"God. I...I don't know how to say it.

"Okay. Deep breath. Here goes...

"Jacob fell in. He's stuck. He was just staring at the lake, and then he just ragdolled and...

"I thought he was drowning, but he's not. I tried to pull him out, and he wouldn't come. Something happened to his hands and his legs. It's like he...

"God, I don't want to say it!...He's stuck there. He's like a...a remora. But those eyes! He just watches us from beneath the water when we go down there.

"Sometimes I hum Peace Like a River to him. I'm sure I can see the recognition in his eyes. But he won't come back to me.

"Sorry. I forgot. Um, day twenty, I think? Twenty-one?

"Like it matters. Jacob fell in, and I don't know how to get him out. Oh, Jacob...oh, my husband."

--Recording recovered from Site Resh, reconstructed 1887 CE (restricted access)

----

15 Rising Withering, 1886 CE

The Amber Palace

The amber palace was beautiful, empty, and sepulchral.

Tvorh wanted out.

Maybe these smooth and glorious halls had once held great works of art, but now everything that could decay had decayed. The palace got dark when the sun went down; somehow it sensed the changing lighting outside the domes of the Amber City. For Tvorh, it meant little. For the others, mostly the darkness meant that they couldn't see the dust motes dancing in the air.

More than once last night, Tvorh had awoken to Aoife's sneezing.

As Tvorh wandered the halls, the sound of rustling came from one of the doorways up ahead. Tvorh frowned. Paper? It should have rotted along with all the rest.

Eztli stood with hands spread on a table in the center of a room. It was an archive, almost a libraratory, but there were books. Amber shelves of books stretched up three stories along the walls and down the center of the room.

Books upon books, like hungry beggars surrounding the Tvorh and Eztli, the wealthy Generosa in their midst.

Eztli glanced up from the book she was reading at Tvorh, who stood poised at the open door. "Erus."

They'd barely explored the palace. It was a big place, with lots of locked rooms. Plus, crazy and crazy powerful Thiyyatt was still unconscious, and they needed a guard of three people on her at a time, just in case.

Hopefully if Thiyyatt woke up in a murdery mood, Senrii, Aoife, and Piotr would be able to take her down without killing her.

"How did they survive?" Tvorh asked. He'd never seen so much paper in one place.

"Vacuum sealing." Eztli gestured toward the shelves. "Inspect them, and you'll see the slots for the sealant. Apparently Thiyyatt unlocked more than just the doors."

"Not all of the doors." Tvorh ventured in. "What are you doing?"

"Sating my curiosity," Eztli said.

Tvorh could hear Eztli's heartbeat. Why had it started pounding when he'd entered the room? "That's what I'd do. If I could see, I mean. I love old books. But I don't believe you."

Eztli straightened up as if he'd challenged her. Well, maybe he had.

"I know we're different Gentes, Ductrix," Tvorh said. "But I just want to survive. I want my family to be okay. I don't want to hurt you or Gens Nxtlu, even if you did hurt my mom and my sisters."

"Idealistic," Eztli said.

Tvorh wasn't sure it was a compliment. "Why are you in here, Comes?"

Eztli sighed and turned the book toward him.

"I can't read it," he said.

"Ah. Of course. My apologies, Erus."

"I could if you let me see through your eyes."

It was the first time he'd made the request of Eztli, but she offered her hand without hesitation.

Tvorh linked with her, seeing through her eyes, feeling through her body as she turned back to the book.

"Like this?"

"Yeah," Tvorh murmured as he read the large High Post-Exarchian letters halfway down the page, indicating a new section. Before the Exodus. Tvorh wasn't familiar with the word used. "What's Exodus?"

Stolen novel; please report.

"A pre-Exarchian term, almost surely," Eztli said. "We believe it means 'Departure.' The Adonists have their own beliefs about it, claiming it comes first and foremost from their faith. An ancient story about a land called Mitzrayim, which their people left."

"That would be before the Heavenfall," Tvorh said.

Eztli nodded. "In the place called Terra."

"I don't know much about Terra."

"For a bookish boy, you have surprising gaps in your education," Eztli said. Tvorh could feel the corners of her mouth tugging in a smile.

"My education got interrupted prematurely. And then restarted prematurely."

"I suppose it did. This is a trove, Erus Tvorh. Over there." Eztli pointed to one of the stacks. "Those are Imperial records. I browsed only a few of them. Dry reading. Scribes and clerks do not write for entertainment, and rarely with the expectation that their works will be read millennia later by those of a different culture. But they could teach us so much about the Imperial lifestyle, imperial technology, what life was like before the Pandemic." Eztli sounded almost... wistful.

"So could Thiyyatt." If she wasn't crazy. "What about the rest of them?"

Eztli turned the book so Tvorh could see its cover. Terran Myths Reconstructed. Redacted by Daonial Ollstrent Pellnias. "I've seen this name in several places in the records. He appeared to be a vizier, adviser to the Imperatrix. Not all of his work are dry records, as you can see.

"Many of the rest, most of them, are in pre-Exarchian scripts. Erus Tvorh, I believe this room held many of the lost, ancient secrets of the days of the Heavenfall. These books are relics of a time long past. The royalty of the Last Era were as interested in the era before theirs as we are about theirs. Have you read any of the scholarly works on the Heavenfall?"

