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Cyrinde awoke with a gasp, beads of cold sweat clinging to her brow as she jolted upright. For a brief moment, she was disoriented, and the room was dark except for the intermittent flash of lightning from the night sky outside the window. The boom of thunder that followed made her flinch. She was both pleased that she slipped into a novice breathing exercise so easily, and momentarily embarrassed that she might need to rely on one to calm her racing heart.

The Accepted sighed wearily. It had been the dreadguards again. Just acknowledging the images caused them to briefly flash across her mind again unwillingly. Ever since that night Sheriam had brought her into the dark recesses of the White Tower, through the three arches ter'angreal to face her fears and gain Acceptance, her sleep had been more troubled with visions from her trip through the third arch. She had been Aes Sedai, then, when the Father of Storms had sent the full force of his army through gateways into Tar Valon, into the Tower itself. The screams of the novices as she abandoned them to enter the arch and return from the test still haunted her. Cyrinde worried the screams would never leave her memory again.

The Atha'an Miere woman took another deep breath to center herself. "If it pleases the Light, all will be well," she intoned aloud soothingly. "All will be well, and all manner of things will be well, if it pleases the Light." The halo of saidar briefly shone around Cyrinde as she embraced the Source and channeled thin threads of Fire, lighting a small oil lantern on the nightstand besides her bed before regrettably releasing the Source. She picked up a small porcelain hairbrush, one of the few belongings she still possessed from her home, and began to comb her hair, smoothing out the snarls from her thrashing about in her sleep. Her mother had given it to her when she was a young woman. It was crafted by the Amayar, a kind people who resided on the island of Tremalking.

Cyrinde paused mid stroke, a frown forming on her lips, and she stared at her tattooed hands in her reflection from a small mirror hanging beside the bed. She realized that the pang of homesickness she had once felt upon joining the Tower had faded. In fact, it had been a long time since she had thought much of her home at all. A long time.

In many ways, Cyrinde was a woman without a home or people. She was Atha'an Miere by blood, called the Sea Folk by the shorebound, but the Pattern had spun her thread in such a way that she had been ripped away from her people when she was only a youth. She had been an apprentice to a Windfinder, a noble tradition among her people for those who could wield the One Power, but those strange leashed women she had encountered in Tanchico had foundered their family's ship in the harbor and forced her to flee on land. She had traveled along the coast by various boats and by horseback -- she still detested the animals -- until reaching safe harbor in Illian, where chance had brought her across the path of an Aes Sedai of the Gray Ajah serving as diplomatic advisor to the king of Illian. The Aes Sedai had insisted that Cyrinde travel to the White Tower for training, had refused any other answer, and with her parents killed and her Windfinder dead or leashed by those foreign invaders who could channel, Cyrinde had had little reason to refuse the offer of safe passage to Tar Valon.

Cyrinde had still not breathed a word of her people's deep secret -- the fact that their Windfinders were women who could channel, trained by their own tradition without any intrustion from the White Tower or the Aes Sedai -- and if it pleased the Light, she would take that to her grave. But she had not served with her people long enough to earn the custom of a salt name, that honorific second name almost all Atha'an Miere carried. There were only a handful of Atha'an Miere in the Tower at this time who had reached the shawl of Aes Sedai, and they were all of the Brown Ajah, and so weak in the Power, by design of her people, that they had barely enough potential to reach the shawl at all. In constrast, Cyrinde might not be the strongest channeler in the Tower -- she could tell that Kyrana Sedai of the Green, and the newer novice Mariska stood just above her in outright potential, for example -- but she was otherwise one of the strongest women to enter the book of novices in years. Cyrinde's mind was sharp and she was very bright; she knew that without false pride. And while the shorebound Aes Sedai were fascinated by her and amazed at her rapid ascent through the ranks of the Tower, the Atha'an Miere sisters among the Browns had shunned her.

Brushing her hair with her comb of Amayar porcelain, a voice whispered into her mind, asking, Who are you, really? And what are you doing here?

Cyrinde sat silently, only the sound of her brush in her hair filling the quiet spaces between peals of thunder. But as she sat there, she realized she had made a decision, and perhaps the most important one she could at this point in her life.

