You're just nice.

Helen has had a dilemma for a few years. It is not, in fact, about choosing between whether she should a) accompany Jamie to make sure he doesn't get his idiot self killed while saving the universe, or b) be the queen who saves her world. That's easy. She's going to do both.

The dilemma she's had is how.

But, after a few years of study in her free moments (mostly spent in Milliways), she's finally found a way to synch up their aging cycles. All she needs is some of his hair. Unfortunately, he says he's seen her die [insert link from dreamwidth] and has been travelling alone the past few centuries, so she can't just join him after saving her world in some ninety years, she'll need to wait and step through Milliways and skip through to where he is on the timeline.

All she needs to do now is get some of Jamie's hair without, by any means, let him know she has no intention of dying. She's not exactly sure what happens in a paradox but that is one thing she has no desire to know firsthand.

Jamie’s been lying on the long lounge chair (a sofa, Adam calls it) for hours, passed out and pale.

Helen’s been avoiding him. Helen’s been avoiding everyone. She is in the map-room of Adam’s for a few hours, thinking, sleeves pulled tight around her hands. There’s a hushed busyness in the other rooms, but Helen is trying very hard not to care.

When things are quiet for a while—Vanessa and Joris out for groceries, Adam upstairs—Helen walks out of the lower room. She does not creep, because she is not scared. Helen isn’t ever scared.

She walks past Jamie, washed out and hair drenched from fever-sweat, and swallows hard. She goes to sit on the sofa across from him, arms crossed tight on her knees.

That’s where Vanessa finds her, and sits beside her, and talks in a calm and soothing voice.
Helen has not had a mother in nearly ten years, and Vanessa’s comforting hand on her back makes her—

Crying isn’t dignified. Helen, as a rule, doesn’t do it.

She’s sobbing, Vanessa fallen to the ground beside her and arms around her.

“It’s not a gift! It’s a d-d-deformity! It’s not even properly a body! Joris said it wasn’t.” And he would know.

“Yes,” Vanessa agrees, in her gentle kind voice, “but Joris was thinking of his own world. I’m sure you can’t judge one world by another.” That can’t be true, all worlds are related, but Helen wants to believe it for now. “Helen, you’d be much better off thinking of it as a gift you haven’t found the use of yet. Haven’t you ever been given a gift like that? You can’t think of what to do with this gadget you’ve been given, but you know it’ll come in handy for something.”

Helen chokes a laugh. “That’s clever,” because it is, “I’ll call my hand my gadget in the future. What made you think of it?”

Vanessa says she feels a bit like that herself, with the skills that she has that have nothing to do with being a doctor, and Helen says she hopes they will come in useful anyways.

There’s a long silence as Helen dries her tears, and Vanessa asks “Better now?”

“Yes,” says Helen, fiercely. “I shall use my gadget to exterminate Them because of what They did to Jamie!”

When Helen wakes up she feels the faint tug in her stomach saying that they're going today. It's only faint, but she sits up and grabs Jamie by the shoulder, shaking him awake.

Helen would not admit it, but she has spent most of the night—except for a few fitful hours of sleep—in the dark of her room, staring through her hair at the ceiling, at her books and at her few possessions. Mostly they are gifts the Hands and the workers of the House gave her on Holy Days as she grew up. Very few are outside of the small chest she has locked in the corner — it is mostly full of children’s toys, and a few other things of which she has no need.

She considers, briefly, going out into the desert in the night—the last time she’ll be able to absorb it, to see it. But she will see enough of it in the morning, and many dinosaurs prefer the night to the day. She stays inside.

Helen drifts off again at the end of the day, and wakes to a knock on her door and the sound of rain, feet above her - where the ground is.

She rises and dresses in her most practical clothes for the weather and circumstances, wedging on her shoes. She does not pull her hair back from her face with the hair bands that are on her desk.

She opens the door and Pani, silent, meets her gaze before he looks away, a furrow of worry in his brow. She’d forgotten about the laws of silence, and feels a momentary hurt before she raises her chin and nods to him. She is not bound by them but if they will not talk, neither will she.

Pani walks her to a far off room close to where the youngest acolytes train, an empty classroom, where she is joined by Hand Fesa-Maraq. They leave Pani outside.

Helen walks to the center of the room, where several female Hands gather around, putting her arms up for them to pull off her big, bulky sweater. They undress her down to her black underpants and breastband (the latter of which makes Hand Fesa-Maraq look up at Helen, startled - she had not realized Helen was old enough to need one - , while Helen holds her chin out as defiantly as possible. Her teacher moves on) to make sure she has carried no weapons for self-protection.

