Chapter Twelve: Findings
I stumbled upon it, really. I would like to say that I spotted several clues along the way, plotting my knowledge in a web, and at one point connecting them with a certain achieved realization befitting that of an accomplished detective. I would like to say I knew what I was doing, that I was smart and clever and witty, but such is not true. Looking back, it was undoubtedly luck, plain and simple, the truest form of it. I got lucky.
Spring had taken hold of the city, and with it, came the rain. All day long it would fall in varying shades of grey sheet, smacking across the cobbled walks, racing down the tiled roofs, and pooling in the ruts and pockmarks. Winter was behind us, its cold, harsh snows forgotten, the trees beginning to blossom in a flourish of garish color.
I splashed my way through the streets, my hood drawn, as the rain pelted my back, and stood before the library gates. I'd just finished lessons with Aryl, and set out with Amoir Vientos Eleywn tucked comfortably in my cloak pocket. All in all, it was a good day. Our lesson had covered history, chiefly the evolution of the peoples and tribes that would someday make up much of Lent and Leir. I found it fascinating to say the least, but in those days, I found almost everything fascinating. It was all so new, so untouched, so undisturbed, and I was so ignorant.
When I entered, I signed myself in quietly. Alace was not at the desk today; instead a clerk by the name of Lucian occupied the seat. I didn't know him well, but I knew that his father was a nobleman, occupying a small holdfast just outside Raenish. The family was not powerful, but the name was recognized, especially in Lent. He had dark black hair, cut short, and a long nose, straight as an arrow.
Once inside, I sat in relative quiet and privacy, the kind that came all to sparse in a city. While human companionship is essential to life and to our knowledge of life itself, solitude is always appreciated. I relished in it for a brief moment, the uninterrupted silence, then brought out the book, for that was what I referred to it as back then, simply, a page of paper and charcoal that I had purchased near two days back, and set to noting and chronicling what I was reading and what I was attempting to translate.
That was when I stumbled upon it. I had just finished noting and connecting various fragments of words on one page to form a single choppy sentence, its meaning muddled and obscure, and decided I try the next page. I flipped the vellum, and as I did, I noticed the next page was missing. It wasn't there, ripped, it seemed, from the binding. I could still see the fractured split, irregular and jagged. Tucked underneath the half-page, was a folded folio, and I carefully unfolded it, noticing that it was the ripped page. Age and time and worn it, like much of the book, but separated from its gathering, the vellum itself had begun to warp and contort, to bend and arc.
I quickly grabbed a random assortment of books from the shelves around me, and stretched out the page as best I could, so it could lay flat, placed the books overtop the edges and looked at what I'd found, quite by the chance, in the end.
It was an illustration, of a kind. I say that because, well, it wasn't a complete illumination. I suppose it could have possibly been finished at some point, but now I could see only half, and that was being generous. What little I could in fact see was smeared. There was a tree, I noticed, surrounded by two faeries, and enclosed with a metal fence. There were symbols too, strange looking markings, and ancient by the looks, especially in the appearance of the tree. I knew the tree, or at least had read about it before. Long ago, when the world was far younger, great arbors grew from the earth, and it was rumored they could move, and even talk. This appeared to be one of those trees. It held a face in the bark, hidden, but to the careful observer, it could be spotted.
Under the image, was a line of strange text: Ectos Caeie Te Leream Imperiae Undes Nea.
To my relief, my father had written a translation under it, many of the words crossed out and changed. It seemed he'd had great difficulty. What remained, read: Mortal Minds Cannot See Beyond The Cage Of Our False Imprisonment.
My father also left a note on that. Below it, he wrote simply: We must look harder.
I sat back in my chair and smiled briefly, shallowly. It was not a smile of joy, but one of shock, of realization. He's talking to me, I mused to myself. It was a clue. I had to look harder...but where?
So I went to the only person worth knowing, and whom I thought could help, the unnamed philos. He opened his doors and let me, and I explained everything, showing him the torn out page, the image, the note.
