He's absolutely not confident that his stomach won't betray him again considering that he's felt vaguely queasy the whole time they've been sitting here, but Verso doesn't dare share that.
Wry: "I was more hoping for a rousing game of cards, or maybe tic-tac-toe." There's humor in his tone, but there's a kernel of truth in that joke, and his disappointment that there's more work ahead is mostly but not entirely imperceptible. There's been a lot of darkness in his life, yes, but there's also been a lot of boredom, and some of his most pleasant memories were made trying to stave that boredom off. Giving Monoco an experimental haircut (a success in his eyes, at least) or trying to teach Esquie to play chess (doomed to fail from the beginning; his giant hands were too big to properly move the pieces). It would have been nice to pass the time the way that he used to.
But he can also understand her paranoia—better than ever now that she's shared the assassination attempt at sea with him—and sympathize with her desire to do something about it. It's the pragmatic thing to do, chatting sailors up and seeing what they reveal. He'd offer to do it alone, but as has been made abundantly clear by the conversation of this morning, he lacks a nuanced view of Rosharan culture. It stands to reason that he might miss one of those truths slipping in, overlook something of importance.
"But it'd be a poor husband who let you talk to handsome sailors all alone, I think."
Jasnah opens her mouth to correct him — handsome? — then closes it again. A flicker crosses her face, subtle as a ripple in still water: not defensiveness — simply mild, private confusion at the idea that any of the crew qualifies as aesthetically remarkable. She glances, just once, toward a knot of sailors tightening rigging on the far deck.
Objectively? Strong, weathered, broadly built men, some with striking features. But Jasnah’s mind sorts them with the same pragmatic efficiency she applies to ledgers. Competent, likely; handsome, irrelevant.
She lets the matter pass. "Then you'd better come along," she says simply.
The next hours are spent drifting from one end of the deck to the other, speaking to sailors coming off watch or stowing equipment. Jasnah organizes them the way she organizes sources in an archive: a Thaylen man with a scar across his jaw, who swears he saw a santhid breach once and calls it a sign of good luck; a young darkeyed swabbie frightened of unusual spren that appeared during the last storm; an older helmsman who recounts rumors of strange tides and ships that vanished into fog without ever returning. Jasnah listens patiently, gently sifting superstition from pattern... ultimately, there isn't anything too odd about a woman behaving scholarly.
By noon, she's pieced together a compass of oddities: sightings of deepwater spren, shifts in migration patterns, and a rumbling undercurrent of something that feels...off. Not proof. But enough to murmur to Ivory about later.
Near the top of the afternoon, when the sun has climbed enough to warm the deck but not yet force them into shade, Jasnah finds herself standing alone with Verso at a quiet stretch of railing near the stern. The sea stretches wide and glittering behind them; most of the crew is gathered forward, repairing a torn sail.
Jasnah leans an elbow lightly against the rail. The wind tugs the edge of her scarf. The ship hums beneath their feet. When she speaks, her voice is quieter. Contemplative, edged with a rare curiosity because it seems to exist without agenda.
"What is your honest opinion of my planet?"
She keeps her eyes on the horizon. The faintest line of tension at the corner of her mouth. So often, that's how she talks about the topic. Not simply other worlds, but planets.
"There are so many others. Whole other societies. I know that now. So I want to hear how mine seems...to someone with the vantage to compare."
Verso is leaning over the railing, too, when she asks her question. Facing the sea rather than the ship, eyes on the horizon to quell any lingering nausea. It works, sort of. He hasn't thrown up yet, anyway.
"You want my opinion?" he asks, a little surprised. He'd expected her to consider his opinion on Roshar to be uneducated at best. Ignorant. There's clearly so much he doesn't yet understand about this place.
But she's asking, so he considers it. "I think—"
It's strange. Foreign. Difficult to understand, at times. He'd always felt a background buzz of wrongness in Lumière, but this is different. He knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he doesn't belong here. Despite that, it's wonderful. He's felt a sense of unburdenedness here that he's never felt before, ever. Admittedly, any other world would have done that for him, but he finds himself somewhat relieved that it was this one.
"I think I'm lucky to have landed in your lap." Metaphorically, dieu merci.
Jasnah doesn't look at him when she answers. She keeps her gaze pinned to the horizon, its hard, merciless line.
"Verso."
A single word. Soft but unmistakably corrective.
"That was not an opinion of my world.That was an opinion of your circumstance within it."
She speaks with an exacting and sharp clarity. The kind she uses when a junior scholar answers the question they wished had been asked, not the one that was. Only then does she shift her attention to him, her expression clouded but undeniably intent.
"I asked because I want to know how Roshar appears to someone who does not take its highs and lows for granted." A pause, barely longer than a breath. "Someone unattached."
Her gloved fingers trace the railing absently, as though drawing constellations on the iron.
"I have heard stories," she admits, voice quiet enough that the wind nearly swallows it. "Not just the ones you've told me about Lumière. But other planets. Other societies. Scadrial. Nalthis. Sel."
