Work Text:
Dust like the breath of a corpse spilt over from the crushed spines of dilapidated books. It formed little dunes and valleys on the scuffed flagstones, a map of undisturbed neglect. There, an oil lamp had been overturned long ago, paraffin congealing along the imperfections where the slabs had been separated by the calm hand of time. Here, the preserved wings of an insect cracked with slow desiccation, the myriad colours that had once shone through dulled to death-gray. The coveted, reviled halls of great Byrgenwerth dripped with disuse, moaned with silence, but were not empty.
Her chest speared by duty, her mind pinned by curiosity, the last scholar of the mysteries knelt in half-life at the only altar she knew. Frayed pen nibs, specimen jars embroidered with cobwebs, and half-finished and illegible research notes covered the desk in a static whirlwind. She dared neither to touch a single sacred part of the clutter, her head bowed and shoulders hunched, nor mourn the dreams incomplete that were conceived on this operating table. Her ears strained for the creaking of the bad step of the spiralling staircase, the failed stifling of impassioned voices that whistled from the overstuffed armchairs by the fireplace. She laboured to trace the remnants of the aural landscape that lay beyond the thin veil of sleep against which she could so easily place her fingertips, stretching its membranous fibres into sagging distortion.
She remained in supplication until her knees ached and the eyes along the lining of her meninges blinked. In stages, she rose to match the waxing moon overhead. Delicately, she plucked the glass bell away from the jar of brine and embalming fluid that had pride of place on the desk's scratched surface. Within swam a multitude of eyes, each trochlear nerve a tail. Two gloved fingers retrieved a brown-irised, blood-bruised eye that she had removed herself from the insular lobe of a dear colleague. She curled her fingers gently around the soft tissue and shook the excess vitreous liquid from its misshapen folds with a single practiced flick.
With the tools of her trade in her possession, she forded the stairs. She knew its music, the nuances of the creaking whine on the fifth step, the squeal of the twentieth. In the days before the schism and the secret, she had run down them in a breathless rush while held in the merciless teeth of sudden inspiration or descended sensibly in rapt conversation with a rival, boot heels clicking smartly, never noticing a peep — but she had been a thing living within these walls then. Now, her ascent did not disturb the quiet.
Alighting in the derelict common room, a poltergeist of longing held her fast. Its fingers were a vise to the flesh of her shoulders, the merciless jaw of the trap that locked her in place where snatches of a light out of time fell. By it, she saw, as though she was peeking through the slits of iron shutters, through the thick gauze of a bridal veil, herself. The young, unblemished face — divested of the blindfold cap — was unrecognizable to her — the nose seeming shorter, the mouth easier, the eyes brighter. It was only the presence of her fellow scholars that indicated the girl's identity.
Rom — marked by the edge of vacancy in her eyes, as though she was split in twain, both present and elsewhere in her every moment — sat perched on the arm of the sofa, arguing fiercely over a point from Damian's most recent dissertation. Another girl, nameless, almost Rom's opposite for how sharp, almost cruel, her features were, played devil's advocate with feigned disinterest. Between them sat herself-who-was-not-herself, drawn from her role as mediator toward the sight of the apparition on the landing.
Yurie's scrutiny fell on her in parts, like a body on the vivisection table, first marking the pristine white of her robe, then the disarray of her hair, and last the Rosmarinus and the rheumy eye in her hands. A faint horror flashed across her face, hand-in-hand with recognition. Her companions did not take note of her distraction, too embroiled in debates of the ascendancy of the will of the self. They were alone, with only the staggering breadth of time between them. Her mouth moved, the words meant for her, but she could not decipher their nature, their meaning.
Her lack of response caused Yurie to bristle, her posture snapping ramrod-straight. Without removing her gaze from her quarry, she placed a hand on Rom's shoulder (catching the trailing line of her sleeve, in truth). In the split second required to redirect her companion's attention from the cosmos above to the stairs below, it was too late.
That texture of the budding scholar's rapacious need to know, to understand, to see — foreign things from a time when she was other than she was — left her with the weight of Yurie's eyes; she was alone. She heard high, wild laughter, deep, repressed sobs, all from the rotten furniture of the now empty room. The last students were long gone, their final breaths drawn long ago, but their voices were caught in the cages of the ogival arches. Presently, she stared up into them, trying to decipher the cacophony. Phantom meanings filled her ears, the old adages and the new theorems, none of which she could turn toward any purpose but the one she already bore.
Mute, unfixed anger rose along the smooth curve of her shoulders as her proscribed path continued out onto the lookout. The hollow edifice of Byrgenwerth — its creeping ivy and chipped stones bathed in the light of the stagnant moon — stood against the placid lake with the wide windows of its eyes trained upon the surface of the water like a disapproving scold or an ashamedly eager gossip, waiting to pounce upon the moment of condemnation.
The lake by the moonside was the site of her first shocking discovery as a greenhorn student, a memory near lost in the billowing mists of the romantic past. On a lark, she had gone down to the lake, the kneepads of her uniform pillowed by the dirt and last blades of grass at its edge, and plunged her hands beneath the unmoving surface. A tickle of seaweed on her fingers made her withdraw, a look of betrayal in twisting her lips before she regrouped for another attempt. That time, she had held against the shiver brought by its wavy touch and pulled up between the creases of her palms a mouthful of water. It had been salty then and now. High above, the bracing scent of salt lived on her tongue, in her throat, stinging her eyes and lingering on her cheeks.
