recreatable | open post.

"I didn't say ought," he argues. He'd... predicted the moral. Assumed that it would be a caution against learning things you aren't prepared for. But perhaps he's projecting his own experience onto the story—this fictional wall reminds him so much of the barrier around the Monolith, so it's easy to assume that whatever knowledge lies beyond it is horrible and dark.

But maybe it isn't. Maybe this is supposed to be a happy story. It is, after all, fiction.

"I guess that depends on what's beyond the wall."

A scrape of laughter; a wagging finger.

"It's cheating to hold off on answering until after you know the ending. But then again," with a tilt of one shoulder, "perhaps I'm cheating too when I say I believe he was both stupid and bold. If nobody asks questions, then we never learn. However, what of the wisdom of his elders? But then again, it's hard to feel the difference between listening to your elders, and your elders simply being just as frightened as everyone else."

He sighs, cracks his knuckles, and looks all the world like he's tired of this backstage chatter. He needs must get back to the story.

"Our protagonist didn't turn back. He climbed. There were outcroppings on the wall — things like spikes or hunched, ugly statues. He didn't know what they were, but he climbed the highest trees all through his youth! He could do this. The climb took days. At night, he would tie herself a hammock out of his scarf and sleep there. Mid-way up the wall, he could even pick out his village at one point. Thinking to himself how small it seemed, now that he was so so high."

Hoid steps his hands up, up, up an invisible space to demonstrate, well, highness.

"As he neared the top, he finally began to fear what he might find on the other side. This fear did not stop him. He was young — and questions bothered him more than fear. So it was that he finally struggled to the very top and stood to see the other side. The hidden side..."

He pauses for dramatic emphasis.

"...And on that side of the wall, the world burst alight in a sudden explosion: a brilliant and powerful brightness that lit the landscape beyond the wall. The boy gasped and saw the world in all its colors for the first time. Green trees, blue sky, red rocks, fields of golden grain all dazzling to behold. But on the backside of the wall, he also saw how it was crisscrossed with enormous sets of steps leading down to the ground. He stared at those steps and suddenly the gruesome nature of the statues on his side of the wall made sense. The spikes were spears. And, oh, the way everything on his side of the wall was cast into shadow—? The wall did indeed hide something terrible. Something frightening. It kept the danger in."

Idle, casual, like he can't help himself — Hoid spins on the bench and turns back to the piano. He picks and plinks at a few keys. Disjointed and barely-almost-kinda frenetic as the pace picks up.

"So he climbed down. Hid among the creatures who lived on this side. And resolved to steal some of their light and bring it back to the other side. To the land of shadows."

"Hm."

Begrudgingly, he admits that this strange man is a good storyteller. Better than him. It makes sense why Jasnah would have kept him around; she seems to enjoy this sort of thing. Stories. History. He then feels a little pathetic for still thinking about her, even now—because the story hits a little too close to home.

"So he didn't mind taking from everyone else if it meant that he could be happy." He thinks of his mother, her body slowly dying outside the Canvas. He thinks of Alicia, traumatized and in pain with no caregiver. And he thinks of the Lumièrans, living in the shadow of the Monolith. "Yeah, I think he's stupid."

A flourish of piano notes. And, as if Verso hadn't interjected at all:

"So the boy brought light for the first time in the village. Followed immediately by storms boiling over the wall. A price to be paid, maybe. The people within the walls suffered from the storms and their destruction. But each storm brought fresh light, for it could never be put back now that it had been taken. And the people, for all their hardship, would never choose to go back into the shadows. Not now that they could see."

Hoid ends the story with a sigh. As if, yes indeed, maybe the boy was stupid. Stupid and bold and brazen. Gently, he drops the lid on Verso's piano before holding out a hand — fingers curling in a pantomime of how he'd earlier asked for the envelope.

Now he wants it back.

"Just a moment, I've changed my mind about something," he muses.

And if Verso complies, Hoid pulls out the folded missive and — producing a bizarrely modern pen from inside his jacket pocket — he scratches one thing out and scribbles in another. Refolding the paper, he stuffs it back into the envelope and leaves it sitting on the piano lid.

