recreatable | open post.

"Lumière doesn't know about them, no."

And thank goodness for that. The Expeditioners only know about them if Verso tells them, and he's long since stopped doing that. It's a death sentence. And, while the Expeditioners will all die sooner or later, he'd rather it wasn't through such violent means. At least being gommaged is painless.

"I guess... they were given those epithets by their creator."

He's careful not to lie. It wouldn't feel right, not after the conversation they just had. He doesn't, though, dissuade her of the reasonable conclusion that they were created by the only godlike being he's told her of.

His answer only raises more questions. Why does he know their epithets? Did the Axons introduce themselves before they (as he implied) tried to kill him? At least she does assume their creator to be the Paintress.

Such misdirection is helped by the fact that she's already drawing careful parallels in her mind. As the Paintress must have created these Axons, so too did Odium create his Unmade. Sja-anat, known as the Taker of Secrets. Re-Shephir, the Midnight Mother. Dai-Gonarthis, the Black Fisher. And all the rest, a pantheon of nine twisted spren.

Uncharitable, maybe. Sja-anat has at least proven herself no longer devoted to Odium. Is that an avenue she should take? Have Renarin ask his spren, one of Sja-anat's children, to make contact with the Unmade. Maybe then...

She's doing it again. Letting her thoughts give way to work. So, with a slowly exhaled sigh, she shepherds her attention back to Verso.

"Do they guard her?"

She doesn't name the Paintress. She assumes he catches the path of her inquiry. At least, it confirms for him that his misdirection-by-omission has worked.

It's not actually that far off, despite the fact that she's working with incomplete information. Honestly, her powers of deduction are impressive. Unfortunately, he can't compliment her on that given that it would out him as being not entirely truthful. It's just— it would be so complicated to explain the truth. She'd think he was insane, probably. Sometimes he still wonders if he actually is.

"Sort of. In a way. It's... complicated."

To say the fucking least. But he whittles it down to what she might actually want to know.

"The barrier around the Paintress's Monolith—the chroma there is dense, impenetrable. Even if you can make it through, you'll just get gommaged on the way."

His tone slips into something educational, like a tour guide explaining that if you look to your right you'll see... "But," he says, "theoretically, a powerful enough person"—he does not need to explain the Curator right now, or probably ever—"could forge a powerful enough weapon to pierce it, given enough pure chroma. Like the kind concentrated in an Axon's heart."

Bitch, how do you know all this??? Don't ask.

He deflates a little. "But they're too strong. It's a dead end."

He warns her that it's complicated and so she does a kind of internal gearing up to meet this complexity head-on. Only to find...well, the explanation is exactly what she might have guessed. Given the detail about the barrier and even the loose wink at power concentrated within these beasts' hearts.

Marvelous, the things you can do with an unreasonable amount of Investiture. And in her mind, that's exactly what this chroma he keeps describing must be. Gather enough of it in one person or one object, and it should overcome nearly anything.

Storms, she even knows exactly the weapon that she assumes could overcome both the Axons and the barrier. Nightblood, currently carried by the man who killed her father. It's okay, though, 'cause he's on their side now.

Her mouth opens. She almost explains exactly that. But then she considers the sorts of explanations of Realmatic Theory it would require. More than that, she'd need to explain Awakening. An Invested Art that isn't ordinarily found on Roshar.

"Have you attempted it? Crossing the barrier?"

Can he survive something as destructive as that?

"Sure," he says. "Lots of times."

Back when it was him and Renoir, they'd tried countless ways to get through the barrier. Mostly, they'd bounced right off of it. When they'd tried to ram their way through it, though—

"I just end up back where I was on the other side." Gommaged and un-gommaged in an instant.

Hmm. Hers is a soft, curious sound. His answer confirms a couple of other assumptions she's harboured. Or, at least, she assumes it confirms them. Is the purpose for which he's hollowed himself out — let it become all that he is — getting through that barrier and stopping the Paintress? Considering the difference of opinion to his commander.

She tosses onto her back in his bed. Hands, folded on her stomach. Eyes on the ceiling, chasing the striations in the tower's stone. What does she know? She knows this barrier must be heavily Invested. More so than he is. How Invested is he? Storms, she'd like to see him from the other side. It's not the first time she's thought this — wondering how he must appear from within Shadesmar.

"I wonder if the Axons pre-date the barrier."

What an expectant silence that follows.

"I don't know," he says honestly. He'd never been interested in this sort of thing before the Fracture. All he'd ever focused on was himself and his piano. That had seemed to be all that mattered.

"But I don't think so. The Monolith appeared after the Fracture, and so did the Nevrons—the monsters," he clarifies, since he's been trying not to use too much jargon that she won't understand. "It all sort of... happened at once."

It had felt cataclysmic at the time. Like the world was ending. He knows now that it was the result of Clea and Renoir's frantic attempts to pull Maman from the Canvas against her will.

"So, it stands to reason that the Axons were created then, too."

"Stands to reason," she echoes. There's an argument brewing behind her teeth but she avoids it at the last possible second. It would only have been (yet another) needling correction that such an assumption is built on faulty logic. And that went so well last time.

