Chapter Text
It is not, in fact, an easy alliance, but March 7th isn’t at the negotiating table in the first place. In fact, several other Memokeepers directly forbade her from attending, so by the time she’d finished sulking, the meeting was over, anyway.
“I think I should have a say if I’m the one being sent out,” she tells Black Swan later, when the mission has been formally assigned to her and she’s signed the contract in crystal. “And besides, this isn’t my style! You could have assigned any of the other Memokeepers who are better at this sort of thing.”
Black Swan sighs and runs a hand through her hair, which they both very well know is futile. Despite the fact that they’re both corporeal for now, March’s hair has never sat flat under her veil, not for a second. “You have a touch for speaking to people, dear. This isn’t just an assignment.” She smiles. “Consider it a promotion.”
March sticks her tongue out. “We’re not the IPC. We don’t get promotions.”
“Forgive me for co-opting their terms, then,” Black Swan says, only half-apologetic.“It was… a sensitive conversation. I don’t think any of us are in full possession of all the facts.”
“That’s why you’re sending me. To find out the rest.”
“I have faith in you.” Black Swan’s hand retreats, dissipating back into its memetic likeness. “We all do. The Xianzhou live long, but there are many things they do not wish to remember. You have always had a talent for coaxing memories out of people who don't want to remember.”
This is, in March’s very professional opinion, a nicer way of saying you break the rules of the Garden of Recollection all the time to talk to people, and the only reason Fuli has turned a blind eye is because you get results out of it. Black Swan’s too nice to scold her for it, anyhow, and doesn’t she talk to people to get access to their memories, too? “Why me?” she whispers. “It could have been you, or Antigone, or Marcel, or any of the other Memokeepers. Why me in particular?”
“It was Fuli’s will,” Black Swan says gently, but as with most things she’s told March lately, it feels like she’s speaking to a small, mortally-wounded animal. Would March make a good dormouse? “THEY see bigger things in your future. You will bring in memories for THEM that the rest of us cannot.”
“Fuli has so much faith in me. I’m just… me.”
“Fuli has faith in you, dear March. But we trust that you will do the job right.” Black Swan pats her arm. Hunter, meet injured dormouse. “Good things will come to you, March 7th, of that I am certain.”
When impendent Memokeepers make the final decision to sacrifice their mortal forms and become memetic entities, it is tradition for them to give up a precious memory in the process. Most give up their names; it’s an easy trade, and one that Fuli graciously allows so that those who do so may obtain new ones in the process. Some give up their memories of their families, and this too is common, especially among those who bear particularly deep scars of abuse. Fuli does not discriminate. THEY will take it all, the good and the bad.
What did you give up? March once asked several of her fellow Memokeepers. Marcel had stared and told her I don’t remember, while Antigone had said everything that I needed to. Black Swan had not even given her words, only a smile. Later, she’d elaborated: Marcel’s offering was her every memory of her beloved, the late #44 Chiara of the Genius Society; Antigone, haunted by the supernova that took out her home satellite Sinne Null, had offered each minute detail she had of her home. Ghosts, memories, they’re all the same, she’d chuffed. Look at them; Antigone only deals in dying worlds and survivors of disaster; Marcel acts as a biographer of every surviving member of the Genius Society, in case they are assassinated by the Lord of Silence like her lover had been. We are all magnetically drawn to the past, dear March. Even me.
March 7th named herself March 7th because it had been the day she’d woken up as a memetic entity, bereft of body or any recollection of her past. Fuli, in THEIR infinite mercy, had only left her one memory: blinding, stinging cold. How bad must her past have been for her to try to give up everything? How bad must it have been for the cold to stay with her regardless?
It does not affect her work as a Memokeeper. As far as hierarchy goes, the Garden of Recollection doesn’t really have one; they are all agents of Fuli, and if THEY speak to some of their agents more than others, so be it, they’re allowed (and perhaps even encouraged!) to keep secrets. March has not been here as long as some of her compatriots, but they respect her and the memories she brings back, just as she respects them and their work. She looks at her own work, beautifully-choreographed sequences of events trapped in perpetual motion inside their glass orbs, nestled between biographies and anthropologies and captured stardust.
Theirs is an important mission, after all: if Fuli is to remake this cosmos from nothing after the war between Aeons brings the universe to its knees, then THEY must have the blueprint from which to begin. The problem, therein, is that there are gaps—periods of history where no one alive knows the truth any longer. They have Memokeepers on board who are good at coaxing those memories out of descendants, out of their very bones if necessary.
In this case, though, the people in question perhaps simply do not wish to remember, or have forgotten, and that is March’s specialty. Every Memokeeper visualizes memories differently: Antigone once described the mind as a calm pond that stretches ever and ever deeper, and March had told her in return of the webbed tapestries that she sees memories woven into. Dead zones, Antigone had called it; slipped stitches, March had said in return.
