Folds converged. Thunder rumbled before its lightning flashed visible - obeying no light nor law, sounding whenever it willed or could. Shay thought the thrashed window in front of her would shatter as crimson hail rained furiously into it. Somehow the glass held strong against such impetuous strength. Violet lightning sporadically illuminated the dark room around her and the flashing bolts resembled spidery legs against fallen skies. A closer thunder startled Shay from whatever depth she was staring into.
‘Serib?’ she wished, unable to discern from the storm's sound alone.
∞
Somehow through the weathered window she could just barely see the rest of the observatories; these structured globes all together and moving as solar systems through the competing tempests of Crimson and Violet, connected by cases of unparalleled stairs that in harshest moments were as pillars supporting the adrift. She was glad to be inside with the dank, the damp and the dark.
∞
She was dizzy from her ‘travels’, throttled back and forth through separate ages. She felt beside or outside herself, as there shone or dimmed dying stars; weird lights shining through the glass. Light being pulled thin and apart into black holes, and labyrinthian sprawled the deep beyond, and therein a Crimson light above all that all were drawn towards. And rainbows becoming spheres, as she smelt old candles going in the dark of her memories. She could see her parents laughing without sound, and wanted to stay by this battered window, until Forever was too old to hold itself together. She saw Serib and Woid sitting for a cozy meal with her parents, Serib a woman-older and stronger. Leaving a steel staff propped by the door.
‘My sister taught me this shamanic phrase: some truths can be taught, others must be on your lonesome learned.’ Amneshay had said.
∞
Shay was shocked out of all this strangeness by a dangerous voice:
“How could Lay’d Payn have found us here?” Gargarensyr snapped from outside the room and Shay crept with a jump towards the near wall out of sight and sound, preparing an improvised set-up from her harness, holding close a vial and keeping her thumb pressed to the cork.
“We are being pulled deeper into the prison…” she listened on and tried to shake the previous 'memories' from her eyes. The kind images. The lands preferred.
The unseen monk received no reply for some while, though heavy feet followed his lighter steps:
“You must regain your patience, brother Gargarensyr.” Shay felt The Ersecutor’s eyes trying to peer through the walls, his voice looking through the holes of his helm.
∞
The shoddier craft of the walls left bricks and other bones of masonry jutting out, allowing Shay to climb if she needed to and hide from lesser eyes in the dark; though Argus’ all-around sight likely would see her up there or anywhere. The room was bare of any furniture or vantage for subterfuge or surprise. She would have to fight them both if they came into this room. Argus spoke again around the corner closer and Shay was relieved to hear they were finally walking further way, quieter their voices and tread:
“We need only wait - the innards of Guar’dezhan have been rearranged as ordained and this will be our opening, on the staircases below.”
“We’ll leap from here?” Gargarensyr proposed. “Or there?”
Shay nudged and nestled forwards an inch or so closer to the door, feeling weird grooves against her fingers on the boards to read:
“Constants the same and variables rearranged.” Here Lay'd Payn had scratched, or there.
∞
“I know we disagreed at the prison, master… but we must kill the girl again in this lineage. Will you heed me as I heed you?" the monk spoke with irony lost. "Control spirals out of our grasp, and we may try again in another version with what we here have learned... their siblingship. It will be easier to manipulate them. We can go further back to learn more about their parents. Alter their education and prevent it all before it starts. Send young Serib away...”
“I bow to your eternal hope but not your consequence; our travelling through the Tayl is twisting you - to Payn’s wish perchance. I have seen too far with Serib’s aid - she is a grounded torch of Truth in this chaos. Shay’s only role is to bring Serib to Lay’d Payn safely, and that Woid is a waste of her ink. Them being sisters a diversion… a shadow… but Serib’s power is more than power. It is Grace and Bravery.”
Shay’s fingers found further cut-words in the skirting, made visible by the storm showing its teeth:
“Doesn’t know about the tea, does he? Being shot by Panzjrah’s laced weaponry… caused it to jam, you’ll see. Or already have seen! Thank you, Amneshay… I feel again greater-than! And so begins or has already finished, the snipping of Fate-sewn sutures.”
The steps halted and Shay feared they somehow had heard her innermost reading.
∞
“Can you not see further than the shaman, master? Why would we need her?”
Argus, still hiding that he could no longer see what was to come, be it here in the seat of his power or elsewhere, replied unable to conceal any longer. Humanity's Attention that long had foreseen could foresee no more, flooded over by Timelessness:
“I confess to you.”
