The possession of self-aware intelligence is a messy proposition. For, though it bestows upon the sufferer many obvious boons, these come unavoidably bundled with the less-obvious burden of ‘caring about things’, which is the chief source of unpleasantness in life.
It is then endlessly cruel that the discerning sentient mind which finds itself objecting to this compulsory state of being has no recourse to better negotiate the terms of its cognition, and may only escape this unsavoury circumstance through either death or lobotomy – the latter solution being a new and miraculous-sounding medical procedure which Mildred had discovered in the newspaper at some point.
Apparently, it was a kind of corrective psychosurgery which could remove some of the unpleasant consequences of thinking.
It might be nice, she thought, strolling with Gregor (he did not stroll) through the endless maze of the laboratory building. A lobotomy, perhaps that was just what she needed.
Evidently, the architectural innovation of mages extended only to the exteriors of buildings, because the interiors were singularly academic and boring, which made sense to her in a strange way.
She was now uncomfortably aware that she had lost a portion of her innocence somewhere along the course of her grand adventure and had gained as compensation a new robustness of mentality. This knowledge caused some distress, because it meant that Mildred’s self was malleable – that her circumstances could change her fundamental self-parts into new and unknown things against her will, rudely and without proper notification.
This gave her fears. Big, scary ones.
When she finally found her father at the end of her long journey and the changes that it made, would she still be the Mildred that he remembered, or would she be too changed and unrecognisable?
It was a silly question born from silly worries, because she knew deep down that she would always be Mildred enough for her father, but she couldn’t help it. And if she could change, what of him?
For the first time, Mildred truly understood what people meant when they complained of powerlessness in the face of destiny or fate.
It is a hollow feeling to realise that you aren’t going to be ‘you’ forever. Few ever know it, but this is the unpleasant sensation of maturity.
Mildred didn’t know it, not that knowing would have made her feel any better, but regardless, she resolved to put it out of her mind, because ideas unthought cannot hurt you. Probably.
The room they found was rectangular, half of the space being dedicated to desks with mounted magnifying lenses and stencil tables and all the more tedious parts of enchantment. The other half was a little more strange.
The walls were slate. Not slate tiles, and not with any of the inclusions or roughnesses of natural imperfection, but seamless slabs of faultless flat stone. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all of the same exceptionally exact dimensions, which together formed a something like a five-faced almost-cube of slate. Floating in the centre of this space was a hemispheroid platform of glass – a sort of altar, she supposed.
The place hadn’t been built. Mildred was clear on that, but she wasn’t clear on what had been done to it. Moulded, perhaps, or shaped like a potter shapes clay. The stone was odd, too smooth and uniform.
Wasting no time, she found a seat in the cluttered deskzone, while Gregor went over to begin his work on the slate.
A glimmering stick of blue chalk popped into reality alongside a page of notes, and he set himself to the task of roughing out runes on the walls.
The procedure would take a few hours if he was quick, and so he encouraged Mildred to use the time for sleep. They would not be visiting the hotel that night.
After they were done with the ruby, it’d be straight to the train.
Mildred, however, was in no mood for rest. Internal conflict aside, the magic just was far too interesting.
Gregor chalked glyphs in odd angular arrangements on the walls and in concentric circles on the floor that expanded outward from the little altar in the centre of the space, atop which sat the ruby, gleaming in reflection of the in myriad dull hues emanating in a very magical-looking way from a collection light-points in the air, scattered around the chamber in a pattern that seemed deliberately offensive in its asymmetry.
Very quickly, she discovered that the bulk of the time was to be spent on preparation, and though everything about this was new and interesting to her in every way, it could obviously not persist in being new and interesting for very long, being that the passage of time is deadly to newness, and that gratuitous repetition kills interest. There were to be lots of runes.
Twenty minutes was the life of her fascination, and thereafter she sought idle entertainment in the academic miscellany atop the desks of the chamber.
Principally, a few ripped-out-and-stapled pages from what must have been a magical publication on fringe matters of bold theory.
“Gregor?” She called after a few eyebrow-scrunching moments of reading. “I think this is saying that time travel is possible. Time travel, Gregor. Possible.”
Not turning from his work, and producing a second stick of chalk to scrawl across the walls in an impressive act of academically-sanctioned vandalism, he responded in a nasal tone. “That would be correct, theoretically. Strictly speaking, it is possible for a person to travel through time, though it isn’t possible for people.”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“What.”
“Well, it isn’t possible for people, it’s possible for a person. One specific person. At some point, the time witch is going to figure it out, or has figured it out, then will start or has started travelling around to be the reason that nobody else can, or so she has claimed and will claim.”
“Oh.” Mildred had to pause at this absurdity. “So the time witch figures out time travel.” She opened her mouth, closed it, then pursed her lips for a little while. “You know Gregor,” she eventually continued, “it is very tempting to suspect that you occasionally make things up just to see how much I’m willing to believe.”
