the deep moans round with many voices

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Ashes, part 3
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[Then he sat cross-legged on the mosaic floor and ran a mental hand along his bindings until Sular arrived in a clatter of beads.]

She looked down at the empty lamps for a moment, but left them where they lay. Instead, she sank to the floor in a swirl of multicolored skirts and rested her hands on her thighs. "Back from the world?" she asked.

Riam shifted his shoulders, working out the stiffness of nearly an hour without motion. "As much as I ever am. What kind of bread were you making?"

Sular smiled, laugh lines crinkling deeper around her eyes. "That would be telling. So. What are we practicing today?"

Riam uncrossed his legs and braced one hand against the wall to lever himself back to his feet. "Guess," he said, offering his other hand to Sular.

She clasped his wrist and let him pull her up, smile fading to concentration. "I think... if a magician crossed the border, and was being pursued..." She frowned. "Riam, what happens if a magician draws power in the middle of a binding?"

Riam hid his own smile, not wanting his pride at his student's progress to mask the seriousness of his answer. "That depends on whether the binding is being held actively or passively. If the binder is paying full attention, he or she can flex around the hole in the world. A passive binding, on the other hand, will tear under the stress of reconciling the essence of our world to the essence of whatever world the magician is bound to."

"Yours tore," Sular concluded. "Can I ride with you to watch the reweaving?"

"Of course. I don't like needing to fix the binding, but there's no point in not taking advantage of it for training," Riam said. "For now, I want to show you how I patched the tear, and why the patch is only a temporary solution." He stepped to the doorway and pushed the beaded curtain aside. "Let's go outside."

"Not the gardens," Sular said as she followed Riam through the corridors. "They have too much life; it's distracting. I'd like to try one of the horse pastures and see if that helps."

"You'll have to get better at sliding through distractions -- in a crisis you won't have time to find a quiet place and settle in," Riam pointed out. "But if grass and horses eating your hair will help you learn the technique, I won't say no."

"Horse drool is good for the soul," Sular informed him, and held a solemn face for all of three seconds before bursting into gales of laughter.

She was still laughing in little fits and starts when Riam opened the gate of a currently empty pasture and led her over to the roots of a spreading blackwood tree, where shade and hungry horses had kept the green-brown grass to ankle height. He sat cross-legged and waited for her to calm.

Sular smiled apologetically as she knelt and arranged her skirts around her folded legs. "My daughter said that to me once, when she came home with her braids unraveled and her hair glued into clumps. I always wondered what my face looked like, to make her laugh so hard. Now I know."

Riam couldn't help smiling back. "I live to serve. Now, close your eyes and breathe, in and out. Feel the air in your lungs, the sun on your head, the earth at your feet, the blood in your veins. You are in the world and of the world, and all things are one. All things work together. All things balance."

"The whole world sings the same chord," Sular murmured, peace blossoming on her face and her hands opening to rest loose on her thighs.

"Yes. Now, follow that song out and out, spiraling wider and wider, until you reach the sound of dissonance," Riam said, falling easily into his student's imagery, the same way his teacher had used Riam's own tactile visualizations. "Stop and touch the veil between song and noise."

He closed his own eyes and stretched a mental hand out to touch the binding, sweeping along the cool, seamless border until he brushed a spiral knot of dense warmth, both alien and familiar as the world's own soul: Sular, touching his binding to the south, near the lark tower.

"I hate being this close to the edge," Sular said. "Everything outside makes me want to vomit and scrub myself raw with boiled water."

"All binders feel that way. Everything outside is wrong; that's why we hold it back," Riam said. "Now, follow me as I trace the binding until we reach the patch."

Sular made a wordless noise of distaste, but the warm spiral of her mental presence trailed in Riam's wake as he led her past towers and hills and the river's outflow until they reached the owl tower and the ragged tear. The patch was holding, but Riam could feel miasma pressing against the hasty mental construct, seeping and snaking through the tiny misalignments where the torn edges of the binding waved free in the outside air.

Sular sucked in a pained breath. "Oh." Warmth reached out, tracing along the edge of the patch, testing for leaks. "Oh, that's ugly."

