Unbinding of Oaths

{{ | date=09/09/2018 | time=15:00 EST | summary=It's official. Alma is not a Chakravanti. | cast=

• Alma
• An unknown Chakravanti

| st=The Undisputed Truth | place_name=Wayne State University | log=Walking from thing to thing, place to place. There are so many bits and things that could - do - catch her attention. Today: on campus, a feather falling from the trees overhead, landing in the only remaining puddle in sight after recent rains, most of them having evaporated. The desire path to the building from the adjacent dormitory has created a dip there that holds water for longer, and new desire paths have opened around it, forming a crook around the puddle.

She stands just over the edge, toes in the water, crouching down.

Alma sees herself in the puddle, of course; the feather, floating, which is not a crow feather but some kind of... gosh, it's hard to say without the actual bird attached. It's all wrong for a crow though. Big enough to be a raven feather, but a lovely light brown color to white at the tip. The way it turns in the water seems to point at the door.

The feather points to a door. But Alma looks down the path of the feather to see the opposite direction as well. She pulls out her field notebook and records these things. She sketches the shape of the puddle and the feather. Notes the color and rachis--everything. The bird is on the tip of her toungue. She leaves the feather there, in case it has a story for anyone else. The notebook goes back in her colorful satchel and she strolls to the door. Tries it.

This is the clock tower building, and it's open; it's generally quiet, low-activity, as students are off reeling after their first week or two back in classes rather than handling business, though there are a few of those. The exception to the general quietude, muted conversations, is a curious droning melody coming from - oh, well. That makes sense. The department of music office.

Alma follows the continuously repeating chord and stops in the door of the department of music.

It's sitar, you know? Playing on a boom box. And actual honest to god boom box. They have a boom box in the department of music. Amazing. Track seven. There's a dusky-skinned, sari-wrapped young woman sitting at a desk there, filling paperwork. This time of year is heavy paperwork time for anyone with classes. She looks up at Alma's approach, waves a hand in. "Come come," she says, holding out her hand like she expects Alma to have something for her.

Alma looks at the woman's hand and realizes there are some assumptions going on here, "Oh, I don't have papers? for you?" She looks back up at the woman, "I followed the music here."

The woman looks at her quite curiously, head tipped, and gives a sort of smile. "I think that is how most come to a music department," she says, accent congruous with her clothing but not overwhelmingly thick. She pushes her chair back, lifts a finger in indication. "Just a moment, okay?" And she comes around to the door, there - like she's looking for someone who might be coming behind Alma. Maybe... Alma is not who she was expecting?

Alma says, "but..." because she is not sure why she would need to wait. But she waits, probably because she doesn't want to interrupt. Her gaze follows the woman to the door.

That seems reasonable. The woman closes the door, and then Alma is in the room with assumptions, the sitar, and this woman. "Come sit," she says, and gestures a hand to the chair, moving like she'll return to have a seat herself.

"Oh!" Alma says, "I don't mean to interrupt your regular appointments. I'm not a student in the school of music. I'm a visiting grad student," She explains. She can't surpress her exuberance from saying, "who studies birds!" Yes, her hair is in a pony tail, styled by Note. "I was just passing through and heard the music." She observes, "It has a brrr? a bzzzz? I like that."

"Sit," she says again. "I've no appointments this day. Come. We should must discuss." She smiles - this, perhaps at the reference to the music, perhaps also enjoying it.

Alma--well, Alma follows paths and learns by going. So she sits, head-tilted. "What do you want to talk about?"

"The bindings of oath," the woman says, folding her hands and - now - smiling in a way that doesn't seem predatory, but also no longer seems connected to the music, more directly communicative. "There is much to discuss."

"Oh. I see." Alma pauses. "I want to see more." She pulls out a twig from her hair. "May I?"

The woman lifts her head, but gestures in invitation.

Alma breaks the twig. She continues watching the woman. "I guess... you probably know me, but I will introduce myself in case not. I'm Alma... Hunter." Normally she just gives her first name. She's not a formal person, but she supposes this is a grave matter.

A small wiggle of her head, agreeable. "I do know you, Alma Hunter," she says, "but I am not here to judge you." The word judge, pregnant with its dire implication, hangs there in the air, but the statement rings true. "You might do well to consider me akin to the djinn of old tale; here to give answer to a wish spoken."

Alma surpresses a spike of alarm, maybe even terror. When she hears djinn, and then wish, she immediately wants to run. This is not good. Not. Good. She holds her shit together long enough to say, "Oh. I see. I'm not interested. Bye." She starts to get up so she can get the hell out of there.

The woman is calm. Patient, actually. Maybe even a tiny bit amused. "Come now," she says. "I am neither here to kill you nor damn you. On the contrary: I am come to release you, as you have asked. And not, lest you think so, to the wheel." No lies, none at all. "I should like to converse with you calmly."