Shay heard Gargarensyr’s robes move and feet stiffen against the floor, as his master concluded:
“What happened to Time has thrown me from my once superior or super position. My eyes are not what once they were. I - no longer The Watcher - could watch no longer, and felt compelled to act.” There was a tense pause. “Rise your chin and hope! All is not yet lost, By Decree, I need your daresay self by my side. You are here, yet having left long ago… after The Gathered Steps.”
∞
Gargarensyr was quiet for a long while, despite his masters’ lighter touch. Until:
“This is truly our last attempt, then? And why lie, master… why stray so far from Truth… how less skewed could our course now be had we been united in might and mind since the start? Is Truth not enough for you…”
The Heir Scholar almost growled again: “Is Truth not enough for you?”
It now was Argus’ moment to reflect under Shame’s weight. The storm thrashed on windows once watched and finally Shay heard him speak:
“I could blame Entropy, tending as things are in that way of Hers, but Truth is my guide, and alas I do not know if not from there of Hers - from where my hesitance arose.” He did not dwell on this for long. “I believe Lay’d Payn’s sight as mine, depended on Time, tethered together as Entropy and Time once were and hopefully, can be again. Effects caused, now without, she peers into the unfathomable murk of Timelessness, and needs a new guide to navigate; for even her sibling Time wavers uncertain by her side. Serib is both lock and key, pivotal not only in the creation of Freedom’s armies, but far grander schemes. She may be the answer to a question Lay’d Payn is too afraid to ask… what are we to do if she is victorious? What is humanity to do with Timeless Freedom? When all bounds are boundless and surface has become depth.”
The plaster wall by Shay’s shoulder creaked with scratches, yet old were the ditch-words filled with dust:
“I have them so clueless, hmm? Throwing out wanton guesses based on desperate assumptions. Oh, that he would know, that he is one such grander scheme unwoven. Their Lady becomes me, helping less and less the sifting and sieving that once with her silk was awe.”
∞
Argus pleaded with Gargarensyr:
“We have lost too much and many in this final loop! This is our last stand, and Serib must be left alive, that we can through her eyes rebuild what has been sundered and surrendered. Her eyes see Beyond, yes - but as well she sees Before what we have lost. Shamans have by trait fine memory, that the poisons of Amneshay cannot cloud, strong against the great confuse of Timelessness. I am forgetting as are you what the past was belike… what Duality is… forgetting what it is to live and die! Trapped as we are in Timeless Rhyme and Why. Lay’d Payn has forgotten all that once was, and once was glorious, was natural and pure in Truth.”
The final message Shay found was large above the storm-lashed windows, visible by lightning’s flash:
“He is closer… pardon me, my Amne.”
∞
Shay continued listening and keeping herself ready, focused away from what she had read; letting Argus' words keep her present: “Serib thinks she can see only into far-futures, but these observatories may help her know and show the deeper pasts she is too young to know, and Conscience may again return from exile to Lay’d Pain. Fate shall find her way back from Freedom, back from the mistake of Entropy ever being conscious. Conscious then having a Conscience, then worst of all having exiled, none at all.”
The latter words grew quietest and Shay wholly unsure of what she had just heard, crept out into the open as to follow them.
∞
She could not find either Gargarensyr or Argus and knew she would have heard had they jumped from here to the staircases below or elsewhere. Alas the epoch was trying to shift with a flutter and a flicker, as the storms Violet and Crimson raged against each other outside. Fate was trying to keep this lineage flowing just as it was threaded, while Payn scrawled that Shay could find Else and Otherwise. Everything was shaking. The icy hail was streaming red.
The rumbles outside settled their continuous colour into quiet, and a lineage or version of things settled stable around Shay - despite what warnings the windows were rattling on. She searched and was soon stood atop sets of nonsense stairs of twisting shape, and heard voices from below. Climbing up unfinished fixtures in the hollow walls and leaping from stiff scaffolds she advanced the stairs above faster and quieter than rushing up them could allow. She tried to quickly find where Argus and Gargarensyr were hiding in ambush, as on the steps below she saw herself, Woid and Serib arrive. Her past self was standing totally unaware by a railing.
∞
Shay had not a moment free to warn them. She looked up through the maze of staircases and there - diving down from those heights undaunted was Gargarensyr in all one motion, his bloody robes all in a spin, while Argus from case to case was bounding, leaping slower with his net in hand. He cast it below as into seas tangling Woid and Serib far, far below. Gargarensyr continued his flowing descent faster than should be, as though a brush up his sleeve with my ink disrupting reality to his will, or truly the monks of Ba’yt Al-almaerif train themselves into state and measure impossible without the wiser knowledge of their libraries by most forsaken in Greed's age.
