To Your New Era

Chapter 34 Part 2: Small Infinity



Leaving the hospital under the cover of night, the city now lit by warm, phantom lights, Iris decided not to follow her ordinary route home, taking a different connection at the halfway point, back to the Great Library.

She wanted to run, start in a direction, and see where it went for no other reason than the sake of it. In Tony's palace of tricks, she could, without facing the consequences of making her way back. She could roam forever, through bookshelf after bookshelf, looking for the pockets of archaeological history tucked away among the forest of shelves.

She had school tomorrow, but the urge to stay up late overpowered her fear of sleeping in.

"Back?" Tony asked, his small silhouette coiled around itself atop the lobby's front desk. "Evalyn wants ya home, no?"

"She does," Iris muttered. "But I'm safe here. What does it matter?"

"Oh, I'd be careful there young miss. Ya haven't got the faintest of the dangers in these walls."

The joke didn't land. Iris hadn't intended such a mute reaction, but Tony's eyes softened all the same, as though they'd finally realised something.

"And so what flavour of danger are ya' lookin' for tonight, eh?"

Iris leaned on the counter, wracking her mind for something specific she could point to, but no one setting captured the entire picture, the whole feeling. Distilling that down to a single place, let alone a noun, was out of reach, and expressing the raw feeling itself to Tony felt like handing over a ten-thousand Ixa note for a purchase worth only a few hundred.

But with a cashier like Tony, she knew beyond the grumbles and complaints, he'd produce the correct amount, the ideal answer all the same.

"I want to forget that I matter," she said, and the cashier gave her back her change with a smile.

A trail of parting floorboards made room for a singular, snaking groove in the ground and up the spiral staircases. With the soft whirring of gears so unique to Tony's moving toys, a half-mannequin, half-scarecrow automaton teetered at the edge of the winding staircase leading deeper into the library.

"Follow me," it croaked through an artificial voice, offering a stiff hand out from its perch. Iris looked back to the front counter, but Tony was missing, perhaps knowing his job was done.

Iris obliged the toy man, climbing the staircase and venturing back into what was now the familiar first steps into the fringes of an endless forest. On and on she went, following the toy man until the bookshelves were no longer recognisable, until seating areas and public facilities withered away into sparse reading desks for the particularly secluded.

Even those soon disappeared, and she drifted into deep storage.

"Let me tell you a story," came a voice that seemed to dance through the thickets of carpentry, and run fingers along every book's spine. A familiar voice, one she was used to hearing emanate from the pin in her hair.

Grass spouted from the floorboards, the infinite ceiling above stained itself blue as the surrounding bookshelves rotted and decayed, falling away into the waist-high fields of green. Iris kept on walking until the Great Library was nothing more than a memory, yet Tony's automaton kept moving.

"I was a Spirit that pioneered the journey west, across the Karaxian mountains and into what became the middling nations."

An earth-shaking thump reverberated through the soil, sending ripples through her skin and the swaying grass. Iris turned around, her eyes naturally travelling up the giant, slender legs of the Queen herself.

"I saw what the world offered, its race for survival. I watched new conflict erupt on the borders of our two realities."

In her wake came an army. Spirits of all make and size running, trotting, flying and scurrying behind her as a tidal wave of formless shadows raced across the grass ahead of her steps.

The Queen paid Iris no heed. The mass of Spirits phased through her.

"So I set out to carve a border of my own, one where Spirits who lived under me might enjoy my protection. The gift given to me as my purpose."

Iris blinked, and the tall grass traded for trees. Immersed in the underbrush, shoes sinking into the mud on the banks of a lake, she and her guide watched as a city floating on water came under siege.

A hail of arrows flung from the tops of log walls against a charging mass of Spirits gliding across the water. An unnatural tempest, its clouds shimmering an ethereal blue, rained hail and lightning, setting fire to the primitive wooden buildings.

"I learnt the failings of diplomacy, the value of strength."

A colossal rendition of her antlers, the symbol flown proudly over Geverde today, rammed through Aerilia's final defense as the last hurrah of Colte's ancestors set fire to the lake.

A bloodbath. Nothing had really changed since.