"Princeps Dorsin prefers more practical studies for me." Much to Tvorh's disappointment. Practical studies were great, but sometimes you needed to curl up with a good book. Or you did if you had good eyes.

Funny how Tvorh didn't blame Eztli for his blindness. She'd been there watching. But she hadn't been able to bring herself to hurt him.

Nxtlu or not, she was better than her brother.

"The Heavenfall occurred, so the stories say, because in the heavens the wealthy lorded it over the poor. Cassilda, a respected officer but one from the lowest ranks, led her people down to Tellus. They found the Symbiont here, as well as xenokaryotic organisms containing genetic material that the Symbiont could assimilate to cause rapid effects. STIGMOS. They used this power to bring down the overlords. Fallen, from heaven to Tellus."

Tvorh nodded. He'd known that much.

"What fewer of the histories, or perhaps legends, relate is that a few generations after the Heavenfall, there were wars. Over STIGMOS, perhaps, or Symbionts, or bloodlines. Presumably, over the same things that humans still war over." Eztli smiled. "For all our talk of evolution and apotheosis, I doubt humanity has changed at all. We remain caught between the bestial and the divine.

"Many of the old records and old languages were lost. Many were forbidden. Others had to change to survive. The General Principles of Gens Nxtlu comes from one such ancient philosophy, passed down orally. Some elements of it survived; others, we are sure, died away. Similar events occurred with Utulo, with Takahashi, and with many of the other Gentes, with texts and oral histories warring to various degrees to give us the beliefs we now follow.

"Even religion was not immune." Eztli tapped her fingers with amusement on the table. "Do not tell your lover this, but some scholars hypothesize that Adonism is a syncretic union of two or more prior religions, and that Amricianism is derived from a pre-Exarchian national philosophy. The nation is gone, yet the philosophy remains in a changed form."

"Syncretic union--wait. Lover?"

"The Sodality girl. Aoife." Eztli licked her lips as if speaking the name was strange to her.

"She's not my lover."

"She should be. You deserve to be happy. As do we all, I would like to think. Blue-blood, red-blood, it doesn't matter. We Generosi claim to be the descendants of the prior rulers, but we are only truly descendants of their powers. The Last Era bloodlines were wiped from the face of Tellus during the Pandemic due to all of the genetic alterations they'd taken on."

Or, worse than being wiped out, turned into Chimeras. "Like Thiyyatt."

"Only the poor, who could not afford gengineering, would have survived. We are not the heirs of a bright past. We are squatters in gleaming ancient ruins." Eztli closed the book reverently. "But then, perhaps the nobles of the Last Era were themselves squatters as well. Come. See the wonders that remain on these untouched shelves."

Eztli was sounding decidedly un-Nxtlu.

Tvorh recognized the foreign glyphs on the spines of the books as they passed them. Many of them, anyway. Some of the books used totally different lettering than the three pre-Exarchian alphabets he'd studied. "Wait," he said, pointing to a shelf. "What are those?"

The lettering on the spines was pre-Exarchian, and even though Tvorh had studied that alphabet, he had no idea how it even sounded, much less what it said. Interestingly, each one had the same lettering. The same title, almost certainly: the left word, four letters, and the right word, five letters.

But while the title was the same, each of them bore a different embossed symbol of gold on its spine. One of them had a six-pointed star, like an upward-pointing triangle overlaid over a downward-pointing triangle. The other had a short horizontal bar crossing a long vertical one at a right angle. With his free hand, Tvorh pulled the books off the shelf.

There was nothing at the beginning of the books. Just empty pages--

"The other side," Eztli said, excitement coloring her voice as she took one of the two from Tvorh. "Perhaps this language is read left to right."

Oh. That worked a little bit better, but still, maybe they weren't the same book. The beginning was totally different. Mostly empty pages, with just a few numerals of the sort Haralt had described during their classes at the bottom of each one.

"Forward," Eztli said. She flipped through the thin pages, then suddenly stopped a few leaves in. "Here."

The page was filled with text. Near the very beginning, there was a large icon, a single glyph. Tvorh grabbed a handful, skipping ahead to a similar page.

"Too far." Eztli reached over and slapped a few pages back. "There."

Tvorh compared them. "They're the same text."

Eztli looked at him, pleased surprise on her face.

"Look back at the shelf. I saw something--there." There was another book marked with the six-pointed-star symbol. Its title was in an alphabet Tvorh had never seen before.

Eztli pulled it off the shelf. She opened it, frowned, then skipped to the end. "While this language is read right to left. This page...it's a completely different alphabet, but the pattern of writing and breaks looks quite similar."

"That book's smaller than this one," Tvorh said.

Eztli shrugged and reluctantly placed her books back on the shelf. "I would keep them, but..."

Tvorh nodded. "Travel light. We'll come back and ransack this place when the Chimeras aren't pounding down the doors."

Eztli was still holding Tvorh's hand when she took Daonial's book from the amber table, so it was an awkward grab. Not awkward enough for her to drop the book, but awkward enough for all of the pages to fan open, expelling several piece of paper. "Oh, great," Tvorh sighed. "Did we break it?"

He grabbed the sheets that had fluttered to the floor.

This wasn't a part of the book. It was a note, handwritten in High Post-Exarchian. Somebody had jammed it into the pages.