Our My Lay’d. Shay had exited the tent and was slipping: that was all she knew as she fell almost to the ground. Everything was leaning to the side and she saw no skies but a ceiling large as skies, and the landscape ahead was cratered wood. They were all tiny again atop Guar’dezhan, The Chiming One - though the clock was not upright - it had since crashed into the laboratory wall. Shay grabbed Serib and fell hard tumbling, trying to keep the little shaman from each bang and bump.
“You’ve only just been seen and tended to!” she muttered.
Somewhere in the spinning she caught Woid’s hand and was pulled up to a slanted safety.
∞
“Back again…” Woid grumbled, nodding up to the dead skin cell house they had entered previously.
They could hear paper being scratched at and pages flipping turned. Guar’dezhan had keeled over into a wall and there it lay dreaming, thus the oaken world atop their head was no more a level plane. Our three crept along its collapse with one another’s support.
After managing by a splintered cliff, gored so that even the rotten wall was open to the expose of empty pipes, they emerged into cool moonlight, and there in the way of such moonlight was a seated figure in the world-room below, a Crimson-gowned titan in a wheelchair. Her face shrouded from view by scabby cloth. The laboratory around her in fallen state.
∞
I was there to greet them quietly lest my voice blow them away, tiny as they were. At the end of - what was to them the world - what was to me the edge of a broken grandclock leaning - I had wedged the end of an old broom handle. The splintered tip of it was dusted with some powder or another Amenshay showed me the tricks of, and in other smallest particles of its oak I had left a message:
“I shall still refrain from speaking until you are a little larger. Inhale the dusty stuff you see and climb down the handle when it looks less mountainous.”
I watched them as I long have, helping one another with the task I had set them and oh! How they grew with each step! When they were big as mice they grew no more.
∞
“Oh! Good!” I shuddered aloud at last, seeing it all together nicely, my voice a boom to their little ears though not deafening. “Not good, best! Oh, best it is as could be! We can natter into schemes with victory's rejoice.”
Shay, Woid and Serib balanced with kilter on one side of the broom handle and teeter on the other, soon coming to rest in my outstretched palm, as there I sat narrow-shouldered in my giant wheelchair.
“Lay’d Payn!” Serib had shouted, nearly breaking the broom with her excitement as she leapt.
“Oh dearest shammy! I know I sent you off into such dangers, but glad I am of your safe return - and you have released dearest Amneshay from Fate’s tapestries and webs. As I promised, hmm? You have helped her remember what is dear. Not seeing many spiders now, are you?”
Shay and Serib smelt not only lavender but rose as well, and found themselves reminded of The Crimson Keep they both had visited. Shay when she was younger and Serib will when she is older. Remembering now for The Tayl is Timeless, and so - let it be told in a Timeless Way.
∞
Woid looked up at Lay’d Payn, feeling mere and uncounted in her bony palm, feeling that observatories could crash and be lost forever in her mountainous range such was her size through shrunken. And he little feared things, but her he feared, that her chair was huge in compare, that perhaps once she had been mightier. And he, a piece for her to move around.
“Flattering thoughts shall little avail you, once-Prince.”
He shivered in the moonlight, struggling to find footing or shadow atop the wrinkles and folds of skin.
“To my cell it is, then!” Lay’d Payn announced, battling with her wheelchair, using this arm and the other, madly transferring our three to each hand to free up another as though bereft of any sense not insane.
“We could rest on the arms, if we are too small to help?” Shay offered practically, keeping her other thoughts hidden.
“Right you are!” with a heaving hoist using both hands, letting them walk from palm to arm, Lay’d Payn waited patiently for those little legs as we all have when helping ferry a bug to safety.
The strength of Payn was waning already and Shay had to umbra-step the rest of the way into Serib's smaller shadow, as Payn’s hand fell drained to her lap. Under her mask, Shay’s expression was dark with thought, watching her Lay’d struggle. She said:
“I could-should help you if I were larger. I have seen I will. I already have.”
“Oof! Withering away in this chair…” Lay’d Payn rambled to herself. “…what’s to be done… here’s and there’s to be undone… lots and lots of it.”
