Far see. “Woid, you lad.” Vinoillo squelched over with his big smug chin leading before the rest of him, adjusting the drooping-drowned ‘moss-flower’ in his breast pocket.
Arachnid eyes magnified by glass meanwhile peered from the near and further observatories.
“No ship for an umbrella or similar?” Woid shrugged from his pockets with one arm, the other hand reaching out.
“That’s a nice shirt.” Vinoillo shook Woid’s hand. “Keeping a low profile of things for this one; quick in and out. Shows our commitment to the new partner, Greed. Everything indicates they’re the one he’s been looking for.” He nodded to his economist brother.
“I’m a chunk upset you didn’t offer me this job." Woid flashed his gemmed teeth. "And you’re handling this personally?”
“Courtdom runs itself, thanks to us.”
“To me.” The economist yelled through the rain, giving Serib a longer look while Argus knelt by his side.
“Leaves us freer to get back to the older ways.” Vinoillo's big hands rubbed together.
∞
“Can I see your prisoner?” Serib asked of Vilifrado as he knee-high’d himself over, his shoes getting stuck in the mud.
“Not for much longer. Your politeness has afforded you it.” Vilifrado motioned his approval, shooing her, and she left the three of them drowning in the rain.
∞
Argus’ body was facing his observatories, but Serib felt watched - and was watched - with every stomp through the sunken garden towards him. Servants and lesser gangsters were dragging the bodies of Argus’ captors into his waterlogged grave. They appeared to have lost none of their fellows in the fight. A broken, bloody grandclock stared up from the dark pit along with the fallen.
“Is it true… am I evil?” the girl asked the myth, standing almost by him, hushed by rain. “Am I fighting on the wrong side?”
“Are you now? Not at all. You are a child of the world Courtdom foolishly calls Ehl’yiteth. Roots settled moreso than blood or birth.”
Serib smiled at this, listening to Argus through the harsh rain:
“We are in a garden without walls for the walls have gone untended for too long. And none of us know where we stand. You are a far-child of Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind. You have seen far as shamans often can, further than most, and set out on a loving quest against what you saw. Am I much different? I see and love, I am The Scout of Ever.”
Serib’s heart was lighter.
“This is not how you will always be.” And when Argus elaborated, that same heft returned. “Lay’d Payn too began her quest lovingly in all her lives, though it has rotted into stagnancy, and stagnancy can only hate itself being not renewed, unwashed, and that now is her inky compass. The core of it is that the right answer in one age may not remain correct in the next, such is Duality. Different ages require answers all and few answers suffice for Hindsight. Courtdom ‘cured’ Need, let us say, though Greed taking Need’s throne brings its own challenges.”
Rain pinged his metal helmet. He was shivering, holding up his arms to feebly cover his many eye-holes from the weather, though protecting some with his palms he left others open to leaks, and he twitched with discomfort as the drips invaded him.
∞
“Do you have a cover for him, anything?” Serib shouted to The Dorn's servants and they brought for him from a nearby conservatory large sheets once for parties perhaps, hanging it from stilts over his sodden self and grave.
The rain made now a drumming thud above their heads. Serib searched nearby greenhouses with them, finding a dry blanket as well. For a moment or longer, Argus wept gratefully, wrapped as in kindness when all else had been cruel to him. Furthermore from Serib’s inexperienced palms she growled a small flame alit, her and Argus’ breath fuelling it, while she tried ignoring the crackling pain - offering it to keep him warm - for not a single twig was dry enough to get a fire going. She thought of Silence, The Black Angel as she did so - thinking of devotion. The devotion Woid had glimpsed in the shadows of our shadows and been visited by madness coldest.
“Are you a shaman, too?” She asked through her pain. “How do you far-see into future, with those?”
There spun and towered the observatories, the Glassdom’s of Older-Than. The sacred infiltrated.
∞
Argus sniffed from his passion, clearing his throat. “Once, and I hope to again. There are yet older worlds than these of Courtdom. Before the isle of isles. Imagine them as sights humanity had to see first before this; their final and highest scene. To speak as a shaman might: can one harness flame to help without first knowing how it hurts?”
Serib tried to concentrate, the skin of her palms very slowly peeling as she listened:
“Such is Duality, toiling well or unwell in Entropy, and with our Empathy we decide much. I know this for long have I gazed into the futures possible, past set and present forming, serving always as Attention.”