Alma does not trust anyone who says they are like a djinn who grants wishes. Not at all. And when None explained Nephandi to her, he said they would be people who offer things. like wishes. without tuition. gifts. This person must be very very dangerous. Maybe she mispoke. maybe not. but...

Alma remains seated because now the woman is talking like a Chakravanti, and this makes more sense. She is not telling lies. Alma swallows. "It's just--Someone who grants wishes is terrifying." She's very anxious. She knows. Well to be honest, she doesn't know with her heart, that she often jumps to the worst conclusions because, and here she loses focus a little and starts to think of how cognition works--the fast parts, the slow parts. Well, this prson does not ned to know all that. She shakes off the distraction. "Ok. I will try to be calm."

She smiles. "Your wish is already spoken," says the woman, who unfolds her hands only to clasp them again, fingers not interlaced this time, which is relatively fascinating - that so simple a movement could be so arresting. "You wish to be oathless. Bound to none by mortal promise. Isn't it?"

Alma narrows her eyes at the woman. "I /was/ bound to None by mortal--Look, you do not even believe in Mortality." Alma is confused and mistrustful.

"But you do," observed this woman. "You think you were bound to someone; and yet, you still are. Bonds so formed are not dissolved with such ease as they are spoken first."

"You want to break the bond with my teacher?" Alma is remembering what Alexandra said. "I know someone who said that if I wanted to leave her order they would burn themselves out of a person's mind." Alma is not happy about that. It sounds barbaric. "She misunderstood." Alma plays with the two sticks on the desk. Her body knows how frigthened she is. "I have my own--it's like an Oath that lives inside me. I don't want that broken. It's me. It might look like my Oath to my teacher, but it's not the same." Alma is afraid that someone could burn out who she is, including her judgement and her honor. She can't even define the word and she is afraid of losing the thing.

The woman does not answer that; there's a more pressing question. "Your own oath," she repeats, her hands form flattened shapes, and cross her body, each hand's fingertips pressing to her shoulders. "Speak aloud its name; and I will see it clear from your siksana, your acarya." It seems impossible, perhaps, this task: to give a name to her own code, right? Fortunately, there's an alternative. "Speak aloud its name, or give a meditative mind to it, and offer it with your rechaka." That, at least, is probably clear enough: that means on the exhale.

"I don't know the words, but I can meditate on it." She looks concerned. "I might--I don't know how long it will take to get to a meditative mind." Please don't let it take too long.

The woman watches Alma, and the hands on her shoulders lift, straighten, flex backward, still crossed; together they form a U-shape in front of her body, the backs of her hands to the insides.

That feels, unsubtly, for Alma, like a series of thoughts, unbidden. Hers, but not in the order her mind wanders; this is an incisive, direct querent, directional, like the rush of a tide upon a shore. Her hands tighten, forefinger and middle meeting thumb, rings and pinkies aloft, like some kind of animal, and there she holds, the through-line of the sitar music in the background slowing.

"This is none of it your siksana-bond," she says.

Alma feels relief that what she beleives is not something that this person wants to take. "Okay. What now?"

"Now," she says, only a slight sideward shift in her chin changing her posture in the least, "your Acarya." There is a pause, her hands still shaped that tense way, and she adds: "That which you fail to find, I will not; and that which you conceal will not serve you." Hey, that's even... vaguely threat-shaped! Now we're getting somewhere.

Alma is concerned, "Will you take love I have for my Acarya?"

With great clarity: "You will know no Acarya. But this:" she pauses, with words, and - if Alma would like to turn her attention to her four-elemented concept love, it is very much like having a flashlight shone in a previously dark room. "If it can remain for that which is not known, then how might I take it?"

That is not reassuring but she didn't have much hope that it would be, for this is /complicated/. She has to accept it. She would do more harm as a Chakravanti than than she would as not. She nods, and meditates on her Acarya.

Can she read any approval on this woman's face? What her hands are doing is much more interesting. A hand closes about its own thumb; this flows together in a small, protective shape before her chest, cupped palms cradled opposite each other as of guarding a small ball between them. And then there is a thumbs-up upon a firm palm, then parted, pulled back like a tightly plucked string against her shoulder, evocative of a bowstring as the sitar melody lifts high.

... and then she is sitting on the stair outside the clock tower building, staring at a puddle. There is no feather. She seems to have spaced off; perhaps she sat because she was feeling lightheaded. Or perhaps she mistook the lightness she feels for lightheadedness; no longer weighed by an onerous, looming expectation. Maybe there is just forward. Her work. Where was she walking from? To? It doesn't seem particularly important, just now. It's getting to be time for something, if she checks her watch.

She remembers nothing, except the finality, the closure. }}