unfinishednetwork | (no subject)

Surely you know a sorcerer's names are part of his power, brother, [Magnus chides, but there's laughter behind it.

He finishes his spell, but does not set down the journal or marker. Not yet. He has to see how it's received.]

But I do agree! Such an irrational fear requires facing, and a little play may bring that person to their senses in due time.

[Then he does laugh aloud as the reply comes, and -- politely -- turns Konrad's glitter-blessed journal so his brother see what's been written and drawn in response.]

A supplicant to "Lord Nerd"! What do you think?

I would venture to say that none of us have gotten an education on what you lot get up to on a regular basis.

[A psyker he may be but clearly he doesn't think of himself as one if he's immediately putting himself outside that cadre. What did psykers get up to? Throne knew! He didn't!

When his journal is almost but not quite offered back, just so he can see, there's a twitch of lips in an almost smirk. Almost.]

Well, now you've been called upon directly. Will you share your wisdom or smite her for her foolishness?

Hmm. That is a lack we must rectify for you, at least. Some of what you are experiencing will be mitigated with proper training.

[It's past time he broached the subject he's been ruminating over since the revelations in the garden.]

I am a teacher first, to the willing! Even if they must announce their willingness like fools. [He tips the journal back to pen a response, saying as he does,] We'll test her resolve.

[Finishing, he tips the journal back so they can both see the responses -- the one that doesn't stay, and the one that does.]

A worthy student, perhaps?

[That brings hesitation. His librarius have never been able to do anything about it either, not when they suffered from the same afflictions. Going to anyone else about the problem simply wasn't going to happen.]

... 'Will', or 'may'?

[There's no mistaking that wariness. Curze has learned through bitter trial and error that hope is never something to be trusted. It always carried a price of failure and false promises.

Easier, is the subject of Hisako.]

That is, I believe, the bird abhuman. She already has displayed some psyker skills, so you won't be starting with a blank slate.

Will. [There is no wavering, no doubt in the word.] Your condition is not uncommon among the inexperienced who touch the Great Ocean without adequate preparation. If the foundational techniques do not, by themselves, give you relief -- and they may not, for your gift is powerful and the pathways of its use burned into you -- there are other avenues we can try.

At the very least, so long as I am near you, I will be able to stop the seizures before they start. I am sorry that I did not anticipate the last one.

[He then digests what Konrad's said, looking down at the journal once more. He tosses off a copy of the woman's poem -- grunts in mild irritation as it vanishes on him -- then repeats an unfinished version.]

Hisako Godsup, I believe, by her writing. If she is as good a student as she is a poet, it will be a worthwhile endeavor to awaken her to the splendor of the empyrean. [And she'd make a useful ally.

He finishes writing his invitation to her, then returns the journal and marker to their owner.]

[Not uncommon. Such a phrase is infuriating. If what he endures is so easily remedied, why has nothing worked throughout his life? Why had their father done nothing?

But more likely this will be as all else has been, a pointless waste of time. He was to die as he lived, after all.

No. He will not be so stupid as to think a miracle fix exists that he just happened to miss and nobody else ever thought of.]

Or at least an entertaining ally. She has methods of farsight I've not seen my Librarius use, in retrospect what her images showed puts some small credence to the claim time is utterly uncoupled from this part of the Empyrean.

[Is that deliberately setting aside the other topic? Yes it is.]

And we will need allies here.

Oh? And what did her images show?

[He does not miss the deliberate avoidance of the first topic -- but instead of pursue it immediately (shocking!), produces his own journal and pulls a chair over with a kine tether so he can seat himself and write back to Hisako.]

They are for the most part less allies and more in need of protection from themselves.

[Which isn't a first for any of them. Dealing with idiot mortals is why most of them wound up ruling a planet before they were found.

He's expecting the topic to shift back to things he doesn't want to deal with but for now it remains on Hisako.]

Her planet, wherever that is. Her phenotype is stable, based on the number of others I saw with the same appearance. [Interesting abhumans, but likely also to pass muster. They're civilized, they're a stable mutation, they're USEFUL.. why would they need to be eradicated?] I believe she was looking for kith and kin. But while she's used to a pict-feed effect the images were still.

