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silkenfinetrammelsPLAYER INFO
NAME: Tory /letterblade
AGE: 28
TIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT: arkady [dot] lizard [at] gmail [dot] com
I WILL NEED A DREAMWIDTH CODE: Nope
CHARACTER INFO
NAME: Winnowill
CANON: Elfquest
REFERENCE LINKS: http://www.ratauvan.co.uk/whoswho/winnowill.html (I am sorry, the Elfquest fandom consistently sucks at web design)
CHARACTER INFO: So you know how sometimes a doctor will joke that it would be wonderful if their job became obsolete because nobody got hurt or sick enough to bother? Well, that's what happened with Winnowill, and then she went insane and turned into the big bad of her series.
In the distant, stone-age past of a world much like earth, a ship full of magical space aliens crashed, and the scattered survivors, calling themselves elves, found themselves feared and hated by the local primitives. One group of them, carefully nurturing what telepathic and telekinetic abilities they'd managed to retain in a world that essentially power-capped their species, hollowed out a mountain and nested in there, safe from the outside world. Their leader's lover, Winnowill, had a talent for healing, and she served as the nurturing second in command and power behind the throne, busily healing their wounds, arranging the ideal elfin sanctuary, and making everything perfect.
Too perfect. Having reached the comfortable limit of inhabitants for their mountain, and safe from injury or illness, the immortal elves stopped reproducing. Stopped dying. Stopped going outside and getting themselves hurt. They didn't need her any more. And then thousands of years passed in utter perfect stagnation, and Winnowill began to go, well, stir-crazy is putting it lightly. She trained a local tribe of humans into worshipping elves and sending her monthly human gifts who she kept as something between servants and house pets. She found a troll (a sibling species, descendant of the same spaceship crash), toyed with him, seduced him, and bore his child, an unprecedented hybrid. And then after he betrayed her, she killed him right in front of her son, and proceeded to drive the boy completely insane with mental and physical torture. A little entertainment.
And then, after all that time, another tribe of elves, the series protagonists, stumbled across the mountain, and everything started changing. And after spending that long comfortably rotting in her own stagnating madness, change was anathema, and that change led to her (admittedly estranged) lover's death. Ever since then, for reasons that are also tied up in complicated matters of elven genetics and her slightly hypocritical devotion to racial purity (why, yes, she has control freak tendencies), she's had a vendetta against that tribe. After many years of hijinks: seduction, manipulation, torture, several plans for genocide, an aborted attempt at psychic healing that left her still insane but also capable of feeling guilt (thus making her *more* nuts), and living for ten thousand under the sea as a mermaid (like you do), she got into a climactic throwdown with the oldest and most powerful elf on the planet. And realized that if she wanted to win, she had to die.
So one of the things about elves is that even if their bodies die, their souls are immortal. Now normally this means they go drift around in their mothership in eternal happy oblivion, but a psychic as powerful as Winnowill wouldn't let herself fall into that, and would actually be *more* dangerous without a physical body to bind her. So the protagonists realized very early on that killing her was a very bad idea.
At the time of that fight, Winnowill had already shape-shifted herself into a human (more below) and seduced the local warlord (because she's lived from the stone age to medieval times, the joys of being immortal) to lead his men in a war against the protag tribe. They had a such magnificent love-hate-trying-to-kill-each-other deal going that, well, he was primed to chop off her head when she told him to. But fortunately for the protags, another old flame of hers was present: a fellow elf, with strong mind and will and a strange psychic bond with her, with whom she'd had a much longer and more complicated love-hate relationship. He threw everything he had into restraining her soul, and basically bound her into his mind so she couldn't go around destroying everything. And ever since, they've wandered the world, her constantly straining for freedom, him unable to sleep lest she break loose and kill him. The last we see of her in canon, at least to my knowledge, after a long and soul-shattering fight, she's taken a smidge of pity on him and allowed him to sleep. A touching moment.
CONSIDERATIONS: Taking away the thousands of years of genocidal sociopathic madness and seeing what that does to her is exactly why I'm apping her to Aather. By core personality, after you strip away all that corruption, she is a healer and nurturer: not as high-empathy as most, perhaps, and with some control-freak tendencies, but a reasonably decent person. The protags sometimes refer to her as "the loveless one," but the flashbacks we see to the distant past where she was happily building a mountain kingdom with her lover imply that this wasn't always the case.
