed when he accepts - they were always supposed to be fighting the shadow. This is just an extension of what's been coming all along.
Their fight isn’t conductive to anything, but it feels right. Maybe that’s what’s actually important.
"We are not going to destroy what’s left of Portland.” Reason hasn’t failed her yet. A portal slides out in front of her, directly parallel to both herself and Zahir. “Fifty miles north should bring us out of the residential areas.”
She's not like him, and she has to choose wisdom where the Philosopher fails.
"Neither of you are fighting, here or there," Thalia growls, and slams a shield between Zahir and the Source. He'd been right when he said she thrashed him up and down Portland, but he'd given back as good as he got and she's exhausted down to her bones. She's amazed she even managed to cut him off when he's already holding the Power. He must be as beaten as she feels.
She's even more amazed when he rips open his own gateway. Snow blows into the room on gusts of freezing wind but Thalia barely notices. "That's impossible," she says. Zahir doesn't seem to hear her. The gateway is there. She can see it. So is her shield on him. He didn't break it. It's just as if--
Thalia doesn't even know what it's just as if. She just knows that it's impossible. Zahir apparently has no regard for impossibility because he merely steps through his own gateway without a word.
"Alya," she manages to grind out. "Alya, don't do this. Something's wrong. He's channeling and I shielded him."
When Zahir steps through the gateway, Alya doesn’t see the impending danger. She sees instead the very real possibility that the Philosopher will escape. Is he really going to fight her? Alya is fighting because of Sophia. She’s not so sure what his incentive is.
She lets go of her own weave without tying it. Instead, she follows him through the portal as if she were retracing Sophia’s footsteps. This is the closest that she will ever get to burying her body.
-
She’s slipping in and out of consciousness, and holding the One Power is the only action that’s keeping her awake. The wind bites sharper and the ice-snow grinds against her skin, but it’s kept her alive for several hours now. Sophia shakes her head stiffly to rid herself of some of the snow, but it comes at a vicious cost. When her neck is exposed to raw wind, she whimpers and considers going to sleep. No matter how quickly she dies after that, there was still a greater chance of being found by a Dreamer than a wandering hitchhiker.
She thinks about what she would tell the Dreamer before she died. I was Xiayi Rosenburg’s daughter, and I was the one who broke her favorite vase. I was given the “Human Vulture Award” at the office for “Most Likely to Eat Anything”. My favorite color is pink. I cried over the 1997 Titanic. I was more girl than king. I miss Zahir. I'm sorry if he misses me too.
Her thoughts are interrupted by what feels like a rude wallop over the head. Sophia lands face-first into the snow. ZAHIR BRAND
He exits the gateway with much less confidence than he entered, stumbling in the snow. The wind steals his sight. His bones crack and freeze beneath the weight of the True Power. Its cold makes the blizzard around him seem tame. Its heat makes him sweat. Everything is a white roar. His foot catches something on the ground and he goes down to one knee. The fight he'd been spoiling for with Alya, the remnants of life, leak back out of him with uncanny ease. In a moment, he can't remember what force even lead him here, much less summon it again.
He's tired and empty. There's a hollow space beneath his ribs. There's noise from behind him, a voice rising against the howling wind. Thalia, he assumes. Her name is warm in his mind. His own bites with a jagged edge. He sits in the snow and waits for Alya's blow to fall patiently, the wet cold seeping through his jeans. He doubts she'll make it quick, but he doesn't think he wants it to be quick.
Moridin rouses in his mind at that thought, a choir of hissing snakes. Shunting him to a dark corner, muting him, is easier than it's ever been before. This was the trick all along, Zahir thinks with wry detachment. I had to be just as hopeless, that's all. A simple trick. How did I never realize it before?
-
Thalia bludgeons her way through the snow when she sees Zahir go down and she nearly trips over the same flaw in the ground. Which is not a flaw in the ground, but a person. She crouches in the snow with barely more grace than her brother and brushes iced strands of hair back from a face she didn't think she'd ever see again. Not intact, anyway. Not still breathing.
She spins around and chokes on a curse when she sees that Zahir's gateway has closed. She doesn't know this place. Skimming it is then. Or waiting.
"Alya," she shouts into the storm. It's impossible to see half a foot in front of her. She doesn't even know if the other woman can hear her. She reaches for the Power and feels the cold slide off of her like hands on glass. It'll kill her if she stays, but she won't feel her death. Small mercies. Small torments.
She uses Air to throw up walls of snow around the three of them--it's only a second's hesitation about including Zahir and the shame burns her throat but what did he do--and a weave of Fire to warm the air inside of the igloo. It's an igloo, she supposes. She remembers reading about them. She remembers doing this, in another life, and swallows the memory down.
“Say something!” Is he just going to keep running away? Alya feels her fist unclench at her side. She wants to fight an enemy. A darkfriend. Not someone who can’t decide if he’s man or a shell. “Defend yourself! Tell me that you loved her back at least...” She crumbles on the last note. He lost her. He’s lost her and he doesn’t even know what he’s given up.
(And Alya did?)
Her mouth feels dry. Sophia deserved better. Knowing didn’t make her feel good. Knowing didn’t bring her any closure.
(Alya wasn’t even there when she died. It made the Philosopher that much more unforgivable. It made her that much more unforgivable.)
She starts crying and she hates it. She hates it in general, but especially in front of this man. Alya lets go of the One Power. She falls to her knees, ice crystals embedding into her jean legs. Thalia brings them to a hearth, but not so much a home. Not when the Darkfriend is here and Sophia isn’t.
