Sweeping Discovery

Welcome to the Gardens: one of the most tranquil areas of the Tower Grounds.
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Welcome to the Gardens: one of the most tranquil areas of the Tower Grounds. Birds sing in the trees which line the wide paths between beautiful flower beds and serene lakes. There are benches to sit and listen to the waterfall, and there is neatly trimmed grass to lie on and rest. Novices and Soldiers as well as Warders in Training can be seen, sweeping the stone paths as Accepted and Dedicated study from books and relax under leafy trees.
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Daniel
"The Shadow Rising"
Posts: 131
Joined: May 30th, 2017, 10:13 am
PC: Nyaine Lintelle, Accepted

Sweeping Discovery

Post by Daniel » June 29th, 2017, 10:45 pm

Novice Nyaine [subtitle]Sweeping Discovery[/subtitle]
The day was relatively pleasant, the wind gusts cooling down the sun-heated air. Of course, that was only of marginal help to Novice Nyaine who had the unenviable task of freeing the pathway between the tower and the stables from leaves and dirt. Wearing a dust cloak and working gloves on top of her novice-white dress, she was equipped with a large broom.

Nyaine hated every second of it. It was menial work for servants and even worse, with the wind gusts it was work without purpose. Only a few meters behind her, the first leaves were already subtly invading the path she had just swept. She did not understand why the Tower forced all those chores on the novices. Cleaning, sweeping, washing, stacking, dusting. There was no end to them. It would take an Aes Sedai seconds to do many of the tasks with the power. She as a novice of course wasn’t even allowed to channel unsupervised. Therefore, she had no option but to use the light-cursed broom, unless she wanted a visit in the Mistress of Novices’ study and be rewarded with even more chores.

At least she was almost done. The stables were only a dozen or so sweeps of the broom away. The work so far had left its mark, however. Despite her quite comfortable working gloves, there were most certainly blisters on her hands. If she was lucky, someone would Heal them away, but it seemed more likely that they would be seen as part and parcel of the chore and thus remain to heal on their own in the mundane way. Yet it was not all bad. Instead of being outside in the fresh air, she could have been scrubbing pots or cleaning privies.

Reaching the stables, she leaned the broom on the wall next to the entrance and ventured inside. There seemed to be some activity with staff taking care of the horses. She wandered over to a pen where a stable boy was grooming a gelding and watched him for a few moments. He seemed engrossed in his work and neither horse nor man had noticed her so far. The boy seemed to be doing a reasonable job, though Nyaine did not know enough about horses to say for certain. The dark brown animal being quiet and letting the servant work should be an indicator of him being trusted by the horse. At least that was what her books had said on the subject.

“It is a beautiful— ”, she did not get any further before the world seemed to start collapsing around her. Surprised as she was, she could only stand, frozen in place like a pillar in her parent’s mansion, and watch the situation unfold in slow-motion. As she had begun to talk, the stable boy must have done something that the horse did not appreciate at all as it kicked the boy with one of its hind legs. The groom crashed into the wooden barrier making up the stall and the gelding turned, moving past Nyaine, out into the stable.

Frantically she tried to catch up with reality. Whatever the trigger for the horse’s reaction was, her surprising both animal and attendant was certainly the root cause. As her eyes followed the escaping horse, she noticed other staff were already on the move to soothe the agitated four-leg. She certainly wasn’t going to be of any help with that effort, in fact she assumed she would be a detriment. Her gaze wandered back towards the box, looking for the boy. She found him lying on his belly next to the shattered wall of the enclosure, looking relatively intact apart from a large wooden, splintered chunk sticking out of his back.

She made a step towards the boy, but found herself unable to continue when her knees shook and wave of nausea bubbled up from her belly. Oh, Light. With legs feeling like jelly, she made the rest of the way and kneeled next to the groom. She reached for his wrists, feeling for the pulse. It was still there. But now what? As if to make her hurry and find an answer to the question, the young man groaned.

“Help!”, she cried. Or did she? Nobody seemed to react. They’re all still busy with the bloody horse, she realised. Was it up to her now? How much damage had that piece of wood done? She screamed for help again, but the effort seemed even more futile than her first attempt, her fragile voice not able to defeat the general noise in the stable. Had she killed the boy? The heartbeat with still there, but was it becoming weaker? She did not know. A third attempt did not bring the desired help either. Unconsciously she brushed the tears of out her eyes that she had not even noticed were there. As she was about to give up and in to crying her heart out, something else happened. Saidar rushed into her. The joy of holding it together with the surprise of having embraced it kicked her out of her stupor. There was something she could do after all.

She had seen the Delving weave used a couple of times by Accepted and sisters when they investigated burns and similar injuries received from Novice training. Weaving Spirit into the boy, she explored the body, trying to figure out what was wrong. Almost immediately she found the foreign object that was not supposed to be there, giving off a feeling of wrongness. The wood fragment, it would have to go first, before she could do anything else. She pulled. Nothing happened. She pulled again, this time using both hands. The boy let out a heart-wrenching moan. Letting herself be distracted by that would be fatal, she thought, and continued pulling. The splinter came free and blood gushed out on its proverbial heels.

With an invocation to the light, she put her hands on the wound, trying to stop the blood flow and then wove the Delving weave again. Where the piece of wood had been, something was still off. It felt deformed and lacking to Nyaine, as if parts were missing. Adding first Water and Air and then Fire and Earth, she wove them in such a way that would in her mind remedy the disruption she felt. She had to fix the groom’s injury before more and more blood came sputtering out of back wound. Desperately she drew on more power, needing the Healing to work, forming a complicated weave made from all five elements.

With her creation settling in, the boy gasped and Nyaine flinched as he jerked in reaction to the weave. It had to have worked. Determination was replaced only by hope. Using her hands, she wiped away the blood from wound and found it whole, the skin intact and no further blood coming out. Her unplanned patient was breathing regularly now. She felt the pulse again. It was still weak but regular. Exhausted, she sat down on her behind, leaning back against the wall of the stall. In the knowledge that she could not channel any more of the power for a while without seriously risking burnout, she let go. Yet she did not need saidar to taste the salty tears on her lips and feel the sweat all over body, making the novice dress cling to her skin. It felt like an exhaustion of accomplishment and relief, though, and with her head reclined against the hard wood, she closed her eyes.

The sun had only just managed to appear on the horizon once more and Nyaine was out with her broom again, sweeping leaves. A child was not supposed to channel on her own. A child could endanger herself and others. A child must learn this lesson and what better way for a child to do just that than to go out and do more chores. Do the very chores she had done before her bout of childishness, so that she would be reminded again and again of why exactly it was that she was doing those chores. Nyaine focussed her anger into the broom and swept it from left to right, not really caring whether the cobblestoned path was getting any cleaner. After all, she would be doing this for the next two weeks in place of any free time she could have had.

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