TVisTV Book 3: Chapter 36 (RAW)

Chapter 36 - The Circle of Time

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but can also lie and make their lies come true.

- Eric Hoffer.

This was not something Mirae had been looking forward to. And, if she were honest, she was dreading it.

How strange, she thought, catching her reflection in the car window. I really do think of myself as Mirae now.

Lies were easier to wear when, on some level, you believed them. And the stakes had never been higher: she had to lead a nation with a careful braid of truth and falsehood, all toward her ultimate goals. After that, who knows… perhaps it was time to unite this world. This one certainly felt smaller than her last one so she felt it might be doable. First she would need to buy their politicians, then she would introduce a common enemy…

Millions would die, but millions more would be saved. She shook her head, brushing off the thoughts of such a bright and golden future.

Against ambitions like global domination, visiting her mother should have been small. Yet the thought filled her with a suffocating anxiety—whether a legacy of her other life or this body’s ingrained reflex, she could not say.

Mirae sighed and scrolled through her messages. The most interesting involved progress reports on the various weapons programs her government was funding. This world, she kept discovering, had grown clever without ever learning the first principles of the Arcane. With a few hints here and there, this country had made giant leaps in the material sciences; South Korea now fielded battle-ready railguns, among other things.

Even so, what mattered most were not the physical weapons. The real breakthrough lived in the esoteric. The paradox that underpinned all magic in her old world—two truths held in tension without collapse—had rewritten their approach to computation, especially the quantum kind. Under her guidance they moved past binary, past mere quantum superposition, into engineered contradiction: circuits designed to cradle a constant paradox and make it work. 

In an age of information and processing power, she held the keys to all of the kingdoms.

And lastly, against her better judgement, she checked her social media feed.

She had avoided social media for days, having noticed the way it smeared her thinking. Exposure to it felt like a slow erosion of self and reason—a kind of mind-control magic without, of course, the magic.

Her mind wandered as she watched some bunnies bouncing on a trampoline. There was not much magic in this world, but not much was not none. What little there was pooled where recent human emotion or tragedy ran high. Unlike in her world, the negative energies here dissipated quickly, lapped away by the hungry ether before they could thicken. Even so, there had been enough. Reinvigorating the old general had been her latest great act, performed in the basement of one of the abortion clinics her companies funded. The death of innocent, unwanted life was a potent catalyst, releasing trace amounts of Mana.

She could not give back his years, but she could restore his body. And with a strong body came a steadier mind. His allotted span remained in the lap of the Divines—beyond her reach. But the time he had left he would spend as a strong man, and more importantly, he would spend it for her and for this country.

And speaking of time.

“How much longer until we are there?” she asked her driver, knowing the answer before his response, just asking the question to while away the time.

“We will be at the St. Mary’s psychiatric hospital, in fifteen minutes, madam President,” the driver responded politely.

She smiled thinly. “Thank you.”

The President of the democratic Republic of Korea crossed her perfectly sculpted legs and adjusted her skirt. Out of habit she fingered the delicate platinum and gold necklace at her throat. Not nervously, of course, Mirae was never nervous. She spent the rest of the time looking at and simply letting her mind think of nothing, an idle form of meditation.

With almost clockwork precision, the car eased to a stop at the curb, brakes whispering into the hush of late morning. Two agents stepped out first, jackets buttoned against the cool. Another remained in the front seat, eyes on the glass entrance and the small courtyard beyond. They were trained to be close without seeming to be. The best of them were possessed of a very, very minor Glamour.

Mirae let the driver open the door for her and stepped out. Far from the city, the air here was clean and crisp. Above the sliding doors, the sign read St. Mary’s Psychiatric Hospital. Inside, the lobby was sunlit glass and pale timber. The receptionist stood behind an expensive mahogany counter. The young girl wore a neat cardigan with a short, pinned bob, neutral lipstick, with a thin gold cross at the throat.

“Madam President,” the receptionist greeted brightly with the practiced half-smile of a true professional. “Welcome. We have been expecting you.”

Mirae gave the smallest, almost imperceptible, of nods. “Good morning. I am here for my mother.”

Her clothes did the rest of the announcing: a long coat with clean shoulders, a silk blouse the color of wet milk stone, a narrow skirt that hugged her slender form, and designer heels that made quiet, decisive sounds as she walked. A thin watch disappeared under her cuff and a small leather bag hung from her shoulder like a punctuation mark.

A nurse in mint pastel scrubs appeared as if summoned. “If you’re ready, I can take you to her.”

“Lead the way,” Mirae said.

They passed a lounge where a morning panel showed what passed for comedy with the volume off, watched by those with vacant stares. The corridors were wide, filled with the scent of disinfectant, barley tea, and something floral that she could not place. 

At the second set of doors, the nurse lowered her voice. “If I may—just for the log.”

“Of course.” Mirae showed her ID; the nurse slipped a discreet visitor badge into her hand, and Mirae clipped it onto her coat where one of the many cameras could see it.

It was silly, of course, but sometimes the forms needed to be met.

Through the glass doors and windows, a beautifully designed garden opened—a square of clipped grass, raised planters, stone benches, smooth paths, with a central tree lifting its canopy over everything. Autumn had chosen its palette of golds, reds, and browns.

The nurse keyed the exit. “She spends mornings in the sun,” she said, slowing.