Aather will be very alien and potentially very good for her. She does *not* cope well with change, and Aather is of course in constant change. But she will also never have a chance to stagnate or be useless. I'm probably going to put some locks on her registry so she doesn't get the worst torture-and-genocide memories before she has a chance to settle in with her starting personality and build some connections (which will, by definition, be out of her comfort zone of pureblood conservative elves.) I may also simply be conservative with how often I play her in games, since she'd probably benefit from having time to develop in Aather before she gets tons of memories.
And yeah, there is always the chance that she'll start sliding into her canon arc and go all evil. In which case I'm fine with playing her through that for as long as I feel comfortable and then booking her. I don't think I'll find playing an entirely disconnected and uncaring villainous character very fun, but I do love the idea of somebody who's relatively decent getting back memories of being a genuinely horrible person, which is why I'm apping her. I'm not going to try to force her into a redemption arc if she's heading in the other direction, but I probably will eventually drop her if she goes all psycho hosebeast. That's very unlikely to happen immediately, though.
As a note, she had changed her form back to her original elf body at the time of her death, so that's how she'll land in Aather. Once she gets the relevant skill back, she'd be able to alter her body to be human, water-breathing, etcetera, but under power-cap, it would probably be way more trouble than it's worth.
SKILLS: Soooo elves in Elfquest are, by nature, all-powerful energy beings from outer space. Think more like Freakangels than anything else; mind over matter taken to the extreme. But here's the thing: the world where the story takes place power-caps them. Not as strictly as Three's limiter, but no elf has ever actually been able to use their full power in canon. That being said, she's on the powerful side within her specialties, which are telekinetic manipulation of living flesh and telepathic woo-woo. Outside of those specialties and some surprise hydrokinesis from late in the series, she couldn't levitate a paper-clip or shape anything other than flesh to save her life.
Telekinesis: Primarily, she can heal. Mend injuries, purge sickness, etcetera. She can also manipulate sensation to induce intense pain or pleasure, and shape and alter people, both physically (ex. turning somebody's arms into wings) and genetically (ex. removing certain genetic elements from their makeup, albeit phrased in high-fantasy terms.) I'm going to be particularly careful with capping the flesh-shaping skill; it's not always easy for her even in canon, so it would be agonizingly difficult in Aather. I should also note that EQ healing isn't instantaneous RPG combat healing: it might take her several hours of sustained effort to heal a major injury in a human, perhaps longer under the powercap. Any of her healing abilities have the potential to be inverted--i.e. instead of healing a wound she can create one--and how capable she is of either healing or hurting pretty much depends upon her current degree of fucked-up-ness. By the end of canon, for example, she's sufficiently insane that she can't heal, can't be compassionate enough to manage it; as she lands in Aather, on the other hand, she'll have no instinctive knowledge that her abilities can be used to harm.
Secondarily, in this department, she appears to develop hydrokinesis at some point during her ten-thousand-year stint living under the sea. From what we can see of this, it's almost exclusively the ability to manipulate waves and currents within the ocean, tossing swimmers around and so forth, and I doubt she'll make much use of it in Aather.
Telepathy: She's particularly powerful with basic sending and receiving, which is basically talking in somebody's head. (It is normally impossible to lie while sending, but she is twisted enough to be capable of it; that may be a separate skill as well if I feel like making things interesting.) I honestly haven't decided whether I'm going to break out shielding into a separate skill like Sian did with KK; we never see elves being broadly receptive to unprojected thoughts like that, but it's arguable that shielding is just as instinctive as sending and that she might get them back separately. And being subjected to other people's thoughts might do interesting things to her. She also can do some wacky shit with astral projection, dream control, invading and messing with people's heads, and imprisoning people's souls on the astral plane, which I am quite willing to limit heavily and/or never give to her, as it's pretty god-modey. (Winnowill's psychic powers also aren't as clearly defined as her healing powers; she can usually do whatever the plot requires her to do at any given time.) A fair bit of her ability in this department comes from the fact that in Elfquest, healing isn't just healing of the body: it's possible for a strong healer to heal damage in somebody's mind, like another healer once tried to do to Winnowill. And Winnowill being who she is, she's also capable of perverting that into *causing* damage or psychic pain. Also, she can block, eavesdrop on, and manipulate other elves' sending, but that's nigh irrelevant in Aather.
