TVisTV Book 3: Chapter 37 (RAW)

Chapter 37 - The Shape of Time

We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.

- Stephen Hawking.

You have slain a Liche [Queen Alamea of the Two Trees]. 5000 experience gained.

Five thousand experience was not bad, but after all the hassle, Seraphina was not sure it had been worth it. This was supposed to be stress relief. What the girl failed to add to her calculus was the relief for the local people not having to live in the shadow of an Undead menace.

Her familiar, the Hydra Cornelia, looped herself around Seraphina—her heavy coils of seeking heat against the chill—then began to dwindle, muscle and scale compressing until the snake was small enough to slip through the gap of Seraphina’s now unclasped gorget and curl to sleep inside the armor with a sated hiss.

The Barrows had lost their oppression. The shadows at the rim of her Zajasite lantern were only shadows now, not watching eyes. The way back proved easy enough—though more than once she nudged Cornelia awake to flick a tongue toward the correct fork. She had no intention of wandering these tunnels a moment longer than needed.

Free of the grip of the dead thing, lit by the afterglow of victory, the climb back up was almost therapeutic. She let herself admire the folk carvings she’d hurried past before and made a private note to acquire a few pieces for her room. On one wall, spiralled suns braided their light together—old Palipula work, a sign for time and light entwined. Something in the motif tugged at her thoughts, but she brushed the feeling away.

At last, she surfaced. She took off her helm, despite being fully aware this would be the perfect moment for an ambush—right when she let her guard down. A prickle ran along her neck; the wind shifted; moonlight played tricks. It was nothing more than her mild paranoia.

Irritated with herself, she headed for the camp. Tonight, it seemed, she’d be sleeping under the open sky. The only saving grace was that there was no school the next day. Tomorrow was a holiday. The peasants loved their days off, and the nobles, eager to placate them, were generous with the calendar. The habit had infected even non-agrarian Meridian; the Academy, of all places, would be shut for the week in celebration for a group of long dead Saints.

Why is everyone in this world so lazy? When she was queen, she would fix that.

***

Sleeping in armor was not fun, but it was not, unexpectedly, without a minor benefit.

You have learned Heavy Armor (lvl.3)

Still, none of it did much to shake her dark mood. She felt cranky—impossibly, exquisitely cranky. And, the very sight of her Knights, her so-called protectors, Frest excepted, only worsened it. They looked… diminished. “Less manly” was the impolite phrase that came to mind: a haunted slackness around the eyes, a tremor at the fingertips as they unbuckled straps or fed the fire, movements robbed of confidence by what lurked behind memory.

If she didn’t know better, she would have called it post-traumatic stress disorder. But that couldn’t be right, could it? These were supposed to be among the best the Sariens Duchy had to offer. They’d only fought a handful of Undead, she told herself with a curt shake of her head. Unlike them, she had done the majority of the fighting and she was quite alright.

Then she remembered: they were, at the end of the day, still boys wearing men’s steel. But, supposedly, in the old days—before comfort padded every corner of life—youth wasn’t permitted to remain young for long. Survival was a hard tutor; life, a harder taskmaster. These boys were already meant to be tough already. 

What good were protectors that needed protecting?

The morning was its own slow remedy. Greasy bacon hissed in the pan, throwing up a hungry smell; eggs broke into bright yellows in dented tin plates. The weak autumn sun did much to banish and dispel the memory of the previous night and raise their spirits. Sir Frest moved among them, voice low and even, offering a word here, a hand there, the sort of quiet encouragement that let a man borrow another man’s steadiness for a time. A little color returned to faces. Someone laughed—a fragile sound at first, then stronger. Seraphina caught herself worrying and clicked her tongue. They would stand or fall; coddling would not save them.

They were there to protect her, after all, not the other way around.

The ride back took on a leisurely gait. Rather than make directly for Meridian, she allowed herself—allowed them—a halt in an establishment in Ardelle, a small township that lay along a small river that fed into Meridian’s canals. Whether it was properly an inn or a tavern she could never be bothered to recall; the sign swung only slightly rusty chains and promised both a bed and a bottle, which was enough.

They lunched on white fish bright with lemon and herb, and a pale local wine that tasted of stone and clean wind. Voices loosened with every bite. The boys ribbed one another over small things, over who had screamed when the skull-thing shrieked, over who had the worst seat and rode like a sack of potatoes. Even Frest let himself be drafted into the banter, trading deadpan jibes with the ease of a man who had lived long in rough company.

Clean-shaven now and properly groomed, Frest looked shockingly young—far younger than she’d first judged. Seraphina’s gaze wandered, measuring one man against another against the fixed standard of her father. Gravens, Frest, Velens, even Hughes—each of them strong in some direction, none of them Anatoli. A part of her, however, felt that the comparison felt unfair and inevitable.

Is my fate to lower my standards? a treacherous thought whispered.

Am I fated to be alone? another answered.

So this was what it was to stand at the top of the mountain, to drink the thin, bright, and lonely air.