Our three tried to dust themselves with more of the powder before the broom clanged to the floor, no longer propped there by the wheelchair. Alas there seemed a limit to its power, and they all had the sense of being their normal size. Mere sentences in length.
∞
After an aeons’ rest Lay’d Payn reversed barely out of the room into The Corridoor, lit by a sunsetting window, while our three sat on tallied chair-arms. Leaving the moonlight behind. Boiled Angels patrolled the skies outside, their stone wings dragging and grating the air. The floor was awfully uneven, for tattered rolls of fabric had been dropped there.
“And that’s all old Fate can manage now, heh! A spot of littering… I apologise there is no victorious welcome as the tome draws its closing; though there will be rest. And that’s all any of us want at this point, hmm? Before the stints to come. Far longer than one lone life, this Timelessness.”
“Was it like this, when you were last here?” Shay asked Serib, stunned by what ahead was clear.
“It was worse before.”
“Don’t be daft… really?” Woid paused, getting used to talking without his fake teeth in the way, though a gem or two more for his real teeth he’d acquired since.
There ahead were fleshy notes nailed by scratches to the walls. The closer they rolled to Lay’d Payn’s cell at corridoor’s-end, the more skin-scored notes there were, overlapping one another, some clear and others less than so. I will not translate them all, because you’re still reading, hmm? There fading in Frac’tral’ien, hoping to spin it all around, but your threads are soaked in my ink.
∞
‘Don’t come out here - you’ll get lost! Wait for Serib.’
‘Remember when Love visits, they’ll leave a sever on the arms of our chair. If ever you’re lonely, look at their arms beside you.’
‘Where did our brother go?’
Serib now understood the straight or zagging cuts in the chair's arms, having tallied effect, that her feet were slipping into as she kept her balance. And some of the other insane scribbles ran like so - notes in discordance. Skip over them if you like:
∞
Constants the same, variables rearranged. She’ll always lose her arm and swords shorten-somehow into needles. Where is Serib?
If the Tayl is Timeless, let’t -
be’told in Timeless S’way.
Decide, dictate, design,” / Hun’gyr The Unkillable/Insatiable - Don’t trust the purple ones
Listen to Dominic, even when you don’t want to
The Era of Gold and Green? Golden Green? Gold an’ Green? Old Ang’rein
The Golden Galleon that was once A Blue Canoe – aright!
Don’t drink the teaFind FreedomRemember to eat!your clockie-timers won’t go off now, will they? Time being dead. You’ll slip even more, into a most complete disappearance.Hug Amneshayevery I have lost my hands and still I will not let go of you or our Anya. – Elijah
Try to love you, even when Love wanders away
hard-sole -
soft-soul
Lucretia in the (wm)hole/Tell the guard a poem-few
won’t give’t-‘way, Fate is reading aren’t you
Entropy (Nature) writes and Empathy (Humanity) reads
the greatest thing that can happen to a soul is they love the right things - Fate / Will
i will make them love
gather the sprigs and buds while you may - Time / Where is Serib?
The Storm We Are -
Crimson Hail-rain (From Pain to Payn and back again)
Violet Lightning (Fate)
Old Calm Blind-Eye (Love)
Amethystine Thunder (Conscience, William, Grave kNight of Thessoladis)
Wrathful Wind (Lillian, The Great Freedom)Put the Rainbow flower lineage back together-Put another Notesn on the walls up hereand in the end there will be a Greatest Beast named Hatred, and their duel with Love
for Reason will have said all there is to say, and Love must speak alone
Where is Serib? Where is Serib? Where is Serib?
Where is Serib? Where is Serib? Where is Serib?
∞
"I'd say your right here, aren't you?" Woid poked Serib. "Definitely."
The young shaman agreed. Neither of them understood a word, hard as it was to focus on any certain phrase as Lay'd Payn's wheelchair rolled turbulently over the discarded rugs and rolls. Shay however clung to that repeated phrase - 'where is Serib?'
∞
There across the walls hung entire chapters erased but not thrown away, or nonsenses not yet intended with clarities much needed. To be revisited. 'Greed, The Worldbuilder' among them. Chapters written on skin and dripping. Black and red. Blood fresh or older.
