recreatable | open post.

Verso runs his index across the side of her finger, brief and unindulgent, before he returns back to his work, softening up the hard knots in her muscles as best he can. He's no expert, but he does know the basic concept: seek out tight spots and press real hard.

"You get tired of doing the same thing over and over." Healing the knots in his muscles is a small example of that, but all the same. Verso is sick of repetition. "What was I going to do, heal it every night before I slept on the ground and woke up with it again?"

Yes, she almost answers. But the way he describes it — and even what she witnessed in the kitchenette — reasserts for Jasnah that it's nothing like stormlight. Upon breathing it in, healing is automatic. Quick. A sip of it would be enough.

She's about to explain this difference, how she can't even keep the callouses she might actually want to form while learning how to wield Ivory as a sword, because they never stay long enough to sink into her Identity. But she allows herself to be distracted — tugged along to other thoughts, caught up in the unpredictable non-pattern of where his fingers press next.

"The ground," she echoes. Of course, the ground. Only once he says it do the easy conclusions slot into place. Back to him, she frowns — thinking about bedding down on obsidian in Shadesmar and shooting a guilty glance over at the square of floorboards that had become his de facto bed here at Jochi's.

"There truly was nothing on the Continent, was there?"

Not even lavis grain stuffed in a sack?

"Not... nothing."

How does he explain? He used to love the Continent, back before the Fracture. Some of his most wonderful memories took place skiing in the mountains, or picking flowers in the meadows, or playing in the gestrals' sanctuary. Back then, there'd been trains to and from most locations on the Continent, even some small clusters of humans living out in more rural areas. That all changed, of course, and now— well, 'nothing' is closer to the truth than he wishes it was.

Verso gingerly sweeps a hand underneath her braid, thumb lingering on the tail of it for a split second before draping it across the shoulder he just massaged. He resists every ridiculous urge he has to take the hair tie out.

"Just— not most things."

He rests a hand on her opposite shoulder, repeating the same actions on this side, fingers pressing along the outline of her spine.

"I'll admit, it took me three days to be able to sleep on a bed again."

An easy, knowing hm is the only sign she gives that she understands — if from a slightly different angle — why adjusting to a soft bed might be an ordeal. The sound barely has time to settle before it twists into a thin, involuntary whine when he finds a particularly stubborn knot.

Nevertheless, a sliver of her attention remains trained on Verso. She finds herself wondering whether he actually slept those first three nights at all, or whether this too is hyperbole — the sort a performer uses to sketch in a feeling rather than recount a fact. But sleep or no sleep, she decides, he has more than earned a comfortable place to rest his head.

When he switches sides, she allows herself to lean back against the divan, resting without fully withdrawing — her shoulder and the line of her neck still offered but her weight no longer held upright by will alone. She has stamina yet to recover, especially after their lunch-that-wasn't-quite-a-date.

"—Was it too soft?"

'Too soft' only in comparison to what he's used to: cold, hard, unforgiving ground. Grass sometimes, wood other times. It hadn't been comfortable, but it had been familiar. Soft mattresses were a relic of the time before, and he'd eschewed any thoughts of them a long time ago—it had been disorienting to have one right in front of him.

"I thought I might sink all the way into it and get lost," he quips, diligently working the pad of his finger into one of her knots.

"It took some getting used to, that's all." And now it's going to take getting used to all over again, actually.

Her cheek nuzzled into the crook of her elbow once again. But unlike last time, it's only to turn her bicep into a makeshift pillow. She sits there, one leg folded underneath her, and listing entirely to the right like she might take a little nap slumped sideways on the divan. Unwilling to disengage from him; equally unwilling to sit tall and still when her wound throbs.

Should she offer to have a good, firm lavis grain mattress sent to his quarters once they return? Better than the ground, surely. But unlikely to swallow him up if he needs to rest. It's the same sort she insists on for her bed.

"...Do you want the divan? Tonight?"

Long gone were the days on the ship where they made good on trading the bed back and forth.

Verso has to list a little to the side, too, to give her a proper massage; they must look ridiculous, the both of them leaning over like weeds in the wind. Having worked out the worst of the knots—at least, as much as he'll be able to in a single round—he flattens his fingers out across her skin and makes a few long, soothing strokes to assuage whatever upset the more forceful touch might have caused.

"As much as I appreciate the offer, I think Jochi might try to bake me into his next meat pie if he saw you on the floor."

He drops his hands into his lap. "All done."

"I can handle Jochi," she insists. Half because it's true. Half because, phrased as he phrased it, Verso didn't technically refuse her.

