Basil sat in the morning class on family history, a subject he found particularly dreadful. His teacher, Walther, noticed that his only pupil seemed preoccupied, his gaze distant and unfocused.

“It seems like a gloomy mood has captured you today, Basil,” Walther said, deviating from the course material. “Are my lectures on your family’s legacy boring you?”

Basil, surprised by the remark, took a moment before responding. “I don’t know. I woke up with a weird feeling about a thought that overwhelmed me last night,” he replied slowly. “I felt so … futile all of a sudden.”

Walther leaned in, curiosity piqued. “What thought exactly overwhelmed you? Surely it’s something we can deal with.”

Basil sighed, the weight of his thoughts evident. “I was awake in bed for a while, staring at the ceiling,” he began. “I was counting the horizontal pattern of the wood inlay, six pieces per ceiling tile.”

“Basil, are you blaming an intolerable ceiling for your gloomy mood?” Walther asked in a teasing manner, hoping to draw more from his student. His formal address indicated he wasn’t letting Basil off without a proper explanation.

Basil took a deep breath, as if verbalizing his thoughts was an effort. “It’s not the ceiling itself,” he explained. “It’s the monotony of seeing the same pattern every day that got to me. I’ve counted those six pieces a thousand times before. It’s the eternity of time ahead, knowing I’ll count them a thousand times more, that struck me.

I feel like my purpose isn’t clear enough to justify any of it. What good does all this learning and training do? Every day, I wake up in the family estate, the day new and fresh, but by nightfall, it’s old, making room for Tomorrow to repeat the same cycle. I’m stuck in safety and privilege and—”

Walther interrupted Basil. “You are worrying about the wrong things,” he said, locking his fullest attention onto Basil’s eyes. “What has been given to you is yours to understand; the rest belongs to the universe.”

“Tomorrow, or the eternity after that, does not belong to you,” Walther continued. “The purpose they might hold is not yours to judge before it is due.”

The words of his teacher were somewhat comforting to Basil, who hadn’t considered this point of view before.

“I guess you have a point there,” Basil said. “Still, I often feel like whatever talent and skill I possess is largely going to waste.”

Basil, as a partial heir of the prominent Avery family, grew up with endless repetitions of important historical events and political etiquette. The safety of the acres around the house appeared to him more as a nuisance than a luxury. The excitement of an uninhibited world was a much bigger drive to him than the family matters that were imposed on him.

Walther was about to reply with further wisdom when something outside suddenly caught his attention. The dampened sound of hooves striking the dirt path that led up to the family estate entered the classroom through an open window. It was a hot early summer’s day, and a slight breeze carried the sound from further than normally audible.

Horses and the beings riding them were not at all rare visitors to the property. It was the intensity and urgency that possessed this one that was peculiar. Walther walked towards the window to look at the rider. Basil’s interest was also piqued, and he stood up. He walked to the window and stared in the same direction as his teacher.

At the furthest visible point of the path, a rider appeared. Horse and man were dressed in a matching set of impressive gold and grey textiles. This was the uniform style of their own family, but there was no such rider expected today, let alone with such haste. The rider also carried a strange emblem on his shoulder and torso. Basil was the first to voice what they were both thinking: “Is that Nymous storming in?”

Nymous – short for Hieronymous – was a special employee of Basil’s family. He was originally hired as a stable boy who also took care of the horses each night. Within his first year of employment, it became clear he was much more talented than mere delivery and equine maintenance.

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Nymous’ role then evolved to a de facto diplomat who was trusted with the most important foreign communications of the estate. This was highly unusual as he fell completely outside of the Avery family kinship. His exceptional talent was so clear, however, that this traditional rule did not apply to him.

Basil practically adored Nymous. At each dinner, a weekly event where politics were dropped in favor of mundane jokes and trivialities between staff and family, Basil always grabbed a seat right next to Nymous. He didn’t want to miss a single story that this man would tell.

After seeing Nymous rushing towards the house, Basil promptly left the classroom and ran towards the back of the estate where the stables were located. After waiting a short couple of minutes and regaining his breath, he realized Nymous should have been here by now.

Nymous wasn’t going for the stables; he was riding straight to the front entrance. Basil turned around and sprinted through several staff rooms, interrupting business just to save a couple of seconds.

