Whittled poise. Teacups were used as containers for the ink that poured and poured. Jars of once-fruit were emptied of whatever living mold had grown inside over the ages, and plunged into - filled - with blood of The Chiming One, perhaps the last clock ever to tock and tick, leaning now faceless and aside. Argus took his broken sword against the walls, grunting at the wounded architecture to pull out solid reams of scrapped paper and parchment. Rifling through, he and Gargarensyr found my notes already written upon, or fresh parchments crumpled into…

“…into crinkled meteorites, like this.” The monk read aloud on one and reeled back trying to wipe the horror from his face, searching for what eyes had been upon them watching all this while.

“Try not to waver - you will find no physical eyes as mine." Argus reassured him. “You will un-fathom yourself into knots trying to understand her; Conscious Entropy... how could she possibly be understood? An echo or ghost from Falsehood's grave, the ages Humanity wasted.”

∞

Once Gargarensyr was calmer and the work flowed in repetition, filling teacups and jars he asked:

“I could count the aeons you were gone, master… sweet clear numbers I can no longer imagine, now the grandclock being fully dead. Oh, what sense there was! In things simple as Waiting. The dance of This and That across days sending their light into night and studious stars… Guar’dezhan…” he read, stacking parchment and fabric into ready piles meditating on his ponders until he further shared:

“Strange were my dreams when you were absent. Awake, I better understand the toing’s and froing’s I saw. Guar’dezhan was faithful still to Fate and Time despite the executions and extinctions that had come for its kind… dreaming with them was without seam, flawless from one to another. They were not always grandclocks… the clocks were their shells human-found or given… orphaned from their greater homes.”

Argus paused his preparations to listen more carefully.

∞

“All we monks rested after our bloody skirmishes with the Were’s, and Doubt I suppose, did the rest. I may have even spoken in some impossible way to Guar’dezhan… we all refused to believe what has happened, Guar’dezhan included - faith kept us in delirium or delusion and the grandclock wrapped us as well dreaming with them - of every hope alive.” He threw a scrap of paper to the floor, insulted by the words and aloud he read:

“…sipping strong teas…” he hissed.

The Ersecutor finished what had begun:

“Guar’dezhan shrouded you, I believe, hoping or knowing that we are the menders of desperate, wounded Time. Faith that what was crooked would eventually, inevitably, lengthen out into linearity. We are the lovers of History, despite all it is. Hiding you, wounded by The Black Terror's invasion of this prison, from Shay, Serib and Woid.”

“Could Fate’s own thread perhaps have played a part in our meeting with The Chiming One?” Gargarensyr asked.

∞

Argus did not answer immediately. “When you are rested and ready, let us both make the mistakes of Lay’d Payn be our machinations… the ink of that grandclock is hers or bears similar reach, and can be used as though it were her own hand upon her own pages.”

“Redacting our way.” Gargarensyr studied the lapping ink that made dark oceans even in small cups. “It is as though we were sat at the loom of Fate, herself? Deciding our own designs in tome rather than tapestry? Warping and wefting outcomes…beginnings into endings.” he began to doubt, his wisdom halting that he reach too far into such unrendered things.

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“Very much so.” Argus agreed. “First we shall read all that has been written and then with this ink we may alter Lay’d Payn’s Tayl as we befit and appear as needed throughout her pages to our own ends, unsettling the motions she seeks to set in motion, intercepting the pieces she moves in her games. You and I being among such unfortunate pieces, no longer; such usurpation of our Will!”

Is your Lady Fate not exactly that, the usurper of The Will? They miss my taunting papers.

∞

“Have we not already been doing so, before my dreaming here…” Gargarensyr felt his leg, trying to find where Shay had temporarily paralyzed it with a blade-coating poison, and other such tells. There was no sign on his skin of any such encounter, only his memory. “We ambushed them in the factory?”

“You must remember, when you can…” The Ersecutor began. “Time is no longer linear, and you cannot waste your energies searching for such sequences as those we once knew. Lay’d Payn designs and dictates that we be trapped in such loops, making old fashion of once common senses. Time once was such flatter circles, it now is a rolling, punctured sphere to navigate; our memories and moments are as motes not traveling along the linear of a circle, but drifting inside - as marine snow. Inside the punctured sphere to recur. Outside, lost forever. The flakes of Now falling next to those of what has and will be - could be.” He held up a piece of my parchment. “This paper helps to flatten what is bloating.”

Now they are learning.

∞

“Is this not better left to the hand of our Lady - who are we to play her part? Could we deliver this ink to her, carcass, paper and all to her cities Frac’tralien? And Fate she shall become again?”

“Lay’d Payn allows the eggs of Doubt in us all, disguised as the ancient wisdom she has perverted and contorted to her ends.” Argus then shared reluctantly. “Our Lady Fate is losing the duel against her Payn, brother Gargarensyr. There must always be a Lay’d Pain… even the perfect, balanced designs of Fate could not remove such integral thread as Red. Always a reply. Humanity comes from the knowledge of pain. Just as The Great Freedom attempts to cut out her Conscience in tales you may never see, Fate herself tried to unimagine Pain, to create a ‘Verse without. All this our Lady has said to me… and now there are two, Lay’d and Lady where once there was only one. A divide worsened by Time’s disappearance.” He waded back to the entrance whence and returned with the clean robes for the monk. “The duel of Fate and Pain all around us, internecine.”

“Her own blessed threads…” the monk felt chosen, the loyal robes tailored especially for him.

∞

As though having waited unseen, other monks arrived to then carry the robes until Gargarensyr was cleaned with the waters they too brought. “You have seen Our Lady? How else could you carry such garb as this.” his eye was elevated, and the carried rage of his shoulders was replaced by a hope that carried him. “Unless you visited the woven spires of Fractra’lien?”

The monks moved into concise preparations. Chanting. Gathering soaked papers. Sweeping the excess tides of inky blood into drains.

∞

“She is not well at all; this duel too great a crown.” Argus sighed, his helmed head was bowed. “She says we cannot fight this for her and I agree, but we must help in every way, I say. Pride is something our Lady clings to, that Lay’d Payn long cast apart from her heart. Prepare to write, scholars.”

And all including Gargarensyr took long brushes from their sleeves as Argus took his moment to sit upon the swept floor, streaked with dead mess. His eyes The Watcher over all:

“Doubtless she will feel our presence upon her ages and their pages if she has not already foreseen it - schemed for it - already waiting with her Amneshay's traps - doubtless she will fight back in kind and topple us spiralling through discordant destinies, designed and decided. Though we must go! Into sewers they think are hidden, stations bustling or desolate, to my observatories in all their varied forms the ages being museums, factories or shrines. These, faithful!”

He held aloft his free hand covered in inky or bloody fluid, in parts coagulating thick as older scabs black as the cold stars will know or redder and dripping fresh down his old scars.

“…shall be our designs.”