Chapter Two

The girl grows.

Her thoughts run in moments - Carza in the past is Carza dead, Carza in the future is equally as dead. Only the present is relevant to her existence, only the present demands her attention. There is an animal tint to her thoughts - a keen sense of heat and cold, light and dark. To others, a change in lighting is nothing. To her, it's a shadow approaching from behind, it's an attacker, a falling object, a crumbling building, worse. She twitches constantly. Sleep is difficult. But... nothing leaps out, nothing attacks.

And slowly, painfully, she unfurls from her core of protected thoughts and cautious motions. She unwinds herself like a hedgehog, slowly exposing herself and letting her spines flex away so she can nuzzle and search and hunt. It's dangerous, living like this. But it's the only way to live. Surrounded by her spines, she's immobile and useless. She'll die of starvation, or exhaustion, or to something which can ignore her spines, crunch them like toothpicks, break through and gobble her up. She has to unfurl. And she's found a very safe place to do it.

Her thoughts remain sharp.

But unfurled and vulnerable... she can start to move forwards.

She arrives at the studium a spindly thing of spiky limbs and unkempt hair. She is teased for her bumpkin rituals - knocking on the doorframe before entering or leaving any room (to warn the Hiders that they need to start doing their jobs, because no-one is allowed to see a Hider) even her own chambers, and especially mocked for biting every coin she finds to check the quality of the metal. That's just silly. She needs to check the quality. The woman in the alleyway told her that worms live in metal, and you can tell by the way it feels to bite. And she said that the worms could crawl from coin to coin and soon you'd have no purse at all. And that's unacceptable. She is reprimanded for nibbling coca leaves from the greenhouses, and told that only paupers chew something so coarse. A month later, she is dragged out of her dormitory, still rake-thin, and caned for smuggling the leaves under her pillow and chewing them doggedly throughout the night. She never finds out who sold her to the mistresses of the studium. Her eyes will never stop burning with faint distrust, but her teeth gradually lose their brown sheen... until she discovers cigarillos and tobacco almost ten years later, and then the cycle begins once more. But for a time, she is always sober, and it sharpens her up more than any stimulant, gives her razors in her eyes. Her deep, brown, intense eyes.

The others tease her in the fashion of children at any time in any place. She ignores them, largely. Focuses on learning. Learning is what she's meant to do. She fought to get here, and she won't sit back and allow all her opportunities to flow by. And the others learn to keep a distance from her intense brown eyes, her strange twitches, and her odd habits. They aren't stupid, despite all appearances. The Court of Ivory is a silent, golden void in which nothing exists but the libraries, the dust, the courtyards of plants which are tended by veiled gardeners. The studium is located in the bowels of the central tower - where the support pillars groan with the effort of sustaining the looming structure above, where the walls hang heavy with professorial gowns in various stages of decomposition and are painted the shade of horsehide - a dark brown night sky punctuated by tiny glimmering stars in the form of tacks and pins, by the engraved initials of a thousand thousand students.

They say this place has educated a million students over the long centuries.

They say many things. But this, perhaps, is correct.

In the girl, Carza, there broods a kind of hunger, a ravenous gnawing in her stomach. It's ambition, and a warning. It warns that hunger is an old enemy and will always pursue her. It reminds her what silty, brackish water tastes like, what it feels to have the wind rip through her bones like they were made of the paper used for the densest books in the libraries of the Court. She never sleeps fully, soundly, completely. Only ever with one eye open. It laughs in her dreams, and tells her that she'll be out there again. Outside the golden void. It laughs, and she shivers in fear... and satisfies the gnawing with food and solitude and roughness. For days she doesn't speak to others except in monosyllables, wary of anyone that could have an agenda against her. Her handwriting has a cramped, paranoid air to it - she hates wasting ink, paper, nibs, anything. The others mock her for a time. But gradually, they become used to her strangeness and her habits - eating like her life depended on it, yet never seeming to fill out. Storing food in odd places. Always keeping her possessions bundled tight and stowed somewhere secure. And forcing herself not to steal knives from the dining hall. Old habits she learned from... too long on the streets of ALD IOM. Hard to adjust to a life where beds are plentiful, where food is dispensed with ease and there is more to drink than rainwater and beer. Where the world is soft.

