The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

Abbey House Dining Hall | 6:14 AM | Third Day

"...Ms. Eshkalon," Linos said, his tone very slow and careful. "What are you doing?"

She didn't reply right away; for a moment, I wondered if even she had a satisfactory answer to the question. That's not to say she looked uncertain, mind. After all, people feel very, very strongly about doing things for reasons they can't put into words all the time.

But after a few moments, she did reply, with a surprisingly calm tone considering the circumstances.

"I believe," she said, slowly, "that it would be for the best for myself and my daughter to head back to the main building, where the Power is suppressed. I understand the reasoning for continuing as a group... But I cannot abide putting my daughter in a dangerous situation outside of my control. My judgement is that it would be safest to find a quiet spot for us which I feel confident I can defend, and remain there until everything is resolved."

Linos looked taken aback, but nevertheless seemed to consider this for a moment, while the rest of us simply stared. Lilith didn't even seem fully aware of what was happening, her eyes glued to the ground.

"Why do you have my gun--"

"For our protection," she said firmly, as he was still finishing the last word of the question. "I should not think your group will need it, with your numbers. I'm sure you understand." It was clear she was eager to end this exchange as quickly as possible, and her hand went for the door handle. "Now, if you'll excuse me--"

"Uh, the barrier..." Ptolema said, weakly.

Mehit flinched, then closed her eyes for a moment. Even when she reopened them, she didn't turn her gaze fully back to Linos. "Mister Melanthos," she said. "Please lower the barrier for a moment. I expect you need to renew it with eris for your journey regardless, so..."

It hadn't even occurred to her. That meant this had probably been a snap decision.

"H-Hold on," he said, with a very forced attempt at a disarming smile on his lips. "Let's talk about this, Ms. Eshkalon."

"There's nothing to discuss," she said.

"I understand you might have reservations about traveling together when there's the possibility that someone within our group could be involved with what is happening, but..." He straightened himself up, trying to speak with calm authority. "I truly do believe it's for the best for us to all remain together. It's my responsibility to protect everyone, and I intend to see that through."

"A man is dead," she said, so plainly it couldn't even be called blunt. "You have already failed in your responsibility."

Fang clicked their tongue. Even I couldn't help but wince.

At this, Linos seemed thrown off guard. He hesitated. "I... We really do need to stay together, Ms. Eshkalon," he insisted. "The killer could be right outside the building."

"Lilith is my daughter," she said, her voice a little more quiet. "I am her guardian. What is best for us is my decision."

Lilith started muttering something under her breath that I couldn't make out. The words were raspy, drawn out.

"Be that as it may," Linos said, a little firmness coming into his voice. "Circumstances being as they are--"

"IT IS MY DECISION!" Mehit shouted abruptly - probably louder than I'd heard anything screamed all weekend - her features flaring with furious anger as her gaze sharply turned back towards our group. In a quick motion, the pistol in her hands shot up, the safety pulled back, the barrel aimed directly at Linos's head.

That was incredibly fast for a civilian, something in me observed. She must have training.

Everyone lurched back in shock. Theodoros stumbled and practically jumped over a chair.

"W-woah," Seth said, holding up his hands. "Take it easy, ma'am--"

"Lower the barrier!" She demanded, her eyes wide. "NOW!"

"Fuck," I heard Ezekiel mutter, off to the side. "This is gonna get us killed if they hit us now, fuck, shit--"

"M-Ms. Eshkalon," Linos said, all confidence in his voice gone as he held up his hands in a soothing gesture. "Please, put down the gun--"

She fired, a searing pop cracking through the air as the bright blast shot just to the side of Linos's face, close enough to make him wince in pain. It tore through the table, shattering the wood and hitting the floor below. A few people screamed, most notably Ophelia, Theodoros, and - irritatingly - myself.

Gunshots reminded me of my grandfather's death. It wasn't a pleasant association.