Hoid stands. And offers a little, clownish bow.

A depressing story. One Renoir would like. He's always been obsessed with parables, cloaking meaning in symbolism. He'd twist it to be a positive: see, even though the storms come, it's still better this way. Verso feels vaguely annoyed even at this hypothetical, fictional version of his father.

"If it's all the same to you," he says, plucking up the envelope, "I'm hoping to sleep when I get back."

So, you know. Please don't be here still playing his piano.

"Bonne nuit," he adds, mostly to be polite, before—if Hoid has no further business—making the trek back to Jasnah's to knock on her door.

"Bonne chance," Hoid counters — speaking Verso's language lightly and easily for reasons we'll never know. But at least he's got absolutely no intentions of being around much longer. In fact, he intends to be out of the tower well before Jasnah ever finds out he was here. A bit of an over-inflated sense of his own importance, really, to think the queen would somehow give chase.

———

But back in her study, Jasnah is diligently at her desk. She's wrestling with the wording on a particularly delicate spanreed conversation with one of the higher-ranked ardents back in Kharbranth. Smoothing over tousled egos, given how quietly and quickly the queen had quit the city. She's fussing over a careful non-apology when there's a knock on her door.

"Enter," she calls out — tired but nevertheless alert. She's expecting a carafe of tea, and so doesn't even glance up from the page when the door opens.

He should just walk in, drop the envelope on her desk, and leave. Don't make a big deal of it. Maintain some dignity. Yes, that's what he's going to do, he tells himself as he enters Jasnah's space once more.

No lingering in the doorway, wishing that she would reach out and give him an excuse to stay and talk with her for a little longer. No purposefully forgetting something of his so that he has a reason to come back later. He still has a modicum of self-respect somewhere inside him, if only he can reach deep down and find it.

"Hey," he says, fingers nervously tracing the edges of the envelope.

She doesn't look up. Not yet. Chewing her bottom lip — caught up in the problem she's trying to untangle — and seemingly far, far, far less on edge in these quarters than anywhere else they'd been together. There's a smaller thin-skinned bubble of safety in Urithiru. Not perfect and not trusted, but it allows her a bit more breathing room.

It's not until she realizes there hasn't actually been movement from the doorway (no one has entered and dropped off a well-deserved steaming hot beverage!) that her concentration twists into scowl and she raises her eyes, prepared to chew out some gawking attendant who's perhaps on her first errand to the queen's———

Oh. It's small, it's minor, but there's tug at the corner of her mouth. The scowl evaporates into curiosity. Jasnah sets the pen down and sits back, attention roving over him. Checking for...for whether there's something wrong?

Her head tilts.

"You're back."

Carefully neutral.

What was he hoping for? That she'd be excited to see him? Obviously not—she'd been so displeased with him when he left. She'd all but ordered him to go, and now here he is, intruding on her space. And it does feel like intruding; standing ten feet away from her feels somehow more of a transgression than it had to sit next to her on the divan and braid her hair or work out the knots in her shoulders.

"Yeah," he says, glancing down at the envelope in his hands. "I—"

Ran into your ex-employee, and he gave me a message for you.

He looks back up. "I'm sorry," he blurts out, because he actually doesn't have a modicum of self-respect left. "You're right, it was stupid. I just wanted your mother to like me."

...Oh, again. Some of the unplaced, nebulous not-quite-emotion on her face choses a direction. She had been (in her own less than expressive way) pleased to see him return. Naively, maybe, she'd expected to avoid revisiting the topic. Can't they just shut it away in a little box and put it on a shelf and let it collect dust?

Jasnah nearly bites out a very abrupt, ballista-style ...but why? before she manages to swallow it at the last possible moment.

"If you want Navani to like you," she offers, a little disappointed, "you're better off asking for a tour of her fabrial labs."

Like mother, like daughter.

"Okay," he replies readily. "I'll do that."