"I fought for the source of our water to the north, the shoreline to the south, the arid plains to the east, and the minerals humans forged into metal in the west."

Each cardinal direction, another hundred battles against human and Spirit alike lacking prejudice or discrimination. Whatever stood in her way, decisive or not, eventually conceded defeat.

"And after years, with many more than before looking to me for a new home, I returned to the river marshes I wished to make my capital."

Iris blinked, and she was back to the familiar sea of uniform vegetation, only now her feet stood on a cleared dirt road. Mature wheat had long since supplanted the grass, yet they swayed all the same in the confines of their dirt moats, dreaming of the freedom afforded to their ancestors.

"Only to find that I had been beaten to it."

Jovial laughter waltzed in the wind behind her. Iris turned as a trio of freckled, ashen blonde, tunic-wearing children ran past, simple leather shoes bounding over divots in the road. They continued, paying her no mind as both their steps and the wind followed the path forward.

A small collection of squat buildings peaked their thatched roofs over the wheat fields, timidly beckoning her to succumb to the flow of things. She obliged.

By the time she arrived, her school shoes were covered in dust and devoid of their lustre, and the sun was mere minutes away from dipping over the horizon. The dirt path she followed at no point became paved, horse-drawn carts and all their cargo bumping over the uneven roads from one house to another. Walls of stone were a rarity, tiled roofs practically unheard of.

Even for a medieval town, it was primitive; barely a hamlet on the outskirts of civilization, a settlement that could disappear before it was ever a blip on a map.

The only solid structure she could tell would stand the test of time was a stone bridge spanning the length of a river. The town's centre, and the draw of much activity as farmers, labourers, carts and children all crossed its length to get from one half of the town to the other.

"A fledgeling town called Excala, another human settlement I assumed I would simply bring to submission."

Iris stood at the bridge's base, shoes stopping just before dirt became cobblestone.

"But every Spirit of Shadow I sent to scout the town reported the same thing."

Iris's eyes drifted to the bridge's apex, and a man of white hair and golden eyes stared back, a friendly grin stretched across his face as he clutched the straps of a wooden backpack.

"There is a human man who can see us."

Those golden eyes, etched into the memories of her Mind Palace, stared in her direction not out of simple coincidence. They stared at her, examining her every feature as he greeted her with a knowing grin.

"He can see us, and he can manipulate us."

The man descended the bridge's arch and walked past her, paying no acknowledgement and letting her wonder if he had ever seen her at all.

"It was a Thursday when I descended to the town myself. He was the first to approach me."

Iris turned, and the sky swivelled on an axis deep into a moonlit night. Frightened townspeople in their nightly garb lined the streets as a heavenly Spirit, as though blessed by the silver sky deity itself, hovered inches above their crude dirt pathway.

One man faced her, white robes making a ghastly figure of his wire frame, as though he were a phantom of the night himself.

"He was a witch doctor that studied Spirits and understood them intimately, the unnamed father of Aetherology. He foresaw the next age, a new era, albeit in broad strokes. Greater war, greater strife as humans and Spirits finally brushed shoulders."

Fire. Smouldering flesh. Iris watched the stones turn to arrows, turn to lead shot, then bullets; the swing of swords and swipes of claws reincarnated in greater weapons and more potent magic.

"He said my worth as a Spirit, my worth as a being, was nothing if I failed to protect all who wished to escape the coming nightmare. The Spirit, the human, and eventually those who were both."

The night faded, the village surrendered to the shadows, leaving nothing but the two eternal beings in front of her, as she continued cowering behind the automaton.

"Fearing his knowledge, I forced him to move on in return for sparing the town. His face escaped me; his voice, his name, but never the words he spoke. Never the promise we made."

The witch doctor turned to face Iris, offering an awkward smile as his existence faded, leaving—for a moment—a single, gleaming golden eye.

"If anybody is the progenitor for the life you lead now, it is him. He is the father of my nation."

A single figure remained from that world of so many hundreds of years ago. The Queen, her unageing silk lazily wrapping her heavenly figure, her antlers standing proud over a dominion of nothing.

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Amestris—Iris's queen smiled and pointed up. Iris followed, and found the shadowed sky now painted with stars.

