Alianater (Worldwalker)

Oh boy, it’s been a hot minute since I posted something on this blog, I swear to christ I’m going to finish the novel, things have just been...a little pandemicky out here.  Anyway!

Brenneth’s favorite Disney movie is Robin Hood, she likes the songs and she had Strong Gryffindor Energy even as a little kid, so the narrative appealed to her.  Honorable mention to Fantasia, which she started watching after getting back from Alleirat the first time as an anxiety management technique.  Sometimes she and Crispin watched it together and pretended they couldn’t see each other getting weepy during the Firebird Suite, because that’s what you do for your soulmate/mortal enemy/best friend sometimes.

Crispin’s favorite Disney movie when he was a kid was Mulan, he tried to convince his sister to help him dress up in Mulan’s matchmaker outfit for Halloween when he was six and their parents shut him down.  It continues to be his favorite movie post-Alleirat (she reminds him of Brenneth) but also he can’t watch it anymore because the avalanche scene makes him shaky (she reminds him of she reminds him of Brenneth).  

Shiko’s favorite Disney movie is actually not a Disney movie at all even though she argues that it counts because Disney distributed it, it’s Princess Mononoke.  Brenneth gets a real kick out of watching Shiko argue with Crispin about it.  In terms of actual Disney movies, she actually didn’t watch a whole ton of them growing up but she had a crush on Prince Eric when she was a kid, so, nominally the Little Mermaid.

Spoilers ;)

Oh, y’all, a fun fact I learned at the Met recently:armorers and weapons-smiths often made children’s toys!  Brenneth makes children’s toys.  They’re much more detail-oriented than mostof the things she makes—Brenneth specializes in weapons, although she’s beenknown to make some armor, usually as a collaborative effort—and she finds thefinicky little bits satisfying to work with. It also helps that she’s fully capable of grabbing red-hot iron with herbare hands if she feels like it, which makes finicky little bits much moreconvenient than if she needed to wear gloves. She takes requests and does not charge, which Crispin needles her about—herpayment scale is flexible to say the least and it gives him hives in aprofessionally mortified sort of way—but she refuses to budge.  She’s not proud of those toys in a technicalsense (they’re…fine, they’re just fine, but they’re nowhere near herusual expectations for herself) but she likes to make them and she’s proud ofhow happy they make people, so she’s happy.

In any “everything is okay” timeline, Shiko and Krei DO in factmove in together!  Krei spends all herfree hours for the first month and a half in their new home putting up shelvesand buying pots to fill them, until every room is dripping with greenery andsmells sweetly of growth and fresh soil. They get a place with either big windows or lots ofwindows, so that Krei can grow flowers in the sunlight and weave them intoShiko’s hair.  Shiko picks up books inAlleirai that start to fill their shelves, first children’s books—the Alleiraiversion of Have You Seen My Hat and Hop On Pop or whatever—and then,as her reading improves, books about religion and about history and about the arcane and about traditions of the dead.  She’s fascinated by the idea of dead gods,gods who were and now are not, and by the idea of runic magic, and by the way funerals on Alleirat were shaped by civil war, and Krei is fascinated by the way Shiko tucksher hair irritably behind her ears as she talks about something she loves.

Shiko also picks up a cat, after a couple years.  It is a non-traditional cat.

It’s dead, okay, she has a skeleton cat.  It’s some extraordinarily advanced runicmagic that really wouldn’t work on anything larger or more complex than youraverage housepet, but binding the cat’s—something, Shiko says cats don’thave souls like people do but at that point Krei kind of tuned out—back intoits bones means it can operate a little more on its own impulses and keepmoving while Shiko is asleep.  It takesKrei a little while to stop jumping every time the thing comes into the room,even if Shiko says that it doesn’t mind being alive again.  Shiko did it mostly as a proof-of-concept, away to make her name as an arcane scholar, but once she had the cat,what was she going to do?  Kill it again?  Obviously not.

She did not tell Krei that she was bringing a dead cat home.  This is because Shiko, while not actually a bad person, is a little bit of an asshole.

I did cross the 100K mark on Worldwalker three days ago, so.

Yes!  I talked a little in this post about how, for example, a flesh worker who specializes in bone might never actually figure that out, because they need to be touching the object of their magic in order to do magic, and live bone isn’t generally hanging out where people can get their hands on it.  (Before anyone asks: teeth are not bones, teeth are teeth.  Dentin is different enough from bone that magic treats it as a separate material when you get to this level of specificity, like iron and steel.)  But that bone worker might still make people taste iron from the bone marrow!  They’re just probably never going to get a sense of what they can do.  