Shay kept one of her hands free as she stepped into Argus’ falling shadow making herself known and she appeared on one of the higher staircases; an open doorway at the end of them. A plan forming.
∞
Not expecting to land so soon, with his heavy helm Argus crashed unbalanced, swinging wildly his broken blade at her and flailing his head as a second desperate weapon to meet Shay’s lone sword; but Shay was ready - saving the vial that was safely back in her harness for the right moment.
∞
His body twisted weirdly - in a style that would see other combatants soon dead, but him with eyes all around could afford such confusing methods, turning around thrusting his sword passing it from one hand to the other. Having parried his initial savage blows and thrown his balance from him again, Shay threw a small vial to shatter against his helm casting a hot, almost blinding light. Even the countless staircases winced, long comfortable in their damp darkness.
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“Remember that?” Shay taunted and drew her second sword, steel bright as well against the thrashing lightning storms outside.
Argus writhed, swinging at shadows there and not. Shining liquid dripping into the holes through which he saw, and had for aeons seen. A concentrated serum of those mushrooms Shay used against him in the world of tunnels under Imirka, of which Amneshay’s shelves in Woven Fract’ra’lien had much supply. The Old Assassin had needed much of it.
∞
Shay began her own assault, though Argus was by no means helpless even blinded so, the front of his helm glowing. Burning. He could see always behind and to his sides, with backhand techniques he still managed to ward off Shay’s attacks at first - though the serum intensified exposed to air and his breathing inside his helm, and a final umbrastep disoriented him completely. Her swords could not pierce his scars and would break upon his helm, but he was where she wanted him.
∞
He was trying to clear the serum from the front of his helm as he defended himself. Wailing in pain he fell or leapt defensively down the steps; Shay was waiting for him and landed a strong kick to his chest. Rolling or bashed through a warped archway into a dead-end corridor, Argus remained there laying was one stunned, his sword striking nothing as he searched for anything that could clean his helm, disappearing slowly into other Payn-soaked tales - for now. She drank from and discarded another small vial. Deep breath. She was gone.
∞
Shay over the bannister took her chance, seeing Gargarensyr’s shadow below against the lightninged window and she jumped - stepping into the monk’s shadow. As she did so, her ‘past’ self had been kicked out of the fight through a railing - and into another chapter of Loyal Tea already read that awaited her somewhere below. The splinters of a fragile banister were flying as random arrows. Shay joined Woid’s brawling duel against Gargarensyr, for the weighted net had little pinned him, slipping into-and-out of shadows as he was. Serib’s wrists and one of her feet were still trapped in the net. Her lightning eyes tangled somewhere inside the heap.
“Drink this for speed.” Shay offered to Woid when they both had a moment spare having dual-struck at Gargarensyr forcing him to retreat and gather his senses.
“I’ll need it!” He nodded gratefully and snatched the vial from the air.
Argus was already walking slowly down the soft stairs towards Serib, broken sword in hand, his helm rustier though clean.
∞
“You defilers of History…” Gargarensyr fended off Shay’s swords and Woid’s dagger with his quicker palms. “Weaklings of Reality! Falsehood resurgent!” His kick met Shay’s shoulder and threw off much of her momentum. “You are the spawn of Hatred! Choosers of Preferred! I hate what you love! Cowards! Face The Truth! There is life and death, and Time beyond your control! Beyond mine!”
The monk was quicker than Woid even in all his shadows, for at the wrong moment lightning was bright and the darkness our hidden prince needed was wincing against the light. A swift chop from Gargarensyr cracked atop his skull, and kicks followed, striking Woid’s knee, hip and gut, and he fell into a darkness too late. Shay’s focus redoubled! She was at the monk’s back, her poisoned and sharpened swords cutting and slicing with speed equal to his. Replying to one of her thrusts, he clapped his hands to meet her blade, cracking the steel. His next swipe shattered the weapon in half, and again Shay swung her weapons now one short and the other long, for are not the constants the same yet with variables rearranged?
∞
Serib had struggled free from the net, and Argus not rushing at all, held out his free hand calmly yet to implore her loudly over the fight:
“Do not run and risk slipping into one of Fate’s loving designs misguided. So much is over… but you yet have a great part in the greater play than this mere introduction.”
Serib stared agape at him and the nearby duel stopped completely; Shay and Gargarensyr - gladly, such was Gargarensyr’s unmatched might alone against theirs combined! - were breathing against the storm, watching The Ersecutor. Woid - knocked silly but still loyal, stepped into Serib’s shadow and held his dagger shakily against Argus in his backhand style.