Serib struggled to keep her own attention, focusing only on parts and asking him:
“You know where I am from… where is your home? Could my Lay’d take you there? Instead of all this pain…”
“Home. In the oldest of those worlds I was a myth and deity attentive where truth was ignored, where little grace or justice and certainly with meaning scarce. I stepped down from the height, becoming human yet still immortal as to protect humanity, and from me they learned to see further than a narrow Now allows. Humanity discovered the future, uncovering me, for through my eyes there was Time.”
“You keep Time safe?”
“I never could have foreseen they would need protecting. What weapon could ever harm them, who would ever wish to? Watching them swim, I was able to watch all things. My defiance against my old world was not a moment I ever foresaw… it was but an instant of The Will, and I knew then I was human, something other-than I had been before. There was a winged spirit of chaos, chance or change in my heart. Others followed or at the same moment too did go, I cannot recall, it was so long ago. Always have I been The Watcher, After and Before my defiance. Even in this disgraceful Now I see what I can, and I see Time wounded! Wounded perhaps mortally. I hope I can help you see your path for what it is, Serib. Your own.”
∞
Woid was keeping his gaze over Serib while he spoke with The Dorns, the three of them unbothered by the downpour.
“What did you see that brought you here?” Serib asked.
“You and the others… your schemes unseen and then - the attempt upon Time’s life, the subsequent attack upon Courtdom; all because of love. Of the right and the wrong things.”
“And hate.” Serib knew. “I hate that all we love shall suffer and die. The best we can hope for in Time... but not in Timelessness.”
“Love, and hate indeed, of the right and the wrong things.” Argus sighed in the glowing warmth of moons and fires, where rains relentless know. “And there you have it, or soon will - there is no one without the other. When I tried to warn High Courtdom what I foresaw from my observatories in Glassdom, it was Lay’d Payn’s plan it seems, that I did so warn. I had stepped into the frame of her long and careful design. Her misalign has been misplaced or reshaped as mine. An enemy has she made of sacred Time in her quest to Escape from Entropy. Entropy increases with Time, and so…”
∞
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Serib wondered why at his sentencing he had named Lay’d Payn as ‘Entropy given form’ or ‘divine walking among us’. Though as burned her hands so too a more desperate sense:
“I can’t watch my master die.” Her jutting tusks shone smooth against the fire of her palms. “Time and Entropy will do that to him, to me and all things… Lay’d Payn showed me. Woid and Shay...”
“She did not show you, your power of far sight is your own; student of history. Your master, Gada’il, searches for you; through this storied tome and others. The Corridoors remain closed to him, his might disguised by the narrator as storms.”
Serib watched the ripped clouds. Thunder again cracked the near things, and lightning long after struck visible the dark places. Her master storming in another dream entranced.
“I know… but I have to keep going.”
∞
“Because you fear the future. Woe it is and woe we are, child of Ehl’yiteth, when humanity no longer knows how to reason with what is to come, and make best of it. When young humanity believes with all its heart as you do, that the best we can hope for is death in the end, that Joy's fleeting carries no weight. We must be happy with our flower buds… happy with Time. Not all of Nature's things are to be conquered by Human Nature. Manifesting, trampling destiny and then making of it a hollow puppet.”
“I fear not just my own… what of when I am a master and I have a disciple? I do not want them to feel this helpless way… when I fade as well.”
“And there you have it, or soon will.” Argus struggled to know where to begin. “And so we are… divided by hope and despair, by love and hate both reckless, both calling one another by each other’s name. You are chasing impossible shores as to see reality changed; the spirit of chaos, chance and change in all of us. The same I felt, and felt compelled to climb down from The Mount. It is for this that you are not evil: the same spirit climbed Truthdom this far, but their depths our vision cannot pierce. You are stronger than you think. You can learn to love transience; humanity long has. There is no greater peace than realising this: Truth is enough for you. Ask yourself about history.”
∞
“I am strong.” Serib held on, keeping bright her flame to warm his shivering, to banish his cold. “How is this different from what Courtdom have done? The spirit of change…”
“Courtdom have conquered Reality, best as it can be conquered. The Truth is what it is, and has ever been our guide through The Divides of Duality. We have never sought to change the fundamental and bring forth what cannot be. This is where you, Lay’d Payn, The Great Freedom and all your others are fanatics: unable to accept what is. Though just as I have told you my beginnings - as you now begin yours and Lay’d Payn her own, who can say where to draw our lines? It is humanity’s way to be dissatisfied; even I stepped down from my primordial height as a myth and deity, even I a traitor once… who was I to question? Who knows what disdain or revere we will inherit by Hindsight weighed. But we must know when to press on and let go, before devotion becomes fanaticism, and we must into discourse with one another… before the human love we set out with… twists. There were other plots before yours, thwarted throughout the ages and pages told, but Time flails now without a tail… for their tail was found severed upon a black-sand beach, black with dry blood. Do you see, what you are doing is different…” He again wept. “Will you help me end this insanity? I tell you all this plainest truth, to dissuade you from your current off-course. Your master searches for you. Your sister fights for you.”