Hadn't she been tired? Yes. Bone-deep tired. But either she's passed that point where her body has given up on sleep. Or else Verso is being just a little too interesting. At the very least, she shuts her eyes.

But keeps talking.

"What do they look like? The Axons. Are the three that you've seen identical to one another?"

She was definitely meant to be asleep by now. He glances over his shoulder, but he can't tell what she's doing in the dark. He turns back around.

"Not at all," he answers, although he purposefully softens his tone a little, speaks a little slower. The cadence of a bedtime story instead of a daytime lecture. "Sirène is... beautiful, but dangerous. If you look at her too long—"

Mm. He has a sudden flash of seeing someone in Expedition uniform standing at the edge of a precipice, then watching them step off before he could reach out to stop them. It's not an appropriate thing to share at bedtime.

"It's just not good." To say the least.

"And Visages is this big, masked creature guarded by someone who calls himself the Mask Keeper." Kind of a dick move on Renoir's part to make the Axon that represents Verso a lying liar who lies, but whatever. "And the Reacher— she's smaller. Pale. One-eyed, at the top of a tall tower."

Hard not to feel a strange thrill — learning about things even the city-dwelling citizens of his home don't know exist. Like being let into a secret. So she tries to imagine what each one might actually look like behind her closed eyes.

"...Do they speak?"

"No," he says, shaking his head even though she can't see it in the dark. "Not that I know of. —Well, the Mask Keeper does, but he's..." A scoff. "You can't get anything useful out of him."

"No?"

Not quite a yawn. Not really a yawn at all. Just a softer note to the question. The sound trails off, never quite reaching its inflection point.

"Why is that?"

Maybe Verso doesn't ask the right questions, she thinks.

"You can't get a straight answer out of him. He just— talks around it." And the most annoying part is how congenial he is about it all. You could almost believe that he isn't about to lead you to your doom. "It can be... very irritating."

Verso is, in fact, the biggest hypocrite in the world.

You know what? She's not going to say anything about how familiar it sounds. Let it never be said that Jasnah Kholin can't (sometimes) toe a line. It's entirely possible that she will hop straight over that line at a different time in a different conversation. But for now, tonight, she holds her tongue.

Well. Other than to practice her novice-level active listening skills.

"That sounds...frustrating."

He's very biased, but Verso happens to find her novice-level active listening skills kind of cute.

"Yeah," he replies. "You can imagine why I gave up on the Axons." Can't defeat them, can't reason with them—actually, they make perfect sense as representations of the Dessendre family.

"—So," he follows up. "Is that enough to lull you to sleep?"

How does one even answer that question? She frowns into the darkness. If she isn't feeling particularly lulled, then she supposes he's to blame for being just a little too interesting tonight.

Still. It's not the information or the chatter or the learning opportunity that'll tip the scales. It's the knowledge that he's here. Invulnerable. A sort of guard in his own right. Even if the sense of security is all in her head.

"Yeah," she answers. Bewilderingly casual. She shifts once more, curling back onto her side and wrapping her arms around his pillow as though she prefers to bunch the material up under her chin. Like faking a firmer cushion than it really is.

"Good night," Jasnah finally says. Letting him gently off his hook.

"Bonne nuit," he replies, figuring she'll know what it means by context clues. Jasnah seems to enjoy the thrill of puzzling things out more than having it directly explained to her.

He doesn't sleep much, partially owing to the uncomfy sleeping arrangements—he's still propped up against the foot of the bed in lieu of having an actual pillow—and partially due to replaying the night's events in his head ad nauseam:

—She'd touched his shoulder. Because she wanted to. Not because she needed to lean on him, or because she was picking a piece of lint off his shirt, or any other practical, pragmatic reason. She'd touched him for the sake of touching him, and then she'd kept her hand there. If he focuses hard enough, he can still feel the way the fabric of his shirt bunched between her fingers.

Mostly, though, it's due to habitual insomnia. When he wakes, it's in the very early morning hours. He glances at Jasnah's sleeping form—somehow still a little bit tense, like a slight breeze could wake her—and doesn't have the guts to shake her awake. The semi-baring of his soul last night had felt surprisingly good, but that's the issue. Good things don't really happen to him. It's impossible not to feel a sort of dread at it being snatched away.

So, he lets her wake on her own time, busying himself instead with staring at himself in a hand mirror and unhappily trying to arrange his hair in a way that makes his apparent roots less obvious.

While Jasnah doesn't sleep for long — or even all that well — it's still better than sleeping alone in a space she doesn't trust. And in contrast to the nights that preceded it, her fitful sleep is downright refreshing. She wakes shortly after he does but stays still. Eyes closed. Willing herself to drift away just once more, like she'd done a handful of times through the night. When that fails, she thinks through her agenda for the day and how she's supposed to both be the Queen of Alethkar and Friend of Verso simultaneously. Impossible.