-
Thalia is the only reason that the sleeping Sophia does not die of hypothermia while the channellers angst over her death.
Thalia feels the air grow warm and sticky around her and presses the back of her hand to Sophia's cheek. Her skin is still cold, but in a way that feels less like death. Zahir and Alya have probably forgotten, in their grief, but there are people who care about Sophia besides those madly in love with her. She's a friend. Thalia is glad she's alive.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket and the fact is so disconnected from her current reality that Thalia lets the call go to voicemail. It beeps. She jerks like falling out of a dream and pulls it out. Zeyn has sent one very flat text message: you're not here.
No, no, she fucking isn't. Thalia laughs like a hyena at the joke and then staggers to her feet with Sophia in her arms. Creator, the ice on her must be doubling her weight because Thalia's knees are buckling. She spins open a gateway that leads only into blackness, and an ascending set of stairs. It's going to be a very long walk.
Leaving them both behind is tempting--Sophia's lack of corpsehood has ground the edge of Thalia's patience down to nothing--but instead she turns and weaves Fire and Air till her voice makes the ground shake.
"Sophia and I are going back to the motel. With or without you."
Alya’s not sure why Thalia is laughing. She’s not sure why any audio outside of her brain is allowed to continue running. She wipes her tears and sniffles loudly, her chest cavity hollow. She turns around to tell Thalia that neither of them forced her to come in the first place--
She freezes. The woman in her arms is still easily recognizable. Sophia had lost her hat during the transition, but she’s still wearing her iconic blue overcoat.
Sophia wakes up slowly, but she tenses immediately after crossing a specific consciousness threshold. She feels the presence of Saidar before she registers anything else. It’s powerful and warm. It can only be--
Even while near death, being carried by Thalia is overwhelmingly embarrassing. “Thali-- I can walk” She protests hoarsely as she tries to blink the blurriness away: the most unconvincing act that anyone has probably seen from her.
It occurs to her that she must sound terribly ungrateful after being saved from certain death.
“Thank you...” She trails off and thinks about how to best maintain her dignity under these circumstances, blissfully unaware of the stupidity a few feet away from them. "I'm sorry for the trouble." A part of Sophia's brain is still half-convinced that they're somewhere in the Yukon territory.
Fuck you, Zahir thinks without heat when Thalia speaks, but in the next moment he stumbles to his feet. Sophia's voice carries across the space Thalia has carved out of the wind and snow. His body feels like it doesn't belong to him, and not for the usual reasons.
Thalia shifts Sophia in her arms, tries to make sure she's comfortable. "You're no trouble at all," she says, her voice amused and affectionate. "Trust me, I wish everyone else here had it together like you."
Speaking of. She steps backwards through the gateway, glaring into the white noise. "Alya, we could use some Healing," she bites off. "I don't know how long this walk is going to be."
She wants some water. She wants a sandwich. Most of all, she wants some answers. “How long was I gone?”
“Too long.” Sophia makes a startled expression when she notices the wetness on Alya’s face.
That’s right. She is their ally. She can’t die so selfishly.
“Don’t get up.” She holds Sophia’s hand like it’s a form of redemption. Like healing her friend can undo the damage that Alya had torn into her own heart. The weave mends her broken cells and tissues, but not her exhaustion.
“Thank you, Alya.”
Sophia is desperate to escape the bridal carry of a woman who’s even shorter than her. Her first step is wobbly, but she finds her center of gravity quickly enough.
She looks up from her boots to Zahir’s face. That’s not something that she was prepared for. The last time that she had seen him, she had left with her electric toothbrush. No, that’s not right. The last time she had seen him --
Salt-and-pepper gravel. Creaking steel. Breaking glass. Groaning concrete. A sickening vertigo from the ground up.
[please save me]
(he won’t, remember?)
[ i am going to leave this place ]
(much better.)
She wonders if she would still be alive if her faith in Zahir remained intact. In a sense, it did. Her faith is a light refracted through a thin sheet of glass.
Sophia didn’t want to see him. Not so soon after their last conversation. But she had seen his face when the skies started falling on her head, and that made all the difference in the world. That, and Sophia draws a very different conclusion from the raggedness of Zahir and Thalia's clothes.
“I’m sorry for worrying you.” She stands with considerably more poise than she did while her joints were frozen over. “Thank you for your concern.”
It’s a hard bet for which of the three channellers are going to be the first to tell her the real reason that the Philosopher looks as if he’s been dragged across half of Portland.
[notes: wow uh. this is not the emotional direction i anticipated this post going]
Zahir thinks that if he were dreaming Thalia and Alya wouldn't be here. They wouldn't be in nowhere, Oregon, freezing to death. There wouldn't be blood on his face, on his hands, or char and soot settled like a veil over his clothes. He knows when he's dreaming and he knows when he's awake and this is not a dream.
It's not a dream, and so it cuts like a knife.
"Sophia," he says. His voice breaks on her name again like it did hours ago, when Thalia held him in the middle of a ruined street and let him grieve. His hand raises, shaking, and he pulls it back as if burned when he realizes he was going to touch her face. "Sophia, I--"
He doesn't know what comes after that. He cuts off. A mass of words flutter like trapped birds in his chest, but he can't make any of them out. He doesn't have any language for this. There can be no language for this, he thinks. This is beyond--
"We can do this in the motel," Thalia says into the silence he left behind. "We can...figure out what to do there. If there is anything to be done."
She turns her back on all three of them and walks up the stone stairs. They stretch without beginning or ending into the darkness, but it's a shorter walk than she expected when the other end of the gateway comes into sight and she can step through into the relative warmth of the motel room.
