Unlike the graduation ball, Yuriko and the other two didn’t spend the night in the Bluebell Theater or the adjoining hotel a block away from it. By midnight, they boarded the carriage and were headed to the estate, a trip that was likely to take a couple of hours even if the traffic along the radial avenues was practically nonexistent by that time.
Well, Sofia and Juliette took the carriage. Yuriko ignored the unspoken rules of the city and simply flew up into the sky. Within a few moments, she was deep within the clouds, though they were thin and straggly in the midst of the Season of Fire.
Climate in Bresia was strange, though not more than what she could expect considering each plane in the Chaos Sea had their own quirks of weather. Rumiga alone had two distinct climate types, temperate in the east, and nearly tropical in the west. Here in the Great Continent, weather seemed to be determined by the elemental confluxes and the ambient elemental flow. The ambient Chaos was nearly nonexistent, subsumed into the ambient energies, and relegated to a tiny, minuscule percentage of the atmosphere.
Chaos was something everyone in the Empire had a complex relationship with. Without Chaos, Animus could not be generated with any kind of ease. But it was also the source of danger, in the form of Chaos Lords, Wyldlings, and the unwanted changes powerful tides of Chaos could bring to the unready.
But that was just it. The unready suffered, but those who prepared, those who were strong, grew their power with the tides of Chaos. And she found that she was missing the pressure of the Chaos against her Anima, of how it sought to erode her, yet build her up. Chaos Founts provided a trickle of true Chaos, but it was hardly enough. It was a good thing she’d already reached Transformation, otherwise she would find herself bereft of power eventually.
The Luminous Moon was in its Waning state, yet it still looked so big in the skies. She was above the clouds now, and she stared at the twinkling of the stars. Such foreign presence when the night skies should have been covered with the Chaos flows. It was yet another reminder that she was far from home.
Yuriko breathed deeply. The air up here was thinner, but that didn’t really bother her all that much. It was colder, too, but her Radiant core simply produced more essence to warm her up. The sound of the wind overpowered every other noise, and up here, there was little to distract her churning thoughts.
The invitation from the Ishodirian ambassador had been surprising, not so much for the invitation itself, but for how well it was tailored to her needs. That meant people had been looking into her motives and actions.
She wasn’t quite sure if she disliked it or not. It might explain why more and more threads circled her dreamscape body over the past Season, but that had always been the case. She never investigated the minor threads simply because she didn’t want to intrude any further, not when her own Mien was the cause of their entanglement.
Dare she check now, while floating longstrides above the ground? Her Anima was strong enough to hold her up effortlessly, and even if she fell, it was unlikely that she would be injured. The only danger was if she were to fall on on someone or something and harmed them. She’d been drifting along the wind currents so she should be outside of the city by now.
She settled habitually into a seated meditation pose them moved her consciousness into the dreamscape. She opened her eyes and blinked, wondering briefly if she made a mistake since the view around her was largely the same, then the golden threads flickered into existence.
She Willed them away almost immediately, or perhaps she just folded them out of sight, mainly because they obscured everything else with their presence. She felt for them with her mind and her Anima, slowly tasting the flavours they presented, the scents, the feelings, and finally, what she could glimpse of the connections.
Her mind seemed to fracture as she beheld hundreds, then thousands, then even more fragments, each flickering past her sight. Each showing a scene. There, a young man was staring at a box with a moving picture in it, one she easily recognised as herself back in Karcellia when she began teaching them about Anima strengthening. But the man’s fashion was a big departure from what she remembered the prudish island folk usually wore.
There, another fragment that showed a young woman looking at pamphlets, though there was no picture of her there. She caught a glimpse of Sofia and Juliette’s fragments, holding a memory of the training she put them through. There, a fragment of an ornately dressed man sitting on a throne, chin resting on his palm, and looking quite bored. Another fragment that gave her only a glimpse of a heavily lined face, before the shard distorted and shattered. But before it did, the man’s eye seemed to meet hers, and she saw him starting to squint.
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With a startled gasp, Yuriko pulled herself away from the maelstrom of images. She thought she recognised other students, and even caught a glimpse of the Ishodirian ambassador. But the images didn’t feel as if they were what was happening now, at least she didn’t think so. She wanted it to be true, but there were images that looked like the past instead. She noticed this because some of the fragments seemed to be younger versions of their current self, in fact, she recognised Heron back when he was eight years old or so.
…had he been attracted to her since that time?
Yuriko pursed her lips. Her memories of childhood events weren’t perfect simply because her memory palace technique had not existed then. It wasn’t as if she had an eidetic memory…that and her Anima only started strengthening after her Atavism Ritual.
But she was still floating up in the sky, and she felt someone enter her sphere of perception. As she was still in her gown, waiting in her meditation pose for that flyer to arrive would allow him to easily see under her dress, so she shifted herself back into a stand. It wasn’t as if she was perched on solid ground, but her anima anchored her to the surrounding air, and into the fabric of reality, actually, of space. Glimmers of Truth shifted all around her, waiting to be discovered, to be comprehended. But she pushed those aside. Space and reality Truth fragments would only dilute her comprehension of Radiance and the Flying Sword. If she wanted to broaden the latter, she had to do the opposite of adding more things to it. At least, that was the flash of inspiration Damien’s memories left her.