∞
The glimpses Shay caught of letters larger than her were indeed as she had heard: constants the same and variables rearranged. Her story. This story and its variations. Always her descent or ascent from Shay to Amneshay, swords breaking small into daggers into needles and Woid by her side forever; and other stories far beyond their own. Something about her parents. An expedition. She missed the rest.
Serib read in the patchwork where her tale had been and where it was going - mere sketches - fearful she reached out to hold Shay’s prosthetic hand and together they stood with Woid all balancing against these bumps the wheelchair met. Shay wished it all would slow for a moment, and allow her with Serib a moment alone away from The Speaking Manor's eyes and ears.
∞
Where the more modern prison began and Lay’d Payn’s ancient Keep ended was not clear, the two structures chewing or crushed into each other. Gnawed as by Gravity’s loneliness. There were cells filled with human meat, bundles of nerves akin to cables, hung from upside ceilings. The meat was seen to - maybe by beetles overseen by snakes - the skin being made into tinged paper. Blind, they graced their feelers over the scabby bumps of Lay’d Payn’s words, reading in such tactile ways.
∞
“Is this my cell?” The Lay’d had words with herself.
There was no doubt in Shay, Serib or Woid’s mind that it must be her cell. The light of many crimson candles was shaking across a vast desk, and none were unable to make clear its true size. Masses of dried notes from the Corridoor as vines wrapped about what may have been a doorframe, leading into the cabin’s fragile belly. Octomni’s slapped and suckled out of view disturbed back into their underwater caves. Snakes hissed from the grasses they had made of papers growing almost coral-like from the mushy walls. No space nor room remained for spiders or their webs.
∞
There were odd sounds from somewhere: rattling as sleepy night trains over cold rails. The hallway more a carriage for a passing moment.
The prison kept always in motion, in constants the same.
∞
Here worst of all were those endless notes, reminders and drotts, drafts hanging off and onto each other, heaping on the inky ground and making the room far smaller than it once had been. Leaving no small detail discarded lest future revelations reveal it to be vital, the massing mess this result. Serib thought in the puddled darkness of it, it looked like fungi: growing inside from outside. Having rolled in Lay’d Payn soon rummaged in the walls, pulling out rustling scraps and making on her gowned lap a neat pile, sorting madly through her hoard.
“Lay’d Payn?” Shay called from the arm of her Lay’d’s chair.
“Oh! I am so glad you’re here. It is that age already? I thought you’d be far taller or I smaller.”
The top scrap of hairy paper on her little pile was ‘suspect expect amneShay’ and an unrelated ‘none of this is fair on you’.
∞
Lay’d Payn wagged her finger dismissively at the nearby desk as if inviting Shay, Woid and Serib to it, though to our three, quite an abyss lay between it and the chair. Lay'd Payn began talking to someone not there.
∞
Thankfully Woid stepped up into candle-cast shadows beyond the desk's ledge, while Shay grabbed Serib and both appeared with the once-prince. Startled. The fields of paper and crinkled hills of bottled darkly red ink were all in their proper places, aligned and ordered against the all-consuming notes growing always this way from the room-world around them. No walls nor ceiling, only the words of her whispering rustling as leaves in each other’s breath. It was warm from all the candles burning with rose-scent, even more heat radiating from a colossally dainty cup of tea that all three of them could go swimming in. As The Lay’d took a sip from that potted lake pouring messily through the bloody cloth over her mouth, Shay realised one of the closest cliffs leading back into others larger and larger-than, was no cliff at all - but a fully formed book entitled:
‘The Timeless Tayl - Shadows of Amneshay.’
Shay felt in an instant both sane and insane.
∞
“The rainbow that is now a sphere and flower… in Time a rainbow, in Timelessness a sphere…” Lay’d Payn began, inching closer to her desk. “…allows the span of Indigo, you, my Amneshay, to sit between the Crimson and Violet once so far apart. For Time is dead, and we now create our own structures. Allowing you to be for both sides loyal. Two beginnings into one. Look where Entropy leads, into complication and contradiction… we must leave Entropy behind in favour of Empathy.”
The gown-fabric covering her face was beaten about by her wavered breath, a crater of cloth pulsing in and out. And still - she was struggling away trying to work. Feverishly drinking more and more tea. Lay’d Payn would forget the presence of her visitors, write a short piece and collapse with some discomfort or another into the deepest of her chair. Leaving slits, cuts, dashes and sigils between each piece (like this ∞), as reminders many and true. To perhaps, make it all seem-seam less endless, and make recollection easier.
