5th Cylus 718
Once upon a time in another life, she wanted to be a dancer.
She wanted to soar on a stage with an audience of a thousand. She wanted the kind of grace and fluidity that knobbly limbs and her unsteady gait she could scarcely imagine ever reaching. She wanted the kind of unbelievable self-satisfaction, that faint dream of working towards and accomplishing this impossible goal from an orphanage without even a proper bed and looking yourself in the mirror and being proud of it.
She wanted to express herself.
She wasn’t bad with words, as many would attest, but even she knew she used it to distance rather than bridge. She couldn’t help herself there - as a tiny child before the power of Transmutation gave her power she could only once dream of, sharp words were the only weapons she could muster. but movement gave her that small avenue to let loose, the permission to not care and speak with her body and-
And nothing.
And no one.
And nowhere, because now she knows it was a figment of childhood idiocy, a little bit of wishful fancy.
Now she knows the insidious truth: only puppets danced for their makers.
Only puppets swayed to a cracked, ugly beat of noisy, wriggling fingers and invisible manipulations from on high. Expression, grace, movement, the synchronicity that meant you knew mind and body and body and mind to be one and the same - all as profound and ultimately as meaningless as a sword stuck in a stone; unused, unwield, shackled in a prison of rock, its worth only giving a chance to be weighed once some chosen king ripped it out for love and country. Steeped in the dance, she could see herself as she wanted to be seen: impeccably cold, precise, a creature of that both housed and extolled the economy of movement that no poet, however great, could ever do justice to, could ever serve as substitute to.
It would have also been pointless creative masturbation; expression for expression’s sake, a brush of the paintbrush that meant the prettiest nothing of all.
Amongst all the Domain Magics, they called Transmutation the spark of creativity. Where Necromancy embodied secrecy and brute manipulation, where Defiance claimed connection with imaginary powers in the sky and the earth, where Abrogation asserted dominion, where Empathy defined ambition to the point of self-destruction, the Etherist and her sorceries were considered kin to the artisan and the craftsman, the painter and the sculptor, the dollmaker and the jeweler.
Bull fuckin’ shit.
Her art served; the others just existed to look pretty. Her aesthetics lay in efficiency and versatility: the ability to conjure up a dozen memorized effects at a moment’s notice, the power to shape earth and metal and concrete and anything that boasted solidity but no life, heal the broken tool and the shattered blade, and summon etheric power bare and brazen at her very fingertips. She didn’t deny style; she just simply understood that, when the chips were down, it didn’t matter how you looked.
As long as you got the job done everything could be forgiven. She could worry about presentability when she could afford to.
She doesn’t dance anymore. Sometimes when she’s alone she finds the familiar tap in her steps and the sway in her arms and she drags herself to the threshold of that whim before stopping just short, cutting the urge down before it rose to bare its fangs.
There were better things to do. If it didn’t push her forward, it didn’t need to be done at all.
She doesn’t do a lot of things she used to anymore.
And she was so, so much better for it.
Once upon a time in another life, she wanted to be a dancer.
She wanted to soar on a stage with an audience of a thousand. She wanted the kind of grace and fluidity that knobbly limbs and her unsteady gait she could scarcely imagine ever reaching. She wanted the kind of unbelievable self-satisfaction, that faint dream of working towards and accomplishing this impossible goal from an orphanage without even a proper bed and looking yourself in the mirror and being proud of it.
She wanted to express herself.
She wasn’t bad with words, as many would attest, but even she knew she used it to distance rather than bridge. She couldn’t help herself there - as a tiny child before the power of Transmutation gave her power she could only once dream of, sharp words were the only weapons she could muster. but movement gave her that small avenue to let loose, the permission to not care and speak with her body and-
And nothing.
And no one.
And nowhere, because now she knows it was a figment of childhood idiocy, a little bit of wishful fancy.
Now she knows the insidious truth: only puppets danced for their makers.
Only puppets swayed to a cracked, ugly beat of noisy, wriggling fingers and invisible manipulations from on high. Expression, grace, movement, the synchronicity that meant you knew mind and body and body and mind to be one and the same - all as profound and ultimately as meaningless as a sword stuck in a stone; unused, unwield, shackled in a prison of rock, its worth only giving a chance to be weighed once some chosen king ripped it out for love and country. Steeped in the dance, she could see herself as she wanted to be seen: impeccably cold, precise, a creature of that both housed and extolled the economy of movement that no poet, however great, could ever do justice to, could ever serve as substitute to.
It would have also been pointless creative masturbation; expression for expression’s sake, a brush of the paintbrush that meant the prettiest nothing of all.
Amongst all the Domain Magics, they called Transmutation the spark of creativity. Where Necromancy embodied secrecy and brute manipulation, where Defiance claimed connection with imaginary powers in the sky and the earth, where Abrogation asserted dominion, where Empathy defined ambition to the point of self-destruction, the Etherist and her sorceries were considered kin to the artisan and the craftsman, the painter and the sculptor, the dollmaker and the jeweler.
Bull fuckin’ shit.
Her art served; the others just existed to look pretty. Her aesthetics lay in efficiency and versatility: the ability to conjure up a dozen memorized effects at a moment’s notice, the power to shape earth and metal and concrete and anything that boasted solidity but no life, heal the broken tool and the shattered blade, and summon etheric power bare and brazen at her very fingertips. She didn’t deny style; she just simply understood that, when the chips were down, it didn’t matter how you looked.
As long as you got the job done everything could be forgiven. She could worry about presentability when she could afford to.
She doesn’t dance anymore. Sometimes when she’s alone she finds the familiar tap in her steps and the sway in her arms and she drags herself to the threshold of that whim before stopping just short, cutting the urge down before it rose to bare its fangs.
There were better things to do. If it didn’t push her forward, it didn’t need to be done at all.
She doesn’t do a lot of things she used to anymore.
And she was so, so much better for it.
