what else is there? (wheel of time | lanfear/liandrin + liandrin~moiraine)

[fiachairecht]

what else is there? wheel of time, lanfear/liandrin + liandrin~moiraine. lanfear steals faces and it hardly changes liandrin's dreams at all. 1.5k words, rated m. for tellitslant in femslashex 2023.

Sleep comes easily to Liandrin and it is a curse, in winter — to dream in the long stretches of darkness that unspool in front of her, to reach out to the shadows flickering in and out of view and know them to be almost more real than anything she feels in her waking hours.

The waking hours, though, are hardly more pleasant. The whole Tower seems to have lit up like a pyre in the wake of the Amyrlin's pronouncement of exile for Moiraine, secrets and plots swirling like ash in the winds. Have you lost your mind? Liandrin wants to ask her Sister, but of course, the Amyrlin hasn't been her Sister in more years than bear thinking about.

Something has been broken, perhaps permanently, and the worst part of it all is that Liandrin cannot tell if the Amyrlin knows what she's done. Decades ago, she would have said that Siuan Sanche did whatever she wanted regardless of whether she'd thought through the consequences, and she might not even have meant it cruelly, but she had hoped that some time as the Seat might have changed that. Now, though, such carelessness could easily spell the deaths of too many.

Liandrin has no love for the Tower, but seeing sisters so willing to openly distrust each other nudges like a shard of ice at her ribs. The Tower deserves to fall. She does not know what she will do if the Tower falls like this.

And all of that is made worse by how, a week after Moiraine leaves and a day after some of her Red sisters bring one of Moiraine's little projects from the Two Rivers back to a Tower cell, Liandrin dreams of Moiraine in her bed.

She's naked but for her Great Serpent ring, and her fingers are warm and smooth as they trace over Liandrin's face. Liandrin herself is in her nightgown, the softer one she saves for nights in the Tower, and she cannot close her eyes even to blink as Moiraine's fingers drift over her lips, her cheek, the curve of her ear.

Even in the dream, Liandrin knows she should tell her to leave.

"Do you miss me?" Moiraine asks, and her voice echoes oddly around them. She's sharp at the edges, not sharp in the way her thin body has always cut through the space around her with ease, but sharp as if she were not quite in the same space as Liandrin's sheets. Vibrant, like she doesn't quite belong.

Moiraine, changed by the road. Moiraine, who has turned down every invitation to bed Liandrin has offered for decades. Liandrin dreams infrequently of her now, preferring to focus on Moiraine in the world they share, but some things her sleeping mind cannot quite give up.

"Tell me you miss me," Moiraine says, except — she wouldn't.

But it must be a dream. If not a dream then Moiraine has taken her to tel'aran'rhiod, and while Liandrin can count on one hand the number of times she'd entered that world intentionally, she knows that the only thing more dangerous than choosing to travel there is being taken there unwittingly.

In tel'aran'rhiod, she has no guarantee that this is the Moiraine that she has known what feels like all her life. Perhaps that is why Moiraine is willing to put voice to questions Liandrin would never ask her to pose. Perhaps the Wheel has given her Moiraine from a different turning, perhaps this is a gift from—

It wouldn't do to name him, here.

She could lie. She should lie, for she is free of this, if not yet free of the Tower.

Can this version of her lie, in the world of dreams? She reaches a hand to her throat as if the thread of Spirit would manifest as a physical thing here, and Moiraine's hand slides down her neck to interlace their fingers.

"Because I miss you."

And that, too, sounds like it should be a lie — like something Moiraine would know better than to say aloud even if it weren't a lie.

"I'm going to wake up now."

Moiraine laughs, and there's an edge of something near to cruelty about it, the first thing that has seemed real. "You will," she says, "It's fine. I'll wait."

There's hardly space for breath between them but Moiraine kisses her anyway, her tongue as insistent as her nails digging into the thin skin over Liandrin's clavicle. It's the sort of kiss they would have once shared, before their paths came between them.

It's the sort of kiss Moiraine would never give her now.

Wake up, she tells herself, for she cannot bear to show weakness in front of this Moiraine, this creature of the Wheel. Leave this world, leave this—

Moiraine's legs are tangled with hers, the damp heat of Moiraine's cunt pressed against her thigh, and Liandrin's neck is throbbing with the dull pain of Moiraine's nails, curling as if they mean to peel her skin clear off.

