008; OPENISH. smoke and ash.

[norea]

Who: Hasibe, open to anyone who'd come visit at Mitchell's/is there already.
What: A general post for the duration of the plot.
Where: Mitchell's flat.
When: Next couple weeks.
Notes: Beware of gnostic and other spiritual narrative rambling.
Warnings: inherent blasphemy?

To the eye of any onlooker, Hasibe appears to float in and out of consciousness as well as reality. Her skin has a fading, sliding translucence, as though she is not quite in one plane of being at one time. Sometimes her eyes are closed, but she is always still. Her shell (her "body", as it is usually called) does not change, grow, develop hunger or thirst or anything similar. Her magic, her spirit, rises from the bed in which she is reclined, snaking around the city and out the holes in reality. In theory, all faqra have a degree of this, a type of witchcraft so immense and world-breaking that it cannot be contained by mortal flesh, but Hasibe has the worst case of what she considers, when her abilities are bound, "this illness".

It's a clever disease. As she grew, it wasn't so strong, it waited for her to grow along with it. She had no idea it would be like this in her mid-twenties, her denial and her attachment to her mortality were that strong; the last time she saw the full face of it she was much younger and much less aware of what she could do. Now she appears aware of very little, only rarely even capable of vague conversation, but she knows every movement in this city, every monster and every life lost. She feels them. Sometimes she considers taking them with her; a heaven she built for them would be one she trusted more than that of these gods, with their petty disputes and their politics.

But they didn't ask for her, and she shouldn't give them a claim undesired.

The thing about Hasibe is that she was never meant to be a creature of earth, it's just that she's so good at it. Still, she knows she must stay like this, waiting for her shell to give out, or for something to change.

Do nothing.

Do nothing.

There will be consequences for the people you want to save if you move your hand again.

Even wrapped in the bearing of Melek Taus's true heir, the devil's own daughter, she doesn't really want this birthright.

Comments

[norea]

The weird thing about looking at someone and seeing their self laid bare in front of you for Hasibe, like this, is that it's not actually weird. It feels terribly natural, with an emphasis on terrible--she lacks any sense that this is something unusual, at least not by the standards of what she is. It's not so much seeing the future as the patterns of how not just people but the universe works, even this universe, with what is wearing at its seams (and she knows, now, what the fault is, what is waiting).

The biggest pattern she sees is that everyone is on borrowed time. It's not new, not even to humans, of course; there's waiting mortality for everything and everyone, even the ancient immortals floating around this city. They're all going to end, extinguished like licks of flame in the dark, more fragile than their power and age let them believe. Their energy goes out of them and into something else. This shell, too, will go someday, but she's not ready to let it leave her yet.

Once, she chose a card from a Tarot deck for herself, and no one understood why it was the Tower, this creature of calamity. It was because after this calamity you had to reinvent, to become again, as she'd done so many times before. The person that Ilde and the others know never really existed in the sense that one becomes who they are naturally, an easy result of their environment and social pressures: the thing that became Hasibe chose herself, her names, her identity. She crafted it, and it's given her a certain resilience. This is what is underneath.

In Ilde she sees many things: a little child in Italy, the hole that should be filled by an absent mother, her father's charms and weaknesses. She can see what comes next, too.

"You'll be okay," Hasi says. "After this. You should start thinking of names."

It's never too soon.

[rhinemaid]

Ilde has had so many reasons to hold off. So much had happened all at once - her fertility restored and then she died, and she's still trembling underneath with the fallout of that experience (that experience that should've been an end and instead gave her this beginning, midway through), and there's Ivan, and Baedal, and...

...there will always be Baedal. This is her world, now; this is her life, and she can live it or not. And she does want to live it, with a breathless fierceness that she doesn't know what to do with because she doesn't...want things, not so strongly. Or maybe it was just always that the things she wanted were much easier to get, she never wanted for long, nothing ever felt out of her reach and so everything just felt vague. Maybe that's what it is.

“Hasi,” she says, half-helplessly, unsure of what to say to that (yes, I will, I want to), and reaches out for her wrist. She's hesitated to touch her because she doesn't know what's happening or what might happen next, but she isn't thinking about that right now and it doesn't stop her.

[norea]

Hasi lets it happen. Maybe she thinks it'll be good for someone to know what it's like, what she really sees when she's like this. The first impression is instant: it is potential, blossoming, developing, the universe expanding all around them. Not just this universe: multiple ones, attached not in the tree-shape Hasi talks about the multiverse being, but something less linear. One world (hers) at the center, the others spreading outward, reaching for something at the edges of nothingness.

(And at that nothingness, something waits, a patient suitor.)

Here in this world, she is conscious of many things, despite her translucent state. For example, she is conscious of the number of cells in Ilde's body, the pattern of her breathing, the breathing of everything in fact in this entire city, the make-up of each body, how close it is to dying, how close things are to being born. Leaves, grass, trees, cats, dogs, fish, monsters. It's hard to know what to look at when there is so much, a thousand stars blurring and spinning and each star is one life, one tiny dot in the sky of this peculiar omniscience.

Hasi shows her something else, next. The gates smashed in her mind, the place where the binding was--those bindings were not especially well-done the first time she did them, the equivalent of a psychic hack job, and now there's messy ruins there, in the plan of her consciousness. This is what needs to be fixed, if they want the world to close back up again (or else, no matter what the gods' intrepid fingers stitch together, more holes will come, more heat from her mind burning open the reality that wraps protectively around them).

Gently, Hasibe pulls her wrist away from Ilde.

She doesn't say anything.

[rhinemaid]

Ilde forgets to breathe for long enough that she's gasping like a fish out of water (--well) when Hasi pulls away from her; it's just that there had been so much else to concentrate on that she'd...forgotten, she'd been overwhelmed, she's still overwhelmed, trying to wrap her mind around an experience inherently so much bigger than she is. It felt like--

--nothing else, everything, and not for the first time she finds herself frustrated with the limitations of the languages she knows. They feel small and human and useless and oh, she's breathing, that's-- good. That's nice.

“I know somebody,” she says, clutching her hand to her chest with the other. “I'll-- call him.”

[norea]

In a way, she's sorry she had to do that, but it communicates what's happening better than she could out loud. Some things must be shown. This memory will be retained later on, and if she chooses, maybe she'll someone else, but maybe--

Maybe it's better if no one else ever sees the truth. The self-made object of lust persona is one she actually needs, it makes her feel grounded, as close to mortality as she'll ever come, and she wants so much to know that mortality. Most people desire power. Hasi desires to limit hers, to know what it's like to struggle that way. She feels, rather than sees, Ilde's withdrawing, and closes her eyes again.