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Second Tuesday, Winter of Nine, Age of the East Winds
The girl was looking at her like she knew her. Elodie wasn’t unused to this. Plenty of people purported to know her in the way they thought that an interview or two, or seeing her at the front of a crowd meant that they were her friend now. Still, it was best not to make assumptions. Maybe she had met her at some fundraiser or gala and had the unfortunate embarrassment of being the fiftieth person she had spoken to that night.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Don’t go to Courage Square today,” she said. Gasped, really, with the amount of air coming in and out her mouth. Her… friend? Companion? Put a hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t take her eyes off Elodie either. “You can’t. You’ll die.”
“Are you an oracle, Miss-?”
She looked at her. She blinked, “You spoke to me? You’re not going back to-?”
Elodie thought she might be better off calling security and leaving. If this was one of their… keener followers, she wanted to get some good distance in case things got out of control. Divinities knew that they couldn’t afford another scandal after Odbuoy’s kerfuffle with Canter, or whatever Ezra thought he was playing at these days. “Where’s Courage Square?” There wasn’t any place on the map that she could think of, and like all wundersmiths, she was a bit more in tune with the workings of the city than the average Nevermoorian. It hummed in her blood. It sang to her. She screamed back.
“Morrigan,” the girl’s friend said to her.
“I know, Cadence,” she said, turning red. She turned back to Elodie, “Are you… you’re going to the main square? To speak to Squall?”
Her eyebrows raised a little. Griselda, Rastaban, and Decima had all said that they were going to… intervene on Ezra today, but what that meant was a conversation in the study chamber. They’d done the same thing to Odbuoy, not because they disagreed with his thing, but just to tell him to keep his head down for a few years. Not make any waves. Maintain the status quo. “How do you know about that?”
An expression flashed across the girl’s- Morrigan’s - face that Odbuoy would probably describe as fuck it. “I’m from the future. You all die in the central square, I don’t know what it’s called now, but when I come from it’s known as Courage Square.”
She blinked. Then she laughed, “That’s cute, kid. I didn’t know it was fool’s day today. I think that was months ago. See if you can get one on me next year too, yeah?”
She turned away, walking with more alacrity than she normally did, on her way back to Proudfoot House, ready to tell Owain and Ezra about this. It might make them smile in the way they used to.
She didn’t hear the shouts behind her, begging her to stop, to listen. She didn’t want to. She went home.
Second Tuesday, Winter of Nine, Age of the East Winds, Again, Again, Again.
There was a girl screaming and crying on the street. Two girls. When she narrowed her eyes, blood clung to their clothes, viscera in their hair, and painting their skin, oxidising in the morning light.
She blinked again and they were clean.
Second Tuesday, Winter of Nine, Age of the East Winds, Again, Again, Again, Again, Again, Again, Again, Again, Again, Again. Again.
“Stay,” the tall girl told her. “Listen to us.”
Elodie had been trained to resist mesmerists, but this was a particularly powerful one apparently. Despite not wanting to, despite trying to resist, she found herself unable to move. She couldn’t even block them out.
“I’m a wundersmith too,” the shorter girl said, holding out her hands. She had a handful of imprints, not as many as Elodie. Not a fully accomplished one yet. But the imprints were sacred. And an illusionist would not be able to fool her with the way they moved.
“Who are you?” she demanded. They had all nine already. And even if there were a tenth, well… she had seen the divinities. Some of them. Was she hallucinating? Drugged?
“I’m from the future,” she said. “Please… can you listen to us?”
She looked up and down the street. This was no place to have this kind of conversation. “Very well. Follow me. I know somewhere.”
The Deucalion was quiet right now, except for the sound of Owain complaining about something to Mathilde somewhere all the way upstairs.
“You live… here?” The wundersmith asked.
“I’m Elodie Bauer,” she said instead of asking for an explanation over what that was supposed to mean. She held out a hand to be shaken, “What are your names?”
“Morrigan Crow.”
“Cadence Blackburn.”
Both of them shook her hands briefly. Their fingers were bone cold. Like the gap in a Ghostly Hour, on the way out.
“The Smoking Parlour is probably empty,” she said. “We can talk there.”
Morrigan Crow inhaled sharply. Cadence Blackburn put a hand on her arm, giving her a warning look.
She turned away from them, heading to the lift. She heard their footsteps follow her. Hopefully whatever anomaly this was, it could get sorted out in time to stay on schedule for their Very Serious Discussion With Ezra TM this afternoon.
“Timelines are strange,” Elodie said, going to pour them a cup of tea. Lemon smoke puffed out from the walls. For sharpness of mind. She suspected that they were going to need it.
“You’ve said that before,” Morrigan said, not looking at her. Looking anywhere but her.
“You always say this,” Cadence said. “Now you’re going to tell us that this sort of thing has never happened before, as far as you know.”
That had been… exactly what Elodie was thinking. She frowned at them as she passed out the cups. “How many times have you done this?”
“A few,” Morrigan said as Cadence said, “Too many.”
“Right,” she said. “What worked? What didn’t?”
“Nothing’s worked,” Cadence drawled. “Why do you think we’re still here?”
Fair point, she thought. “What doesn’t work?”
Morrigan lifted up her hand, ticking off her fingers, “Negotiating with Squall, siding with Squall, avoiding Squall and just trying to deal with his creatures, telling the others, but that might be because we’ve not quite managed to ever get them on side before. We’ve done versions of all of those.”
“To no avail?”
“Exactly.” She nodded grimly.
“Well,” Elodie said. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, in the original timeline?”
