Leader Thread
A/n: First formal introduction of Irmaya and the weft au. Divergent from canon in that the Emperor never arrived on Barbarus, and Mortarion was able to defeat Necare and survive.
Mortarion is a ruler in little more than name alone for six months when they bring the girl to him.
The village is still short on food, they said. The girl was crying. She’d brought down the house with a shriek, they said.
The parents insist on coming to the trial and their tear-stained faces say that while they won’t refuse Mortarion’s orders, they won’t comply easily.
The man who had called the assembly calls for the girl’s death. A witch, untrained, is a danger to her entire society. Her presence summons demons, her powers bring destruction.
Mortarion knows the easy way out. He also knows how Calas, old friend, right-hand man, holds those same powers and suppresses them. He knows how the girl’s parents are held back by the guard, still trying to reach out to their daughter. The powers can come from both humans and Overlords, apparently.
Barbarus had witches once. Had.
Mortarion makes his decree. The girl will remain with him and Calas for a month, to learn self-control while under the watch of the Death Guards. If she fails, or if she practices with the living or dead biologies, she’ll be executed as a threat. If not, she can return to her family. There were human witches on Barbarus once, and there may be again. The man storms off. The parents cheer. Barbarus’s first post-revolution awakened witch looks at him with awe.
The girl is old enough to bow, her tiny face scrunching up in emotions he can’t understand as her parents hug her and make her promise to be a good student.
-------
When Mortarion next sees the girl, a good six years have passed since their last meeting. She’s taller now, and far more controlled than she had been under threat of execution. Gaunt, lanky, and somewhat malnourished, but she’s alive and bowing to him as she presents him with brightly colored fabric.
Her dye work, she said, still keeping her eyes on the ground, dyes extracted from plants and molded to specific colors with witch powers. Made more durable by the attention, the fiber spun first with the same steps as any other, then reinforced with sorcery. She hands him a block of palm-sized swatches in blues and reds and a continuous bright blue cotton, two wingspans and change of clean, hand-woven work. Two of Mortarion’s wingspans.
First work went to her teachers, he’s sure, but this must be the second or third piece at latest, as young as she is. It’s clean too, as good as any novice her age would have made. He hands it to a guard for testing of the durability she promises.
The swatches aren’t all made by her hands, he realizes on a more detailed examination, and the materials differ. Her own family wouldn’t have made so many purchases. Filched? Traded for? Small scraps, almost like they’d been taken from worn-out garments or gifted by others her age. The entire village may well know of her work and encourage it.
Mortarion asks for her process. The girl hands over careful notes, a stack of paper lined up to match the stack of swatches. Messy writing carefully detailing each and every step, from the motions across the loom to the thoughts channeled in time with the push of dye across the fibers. He asks her to demonstrate her techniques, kneeling by her side and noting how Calas also watches as the girl makes the dull white linen turn vein-blood blue.
The fabric comes back damaged, but damage that would have affected leather, not cotton. The holes are smaller, the frays are lighter, and the color stays strong.
The witch- novice, apprentice, soon-to-be woman- bows to him again, keeping her eyes on the ground as she awaits his judgement. By his side, Calas waits for the same.
This is another precedent to be set, he thinks. Witchery in traditional craft, the right to practice in such a way.The right to profit from her sorcery.
The right to help their people grow.
He makes his second decree to the girl. Permission granted to continue her practice, to make her work, to treat it as any other in her village, conditional on her continued cooperation with rules barring the living and dead. The novice thanks him, her eyes still on the ground. Calas makes a motion with his hand, as if beckoning for more.
This time, Mortarion addresses her as he had every guild head, every leader of a craft that had come before him in his first days as the Reaper of Barbarus. He thanks her for her work and the skills she gives to her village and her people, for her craft will keep them warm and remind them that the world is not made only of destruction. He bows his head to her, as he had to the guild leaders and traders years prior.
The novice looks up, her eyes widening, a grin spreading across her face before she catches herself and bows back, bidding him a formal goodbye and retreating with her swatches. When her steps fade out of human earshot, he hears her shriek and catch her breath and tell herself that she’ll need to get started on more advanced experiments at once if she wants to keep the seal of approval.
He learns her name after one of the guards escorting her out returns. Irmaya, child of Ravne and Niahl, first human witch awakened after Necare’s reign.
-------
The next time he sees Irmaya, she is a young woman, seventeen and engaged to a quiet man who bows his respects to the Reaper and busies himself with offering the Death Guards hospitality as his someday-wife shows them her workspace.
She’s grown as a witch, no doubt. The simple blues she’d presented to him as a child hold strong, but so do the bright, almost artificial reds and pinks and a violet color that none of them had seen in cloth, that looks like the roxo flowers on the hills but darker by a significant amount. There are complex patterns in her weaves now too, shifting diamonds and moths and the grains she must have learned as a child, beautiful and as unnaturally colored as the rest of her witchcrafted cloth.
The witch youths too, the ones she’d agreed to tutor in exchange for his seal of approval for her to barter with guilds, are hard at work, reinforcing structures, weaving, digging irrigation and farming ditches.
Meditative practices, Irmaya explains, tasks that help focus the witchery and control it, like a muscle group. Mortarion still cannot understand it, all these years later, but Calas is entranced, and there is a peace that settles over them.
They’ve grown complacent, he realizes, when the clouds come in from nowhere and the acidic rain begins to fall.