Some may simply need more cultivation than others.

[Magnus is an optimist! There will always be opportunities to uplift even the meanest of humanity into something better and brighter.

Though where the xenos and other sorts that also raddle the library are concerned ... Well, he's more forgiving than most of his brothers if they have interesting knowledge to share with him.

Hisako and her Stormwing kind sound like they do not even need that forgiveness -- this is a place where Konrad's harsher judgment of these things is a useful guide.]

I see. [Quite clear in its implication, but Magnus is enough of a scholar to ask,] Did you ask her to scry anything from a known world? To see if the effect replicated?

[This is waved off with his notebook. Curze has no interest cultivating anyone. That he's somehow managed to acquire one (1) friend is still a genuine system shock if he spent too much time thinking about it.]

I didn't have to. Others were indulging their curiosity. Always a still image. I observed for a while.

[Naturally. Magnus lets that topic go with grace as well -- it is not Konrad's role, even if Magnus is deeply enthusiastic about the opportunities before them.]

Just so! Then if the Library itself has no reason to meddle in what is seen outside it, we may assume time runs so quickly here as to put the material world in stasis.

[Restating the point, Magnus ... ]

That will be a great boon to our plans to avoid Roboute's future.

[Because they ARE doing that. It is GOING to happen.]

[What is WITH people and thinking that's possible?

It drains away anything like lingering humor as effectively as pulling the stopper from a bathtub, and for a long minute or so, he says nothing, frowning at the now suspiciously glitter-dusted journal.]

It's not possible to change the past. You already know that. We don't have a future, it's written, it's already been lived.

We are not Roboute's past. You may not be mine, and neither of us may be Sanguinius'. The threads of the future are many, and each choice we take to lead us there may branch off another world like a blossom -- if one believes the theories of the Greater Te'marc.

[Magnus' conviction in this is absolute.]

If any future that was seen was already written, my Corvidae would be no use to me but a comfort for the inevitable.

They are far more than that. Many of my sons owe their lives to futures foreseen and prevented.

Edited 2026-01-26 05:41 (UTC)

This too is dismissed as not worth listening to. He can match conviction for conviction with singularly stubborn persistence, but there's a point where he's just verbally bashing his head against a wall.

"And yet what I have seen aligns with his past. Perhaps then the point of failure in your assumption is with your Corvidae." There's really no mistaking that discussing it leaves him distinctly unhappy, for all that it's masked well. "If what they see can be changed then their grasp on time is weak, and they can't perceive the one inviolate path for what it is."

That's an outright insult to their abilities. "Perhaps it is kinder that they cannot."

Ordinarily, turning the blame back on his peerless sons would be the quickest way to draw Magnus' ire. But Konrad -- and Konrad's bitter conviction in the immutability of the future -- are his problem, nay, his responsibility now to address.

(And ... he cannot now rule out the possibility that his own convictions, his own understanding of both Immaterium and material world, are flawed. Incomplete. He had not recognized Konrad was a psyker, when should have.

He refused to look the doom stalking him, stalking all of them, straight in the face for decades because he could not abide being the man who'd struck such a bargain.

Still can't. But with his illusions torn apart, what other choice does he have but to sit with that awful feeling -- far worse than physical pain?

Easier to tell himself this is all about his brother.)

So the cyclops grimaces, and leans back in his chair, and says something truly remarkable: "It's possible you are right."

Let that soak in a moment, Konrad.

"Nevertheless, were that so, I would expect no positive -- or negative -- correlation between their visions, the actions taken to avert them, and the outcomes. But while interventions on the future are not always successful, or sometimes require much more dramatic intervention than expected -- "

He remembers the weight of a mass-conveyer bowing the shoulders of his subtle body, crushing pain into every nerve as it fell -- and halted.

" -- it is more often we are able to change the future in the way we desire. Should it not be random, no better than a roll of the dice?"