The words land gently — but carries weight. She watches whether they mean anything to him. They are planets she thinks might be stronger than hers. Or hungrier. She lets out a slow exhale, a controlled release of breath that doesn't quite mask the tension beneath it.
In the end, can she even trust the source of those stories? After all, Hoid had once openly confessed that he would let Roshar burn if it meant sparing the rest of the Cosmere. And Jasnah can't actually blame him. Hasn't that been her philosophy, too? Always act in light of the greatest good. No matter what (or who) you have to sacrifice to do so.
"Oh, well, you should have told me there was a wrong way to share my opinion."
It's sarcastic, but not actually irritated. It's just a little silly— she'd asked for his opinion, and then got annoyed when he didn't give it in the exact way that she wanted. He turns to shoot her a Look™, eyebrows raised and head slightly tilted.
"If you're looking for an unbiased assessment, I'm afraid you'll have to look further. My opinion of your world is inherently linked to my circumstances in it."
He's foreign, yes, and has a different perspective, but that doesn't make him any more impartial. If he'd come to this place and had nothing, if Jasnah weren't interested enough in him to befriend—or whatever she might call it—him on the basis of gaining more information, his opinion would be quite different. But obviously, personal preferences aren't what she's looking for. He thinks about the names she just rattled off, then furrows his brow.
Jasnah's fingers go still on the railing — only for a moment, but enough to reveal that his question struck nearer the bone than she'd intended to show.
"Worried?" she echoes, tasting the word. Then her gaze returns to the horizon, where sea and sky meet in a clean, pitiless seam.
"I suppose I am. Roshar has been...reset. Again and again. Every time our nations advance, a Desolation sweeps across the world and whatever remains must rebuild itself on scorched stone."
Her gloved hand taps the railing once. There is so much more to the story, but she doesn't want to distract from her main thrust.
"Other planets have not endured this cycle. You may not yet understand the scale of that."
Her voice lowers.
"The Cosmere is shaped by powers far older than any kingdom. Shards — so called because they are fragments of something that might once have been a god. They rule planets. Shape them. Empower them."
It still feels strange, speaking of divinity with an atheist's composure. Stranger still knowing her only source is a trickster who calls himself a storyteller more readily than a prophet. Wit called it a god. Wit claimed he and sixteen others killed that god. What does an atheist do with a story like that?
"There were three Shards on Roshar," she continues. "Their conflict — petty or profound, who can say — sparked the Desolations that shattered our progress each time we began to climb."
Her jaw sets, soft but resolute.
"When you hear a Rosharan speak of the Almighty, they mean one of those three: Honor. But there is also Cultivation. And Odium."
Jasnah meets his eyes directly.
"Your Paintress, I suspect, is another. The Shard that claims your world. Treats it like a plaything, as all Shards seem to do."
"—Maybe," Verso says with a shrug. Noncommittal. "But I don't think so. I think she's... something else."
Aline is a god, but not in the way that Jasnah imagines. Out in the real world, there's still so much that she can't do. It's only in her playground, on her Canvas, that she has real power. Whatever a Shard is, it sounds like something infinitely more threatening.
Or maybe this is all just someone else's Canvas, the Shards someone else's family, destroying lives over their own personal squabbles. Who can say?
"It's not perfect," he admits. "But I think it's admirable that you've rebuilt time and time again, after all of that destruction." He worries at his lower lip, eyes on the sparkling blue horizon once more. "It would be easy to give up. To just lie down and... wait for it to all be over." He would. "But you persist."
So, that's his opinion on Roshar. Still not unbiased. Take it or leave it.
"...Well. You asked me, and turnabout is fair play. What do you think about where I come from?"
Jasnah doesn't answer immediately. She lets the sea wind pull at the loose ends of her scarf, lets the horizon steady itself back into a clean, rational line before she speaks. There's a hint of hesitation to her words.
"The Expeditions. Leaving knowing you will not return?" Jasnah shakes her head. "I am certain they started out sensible enough. And perhaps it's also a means to a dignified death. But after so many years, it seems a waste to continue chasing an answer that hasn't worked."
Her voice grows flint-hard. Even knowing those of a certain age are doomed, she sees it as a waste.
"A Gommage may not look like a Desolation. But the pattern is the same. Entire societies arranging itself around predictable death."
Although the current Desolation on Roshar doesn't quite fit the pattern. For once, this time, they'd had 4,000 years of unimpeded progress. Jasnah can only access the earlier, quicker Desolations in an academic fashion - indeed, uncovering the truth of those stories had been a throughline of her research. Honor and Odium used the peoples of this planet like game pieces. Granting powers in an ever-escalating arms race. Setting Human against Singer in a neverending cycle. Her own Knight Radiant abilities are part of that arms race. Verso might disagree, but silently she still imagines the Paintress as a Shard.
She inhales, slow, steady.
“A world trying to buy time with its people. Its Expeditions a slow, continuous tragedy."