But the protest amounts to very little. In the wake of those last few touches — ten minutes later, perhaps — she drifts into the too-easy doze that's been stalking her since they returned. She slumps forward over her crossed arms, spine curved, consciousness loosening its grip. Too much walking. Too much excitement. Too much focused listening. All of it coaxed out of her (gently and not-so-gently) by the patient work of Verso's hands on her knotted shoulders.

She sleeps.

The following days pass with little fanfare. The same meals. The same games. The same petty arguments that mean nothing and everything. They walk a little farther each day, Jasnah always insisting that they head in the direction that would take them to the Temple of Jezrian, if they kept going long enough. The temple is their eventual rendezvous point when the Windrunners arrive.

And each time she pushes herself farther she pays for it with an afternoon nap. Sometimes two.

It isn't just healing that drains her. Without stormlight, the realities of a wholly human body crash back into her. Exhaustion, a blister on one heel, persistent muscle fatigue she can't simply burn away. She doesn't ask for another massage. The first had happened too organically and she lacks the language to summon it again without feeling awkward and needy. However, she does expect a fresh braid every morning thereafter. Even if she doesn't strictly need it, she insists on that one remaining layer of polish. A small defiance against everything else she's lost.

Some nights, she asks him to play guitar again. Another night, lying awake in the dark, she clumsily tells him the story of Queen Tsa and Mishim — of moons deceived and dallied with. Yet another night, she asks him to speak only in his native tongue. Most words are meaningless to her but the cadence becomes a strange, musicless lullaby.

Then, one afternoon, with only two days left before the Windrunners are due, Verso returns upstairs from one of his solitary walks to find Jasnah standing by the window.

She's been doing more of that lately: standing. Walking under her own power. Measuring her days in minutes upright rather than hours reclined. Usually, when he comes back, she's pacing a small circuit with a book in hand.

Today, there is no book. She stands close to the window, eye-level with the thick wooden frame dividing the pane in two. And she appears to be speaking. Softly. Rapidly. Words tumbling out in an easy, urgent flood.

She's talking to someone.

As the days go on, nothing really changes; there's no more confessions of vulnerability from either of them, no more touch aside from what's required for practicality's sake. Each day follows a predictable pattern: he takes her downstairs and outside for a walk, keeping close beside or in front of or behind her in case she stumbles.

The walk away from and back to Jochi's—and whatever time is spent with Jasnah in between—takes up the majority of the daytime, and by then he's usually been near enough to Jasnah for long enough to feel the need to clear his head. Then, when he gets back, they eat dinner together and he entertains her for the rest of the night until he falls asleep whispering with her in the dark, and the cycle begins anew. Whatever dislike he has for repetition, it hasn't stopped him from boomeranging back and forth.

He's just been on one of his mind-clearing strolls, expecting Jasnah to be pushing herself again—too far, sometimes—when he gets back. It's a surprise when she isn't, and he feels put off-kilter by the unexpected change in routine. More off-kilter still when he hears her quiet, quick words, and when his gaze drifts in their direction to see her looking out the window.

Verso's brow furrows. Why on earth would she be—? Jochi's rumor about her thrums through his head again, although he dismisses it after a moment.

"Jasnah—?" he asks, taking a step closer.

Edited (i love 'back and forth' i guess) 2026-01-26 00:37 (UTC)

Ivory is awake. And while ordinarily Jasnah is happy to let him sit out-of-sight on her collar or earring, she's missed him dearly enough that she's set him on the narrow lip of wood that crosses the window pane, bringing him to eye-level. The little ink-stain of a man sits stiffly, legs dangling over the edge. Nevertheless, from across the room, he's too small to see.

And before Jasnah realizes Verso has returned, she's still addressing the spren in hushed tones. Hushed tones, and a foreign grammatical structure: "Fascinated with the process is. No stormlight. His finger attached was not — but control still was."

She's telling Ivory about witnessing Verso's pinky finger gallivanting along on its own. In Ivory's natural cadence, at that — some quirk of all inkspren who tend to use an existential copula as the predicate of every sentence. Adjusting her own grammatical structure for Ivory is not that different from adapting to a different way of listening to Verso.

Seconds before Verso approaches, speaking her name, Ivory gives her a sharp warning. Her head cants — as though she's listening — and then a softer mutter, a nod. Once Verso is near enough, he'll catch the little spren sort of flicker to his feet and execute a formal little bow.

"He's up," she states the obvious. Possibly simply because it's a relief to say aloud. But the way her hand still gingerly touches her side, Ivory being awake doesn't seem to have quite put everything to rights.