Riam hummed in agreement. "Much too tattered to fix. I'll have to reweave that whole section of the border, replace it all at once. You get to hold a temporary ward just outside the boundary line while I work, so brace yourself for extended contact with the miasma and its taint."

"...I think I won't eat breakfast that day," Sular said faintly. "I don't know how you manage. I'd go mad with that pressing against my mind from one sunrise to the next, let alone six years you've held the binding since Zudam retired."

Riam shrugged, then realized Sular couldn't see him with her eyes closed. "It's not so bad," he said. "The first few hours are the worst, before you learn how to pull your focus back to the parts of the world that are still right. Miasma feels like poison, but the whole point of the binding is that it can't touch you, or anything you protect. It's not so hard to block it out of your active attention the same way."

Miasma was much easier to ignore than certain other problems, though Riam admitted his practice in pretending other issues didn't exist had probably helped him learn to hold the boundaries without the nagging itch of nausea Zudam had sometimes complained of.

"I suppose," Sular said. Her mental presence brushed the patch one more time, then pulled back to the intact portion of the binding. "Can we come home?"

"Of course," Riam said, and let his focus snap back into his body. He opened his eyes and watched Sular stretch and shift her legs. "You're getting better at reaching out."

"The pasture helped," Sular said, glancing up at the frond-like leaves of the blackwood tree. "I'll keep working on finding my focus in other places."

"Good. So, do you have any questions, or should we deliver ourselves into Purrar's tender mercies?" Riam asked.

Sular smiled, as he'd hoped. "Oh, let's avoid Purrar for a while. How did you make the patch?"

Riam lost himself explaining technical details, and helping Sular practice drawing her sense of how-the-world-should-be into a solid, shining shield, anchored to the earth below and curving up and back until it touched the earth again behind her. He thought she would have the knack of creating a dome by the start of winter, and a full sphere by spring. After that, it was nothing but practice until she could expand her reach to encompass all of Zerlon, after which he wouldn't be the only one holding the binding anymore; they could trade off, alternating months or seasons, until they found a boy or girl with the knack for feeling and shaping the world's essence and took a joint apprentice.

It was always best to have more than one binder. Riam still resented Zudam for refusing to split the work once Riam was fully trained. Yes, the old man had lost two partners in his time, and he was owed all the gratitude and support people could give, but his suffering was no excuse for making Riam suffer in turn.

He kept those thoughts to himself, as always, and concentrated on praising Sular for everything she was doing right.

They stayed in the pasture until the sun was long since vanished behind the western hills and the surrounding gloom of miasma, and the first stars were shining in the midnight blue sky at zenith, away from the rising gibbous moon. Finally Riam sighed and stood, dusting off his trousers and knocking the soles of his sandals against each other. "Purrar won't hold supper much longer, whether Zalir's returned or not," he said. "Let's go wash up and find something small and useful to do so nobody accuses us of shirking."

"Holding miasma out of Zerlon isn't shirking," Sular said, smiling again, "but yes, let's go inside. Purrar was making fried acacia seeds, and I've seen how much you love them."

"You'll tell me that, but you won't tell me what your dough was for?" Riam asked, putting on his saddest face and forcing his voice high and reproachful. "For shame. What kind of apprentice teases her teacher this way?"

"The kind who has two children almost your age," Sular said, lacing her arm through Riam's. "Now stop playing the puppy and get me a good place at the table."

This time it was Riam's turn to laugh as they retraced their steps into the compound and back past the altar room to the great hall, where supper was nearly ready to eat.

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1) I really need to do research on trees and flowers and other plants of Africa, India, and South America, because man, my botanical knowledge is both terrifyingly limited and also restricted like whoa to the Midwest and Northeast of the USA, and that is just boring, boring, boring. So I will be faking my way through here. Please bear with me.

2) Sular's basically a plot device. Does that show, or is she coming off like a real person?

3) I still fail at physical description. *headdesk*

4) Are my metaphysics at all clear and/or convincing, or am I making a muddle of things? Any feedback would be very welcome!

5) 1,600 words today, 4,200 total.