There's a grief in that, quiet but unmistakable. He can't know it, but her mind is on the Heralds. The men and women who return to Damnation after every cycle and who bind the enemy with their whole selves until one of them breaks under the torture again. Starting the cycle anew.
"And I find it..." Her jaw works once, almost imperceptibly. “...intolerable.”
Another beat. She lets the horizon swallow whatever emotion flickered across her face.
"Yes" she adds, tone leveling, "your people are resilient. Adaptable. As Roshar has been. But sometimes adaptation isn't enough. Sometimes, the change must be bigger than simply surviving."
Predictable death. Yes, maybe that's the point. The Paintress lost her child in a violent, unexpected way. The painted numbers on the Monolith, the warnings, they're a kindness. Death in Lumière is gentle and foreseen.
All the same: "You're right. It is intolerable." Fuck, is it intolerable. He lets a hand dangle over the railing, musing darkly, "And you're right that— sometimes you need to burn the whole thing down to start anew."
Is that what she said? Well, it's what he took from it. Sometimes, the mistakes made with thoughtless flicks of a paintbrush can't be easily undone. Sometimes, you need to pour turpentine on the canvas and scrub until it's blank and pure again. He's fantasized about that a hundred, a thousand times.
Silence stretches, and then he laughs.
"I thought you were going to comment on our art and culture." Instead, she chose Lumière's most depressing—although admittedly also its most defining—feature to focus on: the Gommage. Maybe, he thinks, because she finds it relatable to her own circumstances in some way. "Maybe its propensity to produce dreamy musicians with stomachs of iron."
He still hasn't thrown up. That's worth bragging about.
Jasnah's lips press together — not disapproving, just thinking. Deeply. When she answers, it's with that unsettling blend of precision and softness she sometimes slips into when his darkness brushes too close to hers. Moments like these, considering the undercurrent of his words, she suspects Lumière breeds fortitude as much as it does musicianship.
"Art and culture are the surface." Her voice is quiet, level. "Beautiful. Necessary. But they often flourish only because something beneath them is... cracked."
Jasnah thinks about the stories she's been told and angles her head, studying him — not his bravado, not the quip, but the line he crossed without noticing.
"Burning the whole thing down,” she echoes, tone neither alarmed nor impressed. Mostly sounding tired. "Most people don't reach for that metaphor so easily."
She watches his hand dangling over the sea. Fascinated, somehow. Or maybe it's merely a focal point while she thinks. If she has her way, she'll be the last Alethi monarch. It isn't quite like burning the whole system down, but... it's close.
She lets the wind fill the silence for a heartbeat before continuing:
Realizing that perhaps that was a little bit of a crazy thing to say (and feeling no less belief in it for that), Verso crosses his arms, staring out at the watery expanse. "No. They"—they, not we—"have a Council. Elected by the people."
"A council? Elected by the people." She says it like she's tasting a rare spice. Then — candidly — she exhales a soft huff and actually grins. "How refreshing."
She slinks a foot closer, leaning the small of her back into the railing. This position turns her away from the sea, focused all the more tightly on him.
"Power granted by choice rather than birth... it's the direction Alethkar should move. If I have my way, I'll be its last queen."
Her expression brightens further with something like ambition sharpened by conviction.
"Oh," he says, very attuned to this sudden interest in him. Well, not him. A sudden interest in democratically-elected leaders. It feels like the same thing, though, when she's stepping closer and looking at him like that.
A stall: "Um." He's not really sure. It's been so long since he was back in Lumière, and getting involved in local politics had never been his interest in returning there. "I don't know."
But he can't just leave it at that. "Every few years, maybe. Since the Gommage started, they'd have to elect them more often." Seeing as the Council would be wiped out semi-frequently.
Jasnah inhales, slow and thin, the way she does when she's trying very hard not to say something beyond civility. But the silence doesn't save him.
"Every few years...maybe."
Her gaze continues to pin him — cool, assessing, a touch incredulous. Inside, something tightens, the same pinch she feels when a junior scholar hands her a dissertation built on sand. Storms. He truly doesn't know?
She turns back toward the water, but her thoughts bristle. He remembers a world's creatures, monsters, tragedies...but not how its leaders are chosen? Her expression crumples into a frown. When she speaks again, her voice is deceptively mild.
"Perhaps if you'd spent less time at dance lessons and more time attending to current events, you'd have something firmer than maybe to offer."
Her tone is dry, but there's something beneath it too. Curiosity, edged with suspicion. Instinct tightening around a loose thread.
Ah, merde. She thinks he's an idiot who doesn't know how his own government works. He can feel that interest she'd just shown him wilting away like a tulip in the heat.
He's quiet for a moment, fingers plucking at the loose fabric by the elbows of his shirt. Either he doubles down here and really, actually lies about living in Lumière— or he risks her ire (but also her interest again) by admitting that, no, he hasn't actually lived there in 67 years. Oh, and also, he's over 67 years old.
