#iscend comprine

[anthureums]

gee baru how come they let you have four girlfriends

✶

[anthyies]

gaios. kiss her.

[ianthe-is-a-bitch-and-i-love-her]

Nothing but respect for Iscend Comprine because if I was told by Baru Cormorant - who has previously fucked a woman she planned to betray the very next morning and a woman who was her literal actual prisoner - that I was ethically unfuckable, I would commit Falcresti Nine-Eleven.

*remembers what Iscend did to kyprananoke*

wait a minute -

[arianwells]

[digitalnoisefan]

Iscend deciding to aid Baru’s plans in the hope she can then seduce her and become both her advisor and controller is amazing and I love Baru having absolutely no clue what is going on when Iscend starts hitting on her

[sephstones]

Fic :: The Masquerade Series - Seth Dickinson :: Baru/Iscend, Iscend & Hesychast :: by drug and bell

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Title: by drug and bell Fandom: The Masquerade Series - Seth Dickinson Category: F/F, gen Pairing: Iscend/Baru, Iscend & Cosgrad Torrinde Rating: M Word count: ~3,300 Tags: non-linear narrative, nightmares, conditioning

Summary:

Iscend took a deep breath. It had started then. She'd expected this. "Gaios." She was prepared.

Notes:

Written for Assimbya for Yuletide 2025.

[incandescentorrery]

The Most Conditioned and The Least

During their conversation on Kyprananoke, Iscend Comprine says to Tain Shir:

"Aren't you and I beyond such illusions? [...] The most conditioned, and the least?"

Iscend Comprine is insightful, logical, and intentional. She is not imprecise except when she intends to be. So, the order in which she places herself and Tain Shir has to be significant. You and I, the most and the least.

Tain Shir takes great pains to set herself apart from all of the factions around the Ashen Sea. She absolutely understands herself as having cast off all conditioning and ideology.

So of course Iscend Comprine sees right through her and knows that Tain Shir, for all that she is a force of nature, has been so deeply conditioned by her experiences that they still affect her in ways to which Tain Shir has made herself blind.

Iscend Comprine on the other hand was "raised in Hesychast's Metademe, conditioned from birth to put the well-being of the Imperial Republic before all else". However, she has very developed self-insight. Although she remains bound by her conditioning, she has been able to seize the controls of that conditioning to manipulate it as she sees fit. In short, I think that Iscend Comprine is arguing that her intense awareness of the machinery that controls her has allowed her to seize control of that machinery and therefore herself, while Tain Shir so deeply denies the existence of any such machinery within her that she cannot begin to understand how to control it and therefore remains controlled by it.

[mallardbee]

Iscend