"Oh," Verso breathes, deeply relieved that he hasn't just walked in on Jasnah talking to herself. (Although— after this much time being cooped up, could anyone really blame her?) "Wow. That's great." And he means it, too. Ivory is clearly important to Jasnah; he knows what it's like to have your mental health hinge on one weird little guy.

"Welcome back, Monsieur Ivory," he says with a tip of his head. "A pleasure to see you up and about."

For some measure of 'seeing'. He's closer now, and he still needs to squint to make out any sort of detail in Ivory's tiny body.

A glance Jasnah's way, then— "You're still hurting?"

Jasnah glances briefly between the two — a little surprised that Ivory acknowledges Verso at all. She's cautioned the spren against disappearing into the Cognitive Realm without a bit more time to understand any current constraints, otherwise she's certain he would already be gone.

She exchanges another quiet word or three with Ivory before leaving him be. The sun, filtering through the glass, sets his ink-black substance alight with purples and yellows and little oily rainbows. The way she steps away from the window suggests the next conversation won't be between the three of them.

"He's up, but something is still wrong. I can pull in stormlight — but only small amounts, and sluggishly. I do think it's made a difference," she pats her side, "like healing a little bit faster than I would otherwise. Nowhere near as instantaneous as it should be."

Quieter: "He's not quite certain what happened, either. It was a total disruption of consciousness — like when he first entered the Physical Realm, before our bond. If someone on Roshar has developed a way to so entirely neutralize our Radiant Orders..."

Well. There goes their advantage in the war effort.

He doesn't fully understand what Jasnah is talking about, but he can figure that it's bad, at least. Still, our Radiant Orders is far less a concern to him than Jasnah's wellbeing is, so he lets it pass by for the moment. As they talk, he crosses his arms, leaning in and lowering his voice slightly. Not because he has any stake in keeping this private, but because it seems to be a conversation Jasnah doesn't want to share with Ivory at the moment.

"Maybe Ivory just needs more time to recover himself." Again, he's not certain of the nature of this bond, how it works—but this seems like uncharted territory, a spren being damaged in this way. "You were both hurt pretty badly."

It can't be helped. Jasnah's worries have already drifted away from what's personal and immediate; now, she's considering what it means if the enemy targets spren rather than the humans bonded to them. It would never be effective in mass warfare — too fiddly, too precise, too piecemeal. But if she can already imagine the kinds of surgical strikes that could be made against critical members of each order, then it's impossible that the enemy hasn't also considered the same.

So who was it? Odium's forces, or the Ghostbloods? The next critcal question to answer.

"Hm? She shakes her head, setting aside her distractions for a moment and catching up to what Verso is saying. "Yes. That would be the best case scenario. That somehow our bond has been reset in some capacity."

Reset. Hmm. Verso's mind turns over, too, although his focus is less on the implications for the war effort and more on what this means for Jasnah personally. Not like this, he remembers, and frowns.

"You had to swear some oaths to him, didn't you?"

He recognizes that he probably sounds like a fucking idiot who doesn't know anything to Jasnah, but—he doesn't know enough to not sound like that.

"Maybe you need to go through that again."

He sounds so, so far from an idiot. If anything, Jasnah is a touch impressed that he's already caught up to her line of thinking — that he has managed to intuit something despite not having bonded a spren himself. If she scratched the surface of that surprise, she might find further conclusions and questions about empathy, about theory of mind, about care.

But, for now, it's enough to be impressed.

"I think that's right," she nods again. "Each ideal is its own challenge and advantage. And they can't be rushed, least of all Elsecaller ideals."

— Cool, calm, easy. It doesn't occur to her that she's never named her own order before now.

Elsecaller. He puts that in his back pocket. There's no physical file on Jasnah, but there is a mental one; he carefully tucks each new bit of information that she shares with him away, so that maybe one day he might have all the pieces to put together her puzzle.

"Ideals," he repeats. "How did it work the first time?"

...A glance at the window. At Ivory. And while they can't communicate via thought the way some bonded spren and Radiants can, the two have some measure of mutual understanding that transcends such tricks. She knows he won't like her sharing the how and why and rationale to an Elsecaller's oaths with her Inkspren.

But exceptions must sometimes be made. And Jasnah trusts Verso — about as much as she can trust anyone, at any rate. It's impossible not to recognize the ways in which he's had her best interests at heart since the attack. Ordinarily, she'd think it was all because he hoped to find some way home through her. But even that motive rings impossible now.

Under her own steam, she walks into the kitchenette and pours herself a cup of water. Feels good to not require constant, external help.