At least Melqua was nice.

More of an older sister than anything maternal. Clearly as uncertain as Carza was. But that, in its own way, was good. Carza had almost no control of her life any more - not in the way she once did. And being around someone as nervous as Melqua gave her a kind of power. And that was, in some sense, reassuring.

A flash of her life.

* * *

Melqua looked up from some work she'd brought back to her chambers - she liked it better here, the light was honestly superior to the scriptorium, and there was ready access to her private stash of biscuits. Someone had entered. Carza. The studium didn't... really allow people to leave, per se, but the court was so intertwined that it was easy to slip from one place to the other. It'd been just a few months now, and she already had a softer face. Barely spoke, but... it was hard to say where that ceased to be a benign personality trait and became a worrisome personality defect. Founder knew she'd met enough stoics in the past. But Carza rarely felt like a stoic, and Melqua wasn't sure why. She slept cautiously, and liked tight areas where she could keep all her things bundled up. She'd started off with all her possessions in a bundle in her hands, and then she'd moved to simply having the bundle itself - a coarse chunk of fabric - rolled up and cradled like a doll. Which was... progress. Anyway. She was here. And Melqua painted a smile on her face.

"Good evening, Carza. And how was your day at the studium?"

Mechanical responses were easier.

Silence met her. Carza didn't stare, but she simply sat on the edge of the narrow cot which dominated half of the cell, and placed her hands palm-down on her knees, staring down between her legs at the grey stone. Even cleaned up, she looked a bit... rangy and unkempt. Not her fault. Some people were like that. Melqua swivelled her chair around with a small squeak, and watched as Carza's jaw clenched and unclenched.

"...oh, poor duck."

Carza looked over sharply, and Melqua couldn't help herself - she placed a single hand in Carza's hair, and quietly stroked it. The small urchin twitched a few times. Said nothing. That was an advancement. First time Melqua had tried that (on the grounds that she knew more cats than she knew children and cats tended to enjoy getting scratches), Carza had simply smacked her hand aside, and looked on the verge of biting her. Rather like a cat, now she thought about it.

"Hard time?"

A tiny nod of her head.

Melqua hesitated... and reached into a box she kept underneath her desk, mostly as a footstool, and sometimes as a helpful storage device. As boxes tended to be used for. So... hm. Notebooks, notebooks, spare ink, a pamphlet or two... and there. Wonderful. Carza blinked as a small raggedy doll was pressed into her lap. It was a slightly dejected-looking thing, worn around the edges, frayed... but it had a distinct air of enduring enthusiasm which made it endearing. The smile was fixed, but characterful. The button eyes were tarnished and a little chipped but... well, it worked. Carza blinked a few more times.

"There you go."

Carza didn't like talking. And Melqua was happy to let her indulge in silence.

But that doll had been a nice companion in her early years. Which were... not that long ago, really. Founder, she wasn't ready for this.

The door closed.

Carza had left.

The doll was gone.

Melqua smiled, and got back to work.

* * *

She grows.

Her gangliness remains, but becomes a sharp-edged frame of angles and points, everything wound up with tension. Always her fingers curl instinctually, clutching at something invisible, holding it tight and refusing to let go. She never explains where she is from, but people guess. The Court of Horn, for her sturdiness in the outdoors and her unflinching response to the cold. The Court of the Axe, for her slightly dusky skin. The Court of Salt, for her coca habit as a child. The Court of Slate is a small guess, after some of the other girls hear her swearing in a language which they faintly recognise as one of the ceremonial languages of that particular court. She denies it, then says she overheard it a long time ago, nothing more. The others don't believe her... but they forget their suspicion.

Her hair will never quite recover. Always unkempt and tied up with strips of cloth. The sign of her advancing into the ranks of the civilised is indicated by the movement from rags to linen to silk. She is often seen wandering around the court with a woman who is thought to be her sister or cousin. No-one believes her when she claims that the woman is her aunt.

She grows.