The Xianzhou live a long, long time, even in March’s eyes, she who lives in memories. Another Memokeeper had lent her a crime novel once—Elephants Can Remember. A full six planet-class starskiffs full of elephants, and all of them prefer to forget. March really has her work cut out for her.
She phases into existence in the back of a crowd in Starskiff Haven, gratefully accepting a warm cup of tea from another patron but unable to take a sip. A gentleman on a small dais is pacing back and forth behind a table, swinging a folding fan as he speaks to the gathered crowd. “The story goes that the great forgemaster Yingxing decided that he was going to forge weapons for his closest allies, the High-Cloud Quintet, and sourced only the best materials.”
Some of the people who’d sat down to listen start fiddling with their phones; others, not particularly entranced by the oration, just buy a cup of milk tea and leave. But March hangs onto his words tighter than most, seeking out the threads of memory woven into his storytelling.
There was a woman in the High-Cloud Quintet named Baiheng. Her death in battle is shrouded in mystery, but seems to have precipitated the Cloudfall. Your task is to find out what really happened to her, and report back to our allies.
“And that was how Yingxing forged the weapons of the High-Cloud Quintet from hadronite, and how his creations remain to this day the exemplar that every blacksmith follows in the Xianzhou Alliance,” the storyteller concludes, a long and winded story later. It’s likely just that—a story. March probed into his memories with every word he spoke, and it doesn’t seem like he knew the Quintet personally.
Besides, hadronite came from the Ivri system, which was lost in a supernova a century before the High-Cloud Quintet rose to fame. Yingxing would have had to pay much more than just a house, a starskiff and six swords to get even half as much hadronite as he would have needed to forge four weapons.
The crowd disperses after applauding, leaving March to contemplate, still seated in the back with her tea in her lap. “It’s rare that we get offworlders so enthused about Xianzhou storytelling,” says the storytelling gentleman, making his way over to her table with a kind smile. “Did this humble storyteller entertain the little miss?”
“I was very entertained, thank you,” March says, swallowing down her offense at being called the little miss. “This story… is it true? Did all of that happen?”
The gentleman laughs. “You may find truth from exaggerations and lies, but it does take a discerning ear. Who’s to say that it didn’t happen?”
“Don’t go about confusing offworlders, Mr. Xiyan, please speak plainly when you’re not telling stories,” says a youthful voice. March turns to see a young boy dressed in blue, a slender sword strapped to his side. “Miss, you startled me for a moment. I’ve been listening to Mr. Xiyan speak this whole time, but I didn’t see you join the audience until everyone else had left.” He looks her up and down, as though studying her. “Did you arrive on the Luofu recently?”
“My ship got here from the Klimt Republic last night,” March lies, weaving the threads of the tapestry into the boy’s mind. “I have my entry papers in my bag, if you’d like to see them.”
The boy’s eyes glaze over for only a second—memories successfully seeded—before he smiles brightly. “No, that’s not a problem, miss. Welcome to the Luofu. May I know your name?”
“March, like the month.” Not an out-of-style name in the Republic. “And you?”
Mr. Xiyan laughs. “This here is Yanqing, Lieutenant of the Cloud Knights, and the youngest one to ever make the position at that.” Yanqing goes pink in the ears at the praise, but nods firmly. “He’s also the ward of Arbiter-General Jing Yuan.”
“The retainer of the General,” Yanqing interrupts, now pink in the face too. “As part of my duties, I patrol the delves for any trouble. That includes helping outworlders, if they require assistance. Miss March, if you have any questions about life on the Luofu, please do not hesitate to ask.”
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of questions,” March says, almost dizzy with the opportunities. The retainer of the General. The one surviving member of the High-Cloud Quintet. How lucky can she get?
“Your tea has gone cold,” Mr. Xiyan points out. “Hey, Mengming, can you get this girl a new cup of tea?”
“No need,” March says, brushing off her skirt to stand up. Any identifying threads, she snips from Mr. Xiyan’s memory—he’ll remember nothing more than an offworlder girl who came to listen to his performance. “Lieutenant, would you show me around the area?”
Talking to Yanqing is, objectively, a liability. Memokeepers are meant to leave no evidence of their presence when they collect memories. Fortunately for March, her first mentor upon becoming a new Memokeeper was Black Swan, who has been known to bend the rules, here and there, if it gets her the best results.
It’s just a shame she’ll have to take those memories with her when she leaves, that’s all.
“The Luofu has traditionally been the most engaged with the wider cosmos, so most of us are used to seeing outworld visitors,” Yanqing says, leading her through the streets of the Exalting Sanctum. “Is there a reason you’ve come here, Miss March?”
The usual excuse, then: “I’m a post-secondary student of historiography at the University of Stella Yamazaki,” she says. “We have a lot of exchange students from the Zhuming, which led me to my current thesis subject. I’m looking for variations in authorship on the Cloudfall.”