“Our Lady… might I here with you?” Argus ignored the prince, speaking to the walls. “At nearest the ending of my things…”
∞
Gargarensyr breathed calmly watching his master, as though without fret from the fight. He beheld unsure - as Argus knelt to the boarded floor with broken sword in hand and dragged heavily his net away from Serib, and after pressed aside the tapestries as carpets lain over, revealing the already Sentenced oak beneath, etched-bloody out in reply to his mythical voice:
“Of course, Argus Ynoptes.” The word of me Lay’d Payn there for all to read.
∞
Serib saw him there kneeling and remembered how he was in the rain, destined for execution. Remembered him beside the fireplace. Though now his sadness was humility aloud:
“Even before I foresaw the attempt on Time’s life and tried to forewarn Courtdom, there was yet another turn kept from me, and only now the recurred occurs to me. How did I not foresee fundamentally, that Fate usurping The Will would end in evil? How did Courtdom High and all allow it, if not for Timelessness already struck, and perhaps our wills already usurped. Is my will again my own, has Fate fallen wholly into decay? Yet you have kept me long chasing the wrong details… for longer than I can now imagine.” He brushed his finger across a dry, barer patch of tapestry. “Chasing Serib, but missing always what Shay was carrying, and now alas too late.”
Gargarensyr stepped back from the unfurling revelations, his back against the cool glass, his fists trembling with the storms, as on My Sentenced planks and boards were quiet:
“Too late, indeed. I have sipped slowly the salve of my salvation. You were convinced, Argus - Timelessly; to be so rapturous of me in one place and memory, is to be so in all of them. Why is not the reverse complete? The tea, dear Watcher, fills what is empty. Your Lady Fate that once was me, hid from you as to usurp the free will of all, just as I hid or tried my part in the murder of Time. I know now that I was mad, to sew souls as threads into their destinies of my dictated design… but…”
“It was because you love us, majesty.” Spoke the tears of Argus as Shay and Woid stayed close to each other in tales larger than themselves, both wishing they could be even nearer to Serib and snatch her from the scene, neither wishing to unsettle what for now was words and calm. "What else would Conscious Entropy do if it could do its upmost? If it awoke from the unconscious and spoke with Humanity, read its actions, how else would Entropy regard Time than as a force to remove from our form?"
∞
“Always my heart is my compass!” The Sentenced wood moaned under churning weight. “…through the long dark Alway’ otherwise unnavigable. I tell you that I am both Pain and Fate, I am Before and After always against itself, I am Will and Conscience, Entropy and Empathy. Conscious after I was found. Oh-how many tomes has it taken to bring forth what was yon… I remember what I have forgotten, I forget what has been remembered. I, Entropy, was at The Lake of Stars with my sibling Duality or was their name then Time... but I could watch no more! The human suffering! The suffering all sourced from endless fonts; the ignorance, the trying and the dying! So Empathy I became having comprehended all the grief of the universe. You and I inspire one another, humanity and divine alike. Not only I could not, I would watch no more Duality tearing together and mending apart when the silks of Hun’gyr could be better woven into Balance. Alas that Entropy always increases with Time, hmm? I mad and forgetful even without my Amneshay helping me remember. And so my tapestries Fateful frayed, built from their beginnings upon foul premise: such as Will enslaved. For then there was no Human evil… none but mine and upon my shoulders comprehended - all the grief of The Universe!”
The Violet lightning sprawled as legs throughout all that was low and high outside, covetous and protecting as arachnids of their eggs. The floor covered in red-read so too the walls sprawled in silent speech bleeding fresh there ancient, tapestries and wallpaper peeling apart as gored - more words underneath:
“What wonder could there have been that Duality would lash back its elasticity, and reply there in our skies: The Great Freedom, come to release me as Fate from my thrones, The Heir returned. For even Entropy myself is susceptible to itself, I am my own adversary. Now I write in ink what can be read instead of thread, a ‘Verse where there was once The Universe, in which Entropy and Duality bear no place. And now I do not force, I show what The Great Freedom has seen, the shores beyond our good and evil. The shores before.”
“I have seen, Our Lady new and next.” Argus was as though before statues or monarchs not there, low his heavy head resting on the Sentenced oak and words, kneeling before Serib. “Through Serib’s furthest sight I have been shown how shines The Truth unchanged… after Despair there be The Mount I once descended, to which I would return and rest. Could I not have served Serib, the next Heir from the start?”
∞
Gargarensyr felt alone and insane with such instant loneliness, reading what words there or here can be seen and listening to his comrade fall. Or Timelessly is it; his comrade always fallen?
“You have been serving me; whether and either of my names, it all the long-planned scheme of seams into inkier dreams. Half you were forced, and the other your own decisions. All of your choices and mine have led to this. The longest of all the last."
