Atrocious crime. “Master!” Gargarensyr was disrupted from his meditation, his clean robes gleaming in glorious sunlight from the Atearium’s glass ceiling above. His first breath after was the smell of aromatic tea. Other monks were lounging with chatter, sipping such strong teas and spitting out into their cups the seeds of sweet fruits, saving them for planting in the garden.
∞
Monstrous Argus waded into The Atearium, sweat shaking off him with every wide step; pages could be heard rustling behind him. Even his net-cape was dripping as he set aside some clean and folded robes on a gentle chair.
“Fate be praised, I daresay!” The monk and prison warden Heir Scholar Gargarensyr bowed his head, and soon stood to even more gleefully greet his master. “It has been eight… no, a many more than that! Where have you been, what have you… your…” he stammered. “Your body… who has done this to you?” he wore a sudden rage upon his shoulders.
Whatever version this was of the young cyclops, he had not yet seen (or had been made to wholly forget) the version of his master that had been forced a slave into Greed’s arenas; walking without loyal robes. The Ersecutor was facing Gargarensyr, surrounded by reactively defensive Heir Scholar-fellows, but he referenced the still ticking and chiming grandclock to the side, standing tall between potted plants. Almost hidden. Some monks were worshipping every chime-rhyme it made. Feeling himself tempted to bow before it, Argus wavered:
“What gorgeous farses…” his unseen eyes pressed across the room, “…alas so far from Truth.” before leaping at Tall Guar’dezhan, broken sword in hand he yelled: “Begone, faithful or traitorous construct!”
∞
Guar’dezhan, The Chiming One, present throughout all the Tayl in places, was victim to Argus’ weighted net. The oak of their grandclock head smacking into the solid wall. Too-many limbs unrolled and flung forth.
“Acephalous!” The Ersecutor plunged his blade unto the wood, limbs smacking against his helm and trying to slither and suckle inside.
“A Will Internecine!” Whatever ancient limbs slapped and slithered immediately out from the grandclock, they all were pinned and straining, soon unable to fight back as Argus severed and gutted the inky mechanisms inside that now-somehow were living. Ink spurted as blood, the tall thing flailing and slapping on the spilling pool, each movement with less vigour.
∞
The monks gnashed madly at him, kicking and punching into The Ersecutor’s thick scars.
“Dire as things may be…” Argus growled almost with jealousy as the room shimmered, reverting and changing. As it did so, the monks were unveiled to themselves.
“…this beautiful farse is not preferred in the face of a bleaker Truth.” Speaking perhaps and likely to Gargarensyr, or maybe even to the scattered wood he had destroyed.
Heir Scholar Gargarensyr tried to gather his monk-fellows and calm them. Mouldy air fumed from the sprawling growths across long-soaked wallpaper. Teacups waited broken or intact, all curves or craters filled by dust and smallest trees grown from the spat-seeds there, growing around candles as stakes. He and the other monks had been living-warped in an illusion.
∞
The scattered wood of Guar’dezhan spoke back to Argus not aloud, but with my written scratches:
“Envious, aren’t you…” read with taunts a splintered plank of Guar’dezhan, floating by. “…that this Once-Thing can at least sleep, praise to your broken blade.”
Argus stood breathing calmly despite his athletic effort, reading the scattered planks of strangest wood all around him. His eyes everywhere:
“You can yourself rest… be no more this Ersecutor. I know I wrote such destinies for you, but you have more than played your part. Would you have been so convincing had your reward been so clear from that start? How overwhelming - can Truth be all at once believed, or in parts eventually and inevitably…”
As he read, Argus heard a shoreline crashing gently down a distant Corridoor. It breathed along with him where mountain air was lord, and with each breath he felt less severed from it by distance or aeon, from the place that once was home long before his mythic height was old.
“How long have you Watched?” Lay’d Payn’s my scratches too were tempting him, just as had been the tendency to kneel before Guar’dezhan. Just as the other loom-room not far from here with all its promises.
“And have you not - in all your aeons - wished to close all your every-eyes? It only makes greater your sacrifice, Argus Ynoptes, that you could have closed your eyes and have not. It is not revenge that strives you, no, but a greatest good beyond us all. Go to those shores down the Corridoor there, would you? Find after them The Mount you left behind. See that I am true, that Time is dead, and there awaits us a reality without Duality, and thus without Suffering.”