It's worth noting that it's canonically a lot more difficult for an elf to work on somebody who isn't an elf. Healing a mundane human like, say, Hikaru would be incredibly difficult for her, and take much longer. Whereas healing somebody like KK or Mithos, who might be the closest you get in Aather to a fellow elf, would be much faster easier. A fair number of people in Aather will probably fall somewhere in between, as there are a lot of people who are rich with magic but who aren't actually, y'know, all-powerful energy beings from space. I'd aim for the usual power-capped healing abilities to fall in that middle category, if that's acceptable. So healing KK will be easier for Winnowill than it is for Aeris, but healing Hikaru would be harder.
Her mundane skills include lying, seduction, and taking proper care of many feet of shiny hair. (It goes past her toes.) And yes, lying and self-deception is a *skill* for an elf. As a species, they're not much for it.
SUITED TO BE A KNIGHT?
Winnowill tends to think of everything and everybody in terms of Role and Function and Purpose. And knights have more of this than heroes do, in ways that would appeal to her: they have specific functions, specific Personae who they report to, rather than sort of milling around and just game-playing as heroes do. As a hero, she would flounder and be much more aimless, especially as she's somewhat unlikely to teambond easily. Being a knight, she can also start with her basic physical healing skill, which gives her a personal Role and Function. And Aather being how it is, she will never be unneeded as a healer, which is nice.
She'll likely be quite devoted to the general goal of helping and supporting heroes; it's in her nature as a healer. If she starts going downhill, that'll get corrupted into being a manipulative meddler. Well, more manipulative, she's always a meddler, and would certainly insert herself into places. The independence of playing with various teams rather than being bonded to one would probably appeal to her. Socially, she's a middlevert, interested in people but valuing the privacy and independence that being a knight would give her; she's not too reclusive to function as a knight. She would have few to no qualms with punishment if necessary.
She will probably struggle a little with the fact that Aather knights are not actually authority figures in most cases. But, somewhat like dealing with constant change, being in a supportive rather than a leadership position is actually really good for her. Her quests would probably tend to involve organizing or helping people, if they're not making specific use of that person's abilities to further whatever she perceives as their own role.
WRITING SAMPLE
Winnowill had spent several hours sitting with one of her humans, an old one, lost in morbid fascination. The hair was falling out, alarmingly enough. The skin was spotty on the backs of the hands, and as far as she could tell it was no illness, but some distasteful new form of withering. Not nearly as unpleasant as the way the flesh sunk in papery folds, hanging off the face like rotting meat.
This one had been sent to her as a waist-high child, not so long ago. Now it was shriveling up before her eyes.
Eventually, she fled in horror, to recover herself in the crystal garden. There she counted the rings in the delicate stone arches. The gardeners imprinted those in the living rock, one for each year. Less than eight eights, a trivial number, had been added since that child had first lisped Winnowill's name. So fast.
Eight stood in a particular pattern near one crystal tree, and she knew, then, that it was time to visit Door.
She dined, abstained from much wine, mixed the potion she required, and ambled down the back steps to Door's throne. Her protegé who guarded the secret door to Blue Mountain, for she had the gift of rock-shaping and could open and close the very stone. Only two thousand years old, so young, with her wide eyes and round face and delicate hands. Such a dear child, perched in her seat over the portal, perfectly still, barely breathing, transfixed.
Carefully, Winnowill climbed the handholds in the stone, the fluted potion jar strung on a cord around her neck. One of the other Gliders could do this easily, floating up by the force of their magic, but it was Winnowill's responsibility, so she endured this climb with her earthbound body, every eight years, to tend to the child. She had entranced her, after all. Perfect concentration, perfect focus. Her mind had become one with Blue Mountain, responding automatically to a command to open or close, utterly devoted to her role. And she never need move or age or suffer again.
Winnowill balanced herself beside Door's throne and tenderly brushed a thin strand of blond hair away from those wide, staring eyes, then raised the jar to her lips. **Drink,** she sent, strong enough to penetrate the trance, and Door's throat worked obediently. Water and honey, enough to keep the infinitely slowed workings of her body running for eight years. Gold light bloomed as she touched her, reaching inside with a healer's power, making sure everything was in order, smoothing away the sores that her rocky throne had left, purging the scant toxins without the need to evacuate.
When she finished, she kissed the girl's forehead, feather-light. "There," she murmured, almost pleading, smoothing a hand over the girl's slack features. "Don't change. Don't ever change."