Work consumes her. She likes that. Melqua helps, but... Carza is still given to silences over noise. But she does talk. Occasionally. But work is pleasing, and work is validating. Work is the reason she gets up in the morning and goes to bed late. The studium is impressed by her advancements - not because they are especially impressive, but because she's so silent and strange that most assume she's a little on the slow side. She most certainly isn't, and she proves that every day - with all the effort she can muster.

At the age of seventeen, she receives the seven ritual scars of womanhood. Seventeen is a sacred number - seventeen is the age where the founder left his home and became Learned, and seventeen is the age when it is chosen whether to go to ignorance or knowledge. And the time when one remains a child or becomes an adult. Carza chooses.

And grows.

For a week, she has five droplets of wax under each eye to mark her passage through the liminal stages of the rite. Ten droplets, seven scars, at the age of seventeen - she enters into the ritual network of the Court of Ivory, and is surrounded by yet another protective layer of existence. Her movements are stiff and ungainly, her attitude is even more curt than usual. But she feels a little more content. She has been witnessed as a person, and understood as one. She speaks a little more afterwards, when she is named Carza vo Anka and established firmly in the eyes of her peers. No more debate over if she's part of some other court with other rites - she has been initiated in the fashion of Ivory, and she is of Ivory now, and forever more. It enthuses her, and a now thirty-year-old Melqua smiles to see it. She even indulges in hobbies, and for the first time in nearly a decade, turns her eyes outwards to the world beyond the wonderful golden labyrinth of the court. It's been intruding slowly and surely into her world, after all. And Carza can no longer ignore it.

As a child, she worked by the light of an oil lamp. Now, gas lamps burn throughout the studium. Once, she was resigned to needing the heavy iron frame-mounted spectacles customary to the court... and now, she occasionally mounts delicately-sculpted pince-nez on the bridge of her long, sharp nose. Once, she heard beer halls chanting outside, heard rustic music echoing from their glassless windows. And now... now glass shines in every building, smoke rises from smokestacks, and railways have been built to the outside world. Theatrophones blare out the latest comedies and dramas, the laughies and the weepies - the only two genres of fiction, as everyone knows. Some drink beer, and some drink other things, stranger drinks from foreign climes.

A flash of her life.

* * *

Carza twisted her hands nervously.

Melqua, a little older and very slightly wiser, stood at her side, smiling a little. God, Carza had grown. Not into herself, not exactly, but... she'd become taller. That was about it. Taller, and she talked more. By a given definition.

"Go on, it'll be fine."

The theatrophone sat clumsily in front of her. The subscription has been worked out - theatrophones used the telephone lines, and people would pay a regular fee to have the privilege of calling into a particular connection. A man had been round to sort it all out, but she was still... a little confused by it. A little alarmed, honestly. And Carza was obviously even more uncertain. Years later, and she was still more content with silence than noise, and disliked any reminders of the outside world. She'd wanted to remain in the Court of Ivory for her entire life, at least, that's what she professed as a child. And now... even if she wasn't dogmatically holding to it, she still wanted to stay in the court for the rest of her life, clearly. And Melqua could tell. They only met once every few weeks now, but... well, she'd still learned to read a few of Carza's expressions. Melqua wondered why she was so uncomfortable around the theatrophone - the chunk of metal and bristling wires was ungainly, yes, but... oh. Right. Reminder that the world beyond was changing, and the court wasn't immune to that.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

A tiny invasion.

Melqua stared at the device. A blend of metal, wood, and long, spiralling wires. It crackled like a beast out of hell when the man was tuning it up, and now it was just... sitting there. Ominously. In the middle of a slightly larger cell that she'd been moved to after it was decided that a thirty-year-old secretary should probably live somewhere a little nicer. She liked it. Better view. Lacked the root chandelier.

The clock struck. Time for the broadcast, according to the neatly written timetable that Melqua had dutifully copied down, and the clock set to the central theurgic clock at the centre of the Court of Ivory - which, as everyone knew, was accurate down to the second. Less, probably. If that was possible.

"...so, I presume we just... press this button, then?"

Carza shrugged lightly, flinched, and forced herself to talk.