Irmaya barks out three quick commands, and the youths respond as quickly as any of the Death Guard would. A barrier between the sky and the other people outside. A second over the livestock. A third over their own party, all three in the span of mere seconds.
Not a drop reaches the Reaper’s people.
By now, Irmaya’s eyes are no longer fearful when she looks at him, silently acknowledging that this was not technically a permitted use of the practice. By now, he feels no hesitation in complimenting the speed of her students, the efficiency their group had worked with to keep everyone safe.
The someday-husband, as it turns out, is a good cook, and a man long at ease with sorcerous aptitudes in the house, reminding some of the more emotional children how to regulate their powers, and deftly maneuvering the dinner conversation to his to-be wife’s work.
----
When the ships are first spotted hovering in the sky, Mortarion feels like a child again, far too small and weak to take on the looming threat. Then, he remembers who he is. He has not been a child for decades now.
The message comes through, broken and crackling, but enough. A traveler. A scholar. A man searching for his kin, who he claims would have been of an unusually large size, near twice the height of a normal man, nigh impossible to kill, with two heartbeats. Mortarion feels his pulses speed up as the message is relayed.
A brother. Connections to a world beyond Barbarus, beyond Necare. Answers.
Their return message is short and terse, simple enough to fit into the bursts of clear transmission they can afford. Twenty days from now. Come down alone. Come unarmed. The reply is nevertheless enthusiastic.
Silence in hand, Calas by his side, and the Death Guard behind the two of them, he leads them to the spot the ship’s drop pod is landing at. Irmaya is there as well, and the witches within five days travel hang at the fringes of the Death Guard, a backup that he does not want to acknowledge. To be useful here they would have to break the only limit that had ever been enforced.
The man that emerges from the pod is- strange. He is taller than Mortarion, somehow, and both his hair and his skin are a bright red, less like blood and more like Irmaya’s works. Barely any fabric covers him, his arms and face and bare feet so easily exposed to Barbarus, and he is missing one eye.
He is also, quite obviously, a witch.
The man coughs a few times, then shimmers and straightens up, no longer affected by the sting of the air surrounding them. He says his name is Magnus the Red, Son of Prospero, and that he comes in peace, holding his arms up to emphasize the lack of weaponry. As though a witch needs any to be dangerous.
The Reaper steps forward, Silence in hand. Magnus’s eye nevertheless lights up at the approach. He calls him ‘Brother’ with the sort of ease that not even Calas had had at first. An ease that has not existed on Barbarus since before the Overlords.
The smell of witchery is obvious, although Magnus's is by far warmer than that of the Overlords. The air feels almost spiced, like a full kitchen, the scent of flowers and strong tea blending in. The flavor itself says harmlessness, but the intensity of it is like an ocean's mist, precluding the power that hides behind it.
His handshake is firm, and goes to the forearm rather than the hand. When he returns the gesture, Magnus grins and the sentiment ripples out enough that the people closest to them relax by a hair. Calas comes forward, unbidden, and introduces himself as the Reaper's right hand, undeterred by the differences in stature. Magnus crouches down somewhat, just enough to make the difference manageable. The rest of the Death Guard are treated with similar care.
The message of a peaceful contact had traveled quickly to the safe spot of their guilds, and their representatives are set to come up as well. No matter how polite and quite possibly sincere Magnus is, Mortarion knows the man is interested in learning of the witchcraft of Barbarus above almost anything else. He calls Irmaya forward.
Irmaya is taller than Calas, but their visitor still has to bend as she stretches her arms to present Magnus with a wingspan of fabric.
The coloration in this one shimmers, a gradient of every color Irmaya had learned from both the ground and her witchery, tiny diamonds woven into a larger and larger one, encircled by all Barbaran traditional images. The wheat changes hues from ground-dye yellow to witch-made scarlet and the wings of moths are woven in a dozen shades of green, small white skulls dancing in the spots. It is by far the brightest and most impractical thing she has ever made. It could only have been done in the last twenty days, only for their visitor, a display of her skills and the traditions held on Barbarus.
Magnus is clever enough to understand this as well, giving a half-bow to Irmaya before addressing her. He calls her work a display of her world’s crafts, a testimony to her years of practice, and while the words would be polite in either case, they ring true. When he asks her age, Irmaya answers honestly as nearing twenty-three. Then, he asks who she had learned from.
Irmaya’s shoulders square as she raises her head and says, in a too-steady voice, that she is the first human to actively practice witchcraft in generations.
Magnus tilts his head and she shivers, as do several others in the crowd. Magic, Mortarion knows, but he can’t act before Magnus looks at Irmaya with a far more somber face and drops into a kneeling bow to a woman half his height. Irmaya’s eyes widen, and she steps back towards Mortarion, an expression of shock he'd last seen on her a good decade prior.
Mortarion nods to her.
The first witch of a free Barbarus, it will later be recorded, asked the King of Prospero to rise and aid her in restoring the tradition of witch arts to her home.
When the two of them turn to him, it is not as witches, or as his subject and a fellow ruler, but as two people asking to revive a practice which has been dead for too long. A necromancy of sorts.
The Reaper he’d grown into had been clear on the restraint of witchcraft.
But as Mortarion, he once more thinks of clever Calas, of Irmaya’s determination, of Magnus’s extended hand.
The Reaper, it will later be recorded, brought not just freedom to Barbarus, but kinship with a planet they would have found impossible to understand otherwise.