To her right, a sharply reclined rocking chair kept time with the nonexistent waves, the only other soul left in Byrgenwerth seated upon it. Provost Willem seemed to glow under the pale light, his always-wan face aged to the sickly yellow of old vellum imprinted with the oils of generations of fingertips. The laboured rise and fall of his breath was the only sign that he lived, so stock-still was he in the gently moving seat. All the great men of old (never having reached the heights of the Great Ones) were dead, decaying things, and only their humble students remained to witness their dissembling.
With a gesture like a spasm, he called her to his side. She crossed the short distance between them, hooking her sidearm into her belt to allow her to place a hand at the crook of his arm, a gesture made so as not to startle. He was sightless, with the blindfold of his office to obscure him from the notice of the moon, making his acknowledgement of her nothing more than the overlaying of his hand on hers. A cool breeze caressed the night but his touch was familiarly clammy through the sheer fabric of her glove before she withdrew. They had gone through these motions each endless night, never deviating, keeping the perfect shape of the ritual he had devised. She could not say why this night was different and yet—
The lake called; she answered. Two guttering lamps were lit at the end of the high pier, two will-o'-the-wisps that drew her inexorably into their midst. Through the mirror of the water, another Yurie decanted out by the steady hand of her approach until they stood face-to-face, each waiting for the other to break the stalemate.
Yurie-in-the-water was the first to turn, spinning on her heel and allowing inertia to carry her through her about-face. Envy surged in her at that carelessness, the simplicity with which she slid from the spears that held her fast and followed lofty ambition, heady inquiry. Yurie did not hesitate nor look back at the face of the ghost she left behind, each step she took deeper on the invisible path that stretched out before her was firmly planted and sure. No silt rose to darken the water, allowing her to see the fullness of each motion reflected back by the brimming light below.
In that moment, the water stretched forever, beyond and beneath the line of the horizon. The cosmos were at her feet and the part of her that never left the beauty of the shaded lumenflower gardens of the Orphanage — that still genuflected before the altar of despair, that yearned to reach above her head to touch the heavens — wept; her eyes were dry.
Eyes opened around Yurie-in-the-water, a halo in pumice with dreaming brown pupils trained to the skies above. The transfigured ritual that bound the nightmare of blood embodied herself in pitted stone, alone but for the arachnid brood that wandered aimless along the threads of her foamy web. Yurie-in-the-water walked toward her with a smile of fond recognition, arms open as though to embrace all the understanding held within the contours of the cresting current. Her gaze, however, was pulled to the blood in the water, the streak of red marring the pale glass. A phantasm of the ocean, tall beyond the limits of human height, composed beyond the parameters of the human heart. Her hands were clasped, head bowed like the vicars before the blood, eschewing the blooming stars of the sky.
More than from the reflection she had followed into the deep, she felt an alienation from the sight of the woman in the lake. There was held in her simultaneously a desire to leap into the waters of the covenant and a need to refuse the enlightenment of the bleeding stars. It was not hers to grasp.
Secrets held no elevated power when dragged into the harsh light by the maws of beasts, and no matter how she yearned she could not be more than she was. She had been named the last scholar, doomed by her very nature to forever reach and never find, study and never understand.
Fury burned her vision black. The mirage in the water was gone. Hemmed in by the deepening darkness, the glass surface of the lake shone such that no eye, not even the one in her hand, could pierce it. As Yurie-in-the-water had, she turned away, though she could not claim her assurance. Every part of her that still was her hated the way she swathed the world — herself within it — in ignorance, all to partake of the smallest taste of a sacred knowledge. She had betrayed them all to keep that first swallow of celestial water in her mouth, Laurence first, then Willem, last herself.
One damning step after another, she strode back into the shadow of the building. Its corners were darker, shifted as though the unchanging moon had spun in the sky. The contradiction of change brought her up short, a furrow marring the immutable litany handed down by the worn adages of the scholars. The eye swivelled in her grip, wild and desperate, rolling in hysteria.
A sound cracked through the shroud of silence upon the dead university, first the swing of old brass hinges that had not been heard for uncountable years, then heavy bootfalls that rained down like blows. Byrgenwerth trembled with clamour. She was still as death in the presence of the slow footsteps that came through the door, listening to the wrongness of it, the discordant movements of a stranger on unknown soil. In her mind's eye, she pictured the way hang-nail splinters of wood would slide into the cracked leather of the soles, pinpricks of history embedded in the intruder's footsteps. A savage pleasure flooded her at that. They would mark, perhaps, but be marked in return by their desecration of her last charge with their living, covetous breath.
Without seeing she knew that they crossed to the desk (did not kneel), heard the shuffle of papers she had not touched since they had been laid down, could map the slow circle of their hesitant exploration. What they saw, reflected backward upon the cornea of their untrained eye, she could not even guess. It could only be the difference between the oceans of a stone skimming the surface and that of an anchor buried in the silt, the trembling student looking down into the depths and the devoted master gazing up into the firmament.
The first step of the staircase complained under the weight of their boot, presaging the first squeal of the breaking ritual secret beneath their regard. This, came the sudden insight, was why this night was different. The ebb of the tide crashed in her ears. Thinking of nothing, moved by base, bestial instinct, she moved to meet them, to stop them — even in ultimate futility.