Elegy for a Star

Scirocca stood in the center of the hexagonal platform, watching Madame Pava’s blood soak into the stones. Hands upon her hips, she examined the stone slab that Tess had been laid upon, looking at the blood that’d been splattered over one end. She looked back down at Pava, watching the snakes writhe about on her deceased scalp.

“Did you try to stop her?” Scirocca asked Mairaela, who stood behind her upon the stairs.

Mairaela softly said, “Yes, but…”

“But what?”

“...But I saw what she did to Tess.”

“This would be much easier if we had Pava to admit to her wrongdoing,” Scirocca sighed.

“But her ledger…”

“...Mentioned Miri,” Scirocca added, “I know.” When Gwen, Mairaela and Joyona approached Scirocca about Tess’ disappearance (under the pretense that her education was being extended for another six weeks) they had to mention a few of Tess’ secrets. Not all of them were new to Scirocca. Tess didn’t hide things very well and Scirocca was quite perceptive.

“There was something else down here, before,” Mairaela murmured.

Scirocca nodded, “That’s Szachosh’te, the Echoshaper. She’ll leave us be, so long as we pay her the same courtesy.”

She let out a sigh, “They’re going to invert this room.” Scirocca explained, “They’ll play back the events. Clear as day, they’ll see what the Dame did. They’ll see you and I talking like this.”

Mairaela groaned, “Then we’re fucked! Gods, Scirocca, I’m so sorry we roped you into this.” She pushed a hand through her dark hair and shook it out behind her head. Scirocca could sense the thrumming of the Fey’s pulse and the sweat upon her brow. She was frightened.

“Will you help me?” Scirocca asked.

Mairaela paused, “With what?”

“I can fix this with your help,” Scirocca explained.

“Well, f-fuck, how?!” Mairaela sputtered.

“We need to rewrite what happened. Bend the truth a bit,” Scirocca explained, “We can change what they’ll see when they invert the room and look back at what happened.”

“How can you do that?” Mairaela asked, “Sorcery cannot alter time.”

“We aren’t altering it,” Scirocca explained, “Gwendolyn murdered Pava. That is what happened and that will always be the case. But sorcery can alter how others see it.” Scirocca placed her fingers together and drew them apart. A thin, white line of light expanded between them, as though it were a string connecting her fingers together. She twirled one hand around the other until the line of light formed a coil. “Time is a spiral. It’s cyclical, but its bands are parallel, not overlapping.” Scirocca stretched the line out once more, “Being imperfect as we are, we perceive time in a straight line, even when we scry or invert rooms.

“So, when we perceive time as a straight line, we can do things like this…” With a shift of her hands, Scirocca folded a portion of the line upon itself, connecting two parts that were not adjacent a moment ago, “We can fold the perception of time, hiding events—such as the murder—beneath the fold and connecting two previously separate times together. The missing gap in our perception of time can be covered by stretching what remains of the line.”

Mairaela nodded her head. She understood the concept, but the theory behind it all baffled her. “So we hide the murder beneath a fold?” Mairaela asked with a bit of hesitance.

“Well, if we only did that, then anyone but a complete novice would be able to see it had been edited,” Scirocca sighed, “Especially if we just leave the body here. It would look as though it simply popped into existence.”

“So,” Scirocca explained, stepping toward Pava’s body and patrolling the platform as a whole, “We’ll hide the event beneath the fold, we’ll use illusions to display the scenario that we want them to see. I can stretch and squeeze the perception of time to fill in the blanks and we fold over this conversation too. Then we let their inverting do the work for us.”

Mairaela looked relieved, so Scirocca made sure to temper her expectations, “Well, assuming they don’t look too closely.” She didn’t want Mairaela to think that Scirocca could just cover up any crime that she committed.

“So what do we make it look like?” Mairaela said, looking as though she didn’t want to consider the alternative to this plan working.

Scirocca hummed and snapped a finger as she pondered Pava’s corpse, “Well, it needs to be her fault, obviously. Gwendolyn has puncture wounds all over her face, and that can’t be hidden for long, and we’ll need to include it in our version of the events. We’ll need to get her to report this as soon as we’re done.”

Mairaela looked around, “So Pava attacks Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn reacts in self-defense. Why would Pava do that?”

“Because Gwen was going to expose her. The signs of all of Pava’s experiments on Tess are very real, which will only reinforce the story we’re trying to sell,” Scirocca responded, counting the paces from Pava’s body to the bottom of the stairs.

“But how did Gwen learn about it in the first place?” Mairaela asked.

Scirocca clicked her tongue, “That is the part that I am struggling with.”

“It was because I told her what the Madame was up to,” chittered a voice within Scirocca’s mind. There was a scratching of eight legs upon stone, before the massive, arachnid form of the Echoshaper appeared upon the wall. Its human face twitching as it twisted toward them.

“Oh, what the fuck is that,” Mairaela blurted, turning to Scirocca, “Did you hear it talk in your head, too?”

Scirocca nodded and spoke aloud to Szachosh’te, “Your help is appreciated.”

“Of course,” came the echoing in their minds as Szachosh’te helped weave their web of lies, “The Madame had grown deranged, using the students sent to her as subjects for her experimentations. Someone had to stop her, and it couldn’t have been I. She had control over me, after all.” The Echoshaper chittered and clicked its feet upon the stone, “I saw the Dame in Tess’ memories during my work and reached out to her for assistance in stopping the madwoman Pava.”

“That will work,” Scirocca said, inclining her head politely toward Szachosh’te, “Thank you.”

“Wait,” Mairaela paused, looking back and forth between Scirocca and the spider before she landed on the latter, “Why are you helping us? What’s in it for you to be rid of Pava?”

“Nothing, but I do want to help Tess,” it telegraphed directly into their minds, “She did not deserve the Madame’s treatment and her rescuer should not be punished.”

“We will ensure that she knows what you did for us,” Scirocca explained, “And for her.”

After their ruse was set into place and they departed, Mairaela turned to ask Scirocca, “Will this work?”

Scirocca nodded her head, “It will.”

“How do you know?”

“Because our lie is what they want to hear,” Scirocca explained, “They would much rather the handler of the Echoshaper, a Yysh cultist, finally snap than to have their Librarian covering up a murder. Than to have their entire batch of new enlistees turn out to be killers. To have one of them possesses a demon within her that somehow got past all of their checks. The lie is much easier to swallow.”