"Dying gods!" Seth shouted, coming close to being hit himself.

Lilith, suddenly, started to cry a bit. It wasn't like the sort of crying that you'd normally hear from a child- It sounded pained, breathy, like she was having a panic attack at the same time. She hid her face from the rest of us. It was so counter to the person I knew, the smug and strange girl who varied between being incredibly awkward and oppressively adult, but could never be called shy or frail. The dissonance was so severe that it became unsettling, upsetting.

I had to admit, I started to panic myself, my heart racing. Realistically, Mehit was making a profoundly bizarre mistake to try and threaten a group of arcanists like this - if someone had reacted badly just to her firing that shot, she'd probably already be dead, and unless she was keeping an eye on everyone - I couldn't exactly tell - there was nothing stopping someone whispering or tracing a simple incantation to try and disarm her.

But that was looking at the situation from the perspective of a commentator weighing the odds in a fight. As a human, standing here in front of a gun, the reality was that you could pull a trigger faster than even the best arcanists could cast any incantation. Without a defense set up - and with her inside the barrier, we had none - it was the simplest way in the world to kill at least one person.

"I," Mehit said, taking a heavy breath as she spoke, sweat pooling on her brow, her voice cracking. "Have had enough. Of being-- Of being at the mercy of unnatural things. I should have never have brought Lili to this. Never let her into this class. I should... I should have kept her safe..."

"That's still possible," Kamrusepa said, trying to fill Linos's shoes now that he looked too shaken to speak. "We have a clear plan. We just need to work together--"

"It's already too late!" the woman cried out, through grated teeth. "It's... It's too much. All I've done is try to hold on to her, while Hamilcar... While all of you people, pull her further and further away. Put her in special classes, take her to special ceremonies filled with people like you... I knew-- I knew something like this would happen. One way or the other..."

She trailed off, and for a moment, the room was silent, no one else brave enough to speak up. Her chest heaved up and down as she kept the weapon leveled on Theodoros's father.

"...it's sick," she eventually said, the corners of her eyes growing wet. "How you pretend everything is normal. Holding these little dinners, talking to each other, pretending like you're not... Having all this pomp about the 'next generation' of arcanists, about how everyone is so special." She tilted her head, just slightly. "How many of you are like her? Hm?! I wouldn't be surprised if it were all of you. If this whole class just farce, some... Some..."

Once again, the room was silent. Though this time, it was much heavier.

Oh, I thought. So that's how it is.

My eyes flicked over to a few of the others. It looked like they were starting to understand a little of what was going on, too.

"I failed to protect Lili," she went on, breaking from her previous train of thought. "I've... Failed to protect her, over and over, from people telling me that everything going on is normal, that there's a clear plan." There was so much contempt in her words, she practically spat them out. "I won't make that mistake again. W-Whatever is left of her, of her innocence... I'll keep it safe, no matter what happens. Even if doing so requires that I give up my life." Her grip on the pistol tightened, and so did that on her daughter. "Now. Lower the barrier."

"Lilith doesn't have anything suited for combat on her scepter," Kamrusepa said, hesitantly. "You won't be able to..."

"Lower it," Mehit said, her tone growing gravely quiet.

"I-It's alright," Linos said, resigned. "It's alright. I think... I think we should let them go-- I'll let you go," he said, his tone soothing.

He touched his scepter and terminated the incantation for a moment. Instantly, Mehit was out the door with her daughter. I heard the front doors of the guest house open off in the distance, before slamming shut again... And then, silence.

Linos let out a heavy, heavy sigh as the barrier reappeared.

"Wow," Fang said, with an awkward smile. "Not... Great."

"Is this... Really alright...?" Ophelia asked quietly. "I mean, Lili-- She's just a little girl..."

"I'm not proud of it," Linos said, rubbing his brow. "But I think that was the best thing to do in a bad situation. All we can do is hope with our heart of hearts that the culprit has moved on, or else that they're not interested in targeting them. She's at least correct that if they can make it to the main building and find somewhere safe and closed-off to hide, it should be... Relatively safe."