"...yes, I think... maybe we should. It looks like a likely button."

"It doesn't look unlikely."

Carza gestured vaguely to some anonymous looking dials and switches.

"Those look unlikely. No idea what they're for."

Probably to turn the thing into a bomb. Melqua sighed. Alright. Fine. Carza shifted uneasily... and did the honours.

She pressed it.

The speaker erupted into a chorus of cat-like howls which sent both of them thrashing insensibly at the anonymous-looking dials in an attempt to turn the volume down. The court was quiet, it was slow, and this thing was loud and fast and if they didn't turn it down they'd probably be exiled and... and it seemed to straighten a little. Just a little. The sound narrowed down slightly, the peaks of its wails reducing, piece by piece, inch by inch, until they fell into the range of human hearing. The waves stabilised, the signal began to come through a little smoother - assisted by Carza jabbing most of the dials at least once to see if they did anything (they might've) - and everything just... just worked. Slowly, but surely, the theatrophone met the basic definitions of a functional device. Which felt like a bit of a miracle, given how it'd all started out.

'-is the seven-o-clock broadcast, featuring the latest product of Mr. Sol vo Kordis, starring Messrs. vo Yahan and vo Toran as the protagonists of tonight's piece of light entertainment - The Ministerial Fellows, starring the civil servants of our own Court of the Axe who attempt to administrate the management of our fair city. Warning for elderly persons: this is not an accurate reflection of ministry goings-on, nor is it to be construed as such in a court of law, and under no circumstances is this the product of a recording device secured via tape or some other adhesive mechanism to the underside of a ministerial desk. Please direct all complaints to the address printed on the underside of your device.'

Carza and Melqua looked at each other. Uh.

Alright.

Sure.

Why not.

More dials were twitched, and it felt like this helped things in some indistinct way.

'...good heavens, sir, it's rather a heavy workload today. Just look at your in-tray!'

'Hm? Oh, yes, yes... quite a busy day. Five whole letters.'

A shriek of canned laughter echoed through the room, making both Carza and Melqua jump.

'It'll be a long few hours for us, sir.'

'Hm. Quite. Terribly hard crossword today, isn't it?'

More canned laughter, and Carza cracked a small smile, as did Melqua. If there were people laughing in some unknown studio, well... that gave some indication of what was funny and what wasn't. It made things easier when they were basically eavesdropping on a perfectly good play. Made them feel like they had an audience around them, made the entire procedure markedly more comfortable. If other people were laughing, then it was definitely funny. Hm, yes indeed.

'A beastly crossword... I can see this occupying me until four at least, I'll have to take it back and finish it this evening. I hate taking my work home with me, but... well, you know, duty calls'

Roars of laugher.

And Carza laughed too.

Melqua stared at her in mild shock. She almost never laughed. It was a slightly high-pitched, chattering thing which sounded like something a tropical bird would use to attract a mate. Nice to hear because of the context surrounding it, not because of any quality of the laugh itself. The two of them were hunched over almost ninety degrees, staring wide-eyed at the machine in front of them, and the comedy it produced.

And Melqua felt a small shiver of unease.

...the world was really changing, wasn't it?

And the look on Carza's face said that she felt this even more keenly. And had been feeling it for quite some time.

* * *

The city of ALD IOM has changed during the girl's time in the studium.

Once, it was the queen of cities. Uncontested. Alone. Aloof. And utterly, utterly isolated. It stands in its valley, an alignment of cities and towns under one name and eight courts. As a child, Carza learns the rhyme - Ivory, Slate, Salt and Axe / Chalk, Flint, Horn and Wax. The eight Courts. Taught to her as the VO QA TRINLAIC NAM, in the sacred language of the Court of Ivory. All sacred words are rendered in capitals, something she finds indescribably funny as a child, unamusing as an adolescent, and faintly hypnotic as a young adult. It makes her feel important to know even a scrap of the meaning behind them - the language of the founder, of the great progenitor, of the many-eyed sage who hung the first lamps and set the first stones, and meditated upon the names of stars until his skin fell free and he could bathe his soul in starlight, who made needles of thought and danced in dreamlands far beyond human eyes.