Pinprick light coated open space, gathering into broad brushstrokes stretching from one end of the horizon to another, their collective haze turning the blackness into a vivid, purple-blue. The sound of gears punctuated the silence, as a curved arm swept across the night sky as though the machine of a god. Like a mathematical implement, two brass fangs closed in on the distance between two stars as other, more delicate arms crosscut it, gears whirring as they moved to measure one star after another.

They carried magnifying glasses and star maps as others holding white chalk drew constellations into the night sky itself.

"It hasn't changed since I ordered its construction," Amestris muttered, just as enamoured as Iris was, with a twinkle in her eyes that seemed so inherently human. "Thank you."

"For what?" Iris asked.

"Reminding me what that man looked like."

Amestris faced her again, her human-like vessel expressing her elation with a broad smile. "The interior manager recreated these events from historical records, but nowhere in the library is that man so vividly remembered."

To Iris, his silver hair and twinkling eyes didn't feel like something she would ever forget. Perhaps that was a testament to how long Amestris had lived.

"My past-self…I…remembered him as a kind person. He loved Spirits."

"No less than he loved people."

Amestris trotted towards her, robes gliding across the polished floorboards as, with the wave of a hand, she conjured a park bench behind Iris's knees.

She sat first, beckoning Iris to do the same. No more words were said. No more shared between the two but the space between their shoulders and the stars above their heads.

"Was this to cheer me up, your majesty?"

"Is it not to your satisfaction?"

Iris smiled, shaking her head.

"My interior manager—Tony told me to were upset. I don't intend to ask."

"…could you ask? Please?"

Amestris shifted in the corner of her vision, as though there were a right posture for the situation.

"What is bothering you?"

Iris's first instinct was to summarise it all, distill it again. But looking up to the sky—just as Tony had promised—she was forgetting she ever mattered at all, that time mattered at all.

A single moment stretched out to eternity, with stars that felt like they would never change.

She could be sloppy, be roundabout, never grow up, learn to be succinct, and take forever with her sentences. Because for a small, infinite moment in time, nobody was waiting for her, nobody was depending on her, nobody was relying or forcing or spurring her on.

"Dad wants to retire," she began. "But he can't do that. He loves flying he…he's meant to have wings. I love watching him fly I love the presents he gets me and, and I love knowing that he's happy. And mum says she has to retire now. She could just change her office, change the name, but she wants to stop…stop being a Witch too. She's going to leave me alone…but I can't hate her for it because…because…"

Because her mother's blood seeping into her fingernails was something she hoped to never experience again.

The thought of her father never coming home was something she never wanted to entertain.

The thought of being alone as a Witch, however, was something she could still stomach, no matter how painful.

"But they sound like they hate themselves for it," she muttered. "Mum especially…she cried so much and told me she was sorry so many times. She kept saying she should've done something, but…she…I don't understand."

Deep wrinkles were forming in her skirt as she pressed her fingers into a tight ball. Tears, more tears splashed against her skin despite she had cried the last of them hours ago.

"Our time in Fadaak. That sweltering hotel room we stayed in. Do you remember?"

Iris nodded, grateful for any distraction, however small.

"I told your mother something she undoubtedly had already figured out herself. That if ever she wished to change her fate…your fate, then I would never take it personally if she were to kill me in the process."

Something she could do. Something she could have done for her went so far as killing a country's Queen and risk sending her own home into disarray, and yet she still felt guilty about it.

"She's so stupid," Iris hissed, shoulders heaving. "She's so…stupid…"

"The same offer will always stand for you, Iris. It is the only mercy a selfish monarch like myself can offer. Yet…your choice, your mother's choice, all Wizards and Witches who choose to live under our banner; I am eternally grateful to all of you."

From an infinitesimal moment under a night sky to a starry forest evergreen for thousands of years, Amestris seemed familiar with eternities; her words carried the authority of somebody who had lived through several.

There was a strange safety in those words, no matter how harsh, no matter how cruel. They were her truth, her iron-strong truth.

Iris, much like her mother, learned to find as much comfort in them as she found pain.

Provenance wasn't to dine with the Empress. The only meals he took with her were in the safety of her summons, watched by the armoured knights standing by the door. The growing frustration of failing to find any discernible way out had worked up an appetite more significant than he wished to admit.

