Chương 4: Chapter 256 - Quiescence

Siobhan Month 4, Day 4, Friday 5: 00 a. m. Siobhan had another dream about the tower. In this one, Mom was supporting herself in a strange, creepy position, her legs and arms spread wide as she held her body prone just a few inches off the floor, using her toes and fingertips. Her neck was turned far to the side, as if looking out the window and up to the sky, but her long, dark hair completely obscured her face.

She was covered in mud and shallow wounds, seeming to have just clawed her way out of the grave—even though she hadn't been buried—and entirely naked, as Siobhan had only seen during a few important rituals. Mom was scratching at the floor insistently, and in the dream, the tower floor was also somehow the ceiling of Siobhan's bedroom. Siobhan's heart filled with horror and grief, and just as she was about to rush toward Mom to try to help her, to save her, Siobhan's body jerked and she woke.

She was sweating, lying in her bed, and though she thought she smelled the fast-fading remnants of incense, she knew it was a phantom of the dream still fading from her mind. Though she knew it was silly, Siobhan listened for scratching. There was none. And if there had been, and her mind had picked it up and inserted it into her dreams, then that probably just meant Grandfather needed to redo the wards against vermin. Siobhan knew that. But she still felt uneasy.

The night was moonless, almost completely dark, and the wind howled with the promise of rain. She sat up and turned the handle attached to the tiny spark-throwing spell in the oil lamp next to her bed until the wick caught flame. Mom had always preferred firelight to sunlight captured in light crystals. That was probably why she had a demon familiar rather than something from the Plane of Radiance.

Siobhan stared at the flame for a moment, willing it to cheekily resolve into the form of a small, two-legged imp with a grin almost as big as his face. Of course, it didn't. Paimon was dead too. The light helped, but only with the fear. Her throat closed up and her eyes burned as they filled with tears. Siobhan hugged her legs to her chest and lowered her forehead to her knees. Mom was dead. It had been four months now, but sometimes, for a moment, Siobhan still forgot.

Some part of her deep inside seemed to refuse to accept this new reality. Siobhan cried, and when her shuddering sobs became violent enough that she couldn't suppress the sounds, she stretched out flat and held the pillow over her face. However there were only so many tears a person could cry, and eventually, she ran out. She was exhausted but knew from experience that there would be no getting back to sleep now.

"You control your mind. It doesn't control you," she told herself softly. Siobhan had learned this from Grandfather. He had plenty of favorite quotes, but she had heard this one often.

"Everything will be okay," she told herself, as if she were talking to a small child who needed comfort. She swung her legs out of the bed, feeling her skin tighten as the calloused pads of her feet hit the cold floor.

"You and Grandfather will get through this together, and maybe Father will come home soon." Siobhan wanted to believe, but it sounded like a lie. Sniffing hard, she wiped her face with her sleeves to remove the last traces of tears. By the time the rest of the house woke up, the puffy eyes and redness would have faded. Grandfather wouldn't notice. And if he did, he probably wouldn't ask. She moved to the small desk by the bed and opened the oldest of the newspapers that had been accumulating.

Their village always got news at least two or three weeks after the big cities on the mainland, but Siobhan didn't read the papers to keep up with current events. She merely skimmed them for anything interesting. Specifically, anything about Thaddeus Lacer. Siobhan had grown interested in him a couple of years ago when the papers reported on him returning to public life after a long time hiding from the public eye. Grandfather had glanced at the article and nodded approvingly.

"A talented, driven young man with more than a drop of competence. If there were more like him, this country might not be doomed." At that, Siobhan's interest had been piqued. Grandfather used words like "talented" or "intelligent" extremely sparingly. Normally, it was high praise for him to admit that someone was "doing their best." Lacer's return to the spotlight had been a couple of years before Siobhan first learned of him, so she'd had to dig to learn the details.

Apparently, a group of adventurers had been escorting a researcher through the wilderness when they came upon a place where the barrier between Planes was weaker. A powerful being on the other side had created an unstable planar portal, which swallowed the adventurers and their charge.