It's not like he actually hid it from her. Technically, she just never asked. So, he lands on aggressively gaslighting her into thinking it just never came up. "As it turns out, it's been a long time since I've been to Lumière."
Jasnah goes absolutely motionless. Not stiff. Not startled. Just...still — like an axehound scenting something unexpected among the rockbuds. Her eyes narrow, but only slightly. Enough to signal that a dozen thought processes have begun running in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
A long time since he's been to Lumière. A phrasing so vague it’s practically an admission.
"Is that so," she says. Quiet, flat, unhappy.
Inside, her thoughts sharpen: he never said he lived there recently. She assumed. Even after he admitted to being an Expeditioner. But even that had felt like it should have been a recent development. And why did he let her believe otherwise? She can't trace it back to a lie. Only omissions. Jasnah feels a familiar frisson of annoyance.
She studies him openly now, head angling just slightly, as though adjusting the focus on a lens. It's a closer inspection than she's given him since (perhaps) she first met him.
"It appears," she says with unnerving calm, "that we have a misunderstanding."
"Um," he says again, trying and failing not to look like a guilty dog who's just torn up her slippers. Telling the truth always makes him feel uncomfortable. Still, he does his level best to keep his tone light, casual. Like there's no reason to be upset with him at all.
"A while."
Technically, it hasn't been too long. Technically, he's been back to Lumière semi-recently. Clea had entered the Canvas once more and told him that Alicia—her Alicia, the real one—had fallen into it in an attempt to get their shared mother to leave. Maman's chroma had overtaken her, she'd said, repainted her into a denizen of the Canvas without memory of who she was. I don't have time to deal with this. Do something useful for once and make sure she doesn't get into any trouble.
But his scarce visits over the last sixteen years hadn't really been living there. It'd barely been existing there. He'd kept to himself, watching Alicia from afar. Burning with jealousy as he watched her with her foster brother, smiling up at him the way his Alicia used to smile at him before the fire mangled her face and stole her joy.
"I'm a bit older than I look," he says, like it's just good genetics.
Jasnah blinks once as if Verso has just presented her with a puzzle she did not request and does not appreciate. Namely, a puzzle that's a little too simple to solve.
"Older than you look," she repeats, voice flat as a polished blade. She does so enjoy turning a man's words back against him.
Inside, her reaction is sharper Storms. Not another one. Not another ageless worldhopper with selective honesty and a talent for being inconveniently charming and annoyingly interesting.
She maintains the same proximity. She doesn't withdraw; she doesn't shift onto a back foot; she doesn't so much as lean away. He tells her he's older than he looks and she makes a careful spectacle of examining his features. Like she's one errant syllable away from grabbing his chin with her palm and holding him in place.
"Very well," she eventually says. "You realize I now have questions."
She turns fully toward him — poised, regal, absolutely done with plausible deniability.
"And I expect real answers. Can you do that for me?"
Real answers. Not whatever fiction he thinks will go down easier. It isn't personal. He's merely reaping the consequences of another man's habitual lies. Perhaps that transference shows in the way she first confirms whether he considers himself capable of giving her what she wants.
Questions. Verso stiffens almost imperceptibly, mind flashing with memories of being abducted, interrogated— why couldn't you just let it go? Julie raising her sword against him, accusing him of betrayal. Holding her body close in some sick facsimile of an embrace, feeling the life drain from her body as his blade buried itself in her gut. Laying her down on the grass, promising her: it won't be forever. Maman will bring you back.
How unhelpful of her, then, to take yet another step closer . Nearly so close that it could be mistaken as a precursor to an embrace. In reality, she wants their conversation to stay hushed and private between their bodies. One hand steadies on the rail.
"How much older, Verso?"
Than you look.
She will take his assertion literally. If he is to be an open book, then she will be the avid reader creasing pages and leaving indelible marks in margins as she attempts to extract meaning from him.
"Well," he says, "that all depends on how old you think I look." Not a day over 21, right?
He turns his head to look at the ship behind them, eyes darting around before he leans in closer to Jasnah, voice lowered. "I don't know why," he lies, "but after the Fracture, some of us stopped aging." There's an almost pre-rehearsed feel to the words, like he's had to make this explanation before, and that it's been perfected through trial and error. "And the Gommage can't touch us."
Like he's trying to cut any questions off at the pass, he rattles off, "I didn't tell you earlier because it wasn't relevant, and you didn't ask." Another lie. He didn't tell her because he was worried about how she'd react. Like how he's worried about being thrown over the side of the ship right now.
Her posture may be stiff and still, but not to the point where she can't fervently roll her eyes when he sidesteps her first question. Storms! Her lip curls, and a measure of impatience settles across her shoulders.
His explanation doesn't phase her. Perhaps she misses its rote nature because she's already written off the 'why.' To her, the conclusion is almost painfully obvious: he's a Cognitive Shadow, like the Heralds. Unless...
