freedom_is_grey: (What looking over shoulder)
Ysalwen Surana, Warden-Commander of Ferelden ([personal profile] freedom_is_grey) wrote2015-12-30 06:13 pm

What happens in the library stays in the library. Unless it's demons

Ysalwen is seated at a table in the library, tomes and scrolls spread out before her. There's also the remains of at least two plates of sandwiches next to her elbow, and two empty glasses of water. There is one half-empty glass, too.

Liranan, seated at her side, seems to be watching that half-empty glass as if his life depends on it.

Time continues to pass.
yinyangwizard: (Default)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2015-12-31 12:42 am (UTC)(link)
Seimei emerges from somewhere deeper in the library, slipping a newly filled notebook into his kimono sash. (There are so many interesting things to study here.)

He stops short as he comes across Ysalwen at her table. She wasn't here last time he passed this way. He's pretty sure the table wasn't either. The library is funny like that.

"Good afternoon, Ysalwen," he says, bowing politely. "Or is it evening?" Or the next morning, possibly? "One easily loses track of time in here. And hello Liranan!" Seimei pulls a small paper package out of his sash and unwraps it to reveal what looks like a cookie. "I bear tribute to your august self from the finest dog treat bakery in Tokyo."
yinyangwizard: (Default)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2015-12-31 01:07 am (UTC)(link)
"I found a long-forgotten text that would be very interesting to certain people back home. Also very upsetting to certain people. Some of them are, in fact, the same people."

Seimei kneels and holds the cookie out to Liranan. It is very artfully decorated with frosting, like a fancy cookie from an upscale bakery.

"What are you studying so intently?"
yinyangwizard: (Seimei's Magic Seal)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2015-12-31 01:21 am (UTC)(link)
Seimei scratches Liranan behind the ears. "I make for interesting reading, or so I've been told. Is that one a children's book? I didn't know I was in a children's book."
yinyangwizard: (Seimei's Magic Seal)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2015-12-31 01:36 am (UTC)(link)
It's a book of Japanese fairy tales with lovely illustrations. Seimei is just one chapter. He turns to the beginning and starts reading through it.

"Well, most of it is accurate, generally speaking. But my father was not a court official. He was a zuryo, a provincial governor. He wouldn't have met my mother otherwise. And my mother didn't have a fox tail when she took human form, like she does in the picture. She was too skilled for that."
yinyangwizard: (Default)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2015-12-31 01:47 am (UTC)(link)
"Well, it's not like she was officially his wife," Seimei says. "They were married. He insisted on it. But very few people knew. Certainly not his primary wife. He built a house for my mother in Osaka, where I was born, and that's where she raised me."

Osaka is a major city now. At that time, it was out in the sticks.
yinyangwizard: (Default)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2015-12-31 01:59 am (UTC)(link)
"If people had known that my father had taken up with a fox spirit, he would have been banished from the Capital, and I would never have been allowed in at all," Seimei says. "And at that time, having multiple wives was not terribly uncommon, at least not for the aristocracy. A court official might have two or three. The Emperor himself had several," he explains. "Although the difference between 'wife' and 'concubine' was not always that clear, especially where the Emperor was concerned."

Marriage meant something very different back in the Heian era.
yinyangwizard: (Default)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2015-12-31 02:10 am (UTC)(link)
"Well, some spirits we worshipped or revered. But by and large, fox spirits did not enjoy such high regard. Sometimes they were even lumped in with yōkai, or demons."

Seimei, of course, never lumped them in that way.

"If my father had simply had a tryst with a fox spirit, it would not have been considered such a bad thing. But to marry one, and acknowledge the child you had together? That was unthinkable.