"Let us hope," Kamrusepa said.

In spite of those words, the atmosphere was not at all hopeful. At least this had gone a little ways to diffusing the tension - now the only vocal objector to the current plan was Ezekiel.

"Man... She--" Ptolema cut herself off, holding a hand to her mouth. "I mean... I guess I always figured it was like that with Lilith, but hearing her put it that way--"

"Let's not, Ptolema," Seth said.

"Ah, right," she said, stiffly. "Right... Sorry."

We were all silent for another long moment.

Eventually, Linos clapped her his hands together with renewed resolve. "Right, then. No sense in delaying the inevitable any further. Let's move out."

And so we did, moving into an organized cluster as originally planned - albeit slightly smaller - and departing through the doorway ourselves, marching down the hall, our scepters drawn and some of our arms linked to share in the output of divination incantations. It felt almost like I was doing basic combat training again, albeit slightly more awful.

As we moved, Ran spoke to me. "You feeling okay, Su?"

"Y-Yeah," I said. "...Well, I guess as much can be expected..."

"Mm."

"Thanks for asking, though," I said. "It-- I appreciate it a lot. What about you?"

"I'm keeping it together," she spoke, lowering her voice a little. "Just thinking about what Mehit said." She glanced to the side. "Feel like I should've said something."

"Well... Everybody probably feels that way," I told her.

"Yeah," Ran said, nodding.

But then, what could we have said? It was the same as what had happened at dinner, when Lilith had shut everything down. It was a literal elephant-in-the-room situation, like visiting a mad relative who stuffs his cats after they die and keeps them around the house as grotesque ornaments As long as everyone ignores it, it's possible to construct a world where it's... Well, not that peculiar. Where things are something close to ordinary.

But when an outsider comes to visit, and points it out... That's all it takes to shatter the illusion forever.

In truth, I'd already had my suspicions about the precise nature of their relationship. What I hadn't realized until this moment was how bad I really would feel for Mehit. How much I'd almost find myself agreeing with her.

As much as I indulged in feeling sorry for myself regarding my own circumstances, I was fortunate compared to many. Through my whole life, both in my youth and in and after becoming an arcanist, the one thing I'd never wanted for was agency. Fate was kind to me - it had bent over backwards to grant me miracles, miracles which allowed me to trample on the lives of others in pursuit of my own deluded ideas of happiness. While never affording those I trampled the chance at resistance.

It also had spared me from situations of painful interpersonal complexity. Other than Ran - and even she was only a partial exception - no one knew of my vulgar nature, and it was mine to reveal or conceal if I wished.

Many arcanists were not so fortunate.

𒊹

As I explained previously, in the present day, all human beings were, physically speaking, temporal copies of the original 100,000 or so individuals whose biological material had been ensconced within the Tower of Asphodel at the end of the old world, able to live simultaneously only by virtue of a carefully-curated paradox. This was true without exception; you could have sentient life that wasn't dependent on iron, but such a thing could never be called a human. Even the animals the Ironworkers had cultivated in imitation of those from the old world were really nothing like the originals which had existed on Earth under close examination, mentally or physically.

And as I also told you, because human consciousness had been discovered to have an emergent component which resided in the Higher Planes, a new organ had to be engineered to allow the mind to function in the changed dimensional landscape of the Remaining World. That was pneumaic nexus, in case you're having trouble remembering all this terminology-- And that emergent component was often called a 'pneuma', though this was technically a colloquialism.

These two alterations to humanity's state of being gave birth, at the last minute of the Ironworkers labor, to an unexpected complication. In the past, the extra-planar element of the mind grew naturally from a human fetus during the later months of maternity, as the cerebrum began to spark with the crude beginnings of higher thought. But for reasons that were never truly understood - it could have been an inevitability just by virtue of the temporal duplication process, or perhaps because the pneumaic nexus made the process artificial, or maybe even both - this no longer happened. Instead, in new human beings, the pneumaic nexus would simply attempt to re-link with the consciousness of its seed.