He narrowed his brows as he scanned the page. "The picture, it seems familiar...I've seen it before, sue as day. Dammit! Where did you think we should look now? He hasn't given us much to go off of."
"I don't know," I said honestly. Other than his plea to look harder, well, there was not much else. "I can't seem to find anything else. It's the farthest he's translated. I was hoping you'd know."
"I know as much as you, Kaedn," he said. "Nothing more, or I would have told you."
"I wish he'd have just told us were to look," I said. "He knew we'd find it, and yet, he leaves the answer vague."
"That was his way," said the philos. "I know it, you know it. He didn't like giving away answers. Never."
"And instead he leaves us with clues," I said, reclining in my chair as the candle between us flickered upon a low cedar table. "A line of text and half a picture. Not much to go on in any sense."
"Considering all else we've found," the philos replied, "it's the greatest clues we've been given." He ran his finger across the words, and then to the picture. "It's cryptic."
I leaned back over the book. "What?"
"It's cryptic!" said the philos. "Look, look." He pointed to the letters of the original text. "E, C, T, L, I, U, N." He closed his eyes, and thought, tapping his fingers. "Yes! Lectiun. We were reading him the day before he killed himself; it all makes sense. He was an Idan scholar, of the Great Empire. He postulated on life, and the afterlife, death, and the universe. Your father read his work often, I remember, and that picture," he said, checking back to the half smeared illustration. "Yes, I think so." I heard him mutter to himself.
"What does it mean?" I asked. "I don't think he was simply telling us the last thing he read."
"No," said the philos. "Wait, here, wait here a moment." He rose from the chair and started off towards his cellar. "I've Lectiun's work we were reading. I'll be a minute."
A minute he was, and when he returned, he held a large tome, a bare wood cover. He opened it, leafing through the pages. "Here," he said, stopping at a page and the same illustration stared back at them, full and illuminated. "I should have recognized it from the start."
I peered over and saw the entire piece, colored in faded dyes and gold paper. At the top of the tree, there was an eye, with two pupils and a white iris, right against the brown parchment.
"Sysn's eye," said the philos. "Heard of it?"
I shook my head.
"It's the crux of knowledge, the epitome of sight. It sees life, and death, hence the two pupils, and watched the word unfold. Some say we live inside the eye, and some say it watches over us all."
"What do you say?"
"Nothing" said the philos. "But your father did. He knew something, alright. And we're one step closer to finding it out."
I swallowed as I looked into the white eye, into the two dark pupils and for a second, I thought I saw my father's face, but it was only shadow.
***
Hours later, after returning to the library with the book in tow, I found myself in dire need of more paper. This was a common theme, back then, and an annoying one. I had filled up both sides with notes, and my charcoal was running painfully thin. I trust any well-trained scribe would know the feeling.
When I finally reached the merchant's shop, however, it was closed.
I peered through the unoccupied, blackened windows of the shop, and turned on my heel, trying as best I could to remember the way I'd come. You see, the shop was a fair ways outside of Highgate, and although I know the main road fairly well, which runs through Highgate and Cheapwalk, Southgate and Mummer's Corner, I did not have a brilliant recollection of all that lay between. Needles to say, I found myself walking through side streets and alleys which reek of trouble, the kinds of places civilization has left behind.
In short, I got lost. There's no denying it. No sidestepping it. I didn't know where I was, plain and simple.
A light rain misted the air as I went, hands in my cloak pockets, and the grey sky darkened somewhat as tenth bell rang overhead, clear and true. It was getting late, and I was getting hungry. There was cheap food around where I was, but there wasn't good food. Most bars in this part were riddled with poisoned yeast and infected water, so I neglected my grumbling stomach and continued onwards. I would have to wait a little longer.
Then, completely unawares, I stepped into a puddle, which splashed my shoes and soaked my feet. I looked up a split second in momentary irritation, and stopped dead in my tracks.