She nibbled delicately at the fish and let her mind drift the way a girl of her age’s mind drifts in moments of idleness. Perhaps a tournament for her hand, like in the old tales—banners, trumpets, men in armor, tilting for her smile. The image pleased her for as long as it took to recognize its foolishness. That was no way to select a partner for life. Still, she mused, one need not wed the victor. Consider it an audition of sorts. Marketing? The thought made her lips twitch.

It was an easy thing then, in a gesture of queenly largesse, to declare that they would remain in Ardelle for a while and that she wished for a measure of solitude—by which she meant indirectly that the boys could have an afternoon to themselves. Warriors had their limits. Oaths of fealty were sturdy cords, but, more often than not, rarely unbreakable ones.

With Frest standing guard outside her door, she took the quiet for herself and moved into her yoga practice. Within the privacy of her room, she let her body flow through the forms, each stretch a deliberate release of tension, each contortion a step toward balance. Outside, no doubt, her Knights wandered the streets of Ardelle, doing whatever it was that boys did when freed from duty. She, however, bent her focus inward. Breath by breath, muscle by muscle, she unburdened herself, until thought took on the clarity of Crystal. In that clarity, she began to weave the first strands of her plans for the future.

When she paused to take a drink of watered wine, she leaned by the casement of the window and looked out. The square below was a box of noise and color: a knife-grinder’s wheel singing, a messenger boy darting between people, gulls scribbling white across the sky. High above, something swift banked and flashed; she fancied she saw Tia on Kiwi’s back, the pair cutting playful arcs over the rooftops. The sight put a small ache in her chest. Seraphina missed flying. 

Leaving the window slightly open, and with a small amount of will, she turned her mind to the problems of the present.

She needed to break her father’s siege of Aran before the country tore itself apart in civil war. Despite the peace both Aranthia and the Empire currently enjoyed, any hint of weakness was an invitation for the Empire to invade—and it would be her father’s lands that burned first. 

For the moment the Empire had its own troubles: several provinces were in open rebellion. But one of its princes—a famed warrior—was slowly but surely snuffing out the fires of ambition that fed those uprisings. Once stability returned there, war would likely come to Aranthia. A prospect her bellicose father, she suspected, almost welcomed.

For hers were indeed, a most warlike people.

That was the trouble with an age—or rather, a culture—that lacked civilized entertainment. Perhaps she should introduce something like golf? Interpretative dance? she mused, and then smirked at herself.

Unfortunately the music of the war drums was the only beat men like her father appreciated. That, and, well, more amorous pursuits.

When she finished her yoga, she cracked open the door. “Frest?”

“Yes, milady?” the former bandit replied, studiously fixing his gaze on a section of wall with a focus that would have put most scholars to shame.

“Tell the owner of this tavern that I require hot water drawn for my bath,” Seraphina commanded.

“This is, I do believe, an inn, Lady Seraphina,” Sir Frest answered promptly.

Seraphina huffed. “Oh, whatever, Frest. What’s the difference between the two, anyway?”

“Well, one primarily serves as lodging, while the other—”

“Do you really think I care, Frest? It was a rhetorical question. Now go deliver my request to the owner of this tavern—inn—whatever it is!” she snapped.

***

Steam billowed as the door opened and a procession of women filed in, each balancing a brass kettle or sloshing bucket against a hip. A middle-aged woman, probably the innkeeper’s wife, led them, broad of shoulder with her greying hair bound in a scarf, and was followed by two girls with sleeves rolled to the elbow. They curtseyed, eyes lowered, and set about their work with the neat choreography of those who did this a dozen times a day.

A wooden tub, hooped with iron, had already been hauled to the center of the room. One by one the women poured in the hot water, the room filling with the scent of rosemary soap and damp cedar. 

“Is the temperature to Milady's liking?” the innkeeper’s wife asked.

Seraphina tested the water with a finger. “Adequate,” she said, which in the tongue of the nobility meant pleasant.

They withdrew with practiced silence, skirts whispering over the planks. The latch fell. From outside, a floorboard creaked—Frest, a patient shadow outside. 

Seraphina slid into the bath, the heat folding over her like a velvet cloak. A quick inspection of her nakedness revealed that there were no cuts or bruises along her body thanks to her Heal spell. She let her head tip back against the tub’s rim. For a long minute she did nothing but breathe: four counts in, hold, four counts out of the rosemary scent. 

She lifted an arm from the water, droplets pearling down her wrist, and traced a pattern of two spiralled suns in the air. They represented time. Tia, she sent softly with the power of the Beast Lore amulet. Kiwi. Come.

A minute stretched before a soot-dark blur swept through the open window. Kiwi, the broad-backed Watcher Raven, flared his wings and settled on the tub’s iron hoop, claws ticking against the band. The small Fae, Tia, slid from his shoulders in a single, weightless hop; her batlike wings flared, and she balanced on the rim beside him.

“You are beautiful,” Seraphina crooned, stroking Tia’s wings.

Flattery, threaded with sincerity, was catnip to the capricious race.

“I am as beautiful as my winged night. Yet I am a knight in the armor of the red curse,” Tia said, serenely opaque.

“And that, too, is beautiful,” Seraphina agreed at once. “I have a question for you—about time.”

