Fantasy RPG Forum - Standing Trials

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 healer.

She can’t remember a time when she ever cared about people nor did she particularly had an inclination to try. They say the spark warps you, turns you into something closer to magic monster than man, but even before she got in touch with her inner glow, she could never look back and see a time when caring about people actually… worked. In the orphanage, in the etzori slums, it was every fool for himself. They had few beds, even less toys, and not enough food to keep everyone happy. Small cliques for survival, little gangs - an illusion of solidarity, a necessary evil for survival.

But still she wanted to be a healer.

It wasn’t about the people. It wasn’t about the sick and the wounded, it wasn’t about the old and the frail, it wasn’t strictly about making the world a better place - that was just a nifty side effect that worked out for the best.

It was about her.

It was about control. It was about control within and control without: personal mastery and authority.

It was about having all the wealth of knowledge to fix in your hands and the power to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in offering it. It was about having the technical mastery, the confidence, the hands to take the broken and make them whole and leave them without flaw.

In other words, art as she understood it: efficient, useful, wrought of self-actualization that made it a boon to society.

She’s supposed… she supposed there was a poetry to it too. A parallel that both her and the spark appreciated. Just as Transmutation could, if only in a limited aspect, heal metal and restore rust to gleam, so too could the healing arts find restoration to body and mind. Dominion over the organic and the inorganic, a maestro of both metal and flesh born to stich and mend both.

Unlike dancing, she did take steps towards the path of the healer. More than steps, she reach it. To a point.

Every child had to leave the Etzori orphanage at the age of 14, sold away to apprenticeships and whatnot. The system and the people who allowed it to happen to them irked her: to allow chance and fortune to decide the rest of your life was a repulsive thing she would never ever allow herself and her brother to be a victim of.

She sought out who she wanted seasons before her 14th arc day.

Druce LaVarro ran the Bedside Manor in the Etzori Commercial Ring. One of the best Etzori healers in the city even before his 40th arc, she became making visits there and did the one thing she truly despised:

Tried to be charming.

Turned out she wasn’t too bad at it.

She physically spun a story of a young troubled girl with untapped potential trapped within a cycle of poverty that would doom her to some mediocrity far below the reach of her potential. She played off his kindness, his inherent need to heal and nurture, and maybe some kind of paternal instinct he had and when the topic of her the impending apprenticeships so casually came up, he offered and she, hesitatingly yet joyfully, accepted.

She was grateful, regardless. She was undeniably grateful despite everything.

And then the truth of it that should have been so, so obvious came crashing down on her: there was more to healing than technical perfection.

Once upon a now, she wanted to win.

Not rule, not lead, not pioneer, not dominate, not discover; win. She wanted enough personal power that even the Abrogators that seemed to dominate the upper echelons of the Etzori magocracy feared crossing her. She wanted Tovyrn bested, Vuda-

She would never forget that day in his office 4 arcs ago. She would never forget how small she made her feel with words alone-

-dethroned and her free. She wanted to eradicate the bureaucracy she now so handily wielded as a weapon, as if she were one of them, and set it all to the torch. She wanted to kill Robin again and again and again until he could undo the rape he inflicted upon her brother, and she wanted to cleanse Gangui of whatever mental ailment that caused him to regress into the state of gorilla rage he often found himself in.

She wanted perfection that never needed maintenance. Transmutation’s core, it’s ability to create powerful objects that always faded away, was the spark’s first and cruelest joke, a reminder that for all the heights one could reach, one would have to tweak and recover and maintain in between those grand periods of power.

She wanted freedom.

Freedom from Them and the freedom to do whatever she wanted.

She wanted Finn to stop holding her back from it; she wanted to indulge in the dozens of times she thought about smothering him with a pillow, to put him out of a hard life he was never, ever suited for.

She wanted to reshape Etzos; not to better the lives of anyone, but because she could and would.

She wanted…

She wanted to rest.

She wanted to look into the mirror in the morning and see not a tired shell of herself.

… And there was no one who could make it happen but herself.