Cadence looked at Morrigan. Morrigan looked at Cadence. Elodie smelled blood, and realised that Morrigan had bitten her lip hard enough to split it. A bead was welling up from it already, red and shining.
And then they told her.
“Right,” she said. “Have I ever tried to incapacitate him?”
“You’ve tried to kill him,” Morrigan said. “You have killed him, at least twice, or one of you has? Technically it was Griselda the second time…” she was picking at her fingernails, her foot was bouncing up and down on the floor. Cadence shut her eyes tightly. Elodie chose not to ask any more about it.
“What about Tempus?” she asked.
“That’s the thing… even I had trouble summoning wunder. When you killed him, it was from a knife and a chair leg respectively.
She felt saliva drop and drool onto her shirt and closed her mouth quickly enough to make her back teeth clack, “Griselda beat him over the head with a chair leg?”
When they nodded, she closed her eyes. It was almost comical, the image of the thing. The old woman with the steel chair, just like a performance at the Trolloseum. But this wasn’t a joke. This was her family. And either Ezra died or they all died? Not even, either they all died, or just everyone except for Ezra.
“There has to be a solution,” she said. Then, a thought occurred to her, “Whose line are you from?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “It’s hard to keep track when—”
“Yes,” she said. “Quite.”
“I’m sorry you had to watch that, especially so many times,” she said, finding she meant it. There were flashes in her memory now, the more she spoke to them. She wondered if that were the memories leaking through the Gossamer, the life of another Elodie. The death of another Elodie. Or just the result of her morbid imagination. She wasn’t on Mathilde’s level of macabre, but she had always enjoyed a good tragedy. Up until now, that was. “I suppose I’ve asked you before how it happened? How you came to be here, that is?”
“It was a Ghostly Hour,” Cadence said, looking over at Morrigan. She nodded, and Cadence continued. “It started that way. Christmas Eve, there’s a battle between… doesn’t really matter but there’s a big showy thing in Courage Square. Morrigan and I got the idea that it might be hiding something. We-uh, went looking.”
“And you found the massacre?”
“A little before that,” Morrigan said. “But yes. Something of that size, the fear, it all seeped into the Gossamer. The very good and the very bad memories remain,” she sounded like she was quoting someone there. “Even if everything else fades away. The deaths of eight wundersmiths, and—”she took another breath. “What happened to the city in the aftermath, before Squall’s exile, it left an indelible stain on the city’s memory.” Another quote, she was sure. Still, it fit a little bit with the Tempus theory she had studied. Ghostly Hours self-creating out of the worst moments of life. The ones that seemed to rip through history themselves. It had ripped through here.
“But that’s not how Ghostly Hours work,” she said gently.
“It’s not,” Morrigan said. “I- I think I wanted something. I kept passing you on the street, I couldn’t leave,” she wetted her lips. “I couldn’t walk out. I wanted to talk to you, reach out,” she looked down. “I wanted to try to fix it.”
“Wundersmiths grant wishes. Wunder serves the wundersmith,” she said softly.
She sniffed. Her friend looked completely at sea, but she leaned closer to her. Their teas both grew cold on the table. Elodie’s had disappeared at some point, apparently. She didn’t even remember drinking it but only the dregs remained at the bottom of her cup.
“I don’t know what to do,” Morrigan said. “We just keep losing. If wunder didn’t want me to- to win, or to stop it, whatever, why did it let it happen? Why did it happen this way? Why does it keep happening?”
She swallowed once, twice, twisting the ring on her finger on-off-on-off, “Wunder loves the wundersmith. A lot. Too much, perhaps. There’s so much of it, and only nine of us. Ten, right now, I guess, but still. It is not a person. It does not understand us. Or, it doesn’t understand us in the ways we wish to be understood. Conversely, it would be a fool’s game to be sure that we understood it. Do you understand?”
Cadence coughed, “I think I might.”
She nodded at her. “Good.” They were sitting across from her so she had to get up to take Morrigan’s hands in hers. They were still too cold. “It keeps looping,” she said gently. “Because that’s how it is. A Ghostly Hour loops, either perpetually, daily, or annually. You cannot interact. You cannot change the outcome. From everything you’ve told me, and from what I understand of Tempus, this is much the same.”
“Are you real?” she looked up at her. Her eyes were just as black as Ezra’s. “Is this real? Does it stop being real when I- when it happens? When I accept it?”
“I couldn’t guarantee it,” she said. “I’ve never been overly fond of metaphysics. I think I am real. That’s good enough for me, for now.”
“I don’t want to let it happen,” she whispered. Her voice trembled a little. Cadence’s arm snaked around her neck, drawing her closer. “I don’t want it to have happened.”
“It happened before you were born. In a way,” she said. “You were probably born because it happened. At least, born a wundersmith. But this is not your fault, do you hear me, Morrigan Crow?”
“What happens now?”
She sniffed a little. It was one thing putting on some bravado for a pair of teenagers. Accepting her own death, and everyone else’s… knowing what was going to happen to the city, even as Morrigan and Cadence had tried to obfuscate the details of it, was a lot harder. She might even be willing to put bets on whose line Morrigan had come from just off that. They couldn’t change it. Nor could she.
“I’m going to go out there and face what ever’s coming to me,” she said, dropping Morrigan’s hand and standing up. She added, a little brokenly, “I want to die looking up. I want my face to see the sky one last time.”
She closed her eyes as she walked out of the room, hoping against hope that this was the last time this conversation would be had. Hoping that her wish would be granted.