Once again, he could find no fault in his food, although he hadn't refined his tastes enough to distinguish between any cuisine above a certain threshold. For all he knew, it could be kitchen scraps, and he'd be none-the-wiser.

Of all the prospective consequences deciding to stay in the capital might bring, the food was the one thing he was least worried about. So high above the clouds, he could be sure the meat he was eating came from wherever the chef claimed.

Besides that, it was a whirlwind of distinct possibilities—both good and bad—that sullied the taste of his food as he chewed them along with his dinner, like a bitter medicine.

Forgoing the wound to his pride, the Empress was correct in saying their interests aligned, no matter how insincere or self-serving her reasons were. Until her offer, his tactics had aligned with his resources and level of manpower; that was to say, very little. Very little, comparatively.

Vesmos's resources, their power, called for him to look at a picture a hundred times vaster than even what Recres Wesper's capital allowed.

That level of power and money fed to those with the right intentions, and the lifespan of his plans could shorten from centuries to mere years. He could watch the world change in his lifetime.

With the last of dinner cleared from his plate, he excused himself from the table, looking for something to pass the time until his eyes felt heavy. However, a wrap of knuckles against his door put a stop to the notion before he could even act on it.

Too delicate to be the gauntlet of a guard.

"Enter," Provenance called.

The door opened in too violent of a motion for royalty, yet there stood the Empress, still clad in day robes with make and hair impeccable, but her poised expression was slipping.

"His majesty wishes to see you," she said through heaving breaths, unable to hide her pumping blood as a thin sheen of sweat around her hairline glinted in the subtle lamplight.

"Is it so urgent you had to summon me yourself?"

"Not urgent…private."

Provenance bowed his head, accepting whatever the Emperor had in store for him next, or over the next few years.

"I am at your disposal, your majesty."

Melodic, metallic thudding trailed the Empress's frantic footsteps as two billowing black capes followed her figure, erecting a metaphorical barrier between her and Provenance. At their quickened pace, they reached the blank, marble façade hiding her quarters, where Empress Fanreth wasted no time in undoing it.

She reached a hand and touched the cold marble, and as though the heat in her fingers alone was enough to melt it, dipped it into the wall and pulled out a brass door handle. The rest of the door came soon after, drawing a mahogany frame into the pearly-white surface. The Empress opened it and stepped through, leaving her security detail at the door.

Provenance followed, brushing past the black capes into what carried the same architectural syntax as her majesty's quarters, but to an entirely different scale altogether.

The roof bent into high arches of polished stone, the glass at the far end of the hall now stained and mosaic enough to obscure the city while all earthly pleasures and needs were tucked away behind two stone arcades on either side.

Down the centre of the room, from where Provenance and the Empress stood to the great glass wall, was a wide, gold-trimmed black carpet. At its far end, almost camouflaged amongst the glamour, was a throne, a black, gold-hilt sword sheathed at its apex.

"I sorely missed that ragged look of yours, old friend," the man seated under the sword said, as though its black steel were the medium his heavenly decree was scrawled on. "How have you been?"

Provenance bowed deeply, offering the nape of his neck as though to an executioner's axe as a show of subservience. "I have been well, Emperor Skoca."

Jet-black hair, black irises stained with hints of red; the man's muscular figure, barely noticeable underneath the strict, figure-shaping suit of black and gold, stood out in Provenance's mind even as a mere recollection of their last meeting.

"No need for such formality," he said, beckoning them closer with a wave of his hand. "My wife goes without saying, but I consider this the most pleasant company."

Provenance continued to bow for a second longer before he restarted his trek. The carpet squeaked under his shoes, the soft, Aether-born light radiating from behind the window, drawing him to the throne like a moth to the moon.

He stopped himself several paces from the steps the emperor's seat stood upon, as his majesty reached a hand out to his wife. She took it graciously, unable to contain her smile as she ascended the carpeted steps, his lips kissing her fingers.

"I trust my wife has proved a gracious host, as she has been to me so often."

"Indeed, your highness, yet I'd imagine not nearly as gracious as she is to you."