A groundsman with a broom brushed at leaves strewn about the path; two orderlies compared notes at the far end. Mirae stopped, turned slightly. “Thank you,” she told the nurse. 

Then to the cluster of staff that trailed behind her, gentle, flat, and commanding all at once: “I’d like a few minutes alone with my mother.” Her glance found her nearest agent and they simply nodded.

The groundsman vanished as if a bell had rung and the orderlies took their discussion indoors. One agent loitered by the door, eyes watchful for intrusions; the others became part of the background.

Beneath the large tree, the lawn wore a scatter of coins—ginkgo leaves layered it in a wealth of gold. Beneath the sweep of its autumnal branches was a marble stone bench.

There, her mother sat with feet in sensible shoes, a thick cardigan buttoned up to the middle. Smaller than last time, Mirae observed. A book lay closed beside her, spine uncracked. She watched the leaves come down as if reading the air instead.

For a moment Mirae only stood and watched, the gold falling in lazy spirals as a thin breeze wended through the space between them. The woman on the bench was still beautiful, time had touched her only lightly—but something quick and unnerving moved behind her dark eyes, a spark that could be true vision or fever of madness.

The former chairman, her father, had imprisoned Serina here when she had become an embarrassment. Mirae had kept the tradition out of spite.

Her heels clicked once, twice, then found a rhythm on the smooth garden stones as Mirae gained confidence. As she came closer, she saw much of Serina in herself: the tilt of the chin, the set of the mouth, a perfect mirror—a mirror as much to the past as to the future.

Serina turned at the last, eyes narrowing against the sun as she deigned to acknowledge her daughter’s presence. The same eyes that Mirae had inherited. Recognition moved across her mother’s face in fits and starts, a building coming back to life after a brownout.

“Ah,” her mother said. A hand gestured to the space beside her, the invitation practiced and easy. “You finally made time.”

Mirae felt her mouth curve into the ghost of a smile. “Mother,” she said before sitting down, back straight as above them the ginkgo’s fans rustled in a dry applause.

“I feel the ripples you are making,” Serina said, gaze holding. “Do you understand now that I was never mad? But then again, you would—because you are not her. And yet, at the same time, you are.”

Mirae grimaced. Everyone had dismissed her mother’s ravings as that of a madwoman turned to drink. However, like the prophets of old, she had spoken only the truth. Who would have believed a woman who spoke of such fanciful things like the shadow of Dragons.

“In two lives I have played the part of your mother and paid for it,” Serina went on, and her smile was old, almost fond. “Still, I regret nothing, my Sera.”

The name landed like a thrown coin in a beggar’s cup. It took a few beats for Mirae to process it, to recognize how the strings of fate still ran through this woman’s fingers.

“Anaselena,” Mirae whispered. The syllables settled through her like a weight

Serina touched her cheek—so gently it hurt. “How could I not come, when you did?”

“How is such a thing possible?” The question left Mirae as breath more than voice, aimed at the air as much as the woman beside her.

“As possible as you are,” Serina said. “Did you think only you could cross a seam between worlds? You are part of me. In this Mana-starved place my gifts are thin, but memory still knows the way. I saw this moment long ago. I saw this moment long ago, everything you might say has led to this.”

Every word she spoke was a rebuke against Seraphina’s, no Mirae’s will, to truly  be free. What was the point of anything if it had all been decided already, the future fixed in stone?

“There is a victory that lives inside acceptance, blind half of my daughter,” Serina suggested softly.

“I am not just a half!” Mirae shot back, remembering the anger she had harbored for many years. “And I am not blind. Coming here was meant to awaken my Sight.”

“You are blind to the Sight so she does not have to be. The universe always demands balance. Your souls are the same, yet not. Two sides of the same coin would be an oversimplification, but I suppose you understand my meaning.”

“So that girl, the other me, has the Sight?”

At this statement of the obvious, her mother laughed, a tinkling sound that filled the air with its misplaced mirth. “Of course she has, though she knows it not. Every Oracle of the Old Ones expresses it in a different way, but my daughter’s gift would, of course, be most puissant, if a little strange. Instead of peering into the future, she looked to a singular moment. Her Sight was so strong that she not only saw what is and what was, but also influenced it. For a sliver of infinity, she held the power of the Creator, creating a mirror of the entire world behind a screen of glass with only ones and zeros. Do you understand now?”

“No, I refuse to believe it. This cannot be. You cannot be!” declared Mirae.

“You would seek refuge in delusion—that was never like you, Sera,” Serina chortled.

“Explain the cruelty. The suffering. What was the reasoning behind all of that? What sickness would make you do that? No girl deserved that,” Mirae complained, feeling much aggrieved.

“It was all for this—for everything to slot into place. True art can never be made without pain, my love; kindness, too, can be a cruelty. The universe always demands sacrifice. Do you see that only now can your dreams be realized? You are bringing about the new birth-seed of Mana,” Serina continued to laugh, now cackling like a witch. “My right aspect of my daughter’s soul for the right place. You are both, in your own ways, the keys to the lock.”

Fighting back a storm of emotion that threatened to overwhelm her, Mirae got up, her will hardening to iron. She fled her mother, the woman’s words ringing in her ears. The madness was infectious, and to stay would be to invite it in deeper into her heart.

This woman was dangerous, but too valuable to simply eliminate. She would have to double—no, triple—the amount of security around this place.

Bitterly, Mirae came to the conclusion that if she truly wished to conquer this world, she would need her mother’s help.