Since achieving the station of a Graduate Accepted, Sheriam had instructed her to think carefully about her future within the White Tower, and the Ajah she would pursue in the not so distant future. Each of the seven Ajahs in the Tower worked to carry out the mission of the White Tower, and they worked in harmony to do so, but each had its own purpose. Cyrinde had never felt drawn to the cold, calculating logic of the Whites, nor did she possess the Talent for Healing required by the Yellows, though she had adequate training in both reasoning and Healing. She had never felt a singular passion or identified with a cause that made her feel at home with the Blues, nor the desire to spend her days serving on diplomatic missions to various kingdoms or mediating disputes as a Gray. She admired the Greens, and Kyrana Sedai in particular, but she felt that the Greens were not the right fit for her particular interests and skill set.

That left only two Ajahs: the Brown, and the Red. And although Cyrinde indeed was surprised at how much she enjoyed discovering and cataloguing lost information, which came naturally to her, she was more surprised at how urgently she felt that the Tower needed a strong Red Ajah now more than ever. As a novice, with the aid of Jack, a man whom she still believed was very likely insane but did not appear to be able to touch the tainted male half of the True Source, she had slain one of the feared Dreadlords inside the deepest stronghold of the Father of Storms in the Great Blight. She had come across and survived encounters with not just one, but two False Dragons, Yurian Stonebow and Logain Ablar, the latter of whom as far as she could tell was secretly amassing an army of men and teaching them to channel in hopes of creating a "Black Tower" to rival the Tower of the Aes Sedai. And if Cyrinde had not yet again encountered those peculiar but dangerous leashed female channelers known as damane among these Seanchan people, she had found pockets of Seanchan invaders outside of Baerlon, and she knew in her heart that the survival of the White Tower depended on being able to repel not only the dreadguards of the Shadow, but the Seanchan armies as well.

Finishing her final strokes of her brush, Cyrinde nodded to herself decisively and began to pen a letter to Sheriam informing her of her decision. She realized her heart was pounding, but this time from anticipation and not fear, and her hands were steady once more. There was a reason the Pattern had woven her life's thread away from the Atha'an Miere and mixed her up with the Aes Sedai, and if it pleased the Light, she finally felt that she might know that reason. "All will be well," she murmured to herself. Light, pray that it be so.

The room shook with another boom of thunder, but this time, Cyrinde did not flinch.

very well written! I'd read a book about your story and exploits!

Cyrinde strode into the White Tower with her jaw set and fingers fiercely clinging to a bag in her hand. She had a small scowl on her face, though she forced her expression to stillness as she found her way to the Tower Library, following the threads of her Locate Life weave and the target she sought.

The Accepted had scoured the region around Baerlon in pursuit of her quarry, distributing justice to smugglers and barbarian men who dared to stand in her way. A man by the name of Desmun, a disgraced captain of the Children of Light, who had tried to waylay her had found his fellow Children slain by her hand, and she had wielded the One Power in the last defense of her life -- albeit with some satisfaction -- to rend his flesh asunder when he attempted to kill her for being a "witch." Cyrinde had even eluded the threat of Mashadar in Shadar Logoth, narrowly avoiding its tentacles of silvery mist, when she relentlessly searched the city for the ter'angreal she had been tasked to recover.

For three days, including three separate trips into that foul ruin of a city, Cyrinde had searched for the medallion, and when she had finally found it discarded under a rotting skull in the shadows, she felt no pity for the hapless man who had once carried the item before his untimely end -- only relief at finally achieving her task.

Cyrinde released her weave when she found herself face to face with the Red sister. Surreptitiously scanning the room to ensure privacy, Cyrinde discreetly placed the medallion in the Aes Sedai's hands and whispered her request for the woman to carry it directly to Elaida Sedai.

As the Aes Sedai studied the item thoughtfully, Cyrinde offered an appropriately respectful curtsey and left without another word, heading straight for the living quarters. She did not know if a bath could ever remove the taint of Shadar Logoth from her memory, or its scent from her nostrils, but she intended to find out.

THE ONLY CHOICE YOU MADE IS DENYING YOUR LORD HIS RIGHTFUL PARDON

CYRINDE "AWOKE WITH A GASP AND BEADS OF SWEAT". MY GOD, SHE HAS DONE IT. SHE HAS SUCCUMBED TO THE ETERNAL GUILT OF SIN AND TREACHERY BY DENYING HER LORD HIS DULY EARNED PARDON.

THIS TREACHERY CANNOT STAND I WILL NOT ALLOW IT