There were three boys, younger than I was, cloaked in the shadow of the dark alley. They stood wild and feral like a pack of wolves, their hair long and frayed, in need of a barber on any account. What little they wore hung loosely from their bodies, worn homespun and haggard roguhspun, dirtied with mud, and wet and heavy. I could smell them from where I stood, and as I looked at them with fear in my eyes, true fear, I tried to turn and run, tried to get as far away as I could, but my legs didn't respond. I stood motionless as they approached, slowly at first, grinning, revealing rotten and yellow teeth, sharp like swords.
The biggest one approached, holding a little iron shiv that was once probably a dining utensil of some sort. Now, it gleamed and smiled wickedly in the grey light of a darkening sky, slick with rain. "How much you reckon his cloak is?" he said back to his fellow thugs, the one to his left small and thin and redheaded, and the one to his right plump and black of hair. "Seen one like it sell for near on fifty silver ones at the square. But his one looks nicer."
I felt my back straighten and my legs cross slightly, and my fingertips go cold. I tried to speak, tried to say something, anything, but my throat had gone tight as a man on the gallows.
"Don't forget his purse!" cried the other, the plump one.
"I'm not dim!" shouted the biggest one back, and turned on me again, quick as a flash. "Where you goin around here?" I didn't answer. "Not very smart to be wandering these streets. Not very smart at all." He gestured around us. "Now you ain't got nowhere to go. No one to call to. No guards to save you. You're just like us now. Ain't that a pity?"
I began to step backwards as he spoke, stumbling along, until my back hit a wall, tall, too tall to climb, and all of smoothed stone. To my left and right, rose broken walls of wood, choking the narrow spaces between buildings. He was right. He knew it, and I knew it.
"Tomm!" cried the biggest one, pointing back to the plump one. "Get your fat ass over here and hold em for me." He turned to his right and pointed to the redhead. "Rall, strip him down and search him good. Anything that can be sold, rip it off em."
They advanced, and I struggled to even breathe, my hands splayed against the back wall. My chest rose and fell rapidly, but I did not feel it. My heart pulsed and beat like hammer in my mouth, and I bit my tongue, and I felt my head go light and my vision go dim.
Then the boy called Tomm came and punched me, hard, in the gut, and I reeled, doubling over, coughing, spitting out blood, the wind knocked clean out of me. I heard them laugh, cackling and howling like animals in the hunt, and as I grappled to stand, I was kicked in the chest, and then pushed, and then kicked again behind my knees, and I collapsed to the ground, grunting. My body felt tied, as thought I were clamped together with iron, and could not move.
The three of them laughed above me as the rain began to fall heavier now. They let me stand, but only for a second, for Tomm pushed me back against the wall violently, the back of my head rocking hard against the stone. He held me firmly as I lashed out, my neck hot with blood.
"Stop squirming!" cried Rall, who spat in my face and rocked me in the jaw, and I spat blood. My gums ached with a dull pain as the biggest one grabbed my hair, and held my head back against the wall, as Rall managed to search my pockets, finding my coin purse and cavorting around in the muddied ground with the money, singing merrily:
"Iron haft and iron shaft,
Steal me a bit and eat my shit,
Half my haft I will not pass,
Yet for one silver noble,
I'll fuck you in the ass!"
He laughed wildly and fell into the mud, holding the money up to his face and kissing each coin as they glimmered in the rain. Then the biggest one, nameless and wicked, held his shiv to my face and grinned and then he began to angle it towards my eye.
"Thank you kindly for your cooperation, good sir," he sneered, the shiv dancing in the light. "Now, you'll have to die."
I heard his words faintly, but when I saw the blade, when I saw the iron point at my face, I panicked. I wrenched free of Tomm with a twirl, my limbs aching, and pushed him away with as much force as I could. I tried running, then, anywhere, but felt my ankle being grabbed by the fallen Tomm and felt a rock thrown into my back, and I screamed in pain. The three of them hauled me back to the wall and punched me and spit on me, until the biggest one stopped them and leaned close to me.
He held the blade to my face again, but I was held tighter, and then punched in the gut again, but I could not double over, my head was held with a fierce tenacity to the wall. Then the biggest one smiled and laughed and I felt a line of ice drawn down my forehead, and over a piece of my brown, and I saw red drip down my face, felt its burn as it ran off from flesh and mixed with the rain on the mud.
