milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Shortly before sunset, Moiraine had come downstairs and gone quietly out the door to the lake. From time to time, a particularly observant or sensitive patron might well have noticed a flicker of golden or silver light near the edge of the building, or by the greenhouse, or at the fringes of the forest.

Sunset had turned into deep dusk, and now night has fallen. The Aes Sedai is still outside, gliding noiselessly over the grass under the dark of the moon. Silver fire sparks from her fingertips as she tests possibilities and considers threads.

Frequently, her gaze flicks upward as she scans rooftops and skies and the branches of trees.

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She glances toward the trees, where she notes a flicker of gold from a watchful avian eye.

Dryly, Moiraine turns to the lake and tells Ed, "I did not begin my work in the dark, as it happens."

A beat.

"Good evening, ed'Rashtekaresket."

"And yet here you are, all the same."

He swims, circling ever so slowly in the middle of the lake.

"Is it a good evening, Moiraine?"

It is only the phrasing that indicates Ed has asked a question.

"It may be so, for some," she replies coolly. Her outward demeanor is calm enough, but there is a subtle tension about her.

"And as you say, I am here all the same. Where I find there to be need, I often try to be."

"We are, it would seem, very much alike in that."

Except, perhaps, for the bit about the 'try'.

"Perhaps so," she admits.

A beat of silence, in which she does not seem to acknowledge the shadow that drifts overhead on silent wings.

"You have heard, I may presume, of Nita's return?"

"Far be it from me to forbid presumption. Has she, then?"

People, on the whole, do not tend to share news with sharks.

Pity, that.

"So I am told," Moiraine replies. "She has, as yet, kept much to herself within the House of Arch, I believe; but word was sent to me that she seems well enough after the ... experience."

Nothing is implied in her matter-of-fact tone about why she sees fit to inform him of these matters.

"She knows better than to lie to a shark about distress."

This observation only seems random.

"Since the two of you are acquainted, I should think so," she murmurs, but the implication does not go unnoticed.

"Wise of you."

He circles again.

"What need brings you out here, Moiraine?"

Her gaze drifts toward the trees again, and then back to him.

"I seek a way to rid another of unwanted possession," she says, "and this would seem an environment in which such a thing might be possible."

"In the night?"

He sounds mildly derisive.

"Your kind, as I recall, has many stories of things that come inside in the dark, not things that leave. There is, after all, a reason that so many fear it."

There is a reason, too, why so many fear the water.

"Outside the confines of the bar," she says dryly. "Where traps might be laid with less chance of harming those for whom they are not intended. I go where the quarry is, in this."

Dark eyes are very bleak, however.

"I have long been a collector of stories; I cannot disagree."

"It is well that you do not deny it."

He circles again.

"Your quarry, then, is to be found out here?"

"He has been so before," she tells him, and then gestures very deliberately toward the owls in their respective locations.

"And those he regards as his eyes are as well."

In her world, it is ravens; at Milliways, it is owls.

"So it would seem."

He dips briefly below the surface, body fading to a pale shadow beneath the water.

"And he is not one who would enjoy swimming?"

"I do not know." Her gaze upon the Pale Slayer is slightly wary.

"Two spirits, in a sense, are housed within the body of Dale Cooper; I would destroy the intruding spirit, not the form that it holds."

"You complicate your task."

His voice is cool, calm, but layered with great hunger.

"I wonder if that will prove wise, in the end."

She is very still for several seconds, but then Moiraine nods.

(I'd prefer not to die, if it's at all avoidable)

"I know," she says quietly. "And yet, the creature within him has taken control of others before, and escaped, with its victims dead. I would see its rampage stopped."

"Perhaps it has a role of its own to play."

Ed continues to circle.

"The Powers, or so I have heard, are not ones to create lightly. Some of their creations are well-described as terrible."

Ed himself is one of these, or so many would say.

"All things are part of the Pattern," she agrees.

"Perhaps it may be so. And yet I do not intend to surrender, because I may well have my own role to play in such matters, when considered in those terms."

"It might not be the one you prefer."

He submerges again, only the very tip of his fin rising out of the lake. For a moment he would seem to be a perfectly normal shark.

There is a flash of teeth in the dark, below the surface.

"It might not," she replies steadily. "Still, that does not mean that I may not do everything that I can to ensure that it will be."

Dryly, with the weight of memory,

"I have done so before."

"Eventually, Moiraine, luck runs out."

And then he disappears from her view, far more suddenly than one might expect from a creature his size.

The surface of the lake grows still after his passage, stars reflecting faintly off the calm water.

He might not even have been there at all.

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