RIGHT, so, the adara is a magical circuit that closes when two magic workers look into each others’ eyes.  The adara is unique to each type of magic, and usually manifests as a smell or taste, although there are some people strong enough to throw a physical sensation in there--a plant worker like Krei might make people smell grass or blooming wildflowers, whereas a fire worker’s magic might taste like smoke and, if you’re Brenneth, make people feel a wave of heat like standing next to a bonfire.  Crispin’s gaze makes magic users taste ozone and feel electricity across their skin, like touching one of those weird glowing static orbs.  There is a mild-but-real societal rule (more than a courtesy but less than a taboo) against excessive eye contact in general Alleirai society as a response to the existence of the adara.  It’s considered something of a privacy violation.  It’s most common for people to look at the person they’re talking to while the other person is talking, and then look away while they’re talking, and so forth, or else to look slightly off from their eyes if watching them is important.  Close relationships involve more eye contact.  Eye contact is also sometimes employed by magic users to make a point or take control of a conversation, since the adara can be a bit of a jolt if you’re not ready for it.

Here are some rules about how the adara works.

First of all, the adara is a function of power level.  The more powerful someone is, the harder the adara will hit you when you meet their eyes.  A fire worker of average strength might be enough to make you smell candle-smoke, or a campfire, but not much more.  Brenneth can hit people with such a strong wave of magic that a glance usually makes magic workers come out in a heat flush, and if she holds someone’s eyes for long enough, she can make them break out in a sweat like they’re standing in front of a furnace.  

Second, only magic users can sense the adara.  That’s about a quarter of the population, to some extent, but your average non-magical person can stare deeply into any eyes they please without any effect.

Third, although the broad strokes of the adara tend to be in common within a magical “type” (for example, most weather workers will make you smell/taste ozone or rain and maybe feel electricity, as the magic usually works in storms, and most thread workers will make you smell dyes or fibers of some kind), it’s still relatively specific to each person.  Sort of like hair color.  “Brown” is a broad sweep, but if your girlfriend has brown hair, you probably know that color even if you’re just seeing her from behind.  However, someone’s specific adara can change if they suffer a major alteration of their core self, in some way.  That’s what Brenneth is talking about with Crispin--as the White Wolf, his magic feels distinctly different to her, and she thinks of it as the adara being “broken.”  It shifts back to more like what she’s familiar with eventually.

Crispin’s deepest most secret most denied desire is to marry Brenneth and has been since he was twelve years old send tweet

Brenneth doesn’t have any Emphatic feelings about marriage one way or the other, but Crispin wants nothing more than to be able to call himself Brenneth’s husband and, while he very much assumes for a majority of his life that it’s wildly out of the question, he doesn’t care about how it’s done, where it happens, or who’s in attendance.  If Brenneth wandered up to him in her worst, rattiest clothes with soot on her face and ash in her hair and informed him that they were going to be sworn to each other in front of the gothed and five street urchins, he would be Absolutely Fine with that.  They don’t legally have last names in Alleirat (worldwalkers are identified as “of Alleirat” rather than by family name or city of origin), but in another universe, Crispin would be more than glad to do whatever Brenneth wanted with their last names--probably leave them alone.

As for Brenneth, like I said, she’s not strongly invested in marriage as a concept, particularly not to Crispin.  As far as she’s concerned, she’s more tightly bound to him than she ever could be to another living being, any ceremonial recognition of that fact is merely a formality.  She’d propose if she knew he wanted it, though, once they’re together.  (Someone eventually tips her off that he might enjoy being married properly--he’d never propose on his own time because he’s such a trainwreck of a person.)

You’re correct!  Brenneth has kept her hair long for a number of reasons, some of them more esoteric than others, but here’s a short rundown of the main ones.

She’s alianater, a worldwalker, and therefore holds some default status in Alleirat because of her formidable magical abilities, to the effect of Might Makes Nobility--when someone "got bored” of having a bellows in her forge and opted to casually use the kind of magic most people spend years developing to keep her fires hot instead, it’s a rare soul with the guts to roll up and say she’s getting uppity.

Crispin fought for her to be trained with him, and then later for her to hold a rank equal to him.  This was unsuccessful, but won them both some goodwill, and as such the mutterings about Brenneth being above her station were mostly limited to behind their backs.

Brenneth never really wanted to be a hero, and that was true even when they first arrived and she was limping through Alleirai at a rate of a few words a minute.  However.  She also did not enjoy being written off as ‘irrelevant’ because she was a girl, and insisted on keeping her hair long, at first, because it was an indication of “girl-ness” on Earth, even if it wasn’t really the same thing on Alleirat.

Brenneth trained as a warrior as well as a blacksmith, which afforded her additional inherent status--warriors are considered of an inherently higher rank than craftsmen, a holdover from when Alleirat was determined to rip itself apart with wars and warriors were hailed as the pinnacle of human achievement.  It’s not uncommon for warriors to wear their hair long enough to put up in a bun, because the “warrior’s spike” is a traditional hairpiece worn by warriors at formal events or in daily life to identify them.  In old stories it’s a stiletto blade, more realistically it’s a single slender stick made of wood or bone (very occasionally metal) with a point on one end and some kind of carved ornament on the other, like a single hair stick.  Since Brenneth showed a natural talent for combat nearly as good as her natural talent for metalworking, she was technically within her social rights to keep her hair long as soon as she was given her first spike by one of her teachers.

Brenneth likes wearing her hair long.  Her hair is kind of her only vanity, she doesn’t like to think of cutting it off.  It reminds her of when she liked herself and her world the best, and eventually gives her some hope of getting back there.