"And by the way, noblemen's wives at that time were most certainly not slaves. They did not have such a high status as men, and were limited in certain ways, but no man regarded his wife as property. In fact, women inherited property. Men by and large did not. We were expected to make our fortunes at court."
yinyangwizard: (Torii)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2015-12-31 02:16 am (UTC)(link)
"Yes. The samurai and daimyo came later. Back then, the Imperial Court was the center of power. Not the Emperor, so much. Emperor Daigo, the first I served under, was probably the last Emperor to hold any real power. The de facto rulers of Japan were the ones whose daughters were Empresses and Imperial concubines, and whose grandsons were future Emperors and princes."
yinyangwizard: (Default)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2015-12-31 02:38 am (UTC)(link)
"Mostly the fathers. And mostly the head of the family," Seimei answers. "But women had more influence at court than was generally acknowledged. They stoked their husbands' ambitions, oversaw their sons' education, and did all sorts of subtle things to advance the men they favored or embarrass the ones they didn't. I owe much of my success to my first wife, her keen grasp of politics, and her network of friends in palace service."
yinyangwizard: (Heh)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2015-12-31 02:59 am (UTC)(link)
"Akiko was the granddaughter of Kamo no Tadayuki, my primary teacher. It was an arranged marriage, and initially we did not like each other very much. She was not what you would call warm and friendly, and I was a socially inept lad who had no idea how to relate to women other than the ones I grew up with."

So a match made in heaven it was not.

"She may not have liked me much in the beginning, but she recognized that her welfare was very much dependent on my own. She also took to heart her grandfather's pronouncement that I just might amount to something." Seimei smirks. For Kamo no Tadayuki, that was high praise.

"So early on she sat me down and said, 'It is the duty of a wife to support her husband whether they have great affection for each other or not, for their fortunes rise or fall together. I will offer you what help I can, if you are wise enough to take it.' And fortunately, I was." Seimei chuckles.

"She was right. We did not choose to be allies, but there we were, so we decided to make the best of it. Affection came later, although it took a few years." Seimei pauses, lost in thought. "It's been a long time since I thought about those days, let alone talked about them."
Edited 2015-12-31 14:00 (UTC)
yinyangwizard: (Default)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2016-01-02 02:13 pm (UTC)(link)
"The word 'nostalgia' originally meant 'the pain from an old wound,'" Seimei says. "It is actually a welcome thing, when the wound is nine hundred years old."

Also, it's good to have the reminder that he used to be human. But that's about the present, isn't it? Not the current topic of conversation.

"I don't know if you've come across the Kagerō Nikki in your studies, but that was a very unhappy marriage."

And is now one of the enduring classics of Japanese literature, oddly enough.
yinyangwizard: (Onmyodo)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2016-01-02 05:33 pm (UTC)(link)
"Indeed not. I have seen my share of them, some worse than what is detailed by the author of that diary. Fortunately neither of my marriages were like that."

Seimei turns a page in the storybook.

"Ah! Here is Kamo no Tadayuki," he says, showing the picture to Ysalwen. In it, a young boy (presumably Seimei himself) is writing Chinese and Sanskrit on a paper with a calligraphy brush. Sitting beside him and overseeing his efforts is a man with a flowing grey beard and prodigious eyebrows. He looks down on the boy with a smile of approval.

"Kamo-sensei did have a beard like that, but he almost always looked very stern. And I would not have been writing on paper at that age! Paper was too expensive in those days for a child to scribble on. I had a tray of wet sand and a stick. I didn't graduate to paper until I knew my characters." Seimei shakes his head and clucks his tongue.

"I was fortunate to have such a teacher, even if he was a curmudgeon. He had studied yin-yang magic - onmyodo, we called it - with the Daoist masters in China. To him it was not simply a job or a means to an end, as it was for so many, but a sacred calling.

"My mother also had a hand in my training - beyond engaging Kamo-sensei, I mean - but that is not generally known."
yinyangwizard: (Seimei's Magic Seal)

[personal profile] yinyangwizard 2016-01-02 07:29 pm (UTC)(link)
"As my mother and Kamo-sensei understood it, their magics were of a different nature," Seimei answers. "As I understood it, each of them knew certain spells that the other did not. The truth is that they both experienced and practiced magic in very different ways, even though the magic itself came from the same source."

This was a concept that Seimei instinctively grasped for centuries before he learned how to put it into words.

"Unlike the magic Kamo-sensei taught me, my mother's magic involved no incantations, implements, or components. It was just something she did. She taught me how to change shape, how to create glamours and illusions, how to perceive spirits and magic that most humans don't notice."

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