Chapter Text
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Another theory, another treatise, another grand declaration of 'absolute truth' whispered amongst the so-called enlightened. Anaxa suppressed a sigh, though the internal gesture was as weary as any physical one. The Grove, for all its supposed wisdom, remained a garden of meticulously cultivated ignorance, each new bloom merely a repackaging of old lies.
The very air here, thick with the ambition of nascent intellects, felt constricting. Anaxa closed his eyes, the vibrant mental constructs he'd built over centuries momentarily flickering into dust. 'What was the point?', he often mused,' of striving for the summit, when all anyone ever truly desired was a comfortable plateau?'. Yet, the urge persisted. The need to see beyond.
So many geniuses of thought, and yet Anaxa could only think of a handful of people worthy of such a title. In fact, the moment he opened the door to his study, three of those people came into sight.
The first Anaxa noticed was Phainon, Deliverer of Amphoreus. Yet, in his mind's eye, he saw a boy, no older than a teenager, clutching tightly on Agalaea's hand as she introduced them to one another, a boy who had seen more than enough to last a lifetime, and yet time had allowed such a boy to grow and shine brightly like the sun.
Phainon was perusing the various mechanisms Anaxa had left on his desk, not touching them, but his face was so close he might as well have been. Phainon was talking excitedly to Hyacine, describing what the mechanisms looked like and theorizing what they might be able to do.
Hyacine, whose mind was a constellation of disparate yet brilliant thoughts, unparalleled in any medical knowledge, merely hummed in response, her gaze flitting from the intricate gears on the desk to the shelves laden with ancient texts. She’d promised Castorice they’d stay focused, yet the sheer volume of unexplored knowledge in Anaxa’s study was a gravitational pull even she struggled to resist.
Next he saw was Castorice, brilliant and stubborn Castorice that never once uttered a complaint out loud of the mistreatment she suffers at the Grove. Her Touch of Death, the stigma that came with it was nothing more than the predictable fear of the unclassified, the irrational dread of what minds incapable of true analysis could not fit into their neat little boxes. Yet, despite these limitations, or perhaps, because of them, Castorice clung to knowledge with a ferocity that bordered on the sublime. Each text she consumed, each question she posed, was a defiant act against the fleeting nature of her own existence. She sought not just to understand, but to consume every shred of insight before the inevitable, rendering her pursuit of truth a desperate, beautiful race against a terminal equation.
While her companions was distracted, Castorice, meanwhile, was already several paces deep into the labyrinthine shelves, her small figure dwarfed by towering stacks of forgotten lore. "It has to be here," she muttered, a faint exasperation coating her voice. "He said he saw it last time. A crimson binding, I think? Or was it indigo?" Her brow furrowed in concentration, completely oblivious to Phainon's animated lecture on a particularly complex kinetic modulator, or Hyacine's quiet fascination with a diagram of theoretical temporal displacement.
Anaxa watched them, a flicker of something akin to a fond, exasperated amusement stirring within him. They were here, ostensibly, to retrieve a book Castorice had misplaced during her last session of earnest, if somewhat scattered, inquiries. But the moment the door swung open, the true objective had been forgotten, subsumed by the boundless curiosity that defined them.
They were fools, perhaps, in the grand scheme of the universe's indifference, but they were his fools. And unlike the cultivated ignorance of the Grove, their distractions, at least, stemmed from a genuine, unquenchable thirst for something more.