Arriving at the entrance, he saw Nymous already in conversation with his mother. They were walking towards her office. The expressions on their faces portrayed something serious had happened. They had not even noticed Basil, who had now stormed into the entrance hallway while slamming open every door on the way and had now paused there for a moment to observe. When Basil wanted to walk towards them and figure out what was going on, his mother quickly waved her hand to him, gesturing he should stay away.

In total confusion, Basil drooped off towards the large dining hall. All seats at the huge table were empty except two at the very end. Samuel, the chef, and Walther were having a conversation. Basil meant to hijack the conversation to get all his questions answered. That was hardly necessary. When he approached them, he heard them talking about what they thought was going on. He took a seat and started listening.

“Did you see the patch Nymous was carrying on his shoulders?” Samuel asked.

“I’ve always been afraid of seeing an employee of ours come home with something like that,” Walther replied, nodding in confirmation.

“But, is it true? I mean… what they say about wearing a patch like that? I’ve heard stories, but what should a man believe? I don’t know, Walther,” Samuel said in an uncertain tone.

“There was a patchwork transfer in our lifetimes before,” Walther replied, “but none in this house were witnesses of it. But you can be sure it’s a real thing. The stories were verified many times over.”

Basil was not grasping the topic of the conversation and interrupted them.

“What does this mean, patches and riders?” he asked.

“This was somewhat covered in one of my lectures, you know,” Walther replied.

“Patches? I vaguely remember something. Was it mentioned in the dreadfully detailed tome about the Neo-Capetians?” Basil inquired.

The response got a chuckle from Walther, who sometimes couldn’t help but find a little humor in errors made by people trying to talk about history. This was one of his few unpleasant traits, however. Most people still enjoyed his company, if that company lasted for an hour or less.

“Well, no. And it wasn’t even mentioned in relation to the Neo-Franks, to be honest with you. But I’m impressed you even came up with that dynasty name,” he replied, smirking.

Giving the curious young man a break, Walther started explaining patchworks, mentioning they were an obscure system to distribute the administration of specific offices to different families or estates.

When a family held a patch, it was responsible for the entire operation of that office. It was also not transferable by simple choice. Once given a patch, a family would hold it for generations until the family no longer existed. On rare occasions, an estate might have fallen into decadence for too long or perhaps perished by losing a war. When that happened, interesting offices, such as the ones that could be used to generate revenue, might be adopted by some opportunistic family that obtained it after the fall of the previous owner of the patchwork.

The patch that Nymous carried was almost unknown. It had blue letters, with an even lighter blue line edging around those letters that contained the inscription “D VI OOS”.

Basil was engrossed in the explanation given by Walther and had more questions.

“Why is this patch so unknown?” Basil asked.

“Unknown offices are usually hard to generate revenue from. They’re all effort and little reward for the family managing them,” Walther said.

Sure, there were plenty of offices that were undesirable. There was a case hundreds of years ago when an old and very powerful family, the Novak family, was foolish enough to greedily take control of the primary patchwork responsible for nature control, a patch officially known as the “A I NC”.

The first letter A is the classification of the patchwork. The A class is documented in the similarly named A tome and this specific class meant that the patchwork had a direct impact on a base element of the realm. The corresponding lettered tome could be considered as the official and incredibly detailed documentation on how to use the patch.

The second part, the number one, referred to its order within its class. Nature control is thus the first chapter of the A tome.

Nature control, however, was notoriously difficult to manage properly unless the same family also had the patches for soil fertility and, more importantly, corrupted deity prevention. These three patches together are sometimes nicknamed the Gaia stack.

As the Novak family only held the nature control in combination with some other irrelevant patchworks, the family only managed to sustain prosperous harvests in the entire realm for a short time.

The wealth that followed harvests never went unobserved and quickly attracted other beings they couldn’t even comprehend.

These corrupted deities, as they were called, began to ravage farm after farm. After several seasons of pure terror from the corrupted deities, famine set in, and thousands of peasants marched onto the Novak estate and burned their entire legacy to the ground.

After Walther finished his lengthy explanation to Basil, Chef Samuel asked, “What does the OOS office even mean? I know quite a few offices, but this one rings no bell.”

“It was somewhat hard to believe and, I must admit for once, to recall. Even for an academic like me. I quickly looked the OOS up in a review book on patchworks when Basil stormed off towards Nymous,” Walther replied while shaking his head towards Samuel.

“And…? What did it say?” Samuel now eagerly asked.

“As I feared, this is the Office of the Singularity,” Walther replied with a grave tone. The wrinkles that formed in his forehead as deep as Basil and Samuel had ever seen.