∞
On this went cyclically, and Shay looked for a way to snap Payn out of the loop. She noticed something, a scrap of paper hanging leerily from the long-forgotten and buried ceiling. She mistakenly read aloud for it was written in her own writing, not Lay’d Payn’s:
‘don’t burn the lavender.’
The paper was behind Lay’d Payn, such that she’d never see it. Something had scratched it out and added the first word afterwards - the first word fresher, more red than black.
“Did you…” Lay’d Payn uttered to none of her visitors, as though in distant reply.
Her cloud-large hand soon poked nearly into some nearby lavender-scented trees resting on her desked world. Mere sprigs to her size, trees to the eyes of our stranded three. Her fingers thumped meatily and unsuccessful on the table, reminding Shay of when she glimpsed Fate in Frac’tralien, when those massive spidery legs were reaching for a needle or a spool in the corner of the room. Waiting for Amneshay to bring tea.
∞
Shay realised - had she in a later age left herself that note? Before it had been changed: ‘burn the lavender.’
What would the smell do to Lay’d Payn - help her remember as smells often do - but remember what? Why had Amneshay written that, why had Lay’d Payn defaced it?
Finally Lay’d Payn reached the sprigs of lavender, those trees scraping dryly against one another, rubbing their smell into the air. The nearest crimson candle was her aim, to burn the sprigs into incense. Alas the flames were just out of reach.
∞
She cast down gently the bundled trees but the sound to Woid, Serib and Shay was all a forest falling at once. Shay meanwhile was entranced by the note written by her own hand, hanging massive over Lay’d Payn’s head. ‘don’t burn the lavender.’ A nonsense to most eyes.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
She glanced down at her hand where prosthetic and bone were adjoined, obeying her will and nerve. She ‘remembered the future’, recalled leaving the note for herself. ‘When’ she was Amneshay. She still was Amneshay.
Lay’d Payn’s giant hand reached for her teacup, sipping nothing at all, and it was this empty sound to which Shay smiled under her mask. Lay’d Payn sighed:
“When Serib arrives, she can give them a spark. Or… was there something… where is Serib?”
The young shaman was about to call out, though Shay hushed her. The Lay’d started turning in her chair, her shrouded gaze was high and perhaps would see the note hanging above her, but Shay turned to Woid faster, whispering:
“Get me up there. It’s dark enough?”
“We’ll find out.”
∞
In his mastery of the umbra-step craft, Woid vanished and he was up there, standing where candlelight could not reach, standing small atop the note growing out of the wall of mouldy papers. A branch or a stalk. The desk an island flickering below, landscape rectangular. Shay stepped into his living shadow and from her harness uncorked a vial to pour its contents across the parchment, taking care that it would not splash their boots.
“Should I be worried?” Woid leaned back, smelling a fresh scent cutting through the musty reek of the walls.
“Mould does not like vinegar, and these old pages thick with it… all this think-ink in globs…”
Solid words ran watery.
∞
It was to their size a cliff eroding, fizzling. Dripping. An old oak to fall. Leaning more and more forwards towards the floor. Shay stepped back into Serib’s shadow on the table, cast by crimson candlelight, and a moment before or after Woid was with them.
“What are you doing?” Serib frowned.
Lay’d Payn heard a mere page rustling where so many pages were always rustling, and paid it no further heed. She returned to her long work.
∞
“The note says not to… you’re against her? Betraying her?” Serib accused Shay.
“I did as well.” Woid shrugged, feeling left out.
“Betraying her, being loyal to you.” Amneshay replied softly, trying to keep her words from Lay’d Payn’s attention. “Time is not dead. I met them… The Dam’e. Wounded, hiding-biding.”
Woid watched Lay’d Payn, expecting those massive hands to come and grab them. She scribbled away with her nails into parchments of greater gore. Serib’s throat struggled into words, believing Shay completely:
“Then there are no shores? If Time still lives then so does Entropy… so does death. We were lied to.”