“She’s quite real, I assure you. Kaius met her once. Wore a nice hat, apparently. Though, most sorcerers consider her to be something more mythical than tangible – like some kind of rhetorical allusion to the dangers of research into time travel, which we know to be actually quite dangerous. She only stops people who are in danger of being successful, you see, so the world gets to witness all of the consequences of failure.”
“Surely you can call her something better than time witch. She probably hates that.”
“Well,” Gregor turned to address Mildred, “what else would she be called? She’s the witch who solves time.”
“I’d wager that she has a proper name, much like you do, and I do, and like everyone else does as well.”
“You mustn’t assume. She might be from an age so distant that the concept of names is foreign to her. It isn’t impossible.” Gregor the Cripple shrugged, going back to his work. “In any case, sorcerers do not choose names. We are mostly called what others call us.”
Mildred fell silent at that.
There is perhaps no person in this world, or in any other space governed by time, who, after being informed that time travel isn’t nearly so impossible as it should be, would not consider the possible applications of time travel in amending the iniquities their own personal histories.
Being so great a victim of the passage of time as she was, Mildred proved unsurprisingly regular in this respect.
“But it isn’t impossible… right? I mean, maybe there’s some possibility of negotiating with this… time… woman.” She trailed off.
“You should consider it impossible.” Gregor answered. Guessing at the things which occupied her mind, he choose mercifully to kill her nascent hopes now, lest they grew large and had destructive deaths, or became structurally important before inevitably succumbing to rot, leaving the architecture of her mind unsound. “Close your eyes.” He instructed.
A sudden brightness painted the room white, and Mildred looked over to see the ruby sloughing off little splinters of red.
Gregor approached, plucked it from its cradle, brushed off the crystal shavings, and experimentally inserted it into his eyehole.
The coldness was incredibly alien, but that was happily the only notable discomfort. There was no rubbing or scraping, and the size was fine, though he did discover the problem of weight.
Eyeballs are light, but corundum is not. He bent over to see if the gem would stay in, and it did, but it felt risky, and his eyelid would probably struggle to keep it captive if he shook his head. Gregor had not anticipated this, but it was a solvable problem. He could contrive some anchor. Aside from this, there was the matter of lubrication.
His lids felt gummy as they tried to glide over the surface of the ruby, and swivelling the thing in his socket was not pleasant.
Still, it didn’t jiggle in his head or add fresh scars to his collection, so the shaping of the stone had been a definite success.
“Does it work?” Mildred called from her seat in the seat-having portion of the room.
“I have not yet begun the enchantment.”
“Oh.”
She then resorted to reading the newspaper – a document far more arcane and incomprehensible to Mildred than the time travel treatise, for it was a city newspaper, as opposed to the few national publications she had come across in her time with Gregor.
It contained gratuitous esoteric detail about Harsdorf and its residents, both prominent and obscure, and the activities, habits, and concerns thereof. These were things she neither cared about, nor had any corresponding frame of reference from which to begin an exploratory expedition into the territory of comprehension. And so, Mildred quickly flicked through, looking mostly at the advertisements on her way to the classified listings at the back, intending to investigate all the strange new things that city people were soliciting, or hoping to have others solicit.
It was quite interesting.
***
“Did you know that people pay for other people to keep track of the things that they pay for?”
“Yes, I did know about accountants. They also do other things.” And then after a beat, “Surely you had bookkeepers back then. They can’t be new.”
Gregor was now carving an extensive mosaic of runes into one of the slate walls, which Mildred was sure he wasn’t meant to do. It was incredibly intricate, and separate from the rest of his work, and seemed to be of an entirely different kind of rune.
“Well, yes, we did, but really only for companies and townships and taxation, and other money-concerned things of the large kind. Lords too, I suppose. I’ve never heard of a regular person hiring a bookkeeper for personal convenience. If you weren’t very rich, you’d just do it yourself, and if you were more than very rich, like me, you didn’t do it at all.”
“Specialisation has become popular.” Gregor said, slicing the palm of his hand with a little knife and rubbing blood into the spellwork, “People like to become so good at a few specific things that non-specialised people are worth comparatively little in the job market. Thus, these non-specialised others must also gain an advantage in some specialised field to stay employed. The end result is that there are more specialists than generalists in the professional world, meaning that people who might have previously kept their own books now hire accountants, because they have narrowed their own skillsets to no longer include bookkeeping.”
She was growing to truly appreciate and rely upon Gregor's explanations of the discrepancies between now and not now. He was invaluable for more than just his wizarding talent.
“Are those new runes permanent?”
“Yes.” He sneered. “This is going to be very expensive damage.”
Finished with the carving, he returned to the chalkwork.
Well, serves them right. Mildred thought. She certainly didn’t have a high opinion of the university.
However, petty vandalism was a surprising form of retaliation from Gregor. She’d been expecting something a little more… explosive. And morally objectionable. Perhaps quite a bit of murder.
She’d object to the murder, of course, because wrongs are mathematically incapable of making rights, but it might be fine if he collapsed a few buildings. They were ugly things, and it wouldn’t really be wrong to kill them, though she didn't think that it seemed like that was going to happen.