NAME: Tory /
letterbladeAGE: 28
TIMEZONE: EST
CONTACT: arkady [dot] lizard [at] gmail [dot] com
I WILL NEED A DREAMWIDTH CODE: Nope
CHARACTER INFO
NAME: Winnowill
CANON: Elfquest
REFERENCE LINKS: http://www.ratauvan.co.uk/whoswho/winnowill.html (I am sorry, the Elfquest fandom consistently sucks at web design)
CHARACTER INFO: So you know how sometimes a doctor will joke that it would be wonderful if their job became obsolete because nobody got hurt or sick enough to bother? Well, that's what happened with Winnowill, and then she went insane and turned into the big bad of her series.
In the distant, stone-age past of a world much like earth, a ship full of magical space aliens crashed, and the scattered survivors, calling themselves elves, found themselves feared and hated by the local primitives. One group of them, carefully nurturing what telepathic and telekinetic abilities they'd managed to retain in a world that essentially power-capped their species, hollowed out a mountain and nested in there, safe from the outside world. Their leader's lover, Winnowill, had a talent for healing, and she served as the nurturing second in command and power behind the throne, busily healing their wounds, arranging the ideal elfin sanctuary, and making everything perfect.
Too perfect. Having reached the comfortable limit of inhabitants for their mountain, and safe from injury or illness, the immortal elves stopped reproducing. Stopped dying. Stopped going outside and getting themselves hurt. They didn't need her any more. And then thousands of years passed in utter perfect stagnation, and Winnowill began to go, well, stir-crazy is putting it lightly. She trained a local tribe of humans into worshipping elves and sending her monthly human gifts who she kept as something between servants and house pets. She found a troll (a sibling species, descendant of the same spaceship crash), toyed with him, seduced him, and bore his child, an unprecedented hybrid. And then after he betrayed her, she killed him right in front of her son, and proceeded to drive the boy completely insane with mental and physical torture. A little entertainment.
And then, after all that time, another tribe of elves, the series protagonists, stumbled across the mountain, and everything started changing. And after spending that long comfortably rotting in her own stagnating madness, change was anathema, and that change led to her (admittedly estranged) lover's death. Ever since then, for reasons that are also tied up in complicated matters of elven genetics and her slightly hypocritical devotion to racial purity (why, yes, she has control freak tendencies), she's had a vendetta against that tribe. After many years of hijinks: seduction, manipulation, torture, several plans for genocide, an aborted attempt at psychic healing that left her still insane but also capable of feeling guilt (thus making her *more* nuts), and living for ten thousand under the sea as a mermaid (like you do), she got into a climactic throwdown with the oldest and most powerful elf on the planet. And realized that if she wanted to win, she had to die.
So one of the things about elves is that even if their bodies die, their souls are immortal. Now normally this means they go drift around in their mothership in eternal happy oblivion, but a psychic as powerful as Winnowill wouldn't let herself fall into that, and would actually be *more* dangerous without a physical body to bind her. So the protagonists realized very early on that killing her was a very bad idea.
At the time of that fight, Winnowill had already shape-shifted herself into a human (more below) and seduced the local warlord (because she's lived from the stone age to medieval times, the joys of being immortal) to lead his men in a war against the protag tribe. They had a such magnificent love-hate-trying-to-kill-each-other deal going that, well, he was primed to chop off her head when she told him to. But fortunately for the protags, another old flame of hers was present: a fellow elf, with strong mind and will and a strange psychic bond with her, with whom she'd had a much longer and more complicated love-hate relationship. He threw everything he had into restraining her soul, and basically bound her into his mind so she couldn't go around destroying everything. And ever since, they've wandered the world, her constantly straining for freedom, him unable to sleep lest she break loose and kill him. The last we see of her in canon, at least to my knowledge, after a long and soul-shattering fight, she's taken a smidge of pity on him and allowed him to sleep. A touching moment.
CONSIDERATIONS: Taking away the thousands of years of genocidal sociopathic madness and seeing what that does to her is exactly why I'm apping her to Aather. By core personality, after you strip away all that corruption, she is a healer and nurturer: not as high-empathy as most, perhaps, and with some control-freak tendencies, but a reasonably decent person. The protags sometimes refer to her as "the loveless one," but the flashbacks we see to the distant past where she was happily building a mountain kingdom with her lover imply that this wasn't always the case.