This wasn't a problem, at first. After all, the first settlers of the Mimikos and the Empyrean were just those 100,000 people, in bodies directly transposed from the Tower of Asphodel. But when it happened to infants...

Well, obviously it would cause issues, both for the baby trying to bind itself to part of an adults mind, and for the adult who was getting, well, binded to. Fortunately, the Ironworkers developed a solution. The laws of the world and the pneumaic nexus were altered such that nascent pneumas were blocked, irrevocably, from forming this link. This would naturally lead them to develop a different and new higher-planar pneuma, or 'soul', instead-- Like plants forced by a slab of stone to grow horizontally rather than vertically.

However... After the Ironworkers had already resigned and disappeared from the world, an issue came to light.

It was found that the new generation, the children born from this process, had no capacity to use the Power. Even though it had no visible effect on consciousness or intellect, this alteration to the nature of their pneumas damaged the ability of their minds to take on an Index, meaning that using the Power was impossible. There were cases where this didn't happen - where the 'trauma' healed just so - but they were one in a million. So rare as to be useless.

This outcome was nothing short of disastrous. The Ironworkers had left arcana for mankind to compensate for their own failings, and to allow them to possess a quality of life, of dignity and abundance, not too separated from that which they had experienced before the collapse.

Without it... It would be like going back to the Old Kingdoms era. Scraping out a frail existence in a hostile and unkind world, where you'd be lucky not to die of tuberculosis or be eaten by some animal.

Look-- All of this is really technical errata keeping me off the main point, which is that human beings can almost never use the Power naturally. So there's a... Process, which people have to go through to make it happen. It's come up a few times already, and you've probably picked up on the fact that even discussing it is taboo. You could call it an open secret, something that only the fraction of the population to be Inducted ever learns.

Without the Ironworkers, people were forced to find their own solution to the problem. So they raided the archives of the Mimikos's creation which they'd left them, searched through the parts of the Tower of Asphodel which were still possible to interface with after the world had been set into motion.

What they discovered was that the idea that the Tower had only preserved the 10,000 or so human beings within each of the Parties, that they alone were the last remnants of human civilization, had not been strictly true. Though the physical matter that could be integrated into its structure had been limited, this wasn't true for that which wasn't physical. The pneuma normally disintegrated upon the death of the biological mind, but in the Imperial Era, it had been discovered that it was easy to keep it in a state of stasis simply by continuing to feed it a tiny amount of information across the planes.

And so, when it had become clear that there was no preventing the end of the old world... That's what they'd done.

For billions upon billions of people.

As I understood, at some point the Ironworkers had simply abandoned the idea of re-embodying these... Well, I guess the only thing you could call them was 'ghosts'. The scope of the task was too much for what they were capable of, both materially and in their own stamina. And so they'd been left to rot deep within the Tower, where they presumably would have resided forever...

That is, had they not been discovered in that pursuit of a solution.

It was at this time that a profane theory came to those scholars, those who would in time be called Egomancers, diviners of the mind. If the spirits of the young had been deformed through the act of 'blocking' their growth - forced to leave the dimensional 'space' in which they would naturallygrow 'vacant' - then perhaps that cavity could be filled, like grafting a new plant to a free space on the stalk. A mechanism to repair the damage borne of the 'miracle' of creating a new human being in this world which was, by all rights, long, long dead.

The Power could not normally be used on the brain directly; it simply wouldn't touch it, either mundanely or through the Higher Planes. You couldn't alter it. You couldn't even truly read it-- Incantations like Fang's Moment-Emulating Arcana had to base their observations on inference. But there was one means by it could be interfaced with which wasn't quite mundane - that is, though its connection to the Tower of Asphodel, the same process which allowed logic bridges to function in the present, and by which the Ironworkers chose to facilitate the attaching of Indexes.

