Author name: bluemote
Email Address: ezboard please
Rating: PG13 at the moment
Disclaimer: I acknowledge that ME and JW own the characters of Willow and Tara.
Feedback: Yes, yes, yes. Please and thank you very much.
Summary: Very AU (Alternate Universe) fiction. A (very tenuous) kind of follow up to a previous fic I wrote, Into the Stars, although it’s not at all necessary to read that first, and, er, it's not actually quite finished....
This one is set in a future kind of sci-fi world, but with magic, Willow and Tara have been separated by dramatic events and are finally to be reunited. Thoughts are in italics.
Hope you enjoy
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The Dark Matter: Part 1
The woman rages down the passageway, her cloak a dark rain cloud behind her. The corridors are narrow and book-lined, brief flashes of stone and wood the only hint of the rooms beyond. A straggle of low level clerks and scholars follow respectfully behind the slam of her boots.
The arched wooden door looms, brightly painted with the shield of Head Professor even in the gloom. The woman stands in front of the door for the briefest moment, enough for the curious followers to see her eclipse the elaborate carving and gilding with her anger. She enters. She does not knock.
The man looks up from his desk. He is younger than she had expected, his face bland and round, his eyes flat. The door echoes into the wall behind her and he is afraid. It is not who she wanted, but for now he will have to do.
‘Where is she?’
He gapes, begins to shake his head but is unable to ignore the ice of her voice. His eyes wander to the tall staff in her right hand, and he feels its silver wood twisting in his heart before he can answer. He blinks and it is gone but large in his mind and the woman is suddenly closer.
‘Tell me now or it will go very badly for you.’
Her voice is worse than the staff, heavy and sure with menace. He dares not look at her eyes, at the cold and ancient blue he glimpsed as she entered. He must answer, but his mind is wandering away from him towards a dull endless sea of terrified confusion.
‘Wh…Who?’ he manages to gasp, ‘My lady…you must…’
She spins her staff towards him terrible with anger, her cloak circling thunder around her bright hair. Her face is revealed, but he cannot look. Instead, he is falling into a horrifying cave that ends in the silver staff at his chest.
‘The girl.’
The staff stops its shaking and is lowered as the words emerge.
‘The girl that was found. The girl that is living here and working for you in this crumbling place.’ Each word is precisely spoken, sharp and brittle as glass.
His soft face pales in relief. He is scrambling up the cliff face of his fear.
‘Yes,’ he whispers, ‘Oh, yes, the girl we… She’s downstairs. Downstairs, just down the stairs in the stack rooms, maybe I could show…’
‘I wish to see the Head Professor. He will show me.’
‘I am the H…’
A laugh slices his protest to a stop. He cannot help but catch a flash of the cold blue in her eyes. Her voice lowers.
‘Little boy,’ her grin is hard metal. ‘I do not care to have my time wasted, as I am sure the Professor will appreciate. You will get the Head Professor and he will show me to her. I shall wait here.’
He hesitates, grasps the edge the desk with slippery fingers.
‘Now!’ The roar travels directly to his legs and he is running desperate to his escape. The door slams behind him.
The woman, the witch Tara, is left alone in the room. She does not notice the books or instruments, the great paintings proud on the walls. She paces, marking time with slams of her staff.
Suddenly, she freezes.
I can feel her. She’s here.
The anger leaves her eyes, replaced by something soft and sad.
Alive. Alive, she’s here and alive… I know she’s alive, she’s always been alive, but… I have to see her, I have to see her now…I…
The blonde woman has been waiting for almost three years.
I can wait for three more minutes. I can…
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A smaller woman stamps a book. She puts the book on the trolley to her left, pulls the next book from the shelf in front of her. She opens it, re-inks her stamp, which is kept in a box to her right, and presses it down on the front page of the new book. She likes the smell. When she goes to Mrs Orsi’s in the evening she has to wash the ink off before she eats, but she tries to delay this as long as possible to preserve its dark sweet residue on her hands.