Emperor Skoca gifted his wife a smile as he stroked her hand. "I could not ask for better," he said. "My first night with her, and I knew that one day she would be my empress. Devotion to a cause greater than ones-self is something I value over all other. It is why you never cease to fascinate me, Provenance, you who have foregone even your name."

His poised expression and silver tongue stood in stark contrast to Fanreth's subdued excitement, mind still on stuck on the compliments paid five seconds prior.

"I like to think of myself as pragmatic. Devotion is too grand a word to describe myself."

"Nonsense," the Emperor said, scoffing away the notion. "I do not give such praise lightly."

"Of course, your majesty," Provenance said in way of an apology. "Did you wish to speak to me this evening?"

"Yes," Skoca said, his sentence drifting into thought as he intertwined his fingers with Fanreth's, "although I haven't yet decided what about. There's a great deal of catching up to do…but perhaps if we settle our deal first, there will be ample time to do so."

Said as though it were only a matter of signing the contract, its clauses already etched into stone.

Emperor Skoca rose to his feet, and the entire room seemed to postulate before him. He descended the steps, a gentle smile across his face, its sincerity brimming in the dimples on his cheeks and the creases around his eyes.

"I do feel horrible for springing this on you, friend," he said, as he clasped a hand on Provenance's shoulders. "Desperate times, as they say. My court is in discord over the military's actions. Every faction, every one of my brothers and sisters, is of a different mind on the topic. Ordinary I wouldn't mind; squabbling amongst the families is normal."

Emperor Skoca wrapped an arm over Provenance's shoulder, as though they were drinking buddies with a relationship that stretched as far back as their memories.

"But what they decide on carries precedence. Approve of the military actions would be to continue on a hasty warpath, the inverse risks becoming too complacent."

His voice was almost rhythmic, the melody hopping from one word to the next as he summarised his court's politics with the gravity one might use to explain the rules to a card game.

"Such an interesting balance that keeps us afloat, yet lately I've wondered if our little system is more a buoy or an anchor. Sidos's centralised government, Geverde's all-powerful monarch; they move with a swiftness we cannot afford. There is much to learn from them, and that is what we want from you."

An advisory role, a voice in the Emperor's ear. Where the many nobles of the court combined could command forces to slaughter leviathans, Provenance could do the same with a single bullet in the right place.

"You shall work towards our goal, and if it so happens that you find an opportunity to further your own, then we shall never bat an eye."

He grabbed both Provenance's shoulders.

"You at my command, I at yours."

Perhaps the decision already had been made, the temptation growing with every subsequent reconsideration, but there was no doubt in Provenance's mind that it was the Emperor's silver-tongue and sincere smile that pushed him over the edge.

He would have to get used to marble walls.

"And what would your first command be, your majesty?"

A welcoming smile. Gratitude, but not surprise.

"So eager," Emperor Skoca chuckled, returning to his throne. "Well, if you must insist, we can leave the banter to the morrow. For now…there's been an itch that just will not escape me."

"And what would that be?" Provenance asked.

"Are you familiar with the Wishbearer?"

"Yes. Any Wizard worth his salt would have heard rumours," he said. The truth, yet one that didn't fully describe him.

"If you have stumbled across them in your endeavours, we'd love to know anything you could tell us. My wife volunteered to oversee an incursion into Geverde that's been quite successful; she believes the Wishbearer to be a suitable next target."

To underestimate such rumours to please her husband was a new low Provenance hadn't quite prepared himself for, although he caught himself, knowing that rumours inherently lacked credibility. He knew the truth better than either of them, and perhaps that marred his view.

Either way, it was simple to discern what they wanted. Vesmos, besides the rare exception, refused to work with Wizards and Witches. Aether and magic were tools, and the human body was not to be tampered with. If it wasn't an alliance, then they wanted the Wishbearer dead, but that in itself would prove its own problems. The game would be too easy if he gave up such information.

"Unfortunately, I know very little," Provenance lied, "only that I looked for them myself…"

Such a clue would make things too easy, but whatever he said next doubled as a first impression. To build trust, he needed to get them plausibly close to the truth.

"And I found loose connections to a certain Private Investigator in Excala city."


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