He doesn't want to be right. It's not gratifying, except that Magnus admitting he might be wrong about something is a novelty. But it doesn't shake him out of the darkening mood souring his thoughts bit by bit.

There's a lot he could say. Arguments he could make. Evidence, however anecdotal, of his own experiences, his efforts to avoid the worst and failing every time. Never once being wrong. .. Well, once, but he won't really understand that incident until retrospective in another eighty years, waiting for his own death to come.

Curze's last hope that things might go differently than he expects waits at Cheraut, and on word if Balthius is alive or dead. If Nostramo can be saved, or needs to be erased.

For a handful of moments, a breath or two at most, there's nothing but bleak, anguished despair etched into every line of his long, lean frame. He knows impossibility. Futility. "...As you say."

The words are anything but actual agreement.

Edited 2026-01-26 14:20 (UTC)

Despair has its own texture and color in an aura. Such is the life of a primarch that Magnus has become deeply familiar with it, in its most subtle and flagrant manifestations -- from a single mortal suffering in silent depression to whole planetary populaces fearing their inevitable annihilation.

But witnessing it in such intensity from one of his own brothers is a new experience. Another of the new experiences the Library is bringing him, unwilling -- and not one he savors.

He is silent in the wake of Konrad's acknowledgment-that-is-not-agreement. Silent, and staring at his brother, his own face composed in a moue of deep concern.

Finally, he asks -- almost tentative, another new experience for him --

"Do your visions show you anything within this Library?"

A huff, little more than a slightly harder exhale. "They don't stop." Ever. Every moment of every day they pull at the edges of his awareness. "Here, or in the last 'Story', it doesn't matter."

There are serious downsides to being a primarch. His mind is still fully capable of acknowledging and categorizing the relentless flickers of future even when he's trying to ignore it entirely. "It's best to not focus on the little ones. It invites worse." And then he's stuck in muscle-locked agony sometimes for hours, and he preferred avoiding that whenever he could.

It's shaken off, almost literally, in a skin-shuddering twitch. "If it brings you comfort, then hold onto the idea that we have a choice."

Magnus waves away this last idea, addressing it first: "If I am truly wrong, brother, and we do not have a choice, I would do better to accept it as you have."

Unspoken, of course, is the idea that he will need a great deal more proof before he believes the future is unchangeable. Perhaps it is on him to seek that proof, but it goes deeply against his own mercurial and hopeful nature to do so -- so he will not.

But neither will he press Konrad to provide it, when the thought of doing so clearly risks his brother's fragile sanity even further. Instead, still carefully, he picks up the previous line of questioning: "I had meant, more, whether you know what will happen to us while we are here."

A pause, and then as something occurs to him, like a lumen turning on -- "Did you stop seeing them, under the Symbol of Thothmes?" Was that what the twitching was about? And the sudden seizure, as all of the visions were restored?

He's keeping tabs, in a very casual sort of way, on the rest of the writings going on where this had all begun from. It's hardly divided attention, but it gives his hands something to do when the line of questioning is all things he'd really rather not be dealing with.

"In broad strokes, yes, I know what will happen. Don't ask me what any given person has chosen for meals, it doesn't work like that." Not for him anyway. Maybe for the Emperor, who could probably pick out the minute details of anything he chose with an obnoxious level of ease.

Curze's foresight didn't work that way. It only showed him the negative, and what was only a breath or two away. The worst possible outcomes.

And things like Magnus intending to grab him and stuff him in a shower, right before it happened. Had he not been hobbled by the library it would have been enough warning. "...Yes?" The answer is a touch bewildered. "Was that not the purpose of it?" Didn't Magnus want secrecy?

Hisako has been writing back to Magnus as well, in the interim, and he spends a moment penning a response to her latest. Why is it he is always surrounded by those less enthusiastic than he about ~~reckless experimentation~~ the pursuit of ~~forbidden~~ esoteric knowledge?

Oh well. Her reticence is -- likely -- only sensible, but it is a little galling to feel just that little bit stymied on two fronts.