"Good try," he snarled like snake.
I bit my lower lip and looked to the sky. I was going to die. I was certain.
Knowing you're about to die does two things to a man. It freezes them, stops them cold, makes them stiff as stone, or it makes them wild, fueled by the primal instinct of survival. I am not entirely sure how, but I reacted in a matter of survival.
I screamed, loud, my throat raw, and still I screamed, louder than thunder, and I thrashed my body, and punched Tomm in his face, feeling his nose break under my fist. I kicked Rall in between the legs, diving onto the small, thin redhead and grabbed his head, smashing it to the ground. In my torrent of inexorable rage and fear, I felt the shiv slice my arm, ripping my cloak and my flesh, but I did not feel the pain, not until later. Now, I only ran, fast as I could, leaving the biggest one chasing after me, his friends either knocked out or dead. I didn't know.
But I ran, and ran, ran for my life, all else forgotten.
To this day, I still wear the scar through my brow.
***
I don't remember reaching Aryl's tower. I remember waking up though. I remember Aryl's cloaked figure over my face. He smelled of cardamom and lavender a spice of ginger. I remember the fire burning in the hearth, its warmth soft against my face. Nothing else before that, only a dark uncertainty. The mind has ways of blocking off certain memories, traumatic ones, most of all. It is a way of self-protection, an automatic sort of barrier, used to keep the mind sane. It shuts down, leaves the individual solitary and alone, free from the torments of the world.
There are times I wish I could remember, times I wish I could have seen what had happened afterward, but I know would have been able to handle it. The mind itself knows things we will never understand ourselves
"You were lucky," said Aryl simply as he caught me waking. "Very lucky."
"I don't feel lucky," I said back, my brow burning, my head pounding.
"Lucky men do not often feel lucky," said Aryl, stepping away with a beaker of water. It shone dark through the candlelight, dark with my blood. "Trust me, Kaedn. You were extremely lucky. Luckier than most men." He returned with a thin glass vial of clear liquid and a cloth.
"I got lost, Aryl, how is that luck? I can barely breathe without it hurting!"
"You're still here, that's luck," he said, and he dabbed the wound to my brow, and it burned. I clenched my teeth and waited for the pain to subside. "You escaped."
I quieted as I remembered the fear, the blade at my face, and worst, what I had done. I had gone mad. "Maybe I was supposed to die. Maybe I wasn't supposed to escape."
"Nonsense," said Aryl, dipping the clear substance onto the cloth.
"I would have seen my father..." I looked longingly at the fire. "I would have talked to him again, asked him why..."
"You don't know that," said Aryl calmly. "Nobody knows what happens after we die. There could be only blackens, terrible as it sounds, darkness and limitless nothing, infinite and absolute." He let me think in the silence held taunt between them. "Nobody is supposed to die at a certain moment, Kaedn. Death doesn't work that way. Death waits for us all, but we control when that time comes for him to greet us. Death is simply the gatekeeper, waiting and waiting, waiting until we arrive."
I lifted my head after a deeper, darker silence. "I think I killed them." My words were heavy as I spoke them, and it took great care to say them.
"One of them, yes," said Ary, matter-of-fact. "The skinny one."
"How do you-"
He set the cloth to my brow again and I clenched my jaw. "I don't."
"Then, how-"
"Leave it," said Aryl quickly and rose again, turning to his stores. "It is not wise to dwell on bad things, especially after they have just happened. It is not always ours to control, and most times it isn't. Take heart in that." He returned and sat beside me. "You need rest."
I didn't argue. I knew better than to argue now. I had learned as much.
Andso I rested, closed me eyes, and fell asleep to the sound of a flickering fire,but it was not a restful night. There were demons in my mind, evil thingswrought of my own fears and questions, and they were there to stay.
Thanks for reading....sorry for the slight delay, but I hope you lied it nonetheless. Don't forget to VOTE and COMMENT :) cheers!