Thaddeus Lacer rescued them from certain death, throwing about free-cast spells with so much flair and power that people who heard the stories—verified as mostly truthful by a prognos—started suggesting he should be certified as an Archmage. Of course, a lot of his fellow Grandmasters didn't like that, and the drama, along with his apparent indifference to it, only made him more popular.

The papers held some not-so-subtle speculation that Thaddeus Lacer had spent the time between the aftermath of the Haze War and his very famous return to the spotlight working as an agent for the Red Guard. However, what had really caught Siobhan's eye at the time was a photograph of him casting a spell that picked up a small hill of sand and sent it streaming in from all directions to converge on and crush his professional dueling opponent.

His expression had been almost bored, with one eyebrow slightly raised, while his long jacket and hair flapped behind him in the wind. Siobhan had found it electrifying. Grandfather and Mom indulged her, but Father had been quite irked that she went around talking about how she wanted to be just like Grandmaster Lacer when she grew up, or how Grandfather thought that he was actually competent. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

There were no new articles about him, except for a small note that mentioned someone important at the fancy University of Thaumaturgy in Lenore had suggested they hire him. Siobhan snorted. Why would someone like Thaddeus Lacer, who had the freedom to travel the entire known lands—and with his prowess, maybe even the wild lands beyond the edge of the map—be willing to give up his freedom just to teach hundreds of posh idiots?

Grandfather said there wasn't a single individual from the Thirteen Crown Families with a drop of talent, and barely a handful with enough brains to outthink a squirrel. Siobhan cut the small snippet out of the newspaper anyway and pasted it in her "Lacer" scrapbook. It was a compliment to be invited to the University. She put that scrapbook back in her bookcase and pulled out the latest schematic she'd been working on—a suit that would keep her from freezing up in the bitter, deathly cold of the high atmosphere.

Siobhan's collection of Plans and Schematics to Ride a Sky Kraken to the Stratosphere had outgrown its original notebook and now occupied three binders, color-coded by plausibility level. She had first imagined flying all the way into space but learned, to her disappointment, that even a sky kraken could only make it into the stratosphere—and even then not for much longer than they could hold their breath.

The stratosphere had been discovered only a few years before, by an enterprising sorcerer and diviner who released heavily warded hot air balloons to measure temperature changes at different altitudes. Once someone got beyond the troposphere—the layer before the stratosphere—things started to warm up again. The sorcerers weren't sure why, but Grandfather thought it had something to do with solar radiation.

He wasn't nearly as interested in the topic as she was, but he still spent plenty of time poking holes in all of her plans. Father had joked at one point about how Grandfather was so cruel he couldn't even humor a child's fanciful dreams, but that was because Father didn't understand. Siobhan didn't find it discouraging at all.

Grandfather was always very specific about the ways she would probably die, and he gave detailed descriptions about how horrible and painful it would be—occasionally derailed by stories about some of the gruesome deaths he had seen during his many, many years on this planet. But he never told her it couldn't be done or to just forget about it. Which meant that Siobhan just needed to think harder, be more creative, and better understand magic and the way the world worked.

At some point, after iteration upon iteration, she would come up with a plan that Grandfather found possible. She thought that Grandfather actually liked this little game of theirs. He always got a gleam in his eyes when she brought him a new update to the plan, and would set aside whatever he was doing to examine the idea and rip it apart thoroughly. Secretly, she hoped that one day, when she figured it out, Grandfather would come with her.

They could hunt and tame sky kraken together, and Siobhan would have someone to share the experience of viewing the planet from so far above—something no one else had ever seen. A bright, white-purple flare of lightning cracked through the heavens, followed by a bone-shaking crash of thunder, jerking Siobhan out of her focused state. She looked to the window and saw that the howling winds had brought a storm, heavy enough to almost completely mute the faint light of dawn on the horizon.