They redress her, except for her long-sleeved skinshirt and skinpants which they fold and leave on a chair. Helen got them as a gift three years before to insulate and deflect low intensity blows — not much help against the dinosaurs, but she’d hoped they’d help with the stones. She still says nothing, though.

Hand Fesa-Maraq is almost crying when she opens the door, and Pani touches Helen’s shoulder for her to follow him. Helen tries to ignore it, though — honorable exiles do not include tears. And the Hand will be throwing stones, as well.

The women follow them outside, and Helen sees the assembled Hands in the rain and mud, rocks gathered around them. Touching Pani’s sleeve so he knows she’s stopped, she bends down and tightens the laces of her shoes. It wouldn't do to slip.

She has seen someone cast out, before. Once, when she was seven years old. Then everyone’s face was full of a sad anger, and the silence was almost intolerable as the man screamed with pain and ran, tripping over himself in the sand and bleeding from where the rocks had gashed him—nothing very dangerous, but enough that the dinosaurs would be able to find him come nightfall. The faces here are just sad, and scared.

Helen swallows, and stands, and walks ahead of Pani to the assembled masses. Pani remains behind her, as if he is a wall blocking her exit to the desert in case she bolts before they are ready.

The head Hand opens his mouth and breaks the silence. “For blaspheming against Uquar, you are cast out. You will not be recognized or your name spoken in this House except in the Records until your sin has been expiated and you return.”

He nods to Pani, who does not move for a long moment, and squeezes Helen’s shoulder apologetically when he does, walking across her field of vision to join the crowd, head bent down so his spectacles are in danger of sliding off the end of his nose.

Helen lifts hers up and says “I gladly accept exile, instead of imprisonment. May the punishment that has been dealt onto me — for merely seeing the truth of a matter darker than any of you wish to acknowledge — be dealt.”

And she turns, as they heft their stones, and runs—following that faint tug in her stomach that leads across the desert as the stones fall around (and into) her.

She falls twice, blood soaking through her black sweater. She doesn’t scream at all.

It has been days since the door closed, and Helen is still thinking over it. She is very upset, because she left books in her room, but she doesn’t know what to do about that — and they were books that there were extra copies of, so no one has noticed (yet).

She is sitting, and glowering at her notebook, hair half-hanging over her face, when there is a knocking on the door to her room and she stands from her chair to get it.

“Ah, hello, Haras-uquara,” Pani says, “I hope I’ve not interrupted your studies. Hand Corat asks that you would come see him in his office.”

Helen has started to dread when Pani comes to give her messages. Usually the Hand who wanted to speak to her would, themselves, come to see her — or send one of their acolytes. If Pani is sent instead it usually means they think she will be angry (which makes her angrier. What do they expect her to have done now?), because they’ve realized that she probably won’t actually verbally abuse Pani (usually).

So it is very grouchily that Helen nods, and thanks him, and walks with a fast pace to the Honored Hand Corat’s office. She arrives, instead, to find him having a late lunch with Hand Raqen. They are laughing and eating, and she cannot stop her fists clenching as she turns away outside. To think so little of her time as that! To call for her when he is still busy!

Helen has time now, though, and she wanders into one of the hallways near Hand Corat’s office — this is a part of the House she does not go to so often, a very old part, but everywhere in the House there are these seemingly random tunnels.

There are old rooms of worship and secret knowledge scattered throughout the House — you know the feel of them, if you’ve lived there as long as Helen. It goes from a quiet to a warm silence, where the walls are purposefully smoothed out, and the niches are spaced for books and torches so that study can be carried out.

As she walks along the hallways she finds what appears to be a large white portion of the wall, except it’s all covered over like a misty mirror. As the mist parts, here and there, she can see beyond it into a room of tall black-robed figures and — machines?

She parts her hair and tucks it behind her ears, pressing her nose against the cold surface of the wall (though it doesn’t smudge like glass), watching Them. After several minutes They seem to catch sight of her, and turn to look at her through the window—but she doesn’t care. She can see what They’re working on—a big playing board with her whole world spread on it. Some of the seven or eight were considering the board, some where considering her in the deep blackness of Their hoods, and some were entering numbers into Their machines.

And Helen suddenly realizes what They are doing. They have people out as counters over the whole of the board, and They are playing a game with them. She is very, very angry. How dare They do this to her world? How dare They dare to interfere? And she realizes, suddenly, that They must be the root of the dinosaurs and the weather, that They must be those who put away Uquar--

--but They would not dare live in the House of Their enemy, if he truly existed. And how would her god be brought down by these creatures?

And she is very, very angry. And she curls up her Hand as her hair falls in her face, and she points at Them and tells Them exactly what she thinks of Their duplicity. Of convincing her people to believe in a god that never, ever existed.