Her fist tightens around the smokestone. She'd held it all night. And feeling it now, a source of resistance as she closes her hand, she realizes there's no time fabrial to read. No way of knowing what the hour is. And it's that cold shock to her nervous system that has her eyes fluttering open, spine lengthening in a mink-like stretch. She pushes up on one hand, blinking blearily and——

Jasnah watches him sit with the mirror. It's not hard to guess what he's examining — and when she realizes it, remembering a conversation shared back on Jochi's divan — she suppresses a smile. A problem and a solution fall into place, one beside the other.

"If you go and find dye in the Breakaway today," she pockets the smokestone and swings her legs over the edge of his bed, "I'll help you with it tonight."

Her turn to offer an unrepentant, unabashed bribe. Let me be Queen today and I'll return as Just Jasnah tonight.

He'd been half-afraid that she'd react the same way she had when they'd first returned to Urithiru. That she'd wake and flip a switch, and the Jasnah he's fond of—the one who calls him Verso, who takes card games very seriously, who can sit and talk with him for ages without growing bored of the conversation—would be replaced with Queen Jasnah, who has no time for him until she's fearful and furious and needs a distraction.

For the moment, at least, she's the same person she fell asleep as, and he's relieved that's the case.

He doesn't turn to face her, but he does look at her through the reflection in the mirror as he picks at a particularly egregious strand. "—How much experience do you have dyeing hair?"

Gauging by the glow of a soon-to-be-sunrise outside the window, she think she doesn't quite need to flee back to her own quarters just yet. Ordinarily — if she wasn't slowly and methodically healing a gut wound — the predawn hour would be spent in training, learning bit by little bit how to better wield her shardblade. It gives a bit of breathing room to her schedule.

Otherwise, she'd already be gone. Switch, flipped.

"None," she confesses.

No experience whatsoever. But — it can't be that hard, can it? Oh well. Her feelings won't be hurt if he refuses her help and goes looking elsewhere for someone who likely could do a better job. Mostly, she wanted to signal that she'd be back. And that signal is more important than whether or not she actually does the thing.

A thoughtful pause, before Verso sets the mirror down. His hair looks pretty much exactly the same, although he'd balk if anyone pointed that out. It's obviously completely different!!

"I guess it can't be any worse than the gestral apprentice who was doing it," he says as he swivels in his chair to look at her. This, if nothing else, is proof of how much he likes her: he's willing to let her at his hair with nothing but a bottle of dye and a dream.

"Did I ever tell you he once turned it purple?"

Y'know, someone might be offended to hear that their sincere offer of support and service is met with I guess it can't be any worse than (insert other option.) But luckily for Verso, Jasnah is nothing like him in this regard. Her ego is steel-clad in this regard — it's got so much less hanging in the balance than the dozens of other problems she's got to solve in a day. It might be refreshing to fail at something with considerably lower stakes — apologies to Verso's hair for calling it low stakes.

"And I'm assuming purple was not the intended outcome," she muses, having an easier time putting her boots on than she did taking them off.

Edited 2026-02-03 02:02 (UTC)

"No," Verso says flatly. Be more engrossed in his hair stories!

"But all right, I'll go and see if I can track down some supplies." Which means he'll probably be walking around aimlessly until he finds someone kind enough to point him in the right direction. Just as he'd started learning where everything was here, he'd been whisked away. "Your room, or—?" She probably won't want to make a mess in her room. "My room, I suppose."

Sending him on a mission to walk around aimlessly is — sadly — rather the point of this side quest. It buys her another day to decide what to do with a man who refuses to be background furniture, when realistically what she needs from him is background furniture. Unhelpfully, the last Wit hadn't been particularly skilled at fading into the background either — but that was because, instead of sulking, he simply installed himself in the foreground and dared the Kholins to object.

She reaches for the hairpin she'd removed and left lying out the night before. The twisting motion draws a faint frown, but she manages it with only a small hitch — proof, she supposes, that healing is progressing. With practiced ease, she slots the pin back among the others and gives her head a brief shake. Braids secure. Still, she'll likely need to stop by her quarters before any official business. Ugh. She isn't entirely comfortable there yet.

Which makes the answer easier. "Your room," she confirms.

She gives his room a careful once-over in the thin, breaking light. Would it be strange to ask him to keep an eye out for odd cremlings? Storms — would he even know what constituted as odd in a cremling?

Jasnah pushes herself to her feet. She should say something. The silence stretches just long enough to be noticeable. She worries the corner of her lip, then settles something pared-down but honest.

"Thank you," she says, a little stiff, a little sincere. "For letting me stay."

Oh. "Well," he says, unsure what to say, "if I recall, it was more demanding that you stay." While she had one foot out the door, although he doesn't bring that up. It's silly, but it feels like bringing up the earlier part of the evening would sour what became of it. "But I'll gladly take your more gallant interpretation."

He turns back around to look self-consciously at his hair in the mirror again, silently giving her permission to take her leave.

—But he does add one more thing. "It's okay if you can't make it." Better to preemptively assume disappointment than get his hopes up and spend the evening feeling stood up like he had their first night back. "Just let me know so I don't have to organize a search party."

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