"I'm asking now. How old?" She hones in on the piece of information she wants, but he hasn't yet provided. "One hundred? A thousand? Five thousand?"
Trying—but not quite succeeding—at hiding his irritation at the questions: "Does it matter?"
One hundred is the same as one thousand. Both of them are unnatural. Besides, it's not like she's going to be celebrating his birthday any time soon. He sighs, grinding his teeth a little before replying.
"Closer to one hundred than one thousand. The Fracture was 67 years ago now."
Does it matter? Whether asked in irritation or otherwise, Jasnah gives the challenge it's due process. She chews thoughtfully on the inside of her cheek.
"Yes, it matters."
It matters because it's a data point and she collects data points. It matters because it's something real about him. It matters because the last ageless man she spent this much time was over 10,000 years old (if Wit's own word can be trusted) and those milennia had thoroughly compromised his ability to function person-to-person with a mortal like herself. She'd felt it in every game he played. Every slanted response.
But closer to one hundred? Jasnah nods. She can work with one hundred. Although she doesn't return the favour and tell him why it matters.
Instead, she makes inferences: "You go on the Expeditions. And you survive them."
And sometimes not, when he can't bear it anymore. But he's been a part of more Expeditions than he hasn't been, whether helping or hindering them.
Matter-of-fact: "I join the Expeditions, and I guide them. Immortality is—" A moment of waffling, here. "A curse from the Paintress. I have a vested interest in the Expeditions' success."
He holds her gaze for just a moment, then steps away, creating a little distance. "That's all."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tosses u a midnight before bed tag.......
Wry: "I was more hoping for a rousing game of cards, or maybe tic-tac-toe." There's humor in his tone, but there's a kernel of truth in that joke, and his disappointment that there's more work ahead is mostly but not entirely imperceptible. There's been a lot of darkness in his life, yes, but there's also been a lot of boredom, and some of his most pleasant memories were made trying to stave that boredom off. Giving Monoco an experimental haircut (a success in his eyes, at least) or trying to teach Esquie to play chess (doomed to fail from the beginning; his giant hands were too big to properly move the pieces). It would have been nice to pass the time the way that he used to.
But he can also understand her paranoia—better than ever now that she's shared the assassination attempt at sea with him—and sympathize with her desire to do something about it. It's the pragmatic thing to do, chatting sailors up and seeing what they reveal. He'd offer to do it alone, but as has been made abundantly clear by the conversation of this morning, he lacks a nuanced view of Rosharan culture. It stands to reason that he might miss one of those truths slipping in, overlook something of importance.
"But it'd be a poor husband who let you talk to handsome sailors all alone, I think."
delightful.
Objectively? Strong, weathered, broadly built men, some with striking features. But Jasnah’s mind sorts them with the same pragmatic efficiency she applies to ledgers. Competent, likely; handsome, irrelevant.
She lets the matter pass. "Then you'd better come along," she says simply.
The next hours are spent drifting from one end of the deck to the other, speaking to sailors coming off watch or stowing equipment. Jasnah organizes them the way she organizes sources in an archive: a Thaylen man with a scar across his jaw, who swears he saw a santhid breach once and calls it a sign of good luck; a young darkeyed swabbie frightened of unusual spren that appeared during the last storm; an older helmsman who recounts rumors of strange tides and ships that vanished into fog without ever returning. Jasnah listens patiently, gently sifting superstition from pattern... ultimately, there isn't anything too odd about a woman behaving scholarly.
By noon, she's pieced together a compass of oddities: sightings of deepwater spren, shifts in migration patterns, and a rumbling undercurrent of something that feels...off. Not proof. But enough to murmur to Ivory about later.
Near the top of the afternoon, when the sun has climbed enough to warm the deck but not yet force them into shade, Jasnah finds herself standing alone with Verso at a quiet stretch of railing near the stern. The sea stretches wide and glittering behind them; most of the crew is gathered forward, repairing a torn sail.
Jasnah leans an elbow lightly against the rail. The wind tugs the edge of her scarf. The ship hums beneath their feet. When she speaks, her voice is quieter. Contemplative, edged with a rare curiosity because it seems to exist without agenda.
"What is your honest opinion of my planet?"
She keeps her eyes on the horizon. The faintest line of tension at the corner of her mouth. So often, that's how she talks about the topic. Not simply other worlds, but planets.
"There are so many others. Whole other societies. I know that now. So I want to hear how mine seems...to someone with the vantage to compare."
Wit was always ever-so-withholding.
no subject
"You want my opinion?" he asks, a little surprised. He'd expected her to consider his opinion on Roshar to be uneducated at best. Ignorant. There's clearly so much he doesn't yet understand about this place.
But she's asking, so he considers it. "I think—"
It's strange. Foreign. Difficult to understand, at times. He'd always felt a background buzz of wrongness in Lumière, but this is different. He knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he doesn't belong here. Despite that, it's wonderful. He's felt a sense of unburdenedness here that he's never felt before, ever. Admittedly, any other world would have done that for him, but he finds himself somewhat relieved that it was this one.