The day after Helen walked out of the bar, the head Hand told her that full contingents would be visiting from two of the nearest and largest warlords, and that she was no longer allowed to walk the corridors alone. They had no one of the Hands to spare for her, either, except for one of the least senior whose research was least important: Pani.

The spend the whole of the first week in the library, as the polite nicities are gone through in the meeting rooms and runners are sent through the halls. They carry no obvious weapons, but that is saying nothing in her world.

Pani lets her read in silence for the most part, but he occasionally tries to engage her in polite conversation about the book she is reading or the interesting new piece of research he has turned up while studying the evolution of the Uquaran script.

Helen thinks that he is worse than useless.

(from here)

It is morning, and Helen is pulled awake in the cushion room by the twisting-tugging of the traverse pulling at her. The light says it is early, but she and Jamie are already flinging themselves at the door.

She asks the Hand who guards the knowledge to lead her to the information about the back room of the library, and he sighs and walks her through the halls of acolytes who are working on re-scribing the information onto new parchment.

The head scribe calls a halt to the work and glances over to her and she tilts her head up.

"Honored acolytes, might any of you have recently encountered a text describing a carved doorway in the lower treasure rooms?"

An acolyte in the back raises his hand, and says he is working on it right now, and Helen is pleased.

It has been two years since Helen began work, six polished caves, and ten centuries of artifacts. This is only an overview of things already known to exist—to make sure they are in the correct caves, are actually there, or else it would take far longer. 

Helen, in her stubbornness, has never rushed ahead of herself while documenting. But today she is to enter the last cave, and her hair is held back in a black ribbon to keep it out of her eyes like it has been every day. It is a small one, no more than several dozen artifacts are supposed to be in it, but when she enters her eyes are drawn to a deep engraving in the far end. It appears to be an arched doorway, but nothing but the cave wall can be seen through it, it is carved into the stone. 

If anything it is the oldest part of the caverns, and so she turns and begins inspection of the artifacts closest to the door. But the doorway keeps getting glanced at—there is no carved art that old in the House, not anywhere, not even in the room of light. 

Helen is not patient, but she is stubborn. The strange doorway can wait.

“They say the fourth try is blessed,” the Hand who instructs her in Magic tells her at breakfast that next morning.

She mutters a soft affirmative, and soon gathers her plates to deposit in one of the serving carts and walks to the library.

The Hand caring for the books looks up when she enters and she says, after glancing around to make sure no one is studying, “I am in need of entrance to the archives.”

“Yes, Haras-uquara,” he says, handing over one of the burnished keys. “I believe young Pani took his breakfast early, so he should already be down there.”

“My gratitude to you and your shared knowledge,” she replies in kind, pushing some of her hair behind her ear and taking the key.

Through the archway to a sturdy metal door made a thousand years ago (and kept in perfect condition) that she unlocks carefully and relocks behind her, down a short stone staircase in a cylinder of brick, to a landing on sheer rock and another doorway that she lays a hand against and speaks a word, before unlocking it and closing it behind her (re-locking and speaking another word with her hand against its surface).

The caverns that hold the archives are the deepest, for they are the largest, and the best secured because of the stored knowledge and living spaces below. The House has fended off sieges from below ground twice over the past millennia, and they have a long enough memory to defend it.

Finally she reaches the heavy drop-door, which no group of men could lift on their own without many House-taught wizards lending them strength, and calls through a small barred partition.

“Is there a Hand below?”

“What?” Comes the startled response. “Oh, yes—well, there’s me—who wants to come to the archives?”

“One who wishes to preserve the knowledge of Uquar,” she replies, with patient exasperation. 

She can hear him make his way to the crank, below, and spin it a few times, easily.

The drop-door lifts off of its lintels straight into frame above it, and Helen scampers through and down the ladder as it closes back off.

“Hello, Haras-uquara,” says the man in spectacles with amiable deference, as he settles back into the chair in front of his desk—in front of him some type of vase, several large books from the library, and many sheets of paper. “I am trying to prove the relationship between the artwork of the Era of the Sands and the poetry of the Ni.”

“…Which is none,” Helen supplies, eyeing the Three Fingers suspiciously through a space in her hair.

“Of course. But it will hopefully let them leave me alone long enough to find a subject I can actually turn into my research to be a full fist,” he replies with a small, quick smile that disappears as rapidly as it shows. “I heard you were thinking of serving down here, Haras-uquara? What work might you wish to do?”

She shrugs, suddenly unsure.

“Maybe if I leave you alone long enough you’ll find out,” he continues gently, after several moments pass. “Explore as you wish.”