milliways_bar | (no subject)

The front door of Milliways shimmers and not so much opens as unfolds. Beyond, a ragged crowd boiling in the Arrakeen sunlight. A cloaked figure groans and staggers backward, clutching his chest, as another buries a crysknife in it. As the hooded one reaches the doorway, he seems to divide in half, with one part slumping to the dusty ground and another taking a teetering step across the threshhold. The door shimmers again and is closed. Another dead messiah has walked into the bar.

Rather than falling like his vanished twin, the cloaked man turns, revealing that the crysknife has also disappeared. Realizing that he isn't injured after all, he finds with a shock that he's no longer blind, either. Searching the room with his blue-in-blue eyes, he mutters, "I don't know this place." Its smell is too clean, too wet, and completely devoid of the Spice. He instinctively searches within for the future pathways that he knows shouldn't be there, and sees no future. Pathways abound, but all of them end beyond these walls or curve upon themselves into the past. For a minute that stretches into several, he marvels at this.

Utterly lost, Paul Atreides goes to the nearest empty table and sits, staring at the menagerie around him with a measured awe. Somebody buy this man a spiced beer.

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The moisture in the air fills his lungs, but this is water from no ocean.

"I was born on Caladan, where my father was the Duke, but I have lived my adult life on Arrakis." The desert planet. If she doesn't know that name, the Golden Path was followed to the end.

Eska's face lights up. "More places I haven't heard of," she says happily. "It was getting a little overrun with Earth people around here.

"What's Arakkis like?"

Earth, the legendary seat of humanity? But that was gone ten thousand years before his time!

"When I arrived there, Arrakis was the driest planet inhabited by men, and the home of the spice, Melange. If you've never heard the name, it no longer exists."

"Or," Eska points out. "It might not exist on my world at all.

"See, the thing is, this place is at the end of not just one, but a mulitude of universes. I don't even live on a planet."

"Many different universes?" The spice never showed him this!

"What is your world like? What sort of arts do your witches study?" Always get at the heart of power; that's where the largest conflicts arise.

"My world is a Disc," Eska explains, "carried through space on the back of a giant turtle.

"Our witchcraft is natural magic, magic of the mind and of nature. Healing, herbalism, midwifery, that kind of thing."

"You study no violence? Such a creed is to be commended." Or pitied, if their magic is powerful enough to cause envy.

"The Bene Gesserit witches who seek control on my worlds do so with compulsion and dishonesty." He doesn't mention his own mastery of their skills.

Eska smiles drily at his bitterness. A slightly danegrous smile.

"Oh I don't study violence, doesn't mean it's a good idea to cross a witch. Or a wizard, for that matter. And people often accuse us of compulsion and dishonesty. Those people generally have reason to fear witches."

Here is a line of speech the likes of which he's well acquainted. He smiles back, knowingly.

"Then perhaps our worlds aren't so different, after all. Or weren't. You have been very open with me, however. I accept that with gratitude.

"For myself, I must admit that I have known violence almost continuously since I was a boy. I was trained to it from birth and it has followed me closely ever since."

"I'm sorry to hear that. We haven't had any magical wars for centuries, since the Mage Wars that decimated the Disc. Most violence we have nowadays is just your usual species animosity and heroing.

"Wizards tend to keep out of it. Witches too."

"Do your people not travel between the stars? Wars are more avoidable if the combatants can separate themselves. The Great Houses of the LANDSRAAD warred because they spanned our universe and so had no more space in which to expand."

Eska smiles and shakes her head.

"No, we've not developed magic strong enough to leave Great A'Tuin. Besides, I'm not sure the bets way to avoid conflict is to kick people off the world. As you've observed, eventually you run otu of places to run to."

"Indeed. My father believed moving the family to the desert planet would make us safer. Instead, he was assasinated and our House overthrown. Even the Padishah Emperor had his hand in it. So I took his throne."

He is looking away, absently. If there are threats here, they would be petty and personal. And if he's as anonymous as it seems, maybe the past can be left there.

Oh, a hero.

Eska nods, trying to look sympathetic. "That's the disadvantage of Kinging, of course. People want to assassinate you."

Now his smile is for the great irony.

"It is the bones that sharpen your blade. But I didn't feel that sting until I was but a blind preacher yelling blasphemies at my own shrine.

"I abdicated the throne out of shame a sorrow for what my movement had become and sacrificed myself so that my son could lead the Empire out of my darkness. It's that sacrifice that brought me here, I think." Or punishment he hasn't begun to feel yet.

Eska didn't understand a word of that, but she doesn't need to. Politics were never anything she was interested in.

"That's a noble sacrifice," she allows. "Very... heroic."

That word is usually an insult in Eska's mouth. It's still not a very sincere compliment, just a statemtent of fact.

"A hero. My trainers would be proud to hear that. But all I did I did for revenge first, then stability, the last because I could not take the path my son chose. His was more heroic, but no doubt more blood has been shed in both our names than for anyone else in any universe."

He gives the word all the contempt he means for himself. He looks directly into her eyes.

"Mistress, I don't wish to be short with you, but I think I need to spend some time to understand what has happened to me. May we meet again here?"

She nods.

"Of course we may, and do feel free to call me Eska. Everyone else here does."

She stands to give him space to himself.

"It was good to meet you, Paul."

He stands quickly, if more stiffly than before, and sees her off with a small bow. He sits again and pulls up the cowl of his cloak. He definitely has much to think about.