Aather will be very alien and potentially very good for her. She does *not* cope well with change, and Aather is of course in constant change. But she will also never have a chance to stagnate or be useless. I'm probably going to put some locks on her registry so she doesn't get the worst torture-and-genocide memories before she has a chance to settle in with her starting personality and build some connections (which will, by definition, be out of her comfort zone of pureblood conservative elves.) I may also simply be conservative with how often I play her in games, since she'd probably benefit from having time to develop in Aather before she gets tons of memories.
And yeah, there is always the chance that she'll start sliding into her canon arc and go all evil. In which case I'm fine with playing her through that for as long as I feel comfortable and then booking her. I don't think I'll find playing an entirely disconnected and uncaring villainous character very fun, but I do love the idea of somebody who's relatively decent getting back memories of being a genuinely horrible person, which is why I'm apping her. I'm not going to try to force her into a redemption arc if she's heading in the other direction, but I probably will eventually drop her if she goes all psycho hosebeast. That's very unlikely to happen immediately, though.
As a note, she had changed her form back to her original elf body at the time of her death, so that's how she'll land in Aather. Once she gets the relevant skill back, she'd be able to alter her body to be human, water-breathing, etcetera, but under power-cap, it would probably be way more trouble than it's worth.
SKILLS: Soooo elves in Elfquest are, by nature, all-powerful energy beings from outer space. Think more like Freakangels than anything else; mind over matter taken to the extreme. But here's the thing: the world where the story takes place power-caps them. Not as strictly as Three's limiter, but no elf has ever actually been able to use their full power in canon. That being said, she's on the powerful side within her specialties, which are telekinetic manipulation of living flesh and telepathic woo-woo. Outside of those specialties and some surprise hydrokinesis from late in the series, she couldn't levitate a paper-clip or shape anything other than flesh to save her life.
Telekinesis: Primarily, she can heal. Mend injuries, purge sickness, etcetera. She can also manipulate sensation to induce intense pain or pleasure, and shape and alter people, both physically (ex. turning somebody's arms into wings) and genetically (ex. removing certain genetic elements from their makeup, albeit phrased in high-fantasy terms.) I'm going to be particularly careful with capping the flesh-shaping skill; it's not always easy for her even in canon, so it would be agonizingly difficult in Aather. I should also note that EQ healing isn't instantaneous RPG combat healing: it might take her several hours of sustained effort to heal a major injury in a human, perhaps longer under the powercap. Any of her healing abilities have the potential to be inverted--i.e. instead of healing a wound she can create one--and how capable she is of either healing or hurting pretty much depends upon her current degree of fucked-up-ness. By the end of canon, for example, she's sufficiently insane that she can't heal, can't be compassionate enough to manage it; as she lands in Aather, on the other hand, she'll have no instinctive knowledge that her abilities can be used to harm.
Secondarily, in this department, she appears to develop hydrokinesis at some point during her ten-thousand-year stint living under the sea. From what we can see of this, it's almost exclusively the ability to manipulate waves and currents within the ocean, tossing swimmers around and so forth, and I doubt she'll make much use of it in Aather.
Telepathy: She's particularly powerful with basic sending and receiving, which is basically talking in somebody's head. (It is normally impossible to lie while sending, but she is twisted enough to be capable of it; that may be a separate skill as well if I feel like making things interesting.) I honestly haven't decided whether I'm going to break out shielding into a separate skill like Sian did with KK; we never see elves being broadly receptive to unprojected thoughts like that, but it's arguable that shielding is just as instinctive as sending and that she might get them back separately. And being subjected to other people's thoughts might do interesting things to her. She also can do some wacky shit with astral projection, dream control, invading and messing with people's heads, and imprisoning people's souls on the astral plane, which I am quite willing to limit heavily and/or never give to her, as it's pretty god-modey. (Winnowill's psychic powers also aren't as clearly defined as her healing powers; she can usually do whatever the plot requires her to do at any given time.) A fair bit of her ability in this department comes from the fact that in Elfquest, healing isn't just healing of the body: it's possible for a strong healer to heal damage in somebody's mind, like another healer once tried to do to Winnowill. And Winnowill being who she is, she's also capable of perverting that into *causing* damage or psychic pain. Also, she can block, eavesdrop on, and manipulate other elves' sending, but that's nigh irrelevant in Aather.