She has been surrounded by his words her entire life. And only now does she begin to understand them.

She has seen Brother Yanis once in the entire time of her passage from eight to twenty-one - a brief spot of tea in his office where he gives her a handful of bank notes she doesn't know how to spend, a manly slap on the back which makes her stumble, and a vague rumble of approval when she talks of her future plans and her past achievements. She has learned the trivium of rhetoric, logic, and grammar. Then, with an elegant inevitability, the quadrivium of arithmetic, theology, language and mechanics. Arts are denied to her, of course. She is forbidden from learning the sacred language of the founder, only the myriad languages of the courts - the rumbling, deeply foreign speech of the Court of Horn, and the chanting, grating tones of the Court of the Axe. Slate and Ivory alike are denied to her - too holy, too reverent. And every morning, in her lecture hall where the seats ooze dust and the walls sweat with strange resin, she sees the inscription: QUZ AXAXAXA UQLON. The sacred words. She is likewise forbidden from theurgy, the science-which-is-not-quite-science... but she learns the ministrations of the terralabe and the proper modes of address to a theurgist. She hears of sacred geometries, and nothing more of theurgy - not unless she commits. For theology, she learns to the third degree - out of seventeen (seventeen being the holiest number). For this reason, seventeen is the age where she drinks bitter coffee and wears a metal eye over her chest - closed, naturally.

At seventeen, she becomes a woman and is named in front of her peers.

And at eighteen, she is named and known in the eyes of those above.

At eighteen, she is taken into a sealed chamber. Even now she is raw from the womanhood rites and the sacred piercings, and stands staring at a trio of her elders. The chamber is dark and cloying, incense flows from metal grates on the floor, and the air is pungent with cinnamon and liquorice. A great carving of the founder lies on the wall across from her - he is twisted in the Sixth Contortion of Thought-Motion, he is forming a needle from his thoughts, he is dancing on the back of a serpent which seems to twist and shiver despite being made of stone. This is not a chamber she knows - not from her time as an urchin, nor as a student. Everyone in the court came here once. Very few come here twice. Carze knows, in her heart of hearts, that she will never forget the smell. It's a smell which makes her think of wealthy marketplaces... but these days, they say the spices are shipped by the trainload. That even paupers can afford to waft incense around the corners of their hovels. Reality intrudes into her mind like a thought-formed needle, like the silvery thing that the Founder gestures elegantly with on the wall before her. Thought vanishes as a bell chimes, and her elders rise from their stone chairs, garbed in grey and silver. Around their turkey-wattle necks dangle vials of shimmering brown-gold liquid, which seems to teem with tiny forms of life.

It's time.

The rites of selection. To pass from childhood to womanhood is a rite which anyone can pass, if they aren't chronically afraid of blood. To pass from student to scholar... that's harder. Much, much harder. She wears a white shift and is compelled to lie on a stone table, where a heavy weight is rested on her stomach and her eyes are bound with cloth. The founder spoke his greatest truths with his dying breath - in the last breath is the accumulation of all other breaths, such is the doctrine she learned as a student of Ivory theology. It is the residuum of the self, so says the founder. It contains everything, the least, the greatest, the most insignificant and the most defining - it is the accumulation of existence, and nothing can ever quite compare. 'Blessed are the breathless' - so runs part of the single verse of doctrine she has been permitted to read in the original language. And so she is weighted and interrogated, and only truth may spill from her lips. Her eyes remain intense beneath their blindfold. Almost burning the cloth.

By what right does she claim to be a scholar of Ivory?

She is learned and literate, she knows the outer doctrines of the founder, she speaks the one verse of the sacred language she is permitted to know. She is of age, and she is intelligent. Her voice snaps in the dark. There is something of the old gnawing in her, the old lust for survival and safety. She remembers the warmth of her father's office, and the respectful gazes of his secretaries. She wants a place like that for her own, a place where she can curl up and cease to exist in the world. None of this is said, of course. Earthly desires are nothing here. People that express them are banished. She feels... a little dishonest. Melqua has been coaching her on these rites, even when they're meant to be completely secretive. Told her about the weights, how to adjust to the cold stone beneath her, what to say, and what not to say. The woman is busier now - they only see each other once a month. And Carza still feels small pulses of affection whenever she thinks about her, and her old cell with the root chandelier, and laughing over the latest comedies on the theatrophone.