"By Decree - my broken sword is Serib’s, not yours. In Bravery or in Fear." Argus stood emboldened. "Your reign that should never have begun has ended." He turned to Brother Gargarensyr, alas too late to calm the rage of his youth returned.
“This is enough, enough!” Gargarensyr frothed. “This is not where goodness dies, in a rotten manor long disgraced!”
At first hesitating, then with fullest spite, he was quick to strike at Argus, the two grabbling and wrestling. Woid though confused tried to help Argus and was soon smote by the monk’s heel and yell, the force of his voice enough:
“Not where hope stumbles its last, never again to rise!”
Shay and Argus were now united against Gargarensyr while weary Serib pleaded they all would stop, and the Sentenced oak scratched no further words. Shay wept beneath her mask, to remember the monk that smiled sharing the history her actions may well destroy. Ashamed that the greatest part of her did not care, and wanted only what she wanted; the same 'upper hand' Amneshay had boasted of. Ashamed not enough to stop. The Ersecutor’s broken blade slashed savagely down Gargarensyr’s back, but he too could not be stopped.
“Never how faith can break irreparable! It is not here! Not now nor across all of History yet to go! I will fight! I will rage for the history of Truth!”
His fist cracked off of Argus’ helmet, rivalling all thunder in sound and though his helm was undented the old gladiator lost his feet from under him. Buckling and falling down. Shay’s poisoned dagger fit deep between the monk’s ribs, and there she forced it, for the eye of Gargarensyr was focused upon Serib and the assassin wept no longer:
“You will leave her.” She threatened the monk as he bled.
“Stop this!” The young shaman’s own lightning gaze was alight, as worlds ended in the contrasting storms outside.
∞
Woid’s shadowy weapon too plunged into the lone monk’s flesh, and both assassins could not for all their shadows withstand the fury of words and fists following through from there:
“Reality is Good above all and damn you all! For every malice there is a mercy… against all tyrants there are fields of sunflowers… holding together distance there is discourse. Hope! Hope remains yet! Where is your Alyoshian strength?”
Their guts he emptied of wind with his spiteful shins, their throats he jabbed with his fists, keeping them breathless and disarmed. Whatever technique it was he had destroyed The Great Freedom’s statue with, he here began a similar finishing motion leaping upward, though an uncontrolled wave of steaming water crashed through from Serib’s hand, for a moment washing him away crashing into the window. Cracking it fragile. A mirror for the lightning to see itself in.
∞
Scalded and stabbed, yet he went sprinting now for the little shaman. Argus waded with a roll and a swing between Gargarensyr and Serib. His broken sword blocked by the monk’s hardened palm:
“Tell me, master! Where hangs your truth feeble against my Truth, but in the gallows? Damn you to what darkness there is deeper, deeper than my own now swirls! The deep of this labyrinthian prison is too shallow for you! I will chain you to The Great Freedom Heirself, where Hadaeon swirls molten and still you shall be in too high a place!”
Argus’ bones could be heard breaking as they fought and enraged punches landed with precision impossible. One arm in particular was visibly dislodged against the relentlessness of Gargarensyr. An elbow swollen almost immediately.
∞
And all watched The Watcher defending Serib, as Gargarensyr’s final technique was given room enough to fulfil. Up he leapt spinning again with speed known only in forsaken scrolls, and coming down with all the might of being betrayed his fist, tore as a berg into the hull that was Argus’ impenetrable helm. Mountains have crumbled to lesser forces. The sound was a thedral’s thunderous bell. The sound was of endings and beginnings both. What once was domed round now was cratered and cleaved and The Ersecutor fell as a mountain bombed to Sentenced floorboards, to bloody tapestries where word more than scene was all. Serib remembered now - how the old gladiator sat by the dark fireplace, in chapters gone to these. With a helm she knew was strange in moonlight.
∞
His observatories spun as a solar system through conflicting storms as he once their lord. As a planet struck by a meteorite and struggling still in orbit, Argus arose in pieces still with net and sword, and Gargarensyr did not believe. His doubt allowed him to be wrapped in an instant by The Ersecutor’s dragging net, and the final struggle waned between them, and with what weight Argus still could bear he threw himself entangled too in the net with Gargarensyr into the hailed windows,
glass sparkled -
and down they were!
into tempestuous abyss.
The storm louder through the broken window. And all Serib could see past shattered glass and rain soaking in was the fireplace in chapters of Never Again. She ran to muster Shay and Woid together from their beatings, and our three in their huddle escaped up the ever-helixing stairs of dimensions incarnadine.