It was at this moment that Lay’d Payn stopped writing, to know that Serib, key and core to her plans was slipping away. Our three heard Payn’s primordial bones, her neck or spine grinding as she gazed upwards directly at them, her face hidden by her bloody gown.
∞
It happens to us all, caught between worlds - when we must decide the home of our allegiance. Do we brood and mourn over it unsure or in an instant decide?
∞
To protect Amneshay and Woid, Serib rushed over to where the fragrant woodland of lavender sprigs lay, and with her hand aflame she writhed against the pain she could not control, giving hot embers to the parched lavender trees. Lay’d Payn patted and fanned distracted by the immediate immolation, trying to put out the fire, almost striking Serib before Woid stole her away to a safer shadow. As one might swat a moth. The smoke of riled incense poured up. Like a flag The Lay'd gleefully swished the smoking sprigs around, even holding it to her face and inhaling with a starving, addicted depth.
“Tea!” she remembered, sewn as memories are to scent, and a Shadow more her size stepped out of her own shadow appearing in the room, and her cup again was full and hot.
Amneshay. Arms all bony machinery. A broken mask. All in an instant and then gone. Our three watched Lay’d Payn forget their presence altogether having smelt the lavender, its burning calming her direction elsewhere, as she concentrated on blowing her tea cool.
∞
Long passed these gentler things. Sipping. Breathing. Remembering. Forgetting. All meanwhile Serib believed but did not wish to accept what Shay had said. Time was not dead.
Our three remained very still and quiet, not wishing to rouse Lay’d Payn from her trance-like distance. Falling further into the poisonous medicines of Shay and Amneshay. A sound much akin to trains coursing over tracks rattled on, then faded away.
∞
Serib’s anger was gloom across her gaze, the lightning sparkling from her eyes. Far she had journeyed alone to find Shay, to bring her to Lay’d Payn, all for a promise. A wish: a deathless dream, a Reality reordered and changed possible now that Time was dead. Alas that Time instead was wounded and in hiding to return. She did not know if her heart was hopeful hearing that, or lost with despair. She dreaded what was next and stayed close to Woid’s side as Shay stepped forwards, closer to Lay’d Payn, in confidence despite her own trepidation having seen her future self - maimed though free:
“What happens now?” Amneshay asked of Lay’d Payn, whom finally stopped digging her inky nails into paper.
“There’s the thought…” Lay’d Payn passed her hands over the skinned papers closest to her. “Not these…” her fingers thudding and thumping again at things just out of reach.
∞
While Lay’d Payn moved the cliffs and papered waves of lands recurred around her desk, Serib looked up at Shay, feeling the parting - the receding of the waves, of one tale becoming two. She could not focus on the far and grander things that had failed her. She turned her thoughts inward and could only think of Shay:
“I learned so much from you.” Serib said to her protector, her older sister in some memories.
Taken from each other. The burning lavender helped the sisters remember as well.
“I learned more from you.” Shay knelt to hug the strong shaman, her younger sister, in blood and in bond.
She thought, knowing I would hear:
'Who are you to control us like this? Twisting us through different lives and pages to fit your stories.'
I am the authoress.
∞
“I learned more from you.” Shay repeated to Serib. “Or learned again what I already knew and had tried to bury. I was made by Fate and Payn to forget-regret my disobedience, I was turned against myself as Payn is against herself.” The mushroom-food corpses in the tunnels under Imirka haunted her. How could she have done that to herself? “And Amneshay has helped me remember my love for you, for Woid, for our parents and for me. I have grieved enough. I suppose we both had our task - to help each other get here - or get back here, twisted as we were in stories not our own. I’m sorry that you learned fear from me as I learned it from mother... the agony she went through, you may be too young to remember. A poison even I couldn't cure.”
She thought of that first night she met Serib in this tome, of injecting bliss into her arm. She asked:
"Do you feel the same as me, that we are-far sisters - estranged? That Fate or Payn or both have kept us apart? Afraid that we would remember and refuse."
“I do." Serib tried to smile, and with all the relief of a hill long climbed a weight passed from her heart. "Are you not afraid anymore?” the young shaman was unsure what she hoped for.