"I see. If you think it would be valuable, I would appreciate being apprised of anything concerning our fates here. And anything you glean of the Stories themselves." He fiddles briefly with his stylus, frowning with thought at his journal, before turning a wry look on Konrad.

"Forewarned is forearmed, even if only to brace myself for the inevitable." He isn't making a joke of Konrad's predictions, but more, his own reticence to embrace what they might mean.

"And it was. It is meant to block all communion with the Great Ocean, but I was not aware at the time you were having those visions. Or that their sudden restoration could cause you to seize."

More fiddling with the stylus ensues. It looks pointless -- it is not; it is a haptic exercise conjugate to the higher of the Enumerations, though not one he often avails himself of. (It did not do for his sons to see him as less than a splendid exemplar of a Magus -- as someone who still needed such things, now and again.)

"You doubted me earlier, when I said that I had a remedy for what has plagued you so long. But if the visions themselves are a trigger, and I have a reliable method to block them, would you consent to further experimentation in that vein?"

It's ... strange, to be dealing with someone of his own power and station in such a vulnerable matter. If Konrad were mortal, or one of his sons, he would of course seek consent to treat -- but he could be much more direct (~~and persuasive~~) about doing so. This negotiation, this offering of a more diplomatic experiment instead of certain treatment ... he does not know how it will be received. Or if it is the best tack.

Edited (clarified a weird sentence) 2026-01-26 16:16 (UTC)

"If something seems relevant." About their fates? Likel not. Pending stories, if he could pick up on anything, that might be allowable. Magnus is going to keep being stymied too! Every primarch suffered from one particular problem, inherited likely directly from their father - weakness was to be hidden, asking for help is all but unthinkable. Sanguinius balked at people knowing about the red thirst, Guilliman didn't dare breathe word of exactly how much goes awry in ten thousand years, Magnus already knows the flesh change isn't as cured as he'd hoped..

Curze is no different, save perhaps in already being painfully aware reaching out does nothing. He intended to. Fulgrim was ... as close to a friend as he had. Maybe he was wrong about that impending betrayal. If he couldn't trust the Phoenician, then who could he trust?

The brothers caught here with him in this library??

Experiments had connotations. And it would be pointless besides. "I'm not much interested in being a test subject to your idle curiosity, brother."

That does mean what is, and isn't, relevant is largely on Konrad to determine -- but Magnus will take that response. Konrad is not one of his Corvidae to be ordered around.

It's still frustrating. Even knowing that it is exactly how each and every one of them has always behaved when confronted with cooperation with his brothers, even having heard many of their painful secrets spilled out in the garden not so long ago, it's frustrating. Why can they not trust each other? Why must even their most positive relationships eventually curdle to disagreement or failure?

Why can't he just be allowed to help?

He -- wonder of wonders -- covers his face with one hand briefly, as Curze responds. "Think of it as a trial as might be done by an apothecary," he says, after a moment. "Not to satisfy my curiosity about your condition, but to find an appropriate treatment for it. One that returns your independence to you, so you do not have to rely on any of us hovering over you, or poking or prying into your well-being."

Maybe if he tries putting himself more firmly in Konrad's mindset?? (Does he even want to be there?)

Putting oneself into Curze's mindset is an absolutely terrible idea. If he's this way, it's because he was designed to be. Perhaps it gave him a greater appreciation for the suffering he inflicted on others, being so acutely familiar with pain himself. Perhaps knowing the very worst others can do made him reliably less likely to be too lenient and allow a criminal to slip away to strike again later. "..And what, precisely, did you have in mind?"

He knows he is how he is on purpose, exactly the way Sanguinius is the way he is meant to be. Attempting to fix it outside his own legion seemed, in some strange way, disobedient to the Emperor's intentions. It's uncomfortable, almost the same way the idea that Magnus of all people had somehow just failed to notice what he was, was equally uncomfortable.

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FORMAT CHANGE

much nicer on phones

and in general, really.

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magnus is the "no take, only throw" meme but with secrets and other primarchs letting him help

well at least one knows his sekrits!!