That gives Yanqing a brief moment of pause. “The Cloudfall… is certainly a unique subject, Miss March. If you’re studying academically, I’m sure you’d probably know more about it than the average Luofu resident.”
“Aw, no way.”
“It’s just that it was so long ago.” Yanqing picks at the fraying edge of his grip wrappings. “Most Xianzhou natives who were alive to see the Cloudfall have long since fallen to mara. Well, except the General, but he was still fairly young when it happened.”
“My friends from the Zhuming speak very highly of him,” March says, picking her words carefully. “You… Mr. Xiyan said you were his…?”
“His retainer.” Yanqing is firm on that point, at least; something akin to embarrassment is threaded through his voice. “The General hardly says anything of the Cloudfall, to myself or to anyone else, so I’m afraid I won’t be able to give you any answers there, Miss March.”
Well, it was worth a shot. “Thank you, regardless,” March says. “I’m going to start my search in bookstores and libraries, I think.” It’s clear Yanqing’s no academic, so she can probably throw some big words around, even if she’s not fully aware of what they mean either. “I’m still mostly hunting for primary literature from the era of the Cloudfall, so maybe even digital archives would help.”
Yanqing hums. “Qingzu manages the archives of the Seat of Divine Foresight, but I don’t think we have much more beyond demographic census data. You’d probably have better luck asking the Artisanship Commission—they recently expanded to include an authors’ guild.”
It’s not quite what she’s looking for. She’d honestly prefer to start with demographic census data, which might warrant taking a little browse around the archives of the Divine Foresight. Still, “I’ll check it out, thank you!”
“Anytime.” Yanqing sketches a little bow. “Can I walk you back to your lodgings, Miss March?”
“Oh, it’s okay!” She beams at him. “I’m staying with a friend of a friend. I’ll be meeting them in the Exalting Sanctum later, though I’d appreciate it if you could walk me back there. I’m not great with directions…”
“Then I’ll walk you there.”
Yanqing’s a good kid, March decides. His heart’s definitely in the right place, though he’s still young—remarkably young, even for the ageless Xianzhou. “Thank you,” March says. It always feels cruel to take the memories when she goes. What good are Memokeepers if they take all the memories and leave none for others, after all?
But she does it anyway: slips into his mind, takes any identifying information that could lead back to her, and vanishes from sight. Like Mr. Xiyan, he’ll remember a nameless outworlder, but little more. His memories, she’ll convert into a light come and send back to the Garden for archival. He blinks a little as he adjusts to his surroundings: ah, yes, he was helping an outworlder find her way, but someone else has come to pick her up, so he can return to his duties now. They always look a little dizzy and disoriented afterwards, and she always feels a little guilty about it.
It doesn’t matter. She has a lead now, and she’s going to chase it.
Of the five members of the High-Cloud Quintet, legally speaking only one is alive—Arbiter-General Jing Yuan. What people forget frequently is that technically, technically, another lives: the reincarnation of Dan Feng, the celebrated High Elder, lives an admittedly-very private life on the Luofu.
March knows how Vidyadhara reincarnation works in broad strokes. She knows that they lose their memories of past lives when they molt. Still, if there’s even an ounce of possibility that she can pry some truths out of the current High Elder, she’ll take it.
The question, then: where is the current incarnation of the High Elder?
Surely somewhere on the Luofu. March picks up a copy of the daily news from a stand in central Starskiff Haven, and there’s no sign of Imbibitor Lunae mentioned anywhere. She stands in line for some sort of makeup popup, ears attuned to every word spoken and every memory around her, and no one mentions the High Elder or so much as thinks of him. The only thing she picks up is from an elderly Vidyadhara woman who carries a stunningly joyful memory of the day the Pearlkeepers and Preceptors announced that Imbibitor Lunae had hatched and was reborn.
But still: no leads on the location or identity of Imbibitor Lunae. Desperate, she pulls out her phone—has she really fallen so far that she has to learn things from an internet search? This is a particularly new low, even for her.
According to her search, the current Imbibitor Lunae is a man named Dan Heng—not that much different from his predecessor. He hatched about thirty years ago, after nearly seven hundred years of being in the egg. He has hardly made any public appearances in his entire lifetime-career, to her surprise. No photos exist of him online, not because no one’s ever taken one of him, but because all of the photos have been taken down. The Vidyadhara Preceptor Council sent me a cease-and-desist until I deleted the photos, a forum member bemoans. They can’t do that, can they?
“They can,” she murmurs, putting her phone away. “They sure can.”