Whatever a fabrial lab is. He's not totally sure. Something beyond his understanding, surely, but— having gathered up a little more courage, he takes another step in, closing the door behind him just as softly as he had when he'd left.

"I'll wear goggles and a lab coat and talk about hypotheses and variables, if it pleases you."

Don't be mad at him, Jasnah. 🥺

Something in his response is dissatisfying. Utterly. And, yes, unfortunately for both of them it shows on her face. A slight curdling.

The only saving grace is the careful path she plots through her next few words: "Whether she likes you or not," Jasnah seems to test each phrase on its own. Slow and careful. "It's not important."

To me.

"You're not obligated. It's not — required."

"It's important to me," he argues, but that feels like a dead end as soon as he says it. An appeal to 'what's important to him' won't change her mind. It won't make her care about her only living parent's opinion of him. Jasnah's feelings are an immovable object.

"—It doesn't matter," he concedes. "Just tell me what you want me to do here."

Again, she wants to ask: why? Why should he care one speck for what Navani thinks of him? It's not Navani whose patronage will keep him gainfully employed.

She folds her hands on the desk — but not until after primly organizing papers, ink still drying, to the side.

"Why don't you take a seat." Jasnah asks in very not-at-all-asking kind of way. There's a chair to the side of the desk, vaguely facing it but not exactly pulled up to the opposite edge. "We'll talk."

Verso glances down at the envelope in his hands one more time, then slips it into his pocket. It's not like Jasnah needs to know right this second, and he's reluctant to bring up the man she fired, presumably on bad terms, when things already feel on quite shaky ground.

He sits, leaving the chair where it was instead of scooting any closer. With his hands folded in his lap, he looks at her. Mm. This feels awkward.

"I feel as if I've been called to the headmaster's office," he says, lightly, trying to dissipate the tension.

Only now — as he pockets it — does she notice the envelope. An eyebrow lifts, but she doesn't ask. Instead, she sets to the minor task of moving a pile of books from one corner of the desk to another, presumably to free up her line of sight. It ought to be awkward to accomplish it with one hand sorta trapped in a buttoned sleeve, but years and years of practice allows her to make it look easy.

Whatever tension he feels is (mostly) absent for her. Or, at any rate, it's not that much different from the constant pedal note of something fraught and pulled tight. Cogs in the back of her mind still turning. To-do lists ticking themselves off-and-on even as she engages him in a question.

"A headmaster?" She asks. And this time it is a question. "Wait — I'll guess. Sounds like — an executioner."

Like he's waiting for the gallows, maybe? No. That can't be right.

Edited 2026-01-30 00:51 (UTC)

"No— what?" he asks as the realization of her question hits just a beat too late. It takes another beat to work out where she'd gotten that from, and then he does laugh a little bit, although it's quick and not particularly joyful.

"The principal teacher of a school. Responsible for discipline of unruly young children."

Which is kind of what he feels like is happening right now, honestly.

"They scold you whenever you do something reckless or... foolish." Which is definitely what he feels like is happening right now.

Appearing entirely more comfortable with being painted as a scolding teacher than an executioner, Jasnah sinks back in her chair — her posture doesn't lose its iron, per se, but it's an iron that molds to her position. Composed, instead of stiff.

Of course, she's comfortable playing the executioner too. But that topic hasn't exactly been raised before now. And she's in no rush to flaunt it.

"This is my fault," she announces — oh so entirely in that same tone the headmistress might take when they're plying the old not-angry-just-disappointed tactic. "I left you ill-equipped for the role you're walking into. It was on me to set the expectation long before we touched back down at Urithiru."

This is it, buddy. This is the little speech she's been ruminating on in the back of her brain while trying to get real work done.

Verso has been dealing with a constant barrage of I'm not angry, just disappointed for the past few decades. Somehow, though, it doesn't rankle any less, or make him feel any less of a child than it did the very first time. He frowns.

"Expectations?"

"Expectations," she echoes in confirmation.

Jasnah glances at the doorway — only because she's wondering whether this discussion is going to be interrupted when the expected carafe does arrive. But she ignores that little ticking timer like an itch pinned just off-centre of her focus. Another plate, spinning.