Shay and Woid both were waiting for Lay’d Payn to break the chains of her tea, though on she sipped and on she wrote. Shay felt more and more as Amneshay, her True words each a drop of the remedy against her enemy:
“To learn Time is not dead - I still fear-near the future that Time cannot help but bring." She could not shake her stammer. "I wish Time’s coming did not carry Wintery old age, but I no longer grieve for the future when I will die-why and lose you and Woid. I no longer grieve for our parents. Bury my brief with our mother and leave her there. Grief left me vulnerable to Fate-eight, to Payn, and I made promises to them I cannot keep. And so I wasn't there for you, to keep you hidden. I still fear the future but I am braver than I was… because I met you. Young here and older I have met you, I have seen you older than this. A woman strong, a master shaman holding Timelessness together until Time can come home. Amneshay saw it and so I have seen it. That is your journey away from here that Woid and I have fought for, away from Fate’s threads and Payn’s bloody ink.”
“It was all her, really.” Woid shrugged again, enveloped in lavender smoke, summarising all Shay had told him: “Just so that you can make your own choice. Fate is just Payn by another name… whether with ink or thread her control.”
Serib held Shay closely, thinking of the shop. Of their home:
“I still believe even if you do not. I will find the shores and bring you there or bring them to you. Shores where you do not need to be afraid or brave. Wounded Time will die.”
∞
Shay would not allow her heart to fall - she had to remain hopeful, her mask hiding it all. Woid kept his eyes on Lay’d Payn:
“She’s drifting off again.” He warned Shay, and she was unable to respond to Serib’s hope.
There Lay’d Payn was, massive, writing her fingers into the smoky lavender-air rather than onto any parchments near, making brilliant words that did not long remain. This was the parting Serib could feel, the receding of the waves. Shay had her answer for Serib - she took the contract from her harness and offered it, a tiny thing rolled even smaller, to Lay’d Payn. Lacerated with layered signatures.
“This will help.” She taunted the authoress of all things.
∞
Her shrouded face turned to it, and Woid felt those bony titan’s fingers were going to pinch all three of them powerless off the table-land. He could hear my frail muscles pulling on my fragile bones.
∞
With eerie precision only the contract was taken from Shay’s outstretched hand. Lay’d Payn considered it and for far too long. She reached shakily for her cup of tea, wobblily lifting her crimson veil to sip again.
“Ah, lovely ‘tis!” She placed the cup down, dabbing her chin, returning coherent. “Our contract to one another draws closer to completion and renewal; look at us!” She swiped her nail across the paper as to sign it or similar, somehow not decimating it entirely, leaving only a mark in signature as though her hand or the contract were a proper size, and handed it gently back to Shay. Another scar for the fleshy paper to heal.
“Two old loyal lay’d’s with our ‘Verse growing against The Universe. I have not yet fulfilled my end, Amneshay; reuniting you with all you love, returning you back to forlorn memories. Death is proving bothersome, latched and hooked still to Indifference, but I will manage it or we shall, and you will not fear Death again, for he shall be Different and mine. But in these, the whiles between, I see you have found strength again, hmm?”
Woid was unsure where all this was going, though trusting Shay’s instincts fully he said nothing, smiling that she indeed had found strength again. Strength to hold him and know who he truly was. Her mask blank, her smile wicked as Lay’d Payn rambled on.
∞
“For Fate frayed so far from Truth… and tried for you the same, that you would not be strong and loving but cowardly and hateful, or worst of all numb, disassociated and wasteful.”
Meeting Serib brought Shay that tenderness of old. How to care and try again, despite. The strength that some siblings have.
"Numb and of no use to you." Shay added callously.
Lay’d Payn put her hands through a set of rhythmic claps, savouring what was good:
“Yes! Tenderness is the word… you met The Great Freedom briefly, did you? Dear Lillian… the height of Alyoshian strength. We must free her from those depths. And all the rest will follow.”
Serib hugged Shay as their Lay’d spoke and Woid there daunted stood, wearing the look of Always in his heart, in the far of his eyes.
∞
“Fate stole you away from me into one of her yarns, but the defeat has been turned into victory. She overstretched to take you, you being so paramount to my well-being. Alas, you too are to her well-being linked… as you caught glimpse of in Woven Fractra’lien, she takes poison while I take medicine… and so much was left exposed, amidst our storming duel internecine. What glory would hers have been had she managed! And nearly did. Nevertheless, you and I still have some way together-yet, and Serib having been excellent must return to her own story, twined as it is with ours. Hers and yours one among many.”
