Chapter Text
Dearest “R,”
I am thrilled to hear you are drawing closer to fulfilling your dream of becoming a mother. It shall be a marvelous and exciting adventure indeed. I have been thinking lately of embarking on that same journey myself, if Kleiner and I ever find ourselves in the same world for more than an afternoon.
Regarding the other matter that you wished to verify with us, “B” has confirmed it as well. Congratulations, my dear. Do not forget us humble sisters of yours as you climb the steps toward your destiny.
And as for that most precious alchemical component you entrusted to our care in your youth, I do hope the portion of it you used for the current iteration of your grand experiment has finally produced the results you desired. We shall keep the remainder of it safe according to your wishes. It is yours to do with what you will, but I’m sure I do not need to remind you that using such a material may vilify you to those who do not understand the hardship you have endured, so do be discreet.
I look forward to making the acquaintance of your success. Or perhaps I should say, your successor? Ha ha ha.
Your Most Clever and Endearing Sister,
“A”
Hroptatyr carefully folded the letter back on its creases and waved a thin candle under the wax seal until it shone wet enough to press back down on the parchment. He slipped the letter into his sleeve, and set off to meet his colleague.
The Sage had never visited Rhinedottir’s laboratory. He knew it to be located deep within the bowels of the underground city, well below the usual bustle of activity and where even the King’s Enforcers were hesitant to set foot. The sconces along the wall as he descended the narrow staircase grew fewer and further between until he could only just feel his way down the spiral between them, grasping the chain riveted along the wall for guidance, until his foot splashed into—
Water?
With a yelp of shock and disgust the Sage leapt back up onto the last dry stair, clutching the soaked hems of his robes up past his ankles, and peered further down the hallway with new misgivings. One more torch at the end of a leveled hallway illuminated a heavy door, which was flooded partway up in dark water that reflected the golden torchlight.
Resigned and with a grimace, Hroptatyr slipped his foot back into the dark water, which turned to rise only below his knees. He waded carefully down the hall, robes floating heavily behind him, until he drew level with the torch on the wall. The door was plain but for a heavy iron knocker, which he pulled and hammered three times, the sound echoing sharply against the plastered stones.
There was no answer. He knocked again.
After what felt like an intentionally drawn out wait, the door creaked open, sloshing the water at Hroptatyr’s feet, and a strip of a woman’s face peered through the crack.
A noise issued from the person behind the door that sounded like “ugh,” followed by a heavy sigh. “What do you want, Hroptatyr?”
Hroptatyr arranged his face into the most appealing expression he could manage. “Just a friendly chat between academics, if you please, Lady Rhinedottir?”
The single eye that was visible through the narrow opening in the door rolled briefly upward, before focusing behind Hroptatyr into the hallway to discern if he was joined by any more fellows. “I am busy,” she said flatly, and made to shut the door in the Sage’s face, but he placed a resolute hand on the door to keep it open.
“As a fellow Pillar of the King.”
Rhinedottir forced her breath out through her nose again, and pursed her lips, considering. “Do not touch anything,” she finally said with distinct exasperation, and she stepped back to allow him entry to her laboratory.
Bright, dazzling light struck his face so shockingly from inside the room that he had to pause and allow his vision to adjust for several moments before entering any further. The space inside was much more vast, a vaulted and buttressed ceiling supported by perhaps forty pillars and dotted with as many torches. Wonderfully cool, abundant light was spilling from odd circular openings in the ceiling, overwhelming any of the light from the torches. Under each circle of light was a similarly circular stone table, carved on each side of its single pillared leg with runes and glowing sigils, each with a different circular array carved into it for the intention of what Hroptatyr assumed were different alchemical formulas. Each table seemed to be placed in front of a shelf that housed a different set of ingredients, or possibly finished products of Rhinedottir’s experiments. There were potted plants—herbs and flowers alike—both ones Hroptatyr could identify and others that he had never seen before, likely because they weren’t intended to exist, or else common flowers of unnatural sizes, shapes or colors. Another shelf presented jars of preserved animal corpses and mysterious powders, unkempt piles of notebooks and research guides and charts, stone stools at intervals in front of observational logs and considerably detailed charts and graphs. Hroptatyr noted that this laboratory could be considered something like a classroