Linten's stomach turned over again, it's voice of unrest not to be ignored. There was still so very much the fair of skin man needed to accomplish. Who knew when the day would be upon them and the Dragon's need for them at hand. Some that trained in these yards did not realize the gravity of their place in the delicate balancing act between Light and Shadow. They were not just pawns in the creator's game. They were pivotal pieces that changed sweeping portions of that game board. The shadow would realize that with time. But first the men of midnight's cloth must learn and grow, and quickly.

 

His stomach reverberated it's need for nourishment again while Linten spun out a web of small threads. Earth and water created a softening in the ground before him; sporadically in their placement. Fire slipped below the softened soil and heated the rocks and earth; a pocket of pressure below an unmarked point of tender dirt. Each pocket held a different temperature, different level of pressure awaiting it's release. Focusing flows of air Linten lifted a large stone and moved it over to the field he had placed his earlier weaves to. At each point he lowered the rock to the surface applying pressure like the step of a man. The first several pockets did nothing, then a small hiss of escaping steam from the next. Each one the result built until he placed the stone on the final spot of prepared soil. The ground around the stone erupted in a hail of earth and rock debris; a resonating boom shattered the quietness around him followed by the faint thudding of debris shards as they laced into the tree's on the opposite side.

 

Raking a hand through brown hair damp with exertion Linten let the air shield around him drop and stared at the crater. That was not quite the effect he had been going for. The rock he had been using for weight was no where to be seen. Hmmm ... perhaps a bit too much pressure. But the two prior, they will work nicely indeed. Another annoying growl from his stomach as it turned over again finally brought him to his feet. He had avoided the morning rush to the mess hall but he could avoid it no more. Then again he also needed to meet more people much to his own disappointment. Thus it was a conflicting surprise when he spun to head to the Inn only to find a lone man clad in the Black of the tower members watching him. No pins adored his collar so he was one of the newer and junior of the ranks.

 

“Good morning, lovely day to blow things up,” dust lay light in patches on his dark curly hair. “Sorry about the mess. Sometimes it's an experiment to see just what will happen. This is the best place to do that. But where are my manners, I am Linten. As nothing adorns your collar I would assume you are some what new here.”

Your battle for self-destruction

Ain't what it used to be

So forget what you see

So forget what you see

Thoughts went a considerable length in terms of being predigested. Madness. There was something revolutionary to the actions one took to the self. For the self, nothing progressed; it was for the others that their formulation actualised expression, their sharp stabbing points communicated.

 

Reaching into the jar, Blair brought himself be bitten by a widow. Suffering the crisis. Most animals ran away from others suffering. Rather than running away, Blair invited the pain into the cellar. Perhaps it was not new. Perhaps it had always lurked in the mind. He wanted to know what the widow was capable of. The creature reared her ugly bristles; eyes poised; apendages rattled; still Blair transfered the spider to his left hand with oven clasps. He picked her up by the ample abdomen, and she bit him prompty. The tip of his pinkie burned as the chelicerare twisted, increasingly agonised as the tenacious widow dug in. She slashed the cephalothorax from side to side deepening the laceration. Burning him. Flames sunk in as the minisicule glass spat out sand. Pain bloomed intensely. Multiple ebony eyes reflected Blair's watery blue, eliciting droppings. The beads mingled with the fluid his wound perspired. White streaked with brown, the poison and his blood.

 

Just... a little while longer.

 

When it was indeed time, Blair beckoned for his apprentice to remove the widow, escorting her to the nethers of the jar from where she spawned. As his pupil did so, his right hand recorded how incredibly tiny the wound was on his pinkie. Another sandfall found the blue mark, ringed by fairer skin. He would often joke to his apprentice that men were pinko-grey. Like all his jokes, there was more truth than his boy would realise. Rosy flush to the finger refused to invade that pale disk, yet inflused the entire tip with its majestic red.

 

His notes jolted adjectives such as lancinating. He kept time by each throb in the finger now. The pain throbbed on, gathering its strength. The side of his hand numb; the crimson hurt lanced past the base of his pinkie, invading the flesh of his hand further. With fleeting alarm the nerves screamed in his arm; the quickness of his response expected as Blair stared down its length at the purple finger, swollen with the widow's fluid.

 

One look at the sausage and Blair's apprentice could not advert his eyes. He was fascinated, caught in the trap, unable to run from the secrets disclosed before him. Blair dictated the piercing burn in his chest, travelling to his armpit. It was particularly excruciating in his elbow. He asked for the fire to be built up again. Lethargy grated at his consciousness, thickening his breathing. Though it was futile, his degrading body resisted desperately. His apprentice took in his pulse with grey, widening eyes.

 

Neck muscles weakened. His head, it hurt to remain still. Dark curls laid against the cool cushions the apprentice inflicted on him during the last half hour. He could no longer take notes legibly, for it sapped so much of his strength. He delegated that duty to his boy, croaking for a whiskey. Blair's headache raged, competing with the tense pain in his belly.

 

The apprentice handed him a glass. Sluicing down his throat the water augmented a flush to his face. His face softened, too soft to reprimand his boy that it was not whiskey. Blair asked for some more water.

 

He needed to be abed. Legs gave in to the flush. Both trembled frightfully, annoying him as they moved him to fear. Letting nothing show but the dreadful clenching on his face, lying down was difficult, thanks to torturous pain performed by the widow.

 

His apprentice was shamed to admit to himself that the healing would probably need an Aes Sedai. Blair would die before he acquiesced to the need for any channellers; besides, it might be too late. His condition escalated. Pulse check. It was too rapid for a count.

 

Blair laboured, fevered.

 

- Should I?

 

- Not yet.

 

He had heard of heat faciliating with pains. Blair instructed a hot bath to be drawn as he struggled. Imbibed in the water he seemed to recover himself. Inflicted with his spasmodic forearms, the water chopped back at him. Blair immersed his pain in the wrinkles as the water took over. It helped reduce the pain.

 

In the bed once more, he earned a brief respite before his breathing laboured again, the pain ragging at his cooling body. His apprentice poured water into the bags against his back, belly, legs to alleviate the storm wrecking him with sweat and aches.

 

His will weakened.

 

- Should I?

 

- Please.

 

Convulsing unbearably, he consented to the dose that his apprentice pushed into his mouth. It would block out his pain in sleep. Blair stirred but little as his apprentice forced water into him to prevent dehydration. His pores ejected the water and poison, as if they could not be ejaculated fast enough.

 

Checking on the inert form, Blair's apprentice noted the red band that streaked on the left hand.

 

When Blair was woken for nourishment, he could not retain the stew. His apprentice cleaned up the sick and forced down another dose as Blair was restless.

 

During the night the pain startled Blair into clarity. His apprentice observed that Blair's eyes were streaked with red, set in a ghastly, bloated face.

 

Out of the bath, Blair clung to sanity. The threshold of pain proved next to the chills that possessed him. His will paralysed; his apprentice administered another dose.

 

Dawn. Breath more foul than his filthy temper in the mornings. Rashes over both arms. His face was so swollen he had no eyes.

 

Despite the symptoms his breathing improved. He survived the night. He drank litres upon litres of water, letting the poison be pumped out.

 

The fiery burn in his legs were severe, but he could live with that. He still was not able to consume anything. When his apprentice straightened the sheets he saw the diarrhea that ran from them. He changed the sheets, and wrote in the discovery into the notes.

 

Nightfall; the process to the bath and bed cycled, a match against the ever present pain.

 

When he was able to eat the porridge in the morning, his apprentice heaved a sigh. His stomach was no longer tense. Later he would joke to others that he was too pudgy, but he once was owner of abs of steel. There was more truth to the remark than his listeners would have expected.

 

Within the fortnight, Blair's symptoms receded. Itching all over, but he endured. The worst passed, and the skin shedded giving way to fresh pink on his hands and feet.

 

As if he was reborn.

 

He called this entry: Lactrodectus.

 

Blair smiled, face restored to its usual proportions.

 

- Bloodsnakes do worse. They break you down from the inside. Perhaps we will test their poisons one day.

 

- Perhaps we will, Master.

 

The former apprentice of Blair the Flayer dabbled, born to walk the dark roads.

 

However much they suffered, they understood suffering was ultimately for the others. For those who suffered the most, people had not realised what they want. Blair suffered knowingly. That knowledge alleviated the suffering. He survived, stronger because of the pain he embraced. This his journeyman learned.

 

It was odd being back into the apprentice saddle again. They called it soldiering, quite the broad term for a farm. No notes for him on what the men of the Black Tower were capable of. Eyes closed, arms out, hands wide, Ful gave himself to the Creater. For none to know. For none to hear.

 

Sounds. Booming gnashing and crashing around him. The soil disrupted like the skin of a man bitten.

 

Grey shining eyes locked on the scene that transpired before him in unholy fascination. The brown recluse made him cringe. He drew on himself instinctively, humbled by the exercise.

 

Landscape cratered like the holes in the flesh during necrosis. The edginess , and he knew that it came from the speck of the man approaching the rock where he perched.

 

A man in black greeted him.

 

Blair's widow had been black as well.

 

Inserting the tinge of proper lightness for one who was frantically finding his voice, he said "Do not be sorry; apologies are for others. Your deduction is even more on the mark than your aim, Mister Linten. By the dint of your collar, I assume you are somewhat familiar with this ... farm?"

 

Ful knew exactly what the man reminded him of. It was thinking similar to that inspired Blair. The nervousness settled in anticipation of the individual experience: trepidations; madness.

 

He liked that.

 

OOC: Thanks Sam who shared the account of some silly bugger called Blair who was bit by a widow. Vivid, but nonetheless true. :D

Grey eyes, soft like ash, regarded him with a sparkle that one might believe belied fascination or perhaps anticipation. Emotions, the way a man could mask and hide his true intentions and desires were both interesting and frustrating all at the same time. Linten did not consider himself a strong judge of absent emotional display. It was said that the Carhien people played at a game that involved the masking and presenting of false emotions. How this could be advantageous was not lost on Linten, however the nuances were. He knew the void, the calmness presented by a flatness to the eyes; voice distant of emotion and almost cold. None of those existed in the other fellow, and at one time he would have accepted that underlying eagerness as factual. But the simple one time meeting of a woman, a witch, on his return voyage had changed all that. Nothing that she showed, that he observed, had been true about her. He had watched her move through the crowd, spoken with her briefly with downcast eyes during the gathering. Perhaps that was why he had not noticed the agelessness of her face until after he had fled; after, in the night, when he had hid from her and her sister. They had scoured the Inn and town site, looking for the man who had wreaked havoc. Havoc, what Linten had done could hardly be construed as havoc. They should have been looking to thank him, to offer him a place of welcome, fine food and wine. He had rid their fair town of the cut purse who had preyed on the weak and the unknowing.

 

Ful's eyes flick from one of his own to the other drawing attention back. Yes he was definitely comfortable with settling for ash. Formality of tones and words spoke of education or perhaps service in the company of education. The lack of his name spoke of games between nobles. A game Linten was not in the appreciation of. His fingers itched to trace the silver sword pin at his throat when the man mentioned it. So new and shiny still, it was a step closer the to the ability to move as he would need to help righten a great injustice. “In deed I have been at the Farm for a while now, it is a home that accepts me and as you can see,” his arm swept out to indicate his words. “There is less Farm all the time and more of a small town that surrounds the center of madmen's lives. One day their will be a great tower of ebony stones to rival that of Tar Valon's white. But for now we settle with what the mind can picture.” His eyes returned from their wandering of the Farm to regard once more the puzzle he had stumbled on this morning. “You speak well though you do not offer your name. One might almost think you a member of a house or other form of noble. In that a danger lies. All are equal here at the Black Tower, we set our own levels of hierarchy and the nobility level of the blood in a man's veins means no more then the clothes on their back when they arrived. All is given in service to the Dragon and noble blood turns dirt to mud as much as the lowest of street urchant.”

 

Perhaps he was being a little too cynical, the man my have just plain forgotten to offer his name in good gesture. But Linten's inadequate skills in the games nobles played tended to have him on the side of edginess and defensiveness more often then not. Something he was working on but was still like water slipping through his fingers.

 

 

OOC: Sorry for the delay ... should be back to form next week. :(