She wouldn't do this to me either—

"What are you?" Liandrin's voice is rough, her whole body trembling with the effort of holding herself back from reaching out, again, to this phantom that isn't a phantom, this Moiraine that cannot actually be Moiraine.

"What you dreamt me," Moiraine murmurs, and when she pulls away, there's something like regret in her eyes.

Liandrin wakes, and tells herself that the dampness on her cheeks is only sweat.

She doesn't reach for her throat. Doesn't want to see her fingers come away crimson — or, worse, untouched by the blood Moiraine might have pulled to the surface.

By the time she faces herself in the mirror in the candlelit grey of morning, her skin is clean, but the marks remain.

*

The Moiraine who appears in her dreams now is wrong, even when Liandrin is lucid enough to know that she has not crossed fully into tel'aran'rhiod. Whatever strangeness echoed from her first unwitting step into that world has seeped into the everyday, and the longer it goes on, the easier it becomes for Liandrin to almost tempt herself into disbelieving the changes.

Moiraine is always subtly wrong, never wrong in ways that couldn't be explained away simply as flights of Liandrin's sleeping mind. Liandrin catalogues the changes as they regard each other over the fire: the way her hair falls full and straight nearly to her hips instead of flowing into waves and ending at the middle of her back, the way her genuine smile comes easily to her mouth, which is too full and too mobile, giving away everything instead of nothing at all.

Moiraine had never been this happy, not even as a Novice.

Liandrin wishes she had had the chance. She wishes they both had.

But this — whatever this is — is better than the long years of not seeing her. If Moiraine is in tel'aran'rhiod, however strange, then she still lives to dream.

It makes it worse, then, when she learns about the Forsaken.

*

When Lanfear comes to her bedchamber early in the evening, Liandrin cannot pretend to surprise. When Lanfear lets her push her down to the bed and straddle her waist with not even a token protest, Liandrin cannot let her surprise show.

"Was it always you?" She asks. "Did you think you were — what did you think you would gain, giving me her like that?"

Lanfear just smiles up at her, content as a cat curled in front of the fire. "Not always." She pulls her legs up, wrapping them around Liandrin's waist, and Liandrin is reminded of the very first time in tel'aran'rhiod. Not always could mean—

And Lanfear laughs, and even though neither of them are asleep Liandrin knows that she was right, and hates them both for it.

"Interesting fixations," she says, digging her nails into Lanfear's throat just as Lanfear had done to her. Her voice is hollow to her own ears. "I never stole her face. I never dreamed like that until you did. And you — do you even remember your own, after all this time?"

"Does it matter?"

The first time she had claimed Moiraine's face in the world of dreams she had been too sharp to be real; now she blurs, herself and Moiraine and a melding of the two that twists Liandrin nearly in two.

"If you want me, tell me," she says. Lanfear deserves no answers if she will give none. "You don't need her."

Lanfear's hands slide up her thighs, underneath her nightdress, and her palms are cold. She cups the burning heat of Liandrin's cunt in her hand, and the sensation of being held threatends to undo her. A thumb glides across her clit, and Liandrin hisses, biting her lip. The touch grounds her in the moment, makes it easier to think: this is not about Moiraine.

"You do, though," Lanfear says. "Unfortunately for you, you have me."

Liandrin's grip tightens, though she doesn't expect it to do anything. "Show me what that means."

It might mean nothing at all. She almost hopes it does.

(It doesn't.)

Comments

[elasticella]

*high pitched screeching*

The Tower deserves to fall. She does not know what she will do if the Tower falls like this. what a delightful glimpse into liandrin's head before the reader is dropped into her dreams, this fic is exactly what lanfear's fixation line called for and absolutely slayed me. the eventual blurring of lanfear/moiraine was perfect, and lian's voice throughout this is so on point <3

[fiachairecht]

I think about Liandrin who hates the Tower but needs it to exist so she can oppose it so much I am so normal about it and about how Lanfear plays with that need and how Liandrin conceptualises Moiraine-and-Tower together........I am so glad u like it!! <3