There are great ordered caverns of books all around her, and she works through them shelf by shelf. She makes piles, flips the books over a certain way so that she can lift them back in the right order into their dusty dulled lines. Sometimes she has to clean the books, sometimes she has to move them, but today she is just stamping them with another new stamp of the Department.
The stamp is hers, so is the ink and the scraper. She keeps them in a box with her mark on it in the Assistant Librarian’s office, and no one else is supposed to use them. She suspects that some of the others used to, because she keeps her stamp very clean and sharp, and they do not.
If the stamps on the books are smudged they get into trouble. If the ink spills, if the books are torn in any way. If they work too slowly, if they work too hastily without concentrating. The Under Assistant checks, then the Under Assistant takes them to the office and they have to bow and apologise and get shouted at by the Assistant Librarian. Lissen, this girl with the clean stamp, has never been shouted at for those things, but the Assistant keeps her box in his room to make sure that the others do not use her stamp, and to see that the level of ink in the bottle is not changing too quickly.
The Assistant Librarian, Dr Addith, is very concerned that Lissen may be using her ink to write with. It was Dr Addith that caught Lissen writing, but now he seems worried about the writing, rather than angry like he was when he found her at midday break gently drawing on some scrap paper. He pulled her roughly to his office and sent Selyth, the Under Assistant, to the Librarian. Selyth came running back, her hair flying around her face, and Dr Addith made Selyth stay and watch Lissen while he went to meet the Librarian. Selyth watched Lissen very carefully, watched her thin, small body and her blank and confused face. Selyth is a very conscientious Under Assistant, serious about her place and very pleased that Dr Addith had trusted her to watch the lost girl. That’s what the name Lissen means, lost. The mark on Lissen’s box, that means ‘belonging to Lissen’.
Selyth, the name, didn’t mean anything directly, it was an old-name, because Selyth came from a High family and her name came from her aunt. Still, Selyth also had a mark that meant ‘belonging to Selyth’ written on her locker, except she knew that it was writing, not just a mark. Lissen was not supposed to know that marks and writing could be the same; Lissen was not supposed to understand about writing and she was absolutely not supposed to be writing at all. Especially in a Department library where there were specific people to write about specific things, like the libraries themselves, which is what Selyth wanted to write about.
Waiting in Dr Addith’s room, Lissen had been sitting very still and pale and Selyth, curious, got a better look at the redness of her bobbed hair and the tangle of lines that grew up from her collar to her ear. Right on her skin it was, under the scars, like stamp ink that never washed off. At first, everybody had been scared of it, the writing on the lost girls’ skin. But then Dr Addith had explained it wasn’t really writing, or at least not writing that they could understand, so it didn’t really count. Some of the workers were still scared, and when Selyth had been out in the city with Lissen she saw that many people were frightened by the dark marks and Lissen’s bright hair, as well as the scars, but Selyth wasn’t anymore. Lissen was no harm to anyone, and although she looked strange, Selyth remembered her High birth and her devotion to understanding and made the effort not to be afraid of things she didn’t know, and not to act like a common worker.
Selyth’s Aunt had said those things at the dinner table the first time Selyth had been allowed home after Lissen had arrived, and the thin voice often echoed in her mind.
But still, Lissen didn’t get to leave the Libraries much anymore, for all the confusion and stories it caused.
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Edited by: bluemote at: 11/1/04 9:01 am
Did I miss something?? Cause...I was waiting for an update of 
Also, Im really excited about this one it seems very interesting.
.
sorry again about the confusion – I hope the note above helps, and sorry that things got complicated. Thanks very much for your feedback though, and I hope you enjoy this next part. As for the setting, well, you’ll just have to wait and see – i’m thinking that not everything sci-fi will be shiny and metal, but only because I like the smell of ink too 
Thanks so much, and hope you enjoy this part 
) at the same time.
-Cameron 