And what are her ambitions in the Court?

She knows this, has studied the lines over and over. To be educated and to educate in turn. To fulfil the holy mission of Scholastic Preaching that the founder laid out. That is, to comprehend the universe with logical deduction, to construct systems of rationality that may one day be fitted to approach a total theory of reality. To unite all fields - philosophy, natural philosophy, theology, mathematics (she almost says 'literature', but the older hands don't like the term - literature is for bored secretaries who want their dramas put down on paper so they don't need to wait for the nightly broadcasts), and theurgy. To unify all courts and nations. She professes her loyalty to the Ivory doctrine that ALD IOM stands as the axis of existence, around which the world revolves. The arena in which all discussions and strife shall be resolved. The Third Earth, beyond the mundane First, or the lunar Second. The Third Earth of ALD IOM is the only one that truly matters - the others just exist to validate and sustain the Third. There, cite the holy works, cite the Founder, and then emphasise the importance of the city. Too many have their eyes pointed outwards, they talk too much of foreign kingdoms and republics and new technology. The elders look at one another, faces inscrutable. Nervousness twitches in her gut like a starved tapeworm.

And what specifically would she study?

Anthropology and linguistics. To study the world beyond. Her father studied this, and she wants to follow in his footsteps... but she doesn't say that. She has no father, after all. Instead, she declares to the three elders, the weights forcing her voice to a strangled gasp, that she wants to learn how other cultures have developed solutions to the same problems, how this can be applied to the enhancement of ALD IOM, how the human self can be explored through its many emanations. Linguistics is simply a key to access cultures more fully, to act in conjunction with her anthropology. ALD IOM sits in a paradise on earth - but others are not so lucky. How have they adjusted to their environments? How have they succeeded or failed? How have different courts in ALD IOM approached the same issues of life in this wonderful country, and what can be added to them or removed to make them better? All arts must contribute to the great design, this is the decree of the Founder. Nothing is studied for its own sake. Everything must have a purpose. And she has defined hers in terms which the elders find very, very, very appealing.

Their voices reveal nothing - no hint of approval, and no sign that they see through her sculpted speech. Do they know she's been studying with Melqua? Do they suspect? Her eyes are studded with tiny black dots as oxygen is driven out of her. She needs to breathe. They won't keep going until she passes out? The idea of being unconscious is nauseating to her. It's lack of control, lack of agency, lack of defence. The weight forces her to be spread-eagled, and she craves, in a way she hasn't for years, to curl up into a tight, protective ball where nothing can reach her. The final question is voiced. It is long, and the tone is burning with inquisition.

Would she dedicate herself? Would she promise to be chaste and virtuous? To obey the doctrines of the Court with all her heart - a heart that is now beating frantically under a metal weight, desperate for air - and follow the doctrines until her death? To do as commanded?

Her voice, strangled and weak, still rises to a shout. Passion in her tone - she believes every word of this. The world beyond rots with strangeness and savagery, and the court retains a solitary, beautiful existence. There's really no choice to speak of.

With everything at her disposal, she would obey.

There is silence.

Her hands are curled around something invisible, afraid to let go.

Her eyes water.

And a second later, she is released from the weights, a key is placed on her lips, and she is told to leave. With the other new scholars, she burns her shift in one of the courtyards, and stares into the embers with her deep brown eyes, twisting her lips into an expression of uncertainty. Never thought she'd get this far. The fires rise high into the night, and the other scholars hug themselves in the cold. The world seems stranger. Their predecessors would've burned their shifts in silence, but now... now they hear the rumbles of trains arriving, and the world is no longer some far-away, fog-filled place which has no relevant to their existence. The clicking of typewriters echoes out from the offices of secretaries working late. And Carza, for the first time in years, feels deeply unsure. Her chest is mottled with bruises from the weights, the scars of the womanhood rites are still painful, and worse so in the cold air. She's done it - she's a scholar. Only took a decade. And in a few years... she'll be ready to go forth. She still feels like she should be chewing coca and hiding under a bridge, but here she is - in clothes too expensive to feel comfortable in, and the only stimulant she indulges in are cigarillos she buys from the trains which have brought modernity in a crashing wave to their silent place. Odd names hang in the air as her colleagues talk about where they might want to go if they have a chance, with one of the diplomatic missions.