"I think I'm lucky to have landed in your lap." Metaphorically, dieu merci.
no subject
"Verso."
A single word. Soft but unmistakably corrective.
"That was not an opinion of my world.That was an opinion of your circumstance within it."
She speaks with an exacting and sharp clarity. The kind she uses when a junior scholar answers the question they wished had been asked, not the one that was. Only then does she shift her attention to him, her expression clouded but undeniably intent.
"I asked because I want to know how Roshar appears to someone who does not take its highs and lows for granted." A pause, barely longer than a breath. "Someone unattached."
Her gloved fingers trace the railing absently, as though drawing constellations on the iron.
"I have heard stories," she admits, voice quiet enough that the wind nearly swallows it. "Not just the ones you've told me about Lumière. But other planets. Other societies. Scadrial. Nalthis. Sel."
The words land gently — but carries weight. She watches whether they mean anything to him. They are planets she thinks might be stronger than hers. Or hungrier. She lets out a slow exhale, a controlled release of breath that doesn't quite mask the tension beneath it.
In the end, can she even trust the source of those stories? After all, Hoid had once openly confessed that he would let Roshar burn if it meant sparing the rest of the Cosmere. And Jasnah can't actually blame him. Hasn't that been her philosophy, too? Always act in light of the greatest good. No matter what (or who) you have to sacrifice to do so.
no subject
It's sarcastic, but not actually irritated. It's just a little silly— she'd asked for his opinion, and then got annoyed when he didn't give it in the exact way that she wanted. He turns to shoot her a Look™, eyebrows raised and head slightly tilted.
"If you're looking for an unbiased assessment, I'm afraid you'll have to look further. My opinion of your world is inherently linked to my circumstances in it."
He's foreign, yes, and has a different perspective, but that doesn't make him any more impartial. If he'd come to this place and had nothing, if Jasnah weren't interested enough in him to befriend—or whatever she might call it—him on the basis of gaining more information, his opinion would be quite different. But obviously, personal preferences aren't what she's looking for. He thinks about the names she just rattled off, then furrows his brow.
"Are you worried Roshar doesn't measure up?"
no subject
"Worried?" she echoes, tasting the word. Then her gaze returns to the horizon, where sea and sky meet in a clean, pitiless seam.
"I suppose I am. Roshar has been...reset. Again and again. Every time our nations advance, a Desolation sweeps across the world and whatever remains must rebuild itself on scorched stone."
Her gloved hand taps the railing once. There is so much more to the story, but she doesn't want to distract from her main thrust.
"Other planets have not endured this cycle. You may not yet understand the scale of that."
Her voice lowers.
"The Cosmere is shaped by powers far older than any kingdom. Shards — so called because they are fragments of something that might once have been a god. They rule planets. Shape them. Empower them."
It still feels strange, speaking of divinity with an atheist's composure. Stranger still knowing her only source is a trickster who calls himself a storyteller more readily than a prophet. Wit called it a god. Wit claimed he and sixteen others killed that god. What does an atheist do with a story like that?
"There were three Shards on Roshar," she continues. "Their conflict — petty or profound, who can say — sparked the Desolations that shattered our progress each time we began to climb."
Her jaw sets, soft but resolute.
"When you hear a Rosharan speak of the Almighty, they mean one of those three: Honor. But there is also Cultivation. And Odium."
Jasnah meets his eyes directly.
"Your Paintress, I suspect, is another. The Shard that claims your world. Treats it like a plaything, as all Shards seem to do."
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Aline is a god, but not in the way that Jasnah imagines. Out in the real world, there's still so much that she can't do. It's only in her playground, on her Canvas, that she has real power. Whatever a Shard is, it sounds like something infinitely more threatening.
Or maybe this is all just someone else's Canvas, the Shards someone else's family, destroying lives over their own personal squabbles. Who can say?
"It's not perfect," he admits. "But I think it's admirable that you've rebuilt time and time again, after all of that destruction." He worries at his lower lip, eyes on the sparkling blue horizon once more. "It would be easy to give up. To just lie down and... wait for it to all be over." He would. "But you persist."
So, that's his opinion on Roshar. Still not unbiased. Take it or leave it.
"...Well. You asked me, and turnabout is fair play. What do you think about where I come from?"
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"The Expeditions. Leaving knowing you will not return?" Jasnah shakes her head. "I am certain they started out sensible enough. And perhaps it's also a means to a dignified death. But after so many years, it seems a waste to continue chasing an answer that hasn't worked."
Her voice grows flint-hard. Even knowing those of a certain age are doomed, she sees it as a waste.
"A Gommage may not look like a Desolation. But the pattern is the same. Entire societies arranging itself around predictable death."