“Most mortals call it a river; the clever ones call it a circle,” the Fae went on, pacing the rim while Kiwi sidled after her.

Seraphina kept her smile fixed. The Fae knew much, but drawing a useful answer from them was blood from stone. “And what is it truly, wise one?”

Tia’s smile somehow grew even wider, and her eyes sparkled with inner light. In the forest that had once been her home, no one had called her beautiful—no one had called her wise.

The little Fairy tilted her head, listening to something only she could hear. “Time is a scattered shape,” she said at last. “It does not know what it wants to be.”

The girl worked the floral soap into a lather, the scent rising in pale petals of steam. “Scattered how?”

Tia paced the rim of the bath, Kiwi sidling after her like a shadow. “Not a river. Rivers are obedient and take the easiest path. Not a circle either; circles pretend to be finished. Time is… flock-shape. Murmuration. A mirror dropped on flagstones, and every shard is still the mirror, and all the reflections keep arguing about who reflected first.”

Seraphina scrubbed the back of her neck, amused despite herself. Patience, she told herself. “So the future wants to be the past?”

“Sometimes,” Tia said, delighted. “It sees a story it likes and runs backward to become its own beginning. And sometimes the past notices the future is popular and puts on its colors to be invited to the next dance.”

“That sounds like nonsense and truth in equal measure,” the noblewoman replied, pursing her lips. “How does a future reach into a past?”

Tia paused. “Two bells cast from the same metal ring the same note. Strike one now, and the other hums—yesterday, today, tomorrow—because the note was always living in both. The sound travels along the sameness faster than walking. Faster than wanting.” She leaned closer, conspiratorial. “We call it promise-thread. Mortals sometimes call it oath, or a Doom.”

Kiwi dipped his beak to the water, then thunked it against the hoop, pleased with the hollow note. Seraphina watched the ripples run out and return, small rings that chased each. Her soap-slick hands slowed a moment. “So time is like the bells… it can be paired. If I jostle one, the other trembles—no matter the distance. No matter the order.”

Tia was quiet, her expression one of deep thought as she tried to bring her thought-sparks closer to Seraphina’s. It took a while for the fairy to digest her mistress’s comment.

“Yes,” Tia sang, delighted as she finally realized she had been understood. “Twin magical coins minted together. You flip one, and the other looks up from your pocket already decided to agree or to disagree. The choice isn’t moving through the air; the match lives between them. The between-place does not care for your calendars.”

You could not think along lines of logic with the Fae. Seraphina’s smile thinned as she finally worked out what the little Fairy was trying to explain. The folk of the places of the Between were not the only people to have discovered such secrets. “Quantum entanglement,” she murmured. “Superposed possibilities collapsing when they’re noticed.”

“Kwantum, is that a fruit? I do not wish to be entangled with fruit. I only know that the scattered shape likes attention, and does not like attention,” Tia agreed gravely. “But attention has manners. Stare rudely, and it will slap your hand. Glance kindly, and it will bring you a plum.”

“And the past wanting to be the present?”

“The past wants to be thanked,” Tia said, as if this were obvious. “So it rehearses itself until someone notices. Then it bows and enters again, wearing today’s clothes.”

Seraphina rinsed, the water sloshing cool against her shoulders now that the steam had thinned. “If the future can lean backward, can we… change it? Choose a different shard before it settles?”

Tia’s grin went bright and dangerous. “Choice is the trick you teach yourself so you can stand to be chosen. But yes—sometimes you may pick which shard cuts you. Sometimes you may turn the mirror so it cuts the sun instead.” She hopped onto Seraphina’s naked shoulder. “There is a cost. There is always a cost. A tithe.”

“What kind of cost?”

“The kind mortals only notice after paying,” Tia said sweetly. “A votive for those who stand beyond the scattered shapes.”

“Milani,” the girl whispered to herself. “I felt I had spent more time in a place… a place and time that should not have been possible. It cost me dearly. Could that have happened to me?”

“Time is confusing for mortals. You stretch and bend it to suit your senses, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. But there are places where it does not ‘is’ and ‘was’ and ‘being’ like everywhere else!” Tia declared.

The bath had gone lukewarm. Seraphina rose, water whispering off her skin, and wrapped herself in a towel. The floral scent clinging to her. She considered the little Fae and her steed.

“Thank you for your Wisdom,” she said. “You’ve given me enough to think on for a week. Go on and play outside for a while. I will call when supper is ready. And no terrorizing the good folk of Ardelle or stealing anything that will be missed.”

Kiwi clicked his beak, affronted at the implication, then crouched. Tia fluttered on to his back with practiced ease. “We only borrow spoons,” she sniffed, then flashed a smile. “And we return them as forks.”

Seraphina opened the window wider. The evening air slid in, cool and apple-crisp. With a rush like a spilled shadow, Kiwi leapt and was gone, Tia’s laughter trailing behind them as they skimmed past the eaves.

Alone, the young girl finished drying herself before she started to dress slowly, mind turning the Fae’s riddles over until they felt less like riddles and more like tools.

And tools could be turned into weapons.