It's worth noting that it's canonically a lot more difficult for an elf to work on somebody who isn't an elf. Healing a mundane human like, say, Hikaru would be incredibly difficult for her, and take much longer. Whereas healing somebody like KK or Mithos, who might be the closest you get in Aather to a fellow elf, would be much faster easier. A fair number of people in Aather will probably fall somewhere in between, as there are a lot of people who are rich with magic but who aren't actually, y'know, all-powerful energy beings from space. I'd aim for the usual power-capped healing abilities to fall in that middle category, if that's acceptable. So healing KK will be easier for Winnowill than it is for Aeris, but healing Hikaru would be harder.
Her mundane skills include lying, seduction, and taking proper care of many feet of shiny hair. (It goes past her toes.) And yes, lying and self-deception is a *skill* for an elf. As a species, they're not much for it.
SUITED TO BE A KNIGHT?
Winnowill tends to think of everything and everybody in terms of Role and Function and Purpose. And knights have more of this than heroes do, in ways that would appeal to her: they have specific functions, specific Personae who they report to, rather than sort of milling around and just game-playing as heroes do. As a hero, she would flounder and be much more aimless, especially as she's somewhat unlikely to teambond easily. Being a knight, she can also start with her basic physical healing skill, which gives her a personal Role and Function. And Aather being how it is, she will never be unneeded as a healer, which is nice.
She'll likely be quite devoted to the general goal of helping and supporting heroes; it's in her nature as a healer. If she starts going downhill, that'll get corrupted into being a manipulative meddler. Well, more manipulative, she's always a meddler, and would certainly insert herself into places. The independence of playing with various teams rather than being bonded to one would probably appeal to her. Socially, she's a middlevert, interested in people but valuing the privacy and independence that being a knight would give her; she's not too reclusive to function as a knight. She would have few to no qualms with punishment if necessary.
She will probably struggle a little with the fact that Aather knights are not actually authority figures in most cases. But, somewhat like dealing with constant change, being in a supportive rather than a leadership position is actually really good for her. Her quests would probably tend to involve organizing or helping people, if they're not making specific use of that person's abilities to further whatever she perceives as their own role.
WRITING SAMPLE
Winnowill had spent several hours sitting with one of her humans, an old one, lost in morbid fascination. The hair was falling out, alarmingly enough. The skin was spotty on the backs of the hands, and as far as she could tell it was no illness, but some distasteful new form of withering. Not nearly as unpleasant as the way the flesh sunk in papery folds, hanging off the face like rotting meat.
This one had been sent to her as a waist-high child, not so long ago. Now it was shriveling up before her eyes.
Eventually, she fled in horror, to recover herself in the crystal garden. There she counted the rings in the delicate stone arches. The gardeners imprinted those in the living rock, one for each year. Less than eight eights, a trivial number, had been added since that child had first lisped Winnowill's name. So fast.
Eight stood in a particular pattern near one crystal tree, and she knew, then, that it was time to visit Door.
She dined, abstained from much wine, mixed the potion she required, and ambled down the back steps to Door's throne. Her protegé who guarded the secret door to Blue Mountain, for she had the gift of rock-shaping and could open and close the very stone. Only two thousand years old, so young, with her wide eyes and round face and delicate hands. Such a dear child, perched in her seat over the portal, perfectly still, barely breathing, transfixed.
Carefully, Winnowill climbed the handholds in the stone, the fluted potion jar strung on a cord around her neck. One of the other Gliders could do this easily, floating up by the force of their magic, but it was Winnowill's responsibility, so she endured this climb with her earthbound body, every eight years, to tend to the child. She had entranced her, after all. Perfect concentration, perfect focus. Her mind had become one with Blue Mountain, responding automatically to a command to open or close, utterly devoted to her role. And she never need move or age or suffer again.
Winnowill balanced herself beside Door's throne and tenderly brushed a thin strand of blond hair away from those wide, staring eyes, then raised the jar to her lips. **Drink,** she sent, strong enough to penetrate the trance, and Door's throat worked obediently. Water and honey, enough to keep the infinitely slowed workings of her body running for eight years. Gold light bloomed as she touched her, reaching inside with a healer's power, making sure everything was in order, smoothing away the sores that her rocky throne had left, purging the scant toxins without the need to evacuate.
When she finished, she kissed the girl's forehead, feather-light. "There," she murmured, almost pleading, smoothing a hand over the girl's slack features. "Don't change. Don't ever change."