9: Balance; Comfort

Alexandrie’s head was pounding. She wanted to crawl into bed. She wanted to do a lot of things, but she was at a heavy darkwood table listening to Mysel talk about the societal cycle of destruction and rebirth and the order of operations as she made her way through old orkish text and wondered why she’d never considered it strange that she could read and speak the language with near fluency. That it had been a strange requirement of Grandmère’s…that it had been extra work to maintain in Shining Capital, where she hadn’t seen or met orks…

Mysel continued to talk about the way the world worked. Cyclical. Repeated. Constantly becoming what it had been before. A pattern he and Heofonræsele had tried to break for 1500 years to no avail. She flipped a few more pages - what she was looking for was not here, and there was a pile of books to get through.

That Mysel saw Genofeva as uninteresting - uninteresting that Genofeva seemed not to care about the outcome so much as keeping her divinity alive through her own form of worship… that people like her happened all the time, and so they were simply a menace to be dismissed, or tolerated at worst.

Mysel was part of the problem.

He’d spent so long meticulously detailing the need for her to think the best of people while simultaneously expecting the worst could happen. She half listened, but the argument was based on something impossible so it was difficult to follow - especially hungover, and after everything else that had happened that day her mind drifted, eyes creeping across the page absently.
Thinking the best was how she had ended up here - how she had been so easily…manipulated? She hadn’t considered her own grandmother might be concealing information - hadn’t conceived of a world where the stories she had been told could be so far removed from reality.

To expect the worst (to Alexa’s mind) was to lack trust in whatever the situation was.
To imagine the worst possible outcome might be more possible.
The opposite of thinking the best.

Of course.

Thinking the best was to trust.
Expecting the worst was to believe they would hurt you if they could.
Maybe not deliberately, but… but if you expected the worst, you couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t all the same.
She hadn’t thought the worst of Grandmère.
She hadn’t expected the journey to be easy, but she was coming to realise that Grandmère had more than omitted practical information.

She had lied about the way things could or would feel. Alexa had not only been physically underprepared - she had been psychologically underprepared.
Then sent out with less information than Alaina would offer her worst enemy.
The adolescent hadn’t expected the worst, but she had received it. Now she couldn’t see the best.

Faith and Belief again. Now she knew, she couldn’t have faith. Not in Grandmère.

And it all led to those circles, or spirals of empty expectation - Mysel travelling the world with his friend, trying to help people in a way that clearly changed nothing on any grand scale, because the cycle continued. To Alexandrie, La Chanson calling two entities who were powerful in their own right to help her made the cycle seem more like concentric circles, or the touching spirals of rose petals.

Someone (or something) big wanted something so they asked someone smaller to do something who asked someone smaller to do something who asked someone smaller who asked -

But the way people asked was different.
La Chanson asked through magic and visions.
Cedric Edgewater asked with torture.
Mysel asked by mindreading.
Genofeva was asked and asked with threats of death.
Spider asked through sharp observations and sharper blades.
Kaszra asked by pointing out the problem the thing posed.
Alexandrie?
As far as she could tell, she asked using her words and physicality. She asked through questions. She did everything she could not to kill even someone who wanted her dead…

While Myself seemed to be afraid she might genuinely come to enjoy it, or at least see it as an option in the worst case, Alexa’s mind flashed back to the alley in Glitter Delta Cove:
Genofeva had wanted to kill her then. She had tried to cut the others down, but in truth it felt at the time as though she was trying to make Alexa fight back or flee.
And Alexa had desperately wanted to run. Mounted, she’d looked at all the ways she could have fled. But to run put Chevalier at a disadvantage. To run left Lucas and Spider in harm’s way. Genofeva was there for her. Running would only have made things worse for the others. So she had stayed and watched everything. Watched it all, until Genofeva had been the one to run.