Although the current Desolation on Roshar doesn't quite fit the pattern. For once, this time, they'd had 4,000 years of unimpeded progress. Jasnah can only access the earlier, quicker Desolations in an academic fashion - indeed, uncovering the truth of those stories had been a throughline of her research. Honor and Odium used the peoples of this planet like game pieces. Granting powers in an ever-escalating arms race. Setting Human against Singer in a neverending cycle. Her own Knight Radiant abilities are part of that arms race. Verso might disagree, but silently she still imagines the Paintress as a Shard.
She inhales, slow, steady.
“A world trying to buy time with its people. Its Expeditions a slow, continuous tragedy."
There's a grief in that, quiet but unmistakable. He can't know it, but her mind is on the Heralds. The men and women who return to Damnation after every cycle and who bind the enemy with their whole selves until one of them breaks under the torture again. Starting the cycle anew.
"And I find it..." Her jaw works once, almost imperceptibly. “...intolerable.”
Another beat. She lets the horizon swallow whatever emotion flickered across her face.
"Yes" she adds, tone leveling, "your people are resilient. Adaptable. As Roshar has been. But sometimes adaptation isn't enough. Sometimes, the change must be bigger than simply surviving."
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All the same: "You're right. It is intolerable." Fuck, is it intolerable. He lets a hand dangle over the railing, musing darkly, "And you're right that— sometimes you need to burn the whole thing down to start anew."
Is that what she said? Well, it's what he took from it. Sometimes, the mistakes made with thoughtless flicks of a paintbrush can't be easily undone. Sometimes, you need to pour turpentine on the canvas and scrub until it's blank and pure again. He's fantasized about that a hundred, a thousand times.
Silence stretches, and then he laughs.
"I thought you were going to comment on our art and culture." Instead, she chose Lumière's most depressing—although admittedly also its most defining—feature to focus on: the Gommage. Maybe, he thinks, because she finds it relatable to her own circumstances in some way. "Maybe its propensity to produce dreamy musicians with stomachs of iron."
He still hasn't thrown up. That's worth bragging about.
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"Art and culture are the surface." Her voice is quiet, level. "Beautiful. Necessary. But they often flourish only because something beneath them is... cracked."
Jasnah thinks about the stories she's been told and angles her head, studying him — not his bravado, not the quip, but the line he crossed without noticing.
"Burning the whole thing down,” she echoes, tone neither alarmed nor impressed. Mostly sounding tired. "Most people don't reach for that metaphor so easily."
She watches his hand dangling over the sea. Fascinated, somehow. Or maybe it's merely a focal point while she thinks. If she has her way, she'll be the last Alethi monarch. It isn't quite like burning the whole system down, but... it's close.
She lets the wind fill the silence for a heartbeat before continuing:
"Does Lumière have a king? A queen?"
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Realizing that perhaps that was a little bit of a crazy thing to say (and feeling no less belief in it for that), Verso crosses his arms, staring out at the watery expanse. "No. They"—they, not we—"have a Council. Elected by the people."
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"A council? Elected by the people." She says it like she's tasting a rare spice. Then — candidly — she exhales a soft huff and actually grins. "How refreshing."
She slinks a foot closer, leaning the small of her back into the railing. This position turns her away from the sea, focused all the more tightly on him.
"Power granted by choice rather than birth... it's the direction Alethkar should move. If I have my way, I'll be its last queen."
Her expression brightens further with something like ambition sharpened by conviction.
"How often are your Council members chosen?"
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A stall: "Um." He's not really sure. It's been so long since he was back in Lumière, and getting involved in local politics had never been his interest in returning there. "I don't know."
But he can't just leave it at that. "Every few years, maybe. Since the Gommage started, they'd have to elect them more often." Seeing as the Council would be wiped out semi-frequently.
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"Every few years...maybe."
Her gaze continues to pin him — cool, assessing, a touch incredulous. Inside, something tightens, the same pinch she feels when a junior scholar hands her a dissertation built on sand. Storms. He truly doesn't know?
She turns back toward the water, but her thoughts bristle. He remembers a world's creatures, monsters, tragedies...but not how its leaders are chosen? Her expression crumples into a frown. When she speaks again, her voice is deceptively mild.
"Perhaps if you'd spent less time at dance lessons and more time attending to current events, you'd have something firmer than maybe to offer."
Her tone is dry, but there's something beneath it too. Curiosity, edged with suspicion.
Instinct tightening around a loose thread.
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He's quiet for a moment, fingers plucking at the loose fabric by the elbows of his shirt. Either he doubles down here and really, actually lies about living in Lumière— or he risks her ire (but also her interest again) by admitting that, no, he hasn't actually lived there in 67 years. Oh, and also, he's over 67 years old.
It's not like he actually hid it from her. Technically, she just never asked. So, he lands on aggressively gaslighting her into thinking it just never came up. "As it turns out, it's been a long time since I've been to Lumière."
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A long time since he's been to Lumière. A phrasing so vague it’s practically an admission.
"Is that so," she says. Quiet, flat, unhappy.