It was by this mechanism that the first Induction was performed... Awakening one of those orphaned souls to fill that hollow space.

The pneuma contains much of the information that makes up higher consciousness. Memories, thought patterns, aspects of personality which were not dictated by the more carnal components of biology. In a sense, it could be thought of as the platonic essence of a human being; who they are, absent the pressure of existing within an environment.

In this regard, the issues inherent in affixing them to a living person, with their own mind, were obvious. In the worst-case scenario, the original individual would simply be overwritten; left as nothing more than a set of inherited motor functions, preferences and habits, with their personality and memories to be examined, worn, or discarded as seen fit. Obviously, this was undesirable. So the Egomancers refined the process of Induction by meddling in the nature and speed of the upload from the Tower of Asphodel.

The objective was to make it so the imposed ego would be so frail that it would be obliterated at the moment of arrival. In this sense, it was already at a disadvantage; in a completely unfamiliar body and brain, the mind was prone to default to that which seemed most familiar. But traces would frequently still echo, eliciting changes in personality, lingering memories...

What was desired was for the true nature of what was happening to be unnoticeable. After all, the concept was deeply, deeply disturbing at its root. To human beings, our inner world is the most precious thing. It's shocking how much people keep from one another; how much people insulate their complete selves from the painful constraints of day-to-day material reality and social convention. For that to be compromised so completely, well...

In the end, it was 'improved' greatly, though never perfected. In the modern day, it was - just as I'd been told in that doctors office, years ago - extremely unlikely that any of this would have a major impact on someone. The majority of people who went through the process didn't even feel anything happen, and for those who did, it was more like dreaming they were another person briefly; a fleeting thing, immaterial and of no true consequence.

But not for everyone.

The story is long and complicated, but to generalize, the world reacted to this like human beings react to all unsolvable problems-- Which is to say, they decided to pretend it didn't exist. No one desired to try and integrate something so disturbing into their culture. No one desired to think of the minds consumed in the process of Induction as, well, people... And most of all, no one desired to conceive that there was a slim chance that people they knew, perhaps even their loved ones, could be someone else wearing their face.

No one who mattered, at least.

In the end, the reactionary solution reached was that it would be kept a secret among non-arcanists, and culturally forgotten as much as possible. Research further into the topic using the Power was banned and Egomancy with it, replaced by the pneumenology, a strictly medical practice that only replicated the existing techniques. People were sworn to silence, and media concerning the matter was forbidden. Of course, a secret on that scale is impossible to keep completely; any one who really cared could find out.

But most people wanted to forget about it. The original sin of civilization in the Covenant Era, such as it was.

Arcanists didn't even really talk about it among ourselves. Those who weren't afflicted were no different from the average person in finding the idea that the people who they worked with every day, who they might have even grown up and gone to school with before they'd become arcanists, were imposters, and those who were partially afflicted tended to want to leave it behind them, to establish a sense of self that felt absolute.

And for that slim few... Those who truly couldn't be helped... A choice was given. To either decide to - in spite of their self-conception - embrace the identities they now possessed and play that role for the rest of their lives, for both their own sake and the people who would otherwise be left to grieve something so strange and terrible. Or to have all ties severed, and begin a new life in the uttermost sense, preferably far away.

Either way, you were encouraged to keep it to yourself.

However, there was nevertheless an unspoken understanding that existed between all arcanists, regardless of what group one happened to fall into. Which was that we were different from other people. There was a special kinship, a special debt to repay through ones actions, one way or the other...

But it's one of those things Neferuaten had talked about, during the tour. Two people can discuss suffering as a result of a lack of food, describe their violent pangs of hunger and the horror and fear they felt for the people around them, and believe they've had the same experience. Think that they understand one another.

But in truth, there are levels of hunger which are utterly unalike. And what they really understand is nothing at all.