Alexandrie didn’t hate Genofeva. She hadn’t hated the two people she’d killed, and she still thought of the stillness that had fallen upon the rabbit as she’d practiced aiming using magic. It wasn’t that she was a complete pacifist. Alexa knew people, things, ideas had to die eventually. But she couldn’t do it deliberately. More than anything, Alexandrie felt the urge to give, not take life. She enjoyed the rush of seeing Scramble and Oat interact with new things - enjoyed seeing their freedom.

She’d wanted to wake them, bring them with her to the Hall of Records; but they were exploring rest - something she longed to explore herself, one day. They were happy. And they got to experience a freedom Alexa hadn’t felt in a long time.

That Mysel could even ask questions around the reason she killed those people told her a lot about the way he thought of life and death. That he sympathised (or empathised) with the feeling that it was acceptable to think that killing was the only way out - that the end point of a survival instinct was kill or be killed (and that this was her instinct) - that it was important to caution killers against the thought of doing it again -

Alexa hadn’t known her own strength. That was the truth. That was the beginning and the end of the situation. She hadn’t been trying to kill, she hadn’t even been thinking of killing - but it happened.

She had ended their lives. Accident or no, she had done it. The excitement she felt at watching the freedom of the birds was counteracted by the heaviness of that thought. If she had been told about the nature of her abilities - about how quickly they would grow, how intense they could be…

Death was not simply a consequence. It was a journey. A drowsiness. A concept, like fate. On the one side, fate stayed its hand and Spider lived. On the other, slaughter waited hungrily hoping for an opportunity to strike.

One was not better than the other. That she aligned so strongly with life was simply the opposite side of the coin, not a different coin. She said as much:
“Once Slaughter wins, no one will want to breed because they know what happens.”

There was a balance. Alexandrie believed in balance. Gymnastics with Vee, climbing trees, nature and aesthetic…she believed in balance.

The Claws in the Dark, Genofeva…they seemed to be achieving the same ends or walking the same journey - intended or not. Where was life flourishing? What was bringing the life to hold balance together? How many fulxithii were there, if seven babies were born? Was this a large or small number? For Slaughter to continue the spiral, there had to be creation. In the same breath, without Slaughter, creation would be a bad thing - wouldn’t it?

To Alexandrie, Genofeva was no different to her: they had both been asked to do things by someone they (for whatever reason) trusted. To a greater degree than the adolescent would ever admit aloud, Genofeva seemed to understand her thoughts - her internal workings, the words she never said aloud - better than most she’d spoken to. What Alexa didn’t know was why Genofeva thought Alexandrie would do as told. The older woman was right: Alexandrie did want to change the Progress. Everything she had seen was quickly bringing her to the conclusion that something needed to be done, but she wasn’t sure if she was the right person to do it - or whether getting rid of it entirely was the best course of action either. People liked order - they liked systems. They liked patterns.

Maybe Mysel found comfort in the system…it was familiar. He had no concept of what was outside it despite being alive for so long, and despite living - technically - outside it himself. That two beings as long lived as they had not found a way to end a cycle they saw as distressing told Alexa that either they didn’t really want it to end, or it was not possible. That a cycle would reassert itself eventually anyway. The strange thing about that, she thought, covering a huge yawn with a hand as she turned a page, was how comforting it was to her. Not the form the cycle took, but the fact that it existed. That there was nothing she could do that would upset the balance so thoroughly.

Eyes shifting to Mysel as he brought over another book, Alexa’s thoughts returned to the woman who was probably still watching, still listening. She didn’t know, really - truly - why she wanted to call Genofeva back, but she didn’t like that Spider and Mysel kept taunting her. The demon worshipper was capable enough to have lived to now - what benefit did insulting her bring? Besides, she seemed to be more level headed than Alexandrie, and their insults seemed halfhearted in comparison to what she’d heard at the capital. And there was the matter of training…what training could she offer Alexandrie? How did she know more? How did she know so much more? It was that, more than anything - the frustration of being helpless, of following a path without knowing where it would lead - it was curiosity, it was anger, it was resentment…

It was a desire to feel understood that drove her to the question:

“What do you mean by training?”