Inside, her thoughts sharpen: he never said he lived there recently. She assumed. Even after he admitted to being an Expeditioner. But even that had felt like it should have been a recent development. And why did he let her believe otherwise? She can't trace it back to a lie. Only omissions. Jasnah feels a familiar frisson of annoyance.
She studies him openly now, head angling just slightly, as though adjusting the focus on a lens. It's a closer inspection than she's given him since (perhaps) she first met him.
"It appears," she says with unnerving calm, "that we have a misunderstanding."
Dangerously polite.
"How long has it been?"
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"Um," he says again, trying and failing not to look like a guilty dog who's just torn up her slippers. Telling the truth always makes him feel uncomfortable. Still, he does his level best to keep his tone light, casual. Like there's no reason to be upset with him at all.
"A while."
Technically, it hasn't been too long. Technically, he's been back to Lumière semi-recently. Clea had entered the Canvas once more and told him that Alicia—her Alicia, the real one—had fallen into it in an attempt to get their shared mother to leave. Maman's chroma had overtaken her, she'd said, repainted her into a denizen of the Canvas without memory of who she was. I don't have time to deal with this. Do something useful for once and make sure she doesn't get into any trouble.
But his scarce visits over the last sixteen years hadn't really been living there. It'd barely been existing there. He'd kept to himself, watching Alicia from afar. Burning with jealousy as he watched her with her foster brother, smiling up at him the way his Alicia used to smile at him before the fire mangled her face and stole her joy.
"I'm a bit older than I look," he says, like it's just good genetics.
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Jasnah blinks once as if Verso has just presented her with a puzzle she did not request and does not appreciate. Namely, a puzzle that's a little too simple to solve.
"Older than you look," she repeats, voice flat as a polished blade. She does so enjoy turning a man's words back against him.
Inside, her reaction is sharper Storms. Not another one. Not another ageless worldhopper with selective honesty and a talent for being inconveniently charming and annoyingly interesting.
She maintains the same proximity. She doesn't withdraw; she doesn't shift onto a back foot; she doesn't so much as lean away. He tells her he's older than he looks and she makes a careful spectacle of examining his features. Like she's one errant syllable away from grabbing his chin with her palm and holding him in place.
"Very well," she eventually says. "You realize I now have questions."
She turns fully toward him — poised, regal, absolutely done with plausible deniability.
"And I expect real answers. Can you do that for me?"
Real answers. Not whatever fiction he thinks will go down easier. It isn't personal. He's merely reaping the consequences of another man's habitual lies. Perhaps that transference shows in the way she first confirms whether he considers himself capable of giving her what she wants.
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He shoots Jasnah a glance.
"I'm an open book."
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"How much older, Verso?"
Than you look.
She will take his assertion literally. If he is to be an open book, then she will be the avid reader creasing pages and leaving indelible marks in margins as she attempts to extract meaning from him.
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He turns his head to look at the ship behind them, eyes darting around before he leans in closer to Jasnah, voice lowered. "I don't know why," he lies, "but after the Fracture, some of us stopped aging." There's an almost pre-rehearsed feel to the words, like he's had to make this explanation before, and that it's been perfected through trial and error. "And the Gommage can't touch us."
Like he's trying to cut any questions off at the pass, he rattles off, "I didn't tell you earlier because it wasn't relevant, and you didn't ask." Another lie. He didn't tell her because he was worried about how she'd react. Like how he's worried about being thrown over the side of the ship right now.
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His explanation doesn't phase her. Perhaps she misses its rote nature because she's already written off the 'why.' To her, the conclusion is almost painfully obvious: he's a Cognitive Shadow, like the Heralds. Unless...
"I'm asking now. How old?" She hones in on the piece of information she wants, but he hasn't yet provided. "One hundred? A thousand? Five thousand?"
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One hundred is the same as one thousand. Both of them are unnatural. Besides, it's not like she's going to be celebrating his birthday any time soon. He sighs, grinding his teeth a little before replying.
"Closer to one hundred than one thousand. The Fracture was 67 years ago now."
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"Yes, it matters."
It matters because it's a data point and she collects data points. It matters because it's something real about him. It matters because the last ageless man she spent this much time was over 10,000 years old (if Wit's own word can be trusted) and those milennia had thoroughly compromised his ability to function person-to-person with a mortal like herself. She'd felt it in every game he played. Every slanted response.
But closer to one hundred? Jasnah nods. She can work with one hundred. Although she doesn't return the favour and tell him why it matters.
Instead, she makes inferences: "You go on the Expeditions. And you survive them."
Storms.
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And sometimes not, when he can't bear it anymore. But he's been a part of more Expeditions than he hasn't been, whether helping or hindering them.
Matter-of-fact: "I join the Expeditions, and I guide them. Immortality is—" A moment of waffling, here. "A curse from the Paintress. I have a vested interest in the Expeditions' success."
He holds her gaze for just a moment, then steps away, creating a little distance. "That's all."
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i lied, sends this tag in another direction
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a short but very meaningful tag
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my turn for a short but effective tag.
mom said it's my turn
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