Serib’s own heart broke then for him, he whom would or has in other folds and lines chased her, broken sword in hand. “You need to see what I’ve seen.” She sniffed away her tears. “Or have you?”
“There is nothing to see, your destination is a fantasy, a mad hallucination, or an illusion fluffed up by tricks of borrowed light and stolen shadow.”
Serib could no longer keep alight her flaming palms, grunting away from the fire and snuffing them to smoke. Kneeling there panting in dark mud until her breath was hers again, full of wishes. Wishing that her sister was close, that Fate had not stolen her sister from her into a tale not her own. As a thread pulled to fruition and sewn somewhere else. And here or there and everywhere she tried to put the apart together again.
∞
“You said we must discourse.” The skin on her palms was peeled raw. She struggled over to where the rain still was falling beyond the covering sheets. “I will show you.”
“How long will your hope stay bright?” Argus asked, wrapping the blanket tighter around his wet-through robes of loyalty, seeing her crawl and hold out her hands to cup the rain.
∞
“Can you imagine it with me?” Serib pleaded, one of her steps back to him nearly slipping completely in the mud. Her hands wreathed with healing steam - those tears of her master sent - from the clouds of another story far from here. “Are you not tired, a sleepless Watcher? Do your eyes not ache with the aeons you have kept them open for the good of humanity? Let others Watch and remake it so that things do not need watching over.”
“Are these your words or those of your Lay’d?” Argus sighed. “Yet… no matter their messenger, at any moment I could undoubtedly lay down and sleep…” he chuckled. “…until the old worlds were new again… and still I think, I would not wish to rise. I would there another hour, another day. I doubt you remember those words of Time…”
“You could rest forever, Watcher, on the shores I have seen.” She held his eyeing-helm, tempted to see inside. “And I would watch over you as a gesture only, because there is nothing to fear where we are going. You would be there with my master... with my Woid and Shay...”
“Thank you for trying, sweet child of Elden Ehl’yiteth, those words your own I know, tinged as they be. Are not all our words so tinged...” He gracefully took her hands from his holed-helm. “I would give all Courtdom to make it so, you know? Alas - that I prefer mountains to seasides. I longer than you in your bare age have wondered. Do you think I have not?”
∞
Serib stepped back, listening:
“That I have not dreamt with eyes awake and imagined what could be in the stead of what is? Courtdom is the peak of such questions answered, the greatest civilisation. And still I longer than you in your bare age have wondered… I have stared down those corridors of endless thought never satisfied. I have questioned Life Proliferate. I have put Indifferent Death through the trials of my mind. Why would or should Existence have thrust me here, hmm? Into consciousness without first asking this: should I wish to live in love and pain alike? These doors I tell you - open only onto themselves, headlessly to acidic cynicism the sort that accuses all other than itself.”
Serib listened, kneeling to the mud again. His words were not breaking her but she was swaying, knowing there was no path to those dreamt-shores without much hurt and harm between. Such a fundamental upheaval of all that is to make way for what could be. Argus said:
“I see your Lay’d’s vision is different; it does not slump miserably, casting blame against Suffering and doing nothing about it. Her vision stands and strives absolute, in Alyoshian strength. That is how and why I still hope for you, Serib, and all your fanatics; all your hearts are those of love.”
Argus’ head lifted to his orbiting observatories, where Glassdom was overrun system after system with arachnids.
“When The Truth is your heart and you accept that finite is your Time alive, that is the uncorrupted bliss of ages. Even I immortal know for me there is no Forever, and better shall things have been because of me than without me. That is where leads The Truth that supports and crowns Courtdom; away from your shores.”
Rain sank somehow heavier and Serib could not speak.
“I dread, Serib - what I must do if you continue this path with Lay’d Payn. What you must do.”
∞
The young shaman raw with thought and power wandered her thoughts through her master’s rain. Across flooded gardens and leaking greenhouses. Thinking of him, Gada’il his name, whom the pages of this tale shall not see, kept away by my motions. Deep was the proposed grave of Argus, and Woid, in every shadow as was his way, stood within that wet grave leaning. Sharing his presence and attentions between the grave and The Dorn’s prattle, he listened to all that was said. Staring into the dead face of the broken grandclock - lost in the swirl of its numbers.
∞
Lost without Shay.