“Without Pain.” Argus spoke, stepping onto one of the planks, that perhaps the narrator might feel his weight. Ink oozed squelching out of it. A puddle forming throughout the room.
∞
Gargarensyr was still coming to his separated senses, bringing together again his one centre.
“Indeed, without Entropy.” Scratched the wood underneath Argus. “Was it not in your birthplace where it was spoken, of trees being planted by those older-than, who will never see their shade?”
He scowled aloud:
“No. You pervert ancient wisdom to profane heights, placing it rotten on absurd scales. You hope to sway me, that I will not use this ink your own to our favour?” Argus paused. “You once were Lay’d of all things, Entropy. You have grown into a sickness - Empathy without bound - and with every respect we shall treat this battle… you shall be well again and lead again, for you are The Heirarchy. You are becoming all you have forgotten…”
And the wooden walls too were sore with scratches, climbing into glassy ceilings he read me:
“Of course would Freedom rise in reply against tyrannical Fate. Yes, that once I was Fate… flitting! When The Sifting could divine no more accurately than flipping a coin. Flitting between ultra and infra. And you for all your eyes do not see where that depth of cynicism has led humanity, for cynicism accuses all things other than itself. It weighs and measures leaving only itself unobserved. What Will is left for humanity in Greed's age? Time is dead for I have killed them! Fate trembles! And The Great Freedom Heirself has returned! Chained yet deeper in this Prison soon to be unshackled.”
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“By you?” Argus asked and yet refused. There were no more messages in room or wood for The Ersecutor, search as he did. Only madness-mine written down.
∞
Gargarensyr meanwhile saw Shay, Serib and Woid rushing around a distant corner down a twisted, gravity-gnawed Corridoor, leaving behind them the dead creatures of sagging faces that once were monks. Across acid-charred oakenstone. Poisoned by a laid trap, with little chance to defend themselves. He recognised the robes and beads; those the same souls that he had dwelled here with in the Atearium, sipping strong teas and enjoying sweetest fruits.
∞
Alone with his master Gargarensyr sat stupefied in the mouldy Atearium, the supposed jailor of this place by trap and illusion fooled. Guar’dezhan’s promises had peeled away:
“My master… The Were’s invaded!” his robes now were splattered with blood and else, torn open by Were-claws. His knuckles were blistered, and fingers stiff.
Patchy fur and broken fangs lay about him, leading to lupine skeletons still clinging to their musty, crumbling robes. The frost-and-flame wielding wizards of Everwere. The ink puddled out from shattered Guar’dezhan staining the long dead. Ink carrying wordy driftwood.
“I was wounded by The Black Terror… though through light I escaped… I rested here unable to go on, resting my mortal wounds.” Sweat rained onto Gargarensyr’s lips and off his chin, spraying as he spoke. A mouldy scent was shouldering into his nose.
∞
“And a mirage grew around you, my friend.” Argus helped Gargarensyr to his feet and embraced him with one arm, the other holding his broken sword.
“The Were’s are here… or will be…” Gargarensyr scowled at the skeletons. “How were we not warned?” the anger across his shoulders throttled him away from his centre of sense and self. He grabbed something, anything, was it a skull or a chair, crushing it as he frothed. "How could they be inside this impenetrable ultrastructure without our knowing? Always something!” he cursed Lay’d Payn.
“Regain yourself!” Argus towered over the moment. “Regain or be doomed as a piece in her scheme. What happened to Time - whatever it exactly was - has unleashed Lay’d Payn’s true power… there is nothing to keep her as Entropy in check. The Weretree was likely always in The Labyrinth, having dwelled and drifted long enough that a collision was inevitable. I did not know of her dealings with Alina until too late… when I saw Shay’s false arm.”
The scholar did not know who that was. Argus breathed gently until he could no longer hear the Corridoor crashing with ocean waves his sleeping name, and mountain air of home begone, resisting temptation to be drawn unto. He knelt down to Gargarensyr, whom was driving his fist into the damp soft floor shivering and then clutching at his chest.
∞
“Though you are now the leader of your monkhood, you are not alone at such heights, brother Gargarensyr.”
Gargarensyr raged, scrapping against things not there, his jaw in knots.