The sheets of falling water were so thick she could barely see through them, and they pounded on the roof like a hundred thousand angry drummers. She shivered. Her stomach, as if awakened by the sudden realization of how much time had passed, gave a loud complaint regarding its current state of emptiness. Down below, she could hear very faint sounds of clattering pans and tuneless humming from the kitchen, which meant that Aimee had woken and was puttering about making breakfast.

Siobhan grinned and dressed quickly, making a mental note that her hems would need to be taken down again soon. It seemed like she was growing an inch every three months. Her bare feet picked up some gritty sand as she approached the door. She paused to examine the floor. It was scattered with a surprising amount of fine ochre sand, which was peculiar, because the ground around the village was mostly muddy and dark, full of decaying things and plenty of rocks.

She had no idea where she would have tracked this in from. If Grandfather saw it, he might make her clean her room from top to bottom. After contemplating for a bit, Siobhan swept it all under the bed. She hopped down the stairs two at a time, and then skipped into the kitchen, where their maid—who was also their cook—was yawning over a boiling kettle.

Aimee had a strong accent that Grandfather said came from the central part of Silva Erde, but she was a fantastic cook and a kind young woman, and she never looked twice at Father when he and Mom were home. Siobhan had hinted at this once, and Aimee had given her a look of disgust.

"I like dark-skinned men. Ze darker, ze better. Freckles? Ugh!" she had told Siobhan, allowing her accent to become more pronounced as she shuddered dramatically, despite the fact that she herself was a fair blonde with plenty of brown spots scattered over her nose and cheeks. After Mom had died, Aimee hugged Siobhan for several minutes straight, rocking back and forth while holding her so tightly it seemed as if Aimee's arms made up the whole world.

And then, she silently turned around and made an entire potful of caramel pulled-sugar threads, which she knew were Siobhan's favorite. For all of these reasons, Siobhan loved her.

"Why do you look at me with these sparkling eyes, little beauty?" Aimee asked, using her nickname for Siobhan.

"Can you make me a quiche?" Siobhan asked, batting her eyelashes.

"I'm dying of hunger, and you're the only one who can save me." She had discovered a taste for foreign delicacies when Aimee came to stay with them the year before. Grandfather "never got used to" fancy food and preferred that Aimee cook more simple fare. Siobhan wasn't sure if Grandfather was telling the truth, or if that was just something he said because white flour, butter, and honey were expensive.

"We just got in a fresh goat cheese from the O'Kervicks." Aimee winked at her.

"Go get the eggs." Siobhan grabbed Grandfather's enchanted umbrella—made to be particularly effective against water coming in from any angle—before struggling through the wind and rain to the coop at the north of the house. The hens were all huddled up in their cubbies, and Siobhan glared them down one by one, daring them to peck or scratch her as she pulled the still-warm eggs out from under them.

Mom never had any trouble with this, supposedly because a simple flex of her Will was enough for sensitive, domesticated animals to understand their relative place in the "pecking order" and submit. Siobhan's Will wasn't there yet. Though she had recently progressed to being able to cast the vexing tone hex, all that would do was frighten the chickens into a panic.

Back inside, with the eggs delivered and Aimee humming a little song as she prepared to cook, Siobhan began to set the table in the dining room attached to the kitchen for herself and Aimee. Grandfather wouldn't be up for a few more hours, since he liked to go to bed so late.

"Should we use the fancy candles?" Siobhan called.

"We can pretend we're having posh-lady brunch." Aimee responded with a shriek. Short and sharp, and then another, long and drawn out. Like her life was in danger. Siobhan dropped the decorative candelabras and raced into the kitchen. She burst through the open doorway, her heart frozen in her chest as she looked around for the danger. Aimee had pressed herself against the wall opposite the counter, her face as white as old bone.

Siobhan followed Aimee's gaze to the mixing bowl, and with a step closer, was able to see the contents. A single egg had been cracked inside and was sitting with the broken shell resting atop it. The egg white was the deep crimson of blood, and the yolk an orange-red more ominous than any sunset.