Some say they want to go to Fidelizh, to Apo, to Herxiel and all the other odd places that have suddenly become more than vague rumours carried by traders and dubious travellers. They talk of a war which has no bearing on her existence - and thank the founder for that. A living city of brass far to the east, a country built on the still-breathing husk of an enormous sea-creature, a mutant dredged from the depths... and other, smaller things that still intrigue her, just a little. A city of thirty-seven towers which are the oldest things ever built, debauched men and women who live in the forests and drink perpetual youth from iron-bound cauldrons, mountains so terrible and hostile that no man has ever crossed their peaks, martial cities, artistic cities, industrial cities, religious cities... cities with stories and names and gods all their own. The world is bigger now.

She can't be quite sure if that's a good thing or not.

Her own, lovely Rudric mountains loom overhead, snow-capped. She murmurs a prayer to the things which she still believes live up there - the gods which watch down and judge. Snow glimmers... and she imagines that they are staring, their eyes glinting with curiosity. Perhaps even pride - but that would be fanciful silliness, and she can't bring herself to be so... light at the moment.

Carza stares out into the burning remnants of her old life... and tries to smile, to join in with the others. They're all forcing themselves to be cheerful, even if they're worried about the future. There's talk of universities outside of ALD IOM, of science and understanding which hadn't yet reached them. The central towers of the Court of Ivory seem so... small, when flanked by the dark mountains above. She used to think this place was so utterly perfect and secluded that she might as well forget the world existed, but... the world hadn't forgotten the court, no matter how much the court tried to forget everything else. The walls seemed thin, and she could hear people talking behind it - civilians, talking about civilian things. Carza clutches her shoulders, unsure, forcing a laugh out of her mouth as one of her colleagues makes a small joke. Founder, she wanted to wheeze on some baccy right now... the others looked like they wanted to try and steal some brandy from one of the scholars, but the future was weighing on them with all the dreadful certainty of the weights that had bruised their chests.

She's here. She's won. She's achieved it. No more coca-chewing and stealing food, no more living on a roof and hunting for bird nests that maybe had a few eggs in them. Her teeth itched at the memory of raw yolk caking them, of shell sticking between them as she gorged herself over and over, readying her lines to use against Yanis, to convince him to take her off the street and into the warmth and security of a court. She'd done it - become a scholar-in-training, an embedded component of the Court of Ivory. A bright young thing who could gleam gently for the rest of her days in dreamy contemplation. Precisely what she wanted - a quiet office, a few secretaries, and regular lunches. Seclusion from ALD IOM. She'd done everything she wanted.

Right?

Time races forward, in a way.

* * *

And Carza took a deep breath, feeling the cold rushing into her abused lungs, inflating her bruised ribs, twinging at the edges of the scars of adulthood. She's... her perspective had changed, just now. She could feel it. She'd... succeeded. Even if she failed now, she'd just be demoted to secretary or, worse, a studium instructor. She was fine. Safe. She wetted her lips, and wondered how she'd gone so long without talking. She was safe now. Wonderfully, impeccably safe. And more than that, successful. Respected. The others were joking with her like she was one of the gang, and Carza smiled. Some of her animalistic thoughts had just... vanished, like they were nothing. Carza had become a temporally enduring entity - not a piece of flotsam riding the wave of the present, but something which existed in past, present, and future. A story, and not a self-motivated amoeba clawing its way from second to second, never looking behind, and terrified of looking ahead for fear of losing its grip on the wave beneath it. She was alive.

Carza smiled... and welcomed what was about to come her way.

"Could someone pass that brandy, I'm parched..."