Observed rain. Serib's fingers soon began to bleed and slip against the sharp stone as she grabbed herself higher and higher towards the sunlight. Woid stepped into her shadow as the room fell into insufferable noise at their commotion and grew tinier with height. He grabbed Serib, slipping through shade to the darker part of the pillar, holding onto the edge of it where a metal ring was dug, likely for the hooking of chains.
“Go on, then.” He tried to throw her upwards. “We’ve both had a cake too many.” His hand strained to hold both their weight.
∞
“It’s too far…” Serib whined, glaring at the stone and soon a length reached out from it, a rocky branch, an arch or an arm for her to grab, a place for her feet to jump from.
“A shaman thing.” She smiled at Woid hanging easier now, as she jumped up to the ledge from the rocky growth. Before she could peer back over it to help Woid up, he had used her shadow.
“Ah.” He sighed relieved, brushing himself off beside her.
Now they were on top of the rising judgement platform, watched by Argus not far away.
∞
“We meet again.” Woid called over to Argus, as the rising platform left the hole in the ceiling behind. “Sort of…”
The Watcher’s body was not facing them, but all-around him was his sight. They rose now not into sunlight but moonlight somehow, as shone his helm blue and round against the night, and all the land was lamps and torches flickering - a sea of nightly flames. Of human stars again.
“I cannot claim to know you.” He replied blankly to the flashily dressed assassin. “Are you here to mock me?” he pointed at Serib. “You should listen to your young compatriot, Serib! If I am freed I shall hunt you - I shall have to!”
"Young?" Woid raised an eyebrow.
Argus looked meekly at his own scholarly stature, as though wondering how he would do such violent things in his future, thinking his framing by me had made him entirely alone. Woid unsheathed his dagger from shadows, wielding it in his backhand style. Ready to murder before the younger could become the older, if it works like that at all. The sky bright with moonlight, glowing over hard clouds. Serib was about to stop him as cloud-waves crashed against the judgement pillar, throwing Serib to the ground though Woid kept his footing. When Serib had her senses about her again, she saw nearby an island crowned with ‘scopes and glass. The wind bearing Ocean's sounds.
∞
“No…” Argus fell to a knee unable to keep his balance, blinking through different worries. “How did sunlight vanish into moons as we passed? So instantly… has Time already been assailed? Moments of Time as motes of dust or smaller grains, thrown into abandoned jumbles, experienced by us in whichever way… it is or is it? As I have seen, as I have read…?”
Serib could hear the windy oceans or watery gales surging. Ice sparkling in moonlight was frothing closer as another cloud-wave hushed over, bringing with it a relentless chill. She snatched Woid’s arm and the two tumbled together as though submerged, by raging seas through the clouds. She cast her untrained water - boiling a shield against the overwhelming ice. Scalding herself as much.
∞
Darkness took them both for a while. Into stillness. Serib was wakened eventually, grimacing against heavy rain hammering drips onto her face. Cleansing her burns. She felt vulnerable - shone upon by a spotlight of the moon. Oval stars were blinking. Around her a garden was blown rustling in the wet winds. Above, yet higher clouds of Black and quiet smoke dwindled. The pillar or platform of judgement was far in the distance now, laying limp and crumbled across the earth, having collapsed into whatever building of Justice it had grown out of. In lost (p)ages. Serib was with Woid atop the island crowned with ‘scopes and glass that had been drifting closer through the ice a chapter or page before. He grunted awake and she could not see Argus anywhere.
∞
With regathered wits they explored every structure around them. Each building was glass or covered with it, reflecting countless soaked moons.
“Not an oval like the stars, are you?” Serib already soaked, asked the moon.
She held her hands up to the rain and the cuts in her hands were sewn shut or washed away.
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"Thank you, master Gadail. I'm sorry..."
Strangely, thunder crashed first - and lightning flashed violently afterwards.
∞
“That’s not right…” Woid remarked at the sound, slipping into shadows ahead and Serib rushed after him. “Stay close… I’m not so sure what’s happening.” Her own shadow spoke to her with his voice.