The flyer turned out to be a familiar-looking man. He wasn’t the ambassador of Ishodir, but someone who had been in the Gala Presentacion. The master of ceremonies, actually.
“Good evening, Miss…” He squinted at her, noting her aura and the golden corona around her body. “Ah, my apologies, you must be Professor Davar of Niria Academy.” He arched an eyebrow as he looked pointedly at the white rose still bound around her wrist, but he didn’t comment on it any further. “I am the Minister of Commerce, Hector Soria…well, hopefully I will be the Councilor of Virtalla, but the vote count isn’t done yet.”
“Good evening, Minister Soria,” Yuriko said. “It’s a nice evening for flight, isn’t it?”
“Indeed.” He laughed, “I’m actually here to inform you that flying over the city unregistered and without permission is a fineable offence, but seeing as you are a newcomer to the city, I’ll let you off with a stern warning.” His laughing tone belied his words. “Nevertheless, please refrain from flying over the city, especially in such an eye-catching fashion.”
“My apologies,” Yuriko offered, but she didn’t say that she wouldn’t do it again. She didn’t want to lie, after all, and she had no doubt he would catch her insincerity. As it were, the quirking of his eyebrows and twitching of his lips pretty much told her that he caught on anyway. She hurriedly changed the subject, and said, “You campaigned against the current councillor? Are you a member of the Scions of Virtalla?”
“Precisely,” he said, his eyes gaining a feverish light. “I would not expect an outsider to understand, especially since you are a foreigner, but Virtalla’s original populace has practically been supplanted and suppressed by immigrants from the other cities. Virtalla is a city of culture, yet increasingly, that culture is becoming a tool for mercantile objectives. Why, the upcoming Festival of Joy, celebrating the successful sowing and growing of the fields, had become nothing more than a platform for traders and merchants to sell their overpriced goods, undercutting the local producers, and underpricing local farmers…”
He went on in a similar vein for several minutes, while Yuriko listened with increasing agitation. His rhetoric was smooth, and she found herself nodding along, feeling indignant at the injustices that the Scions and their people received at the hands of everyone else…
At least until Yuriko closed her eyes for a moment and recognised that the minister was anything but benign. She could feel a subtle spell attempting to influence her mind, though it wasn’t invasive. It was laced into the man’s words and if she couldn’t see and feel elemental energy, if he had not been speaking while floating within the range of her perceptive aura, she would not have caught on to the attempt. But the man was a politician who kept his power and office through his ability to convince people that he represented their best interests. She couldn’t fault him for the attempt, but it did taint whatever opinions he had been trying to push.
When he came to a natural breakpoint in his speech, Yuriko said, “I’m afraid its getting a bit late. I must return to the estate.”
“Oh, my apologies!” the minister said. “You’re staying with the Abad family estate, are you not? I noticed you arrived at the Gala Presentacion with their heir, Miss Juliette.”
Yuriko nodded.
“I see, well, far be it for me to keep a lady talking against her will.” His grin was wide and infectious. Yuriko simply nodded, and left. She noticed that he stared at her for a long while before leaving, and she wondered why he’d been up in the wee hours of the night.
It was a couple of hours past midnight already, and the estate was dark. The window to her bedroom was open and Ryoko was slumped down on the divan, clearly having fallen asleep waiting for her. Yuriko chuckled and carried the older woman to her bed and tucked her in.
She took a quick bath, then settled down to sleep. She woke at the crack of dawn and felt well rested despite the short sleep. Her Anima flared, her Mien uncoiled, and her body tightened as she stretched. Her morning ablutions came next, then she made her way to the dining hall for breakfast. Neither Sofia nor Juliette were up, but Yuriko’s perceptive aura caught that there were two people in Sofia’s room that morning, ehehehe.
The dining room was not empty and the head of the household was already there. Juan Carlos nodded to her and said, “good morning. Did you enjoy the Gala?”
“It was fine,” Yuriko said concomitantly. “The Ishodirian ambassador was there and asked for a dance.” She shrugged. “He wanted me to visit the empire in the near future.”
“Oh?” Juan Carlos’ eyes narrowed suspiciously. “That’s…I guess it’s not that strange that they want to poach you from Niria, but I’m surprised that the offer came so soon. What, you’ve taught a single trimester there, right?”
“Right.”
“Hmmmm…” He hummed in thought but didn’t say anything further. Instead, a butler arrived in the hall with a tray carrying the morning news pamphlet. The elderly man took it, and then his eyes grew wide. “Accursed empire.”
“What happened?” Yuriko asked curiously as she sat down with a plate of toasted bread, eggs, and grilled slices of ham.
Juan Carlos grunted, then slid the pamphlet over. Yuriko caught it and looked at the headline, frowning in thought. What was the Ishodir Empire playing at?
On the headlines were the words: Ishodir forces gather in the Sodden Plains Conflux, training exercises declared.
The pamphlet was oddly neutral in tone, but if a low key hostile nation gathered troops at the border, which the conflux was, it would not be met by apathy like this.
The waters of Virtalla City run deep, and she wasn’t sure if she’d prefer to leave…or swim.