She ends up following the older woman with the memory of Imbibitor Lunae’s birth. It turns out her husband is a Cloud Knight who happens to patrol the Alchemy Commission; she sees him interact with a healer who later talks to a Vidyadhara visitor in solemn garb, and seizing the chance, she ducks behind a tree to eavesdrop. “You’re sure these meetings can continue?” the Vidyadhara asks. “Surely they will begin to plot—”
“They haven’t,” says the healer—sweet, saccharine, feminine. “I will let you know if I suspect that she knows anything.”
Well, that isn’t suspicious at all.
The two conclude their conversation with mutual bows, and the Vidyadhara in robes leaves the healer behind. March follows, at first from a distance until she’s absolutely certain the Vidyadhara can’t detect her. It's a slow trek. The man walks through what must be three delves before finally stopping before an ornate building, several storeys tall and carved of white marble. It’s in a style distinct from the rest of the Luofu’s architecture, too; March would be stupid to not recognize this as something important that most people shouldn’t know about.
The man scans himself into the building via biometrics, which is unfortunate; despite her memetic status, March still has an unfortunate tendency to set off most scanners at doors. Steeling herself, she forces her body to go as thin and memetic as possible—the furthest she can get from corporeal—and presses herself through the wall, inch by inch. It always leaves the aftertaste of whatever she’s passing through in her mouth, no matter how tightly she keeps it closed.
Chin up, March, she thinks, at least it’s marble and not drywall!
It takes her much longer than she’d like to slip into the building. Some of her fellow Memokeepers are really good at it, but try as she might, she still struggles. She emerges coughing and hacking, grateful as she often is that her memetic nature makes her invisible and inaudible if she so pleases. Once it stops feeling like she’s choking on dust, she sits back on her heels and surveys the place.
An office of some kind. Everyone standing around is a Vidyadhara, judging by their ears, and they’re all wearing various colours of official-looking robes, like the man that March followed to get here. “How did it go?” asks a solemn-looking man with a single blue horn on one side of his head. “Anything to be suspicious of?”
“None at all,” says the man March followed in. What is this, a cult? Is that what she’s stumbled into, in her search for the elusive Imbibitor Lunae? “Our allies don’t believe there’s anything to be worried about.”
“Excellent.” The man with the horn tips his head towards what seems to be an elevator. “The High Elder places a great deal of attachment in his meetings with the healer girl. We cannot discourage it, but he cannot be allowed to neglect his duties.”
“Of course,” the others chorus. March hides up in the rafters as they spring into action. One takes a plate of food—what seems like a very simple dish of vegetables and rice—and brings it towards the elevator. Another prepares a set of linen robes, likely for sleep; a third, taller and more muscular than the rest, fills a bronze basin with water and hefts it up and away.
So this is it, the High Elder she’s been looking for! March screws her eyes shut and rises through the ceiling, ignoring the lingering mouthfeel of the floorboards as she ascends. These must be the aides and teachers of Imbibitor Lunae, young as he is! She’s really done it, she’s found where he lives!
Except… she hasn’t. She rises into what she thinks is an apartment, which turns out to just be more administrative offices. Paperwork and jade abacus servers, lots of them. One of the aides is up here, ironing a set of white robes lined in verdigris and gold while watching a video on their phone. Another floor up is just storage for all manner of ceremonial clothing and objects, and ascending any further just sends her out the roof and into the crisp evening air.
“So if that elevator doesn’t go up,” March murmurs, heart sinking. “He lives in a basement?”
It’s not until all of the aides have left for the night that she gathers the courage to go back into the building. The elevator stands in its dark corner, platform barely even glowing to signal any functionality. March coaxes it into descending on its own, one hand on the panel, so she can slip into the passageway below.
Every step closer fills her with greater dread.
By the time she reaches the great doors, what little light from the elevator pad no longer reaches the floor before her. She reaches out with a tentative hand, and finds resistance immediately. A door—a lock, just a number pad but still outrageous considering whose room it keeps shut from the outside.
She should turn back. Leave the High Elder to his sleep.
But March has come this far—she’s made it through how many layers of walls now? What’s one more? Taking in a deep breath, she makes the plunge: through the door, and then through a second door, there’s a second door and it too is locked, with some sort of complex Xianzhou puzzle, and how can they keep the High Elder in circumstances like these?
—Memoria surges up to meet her, chin-high and rising. Someone suffered here, in this room. Someone suffers here now. Someone’s scars bear witness to lies. The Aeons are cruel, cruel, cruel. March gasps in the first breath of fresh air that she can, buoying herself up until her back is against the ceiling. It’s so dark. So cold. So lonely.
A pair of azure lights cuts through the void, staring directly at March. “Who’s there?” demands a masculine voice, accompanied by the rustle of bedding being tossed aside. There’s shuffling—but from the other side of the room? Is someone else also here? “Show yourself!”
Then there’s a sickening crunch, someone screams, the lights blaze to life with the force of a thousand supernovas in March’s eyes, and she’s falling out of the sky.