They found cover behind mossy old stones of an older building, fallen under its almost-ceiling. Ahead of them was a glass tower of countless portals magnifying the spidery, unblinking eyes-inside, orbiting yet another larger tower of unknown telescopes that too was full of blinking eyes older, itself orbiting around a yet bigger mass, covered and covered with Watch. They all winced however looking at Serib, these star-large observatories. Prehistoric monoliths of stone too drifted yet more gargantuanly in the centre of all smooth-obscure of definition, and beyond this obscurity none could further see. Woid put his arms around Serib as she hugged herself shivering in the oppressive, indifferent rain.
∞
Down a hill through the gardens, Argus Ynoptes was kneeling skinny, awaiting execution by a grave already dug, half full of rain. Large machines hung either side of him, being now detached from his helmet (perhaps designed to remove it), and The Dorn Twins stood ahead with pistols in hand. Blood joined the streaming rain for dead monks and armoured guards littered the dripping and bowing grass. Argus stood weakly, being no longer hindered by the machines.
“I think…” Woid struggled through his own shivers. “The helmet keeps him alive. In death matches his foes would always try to pry it off him.”
“That’s how they were going to execute him here?”
“Looks like.”
“Don’t we know them?” Serib eyed up The Dorn Twins.
“I’m not on such good terms with them.”
“But this is earlier than that - Argus didn’t recognise you. Maybe - you didn’t upset them yet?”
“Hmm…” Woid nearly agreed.
Serib was about to rush off into the rain towards them, when she felt the strangeness of umbrastepping for only a moment - where the rain could not touch them. Where only shadows reign.
“Hush and pretend.” She heard Woid say as he took the lead. Her shadow with his own.
∞
The Dorn Twins’ pistols were smoking as they holstered them, walking close and encircling vulnerable Argus:
“We have a client…” they were both sopping,
“A business partner…” dripping from chin and nose.
“An associate… that can sort you out of this messiness.”
∞
A small glint from another hill nearby caught Serib’s eye. After the lightning.
“Is something up there?” she whispered to Woid, trying not to be heard.
“Panzjrah, probably, staring down his rifle at us. Don’t stress, I’ve waved at him our secret friendship sign.” He mouthed very deliberately for Panzjrah to lip-read. “I can just hear him now having a grumble, ha!”
∞
“Do you know who you are set to deal with?” Argus crawled his eyes over the souls around him.
Water poured out of his lowest eye-holes. Vilifrado replied, pointlessly fussing with a cloth over his spectacles in the rain:
“You’re Argus Ynoptes. I know with every certainty.”
Vinoillo had spotted Woid with Serib, pressing his palm towards them as to wait. A masked servant brought a tray loaded with nice drinks, offering them to Vinoillo, the glasses swilling mostly with rain. He downed a drink. Argus stared:
“No… your associate ‘Greed’… you think to know their ambitions as mirroring your own. They are the ultimate end of your Distribution Theory, Vilifrado, if left unchecked or challenged, overwhelming even your understanding of your own discovery. Their supremacy is tied directly with Lay’d Payn’s schemes.”
Vilifrado refuted:
“Such is Entropy, there will always be a check and a challenge, a change as due to chance. Not to worry about us; Niche is where we’re from. And what you’ve ‘seen’ has been thoroughly investigated, and been found lacking in Truth. You should really worry more about you… as Falsehood you fail to revive. You’re aware of our associate taking over our arenas?”
∞
“A fine sale it was; a shame about their follow-through.” Vinoillo finished another drink. “Hurry along, aren’t you chilly?” He moaned with care at his servant, as they pattered off through the squelch.
“Indeed, but Change: it is as it is.” Vilifrado paced in the new mud. “They would appreciate your participation in such matches. To the death.” He leaned in. “Watching one of High Courtdom thrash about… with Need conquered, to be entertained has become an utmost, and Greed the next Heir of Heirarchy. A humanity without Need, their entertainment knows only the unrelenting creep of novelty.”
Glowing moss was tuft from the breast pockets of Vinoillo and Vilifrado, where flowers once bloomed. Argus stayed a while quiet, watching all drips begin in the clouds and splash their endings around him; rhose drops their cyclic lives he had observed over again:
“If you are able to release me, return me at once to my observatories there, that I might into my telescopes and regain watch over Courtdom. With my steer, your influence could yet reverse what is coming undone. I can only in nightmares fathom what Lay’d Payn is doing in my absence with her newly woven control. What you seek is good now; it does not remain good.”
Serib looked down to the grass as though ashamed.