“We are between stories, then?” Shay asked, keeping close her calculations, without 'medicine' weighing her down she knew what Amneshay knew. “In this place now in this moment, not caught in Fate’s strings nor tinged by your ink? You are weak in this between.”
“Fear not, it is only for a moment. Sign again… and the next phase of stages can begin.”
∞
Serib knew all this, for far she has seen. Shay darted her masked eyes between her Lay’d and her sister, asking in character unbroken as to not unsettle the tea’s work, a character that believed in loving madness, in deathless shores, that Time was dead:
“Where will Serib go from here, and how safe will she be from the horrors against us, those that do not want happiness to last forever?”
As Payn moved and spoke, a bloody taste filled the air, thinning the lavender smoke:
“Your sentiment is a sacred one, yes, what of those whom want goodness always to die, and from bleak ashes rise again? And again. Natural. As has always been. Nonillion are the parts that move - my own and those against us, and we must to our feats and strengths be put. You are the skulker of ‘thedrals, tunnels, corners and their Corridoors, my Amneshay… Alchemist of my Court. And… with pride and shame alike, the only soul I can trust to my memory-to-memory or, moment-to-moment care.”
The note-trees-and-shrooms across the ceiling breathed in rustles. Shay revealed a scheme long hidden as she spoke to Lay'd Payn, details returning to her from futures almost forlorn:
“Then if I stay here, give you your tea when best, Serib will be safe. Helping you remember and forget.”
Shay signed without hesitation, the ink or blood of Lay’d Payn’s signature still wet for her to use. She rolled the messy scroll back into her harness.
“Since you were a girl this has been your task for me. I know I have failed you twice… your mother died of her wounds. That your father more slowly faded into Age’s colours. I know this is not what was promised, but you must believe that we are closer now in this revolve, this variation. Without Argus, there is much our enemy will not see. Yes. Do you hear the shores in this room? Breathing. Yes! With you beside if I am well, I can help guide your Serib.”
“She’ll be okay by herself?” Woid worried as he was not known to, unsure how he felt.
“Where Serib is going, where true mountains hall - away and over from more open reed-fields, two Shadows would be of lesser use. Her search for The Lightning Crown she will become has begun and must continue from this necessary divergence, having returned my Amneshay to me. She has yet much to learn of shamanism from her master, Gada’il. And she will return all-powerful with a crown to compliment my own. Yet so much to learn….”
“Mhm. Clearly. Clueless.” Woid poked at Serib to soften her gloomily serious gaze.
She turned and gave him a good wrestle, her lightning robes sparkling in the crimson candlelight, her thick hair all longer than it ever had been, in eight locks. Shay watched them tug and tumble atop the rough desk, under dark clouds amethystine. For a moment everything looked bloody in the reddish fiery glows. Lay’d Payn sipped and slipped away.
∞
“This’ll do.” Her cup striking its small plate gently was as a hammer to an anvil, a sentence to its end.
Once her tea was finished, Lay’d Payn exhaling leaned a giant book on its pages open slightly, appearing there an archway archaic, a cavern worded on either side to pass through. For Serib to pass and vanish back into her own story. Woid obviously leaned against the papery entrance, hands visible and invisible folded under his arms, checking it all out. Squinting his eyes at the words. Shay pulled away her hood and set down her mask, sighing to one knee as Serib said to her:
“Please keep hoping! For you are so good when you hope…”
Shay smiled though saddened that her sister still was lost in part, though indeed hoping she could now free from Fate or its Payn find her own way. Shay spoke one thing though meaning far more in character unbroken:
“We’ll stay here, giving Our Lady her medicine and keeping our foes away.” The disguise-ridden skin of her face was sore having too long been in the dark.
“I’ll return.” Serib’s chest and chin were high against sadness, and cheeks wet with tears as she reinforced as she had already sworn: “I still believe even if you do not. I will find the shores and bring you there. Shores without fear, the shores of my will.”