“I know not if this you feel is Terror’s doing, or your own, but imagine with me: fighting not alone in this, but with all the many ages of yourself aligned, united against your enemies. See through my eyes. See all you have ever done for yourself to arrive here and will yet do for yourself.”
Gargarensyr regained control and reigned in his breathing, alas his darting eye was unable to focus as his master spoke on:
“Imagine your young self on The Gathered Steps. Be you there walking up them daresay, showing travellers all that has been, or leading down them courageous the charge against Heir. Remember that even younger lad arriving at the temple's steps. Do you not deserve your own greatest effort here, having been victorious against Heir Boiled Angels? What sweet or bitter better else have you to give than your greatest effort? With this one chance that we all are given…”
The struggling monk stared now at his fallen brethren in the twisted Corridoor, at their strange faces sagging not with age but from stretch and strain, from the eating of spines. He tried to remember what depths of fanaticism had taken them so into such transformations. Destroying fables or histories fake or real.
“Imagine The Great Spine Eater you are destined to become. How can you to such height of faith and hope, if you do not rise from this inky floor with sense aligned?”
∞
Gargarensyr sat then in the blackest ink or reddest blood as it sought to make a pool of the room, pouring from tall and fallen Guar’dezhan. He drove no more his fist with rage into the floor. Argus said to him:
“Lay’d Payn wants you to wallow in illusions. We are erased off of and brushed away from her ages that are as pages… having been used and spat out of her Timeless Tayl; but the ink spilling… is our way back upon such pages, where our fight can continue.”
From Gargarensyr’s eye went almost dry tears and finally he rose from the pit, drenched in sweaty blood.
∞
“What is this grandclock, master?” his voice raspy from a now passed rage, Gargarensyr rummaged his foot through the inky wreckage. “It kept me and my fellows drifting in illusions?”
“There once were many of these camouflaging species.” Argus explained. “I understand them to be leftover devices of Lay’d Payn’s scheming plots. And even then repurposed from an older rhyme. We - here - are in her final escape plan. These grandclocks remain from her penultimate plot that has already run its course, a lineage of events you and I have already lost. With each of our victories and her losses, it seems, we have inched always towards the places she needed us in, no matter the sacrifice she or we offered in each, regardless of how clear our triumph be. These grandclocks were vital to her in some bygone Before, tying together distant locations - different successes - into one, these Tall measurers no longer of Time but Space alone. I have been navigating the labyrinth best I can for a long while, following treads, threads and rumours hoping that one escaped their extinction. This one, Guar’dezhan.”
Heir Scholar Gargarensyr nodded:
“A measurer of Time but with Time uncertain it measured Space instead… I have never heard of such - is this not a holy creature to us? Surely?”
“Yes… though as it kept you wrapped in a gorgeous farse it too would have me had I not destroyed it. I tried before - from my perspective - to reason with them, Guar’dezhan The Chiming One. Alas. Alive it was of an endling's sadness, but dead the carcass can still be used to our advantage.”
“Escaped their extinction.” Gargarensyr searched his mind. “The grandclocks are a creed of somesort? A conscious race.” he could feel fragile pages between his fingers and smell the dust of forgotten shelf-rooms back at the library of Ba’yt Al-almaerif.
∞
Argus’ eyes searched everything as he spoke on:
“A most elden kind, almost old as Lay’d Payn in age; she is perhaps their progenitor. A penchant of hers: to betray her own and sacrifice anything, seeing only a Greater Good impossible and incomprehensible, capable of justifying everything she does.”
Gargarensyr nodded, knowing well such patterns recurred. He listened to his master:
“The grandclocks were herded and culled when at last Lay’d Payn could hide no longer that she orchestrated the assassination attempt against Time, and my removal from The Observatories was set into almost tidal motion. The remaining grandclocks withered - no longer connected to Time. Or Shadows such as Amneshay found them. I cannot account for the presence or survival of this one; and though her words are upon it… within it...”
“Lay’d Payn lost control of this being, this device.” Gargarensyr interrupted. “The words are her attempt to salvage what damage Guar’dezhan could wreak, when unleashed. Or that we could wreak, with their inky and oaken remains?”
“Heir Scholar, indeed!” Argus agreed.
He still hoped Gargarensyr’s daresay-self would return, alas all he saw was a controlled hatred across the monk’s dense frame, all concentrated in his lone eye.
Solemnly, the two set about their task.