"And how they might shift between private and public arenas. I likely should have better prepared you for it during the trip back."

You know, instead of another riveting academic discussion about trade goods and treaties. Her mistake.

Verso blinks a couple of times. Expectations, shifting between private and public arenas. He thinks he knows exactly what she means, and yet, he can't bring himself to come right out and say it, even with the steadily sinking feeling in his stomach. He shrugs, as if confused. He's not confused.

"As you're well aware, my wits aren't quite as quick as yours."

He taps his fingers against his knees, a nervous little rhythm.

"You'll have to spell it out for me."

Jasnah inhales slowly, deliberately, as if choosing each word were an act of statecraft rather than something painfully personal. Spelling it out is an uncomfortable necessity and she bleeds her tone dry for it. Nevertheless, it must be honest.

"In Thaylen City, we were afforded a kind of anonymity. A temporary vacuum. Borrowed walls. That is not the world we've returned to."

She leans her palm on the desk, fingertip tapping between phrases.

"As Queen's Wit, you are expected to be sharp, perceptive, charming when required," she continues. "You already are those things. But the role also demands restraint. Deference. In public, when I decide, you must follow my lead without hesitation. We cannot appear divided. Not even subtly."

There are no kind ways to put it. If he proceeds in this role, then he is a dagger on her hip and a jewel in her hair. An extension of her — a depth of involvement she now wonders whether she undersold. Well. Like she said. Her fault for not preparing him.

"That does not mean you are silent." A faint edge enters her voice, precise as a scalpel. His earlier accusation — seen and not heard — had stuck with her. "It means that disagreement happens in private. Where I will rely on it."

Jasnah does not need obedience everywhere. But she needs it where it protects her — protects them both, really, given the nature of this court. And then behind closed doors she will require his honest dissent. After all, it was exactly that dissent that kept her on track for recovery back in Thaylen City.

Another blink, blink as he takes in what she's saying. Yes, it's quite clear what she means now. That she views him as her hired hand first, and that she expects him to act like he does, too.

She's right. She didn't prepare him for what this all entails. He'd agreed because he'd needed a purpose, and he didn't have any reason not to want to spend his time entertaining her, but it's starting to sink in that for all intents and purposes, he'd agreed to be her servant. All this time, that's what she's seen when she looks at him.

"Ah," he says, the rhythm of his fingers on his knees slowing, growing more disjointed. "So I was meeting your family as your employee."

Makes sense now why she'd found what he'd said so inappropriate. A lot of things are making sense now, actually.

"I get it."

He gets it. Good. She exhales a breath she didn't quite realize she'd been holding — all her calm, cool control disrupted by the electric anxiety of having to explain the very concept of working in service to royalty. There will be no casual discussions of her injury in front of Windrunners, for one. That's a whole other loophole he'd snuck his way through that honestly...honestly, she hopes she doesn't have to raise as another uncomfortable instance.

"This power stands on uneven ground," she explains. "And a slip can be as deadly as a knife, in the end. Controversy doesn't frighten me. Unlike when we were on the run, so to speak, I invite you to read and write and perform as boldly as you like. Make the highprinces question their arbitrary divisions — I'd welcome it. But there's controversy and then there's weakness. I don't dare show them weakness."

They'll eat her alive. Like they'd started to eat Elhokar, picking away at his power and influence.

"Yeah," Verso says, nodding, not at all listening to what Jasnah is saying. He's too busy playing the past few weeks over in his head. Recontextualizing everything he experienced. "I understand completely."

He'd thought that he was doing things for her as a friend. Spending time with her, helping her walk, whispering to her in the dark when she couldn't fall asleep. He realizes with sudden horror that what was the most meaningful closeness he's experienced with another human being in nearly a century was just a job interview. He hadn't been doing those things as a friend, he had been doing them as the help.

As if it's suddenly just occurred to him: "Ah, I just remembered I need to— organize my..." He can't think of a single reasonable excuse to abruptly get up and leave, so he ends on a vague, "Things. Quite urgently."

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