"Knight Radiant abilities — the Surges — are powerful. Too powerful, perhaps. The oaths are a way to ensure those powers are used for appropriate purposes. Spren, like Ivory, choose their bonds carefully. And only allow a Radiant to proceed further once they've proven themselves. It's different for the different orders. The Windrunner's you'll meet in two days' time will have taken oaths to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Break those oaths, and they lose access to their Surges."

Verso stares back at her. She's doing it again. That thing he pointed out (that she didn't like that he pointed out)—talking about something personal as if it's merely an academic discussion, not anything to do with her. After having told her about Renoir and the scar, it feels...

Disappointing.

He takes a page from her book. Asking rather than assuming. It doesn't come naturally. He presses his fingertips to her upper arm, lightly, and asks, "You don't want to tell me about yours?"

Okay, fine. It's more of a statement with an upward inflection at the end, but he's trying to speak her language here.

She doesn't pull away from his touch.

But she does tip the cup back for a mouthful of water, buying herself a moment longer before she answers, attention slipping back through the arched doorway of the kitchenette. She can't see Ivory from this distance, but — he's there. Cross-legged, likely. Some pantomime of meditation.

"No, it's not that." She seems quick to correct him. It's not you; it's me and my even-more-paranoid spren. "They're not mine alone to tell."

Earlier, before Verso returned, she and Ivory had talked. About the unidentified Cryptic in the alleyway. About what it was doing there, and what might have attracted it. And they'd discussed Verso himself — with Jasnah filling the spren in on what these last two weeks had been like. It was damnably complimentary; Verso would have enjoyed hearing it. But in the end, they'd argued most over how much should be shared. Between the two of them, Ivory is the more reticent.

"Elsecaller oaths are less oaths and more — outcomes. It might be more helpful to understand the rules before you learn the exceptions."

He understands 'not mine alone to tell'—but at the same time, he feels just a little niggle of irritation. Isn't it enough for Ivory that Verso spent the past two weeks taking care of Jasnah while he was indisposed? Isn't it enough that he offered to go looking for him, and helped Jasnah when she was finally ready to do so?

Verso didn't do all of that for Ivory's trust or praise. He did it because Jasnah needed him to. Still, it rankles a bit. Hypocritically—he'd always expected Monoco to keep his secrets from the Expeditions, no matter how much bonding they'd done, and those secrets were far worse than Jasnah's ideals.

A breath, and he drops his hand. "Am I allowed to ask what you mean by 'outcomes'?"

"You're allowed to ask anything you'd like," she corrects — but it's a measure gentler than other corrections. Maybe less a correction and more like an instructive nudge, setting a wayward student back on their path. "Just as you're allowed to decline answering anything you're asked."

She rolls the cup in her hand, between her thumb and fingers, and slowly-eventually-finally gives way with a nod.

"Outcomes, like aspirations. A Windrunner promises their spren that they will protect those who cannot protect themselves, and jeopardizes their bond every time they fail to make good on that promise. An Elsecaller..." Jasnah pauses, hitching mid-sentence, before adjusting her language. "I promised Ivory I would do what I could to reach my full potential."

It's more than this. There are real, earnest declarations she's made about the kind of leader she intends to be — but that might indeed be too personal to share. Storms, they might be moot if their bond truly is so damanged.

This is a challenge for both of them, clearly. Trying to navigate their interactions, to speak each other's languages (literally, sometimes, in Jasnah's case). But if she's going to try, he's going to try, so Verso nods along to her instruction, listens carefully to her answer.

"Well, you've certainly done that." Worked to reach her full potential. He's not sure he's ever seen another person so ambitious to do their utmost. Clea, perhaps, before— mm. He feels a sharp pang of grief and shoves the thought away.

"If your abilities are based on that, they'll come back." Even as he says it, he knows Jasnah will probably hear it as a meaningless platitude. After all, he has no way of knowing. Still: "I'm sure there's no one in the world better suited to—" What is it called? "Elsecalling."

She doesn't share his confidence. Considering the effort and diligence that went into all four of her Ideals thus far—? Storms, there's only diminishing returns that remain to her. There is very little room to grow when you're so undeniably at the top of your game.

The thought of starting over again, of painstakingly picking a direction and grinding against it — well, no, actually, it would be fun and exciting were it not the impending sense of existential dread thanks to Odium's threats against Roshar. If the answer truly is to start over, she'd best define her goals. And quickly.

"You're right, if only by default. No one else could possibly be better suited to it because there are no other Elsecallers. As far as we know, only Ivory has chosen to make a bond."

"Oh," he says, surprised. "That must be—"

A beat. He swallows.

"Is that hard? Being the only one?"

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