Shay had in renewing her all-consuming contract with Lay’d Payn, in agreeing to continue on as her alchemist, said without words all she needed to. Lest those words reveal her true intentions. She asked, keeping up her last disguise:
“Will you be alright out there-where? If you ever need us, do that trick with the thunder again - and your foes’ll find more than just your shadow.”
Serib took comfort in her sister’s words, inhaling deeply. Ready. Exhaling.
“Won’t find me there.” Woid rejected, laughing.
Serib knew he was joking, still feeling empty until he rolled his eyes to say:
“Because I’ll be behind them.” He brandished his shadowy knife, sheathing it back into shadow.
∞
Shay wanted to start planning and sketching her next move, to distract her from what was happening. An old habit can still fit. Tearful with bravery, Serib turned away towards the archway Lay’d Payn had made of a book leaning on its pages. Serib’s own story. As the girl passed into those ages she paused, Woid by her side, his hand on her shoulder. Assuring her to go. And so Shay, keeping to herself a hidden wish that would pass throughout Timelessness, becoming a constant among variables, watched Serib go bittersweet with pages to either side.
∞
Watching aging. Vanishing. Into the arched pages Serib walked longer and longer, the book above and around her as a hallway. A meadow longer. Words all over her skin. Melding-gone into the ages until she was gone. In that quiet-after Shay hoped there would be someone to meet her on the other side, that she would not be alone. Woid umbra-stepped to Shay's side in his worry, and she placed her hand on his shoulder to reassure him:
“She’ll be alright.”
“Coolest.” The once-prince nodded, his tongue rolling over the rough gems on his teeth. “Wish I’d called her that. When we see her again, I’ll call her that.”
Lay’d Payn returned the book to a pile of others, dust falling from it as would snow. Shay and Woid could see its title scratched along the spine, their vantage powerless, two shadows gazing up at the indomitable tome:
The Timeless Tayl -
Serib and The Synarchy
of The Two Crowns
"Say that in a hurry over and over." Woid mumbled.
∞
Shay’s eyes as never before glowed now with Indigo light, Woid saw, as she adorned again her mask and hood becoming Amneshay proper. He later would describe it as a halo hidden. Though no such version of Amneshay yet had such eyes ascended, so far as Shay had met. She had something all the rest did not, that even to Lay'd Payn's surprise:
"Your eyes..." The authoress was giddy. "...at last. The penultimate is behind us. The last cycle begins. The new rainbow..."
∞
Under her mask she closed her eyes knowing. Believing Time’s words spoken in a manor of smoke, knowing she had done all she could to free Serib from the ink of Payn and silks of Fate. Knowing for she had met herself older, with both arms severed and replaced, amnesia her role internecine, part device and part soul. Knowing that by staying and controlling Payn with poisonous medicine, was to control this rogue Entropy going by name of Lay’d Payn that should not be conscious, should not be exerting its will over all things. Her family of bonds among them.
“Time is dead.” Amneshay bowed to the titan in mantra or salute. “Let’s get you out of this prison, my Lay’d.”
Woid meanwhile was wondering most when everything would return to its normal size.
“Out?” Lay’d Payn dismissed. “No… we must head yet deeper in, my Amneshay, to where Lillian is incarcerated. A city dark for all its light where you two Shadows can best wreak My Order.”
∞
The Shadows of Amneshay closes and is closed, and can that way remain - as an introduction to The Epic of Entropy and Empathy; my Timeless Tayl told in a Timeless Way.
If Indigo now is written as you have read, what colour next shall be?
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Sip.
“Where is Serib?” I ask my Amneshay as she opens the drawer I am now kept safe inside, made tiny by her expertise. A powder of shrink and size.
My desk that once was grand and easy to find fits in here, surrounded by my grim work. A titan in size compared to me, Amneshay peers downwards, from my shadow hands me another cup of tea. She answers as she gently closes the drawer with me inside: tells me I am safe here. Not a prisoner. Lillian is in here somewhere, not out in the prison deeper-than. The drawer of my world closes, key and lock clicking together. I hear her, dementian-amnesian, in the fluttering darkness of my violet and crimson candles here with me small, blood and lavender my thoughts infinity:
“We do not need her. Remember? Leave her be. Take another sip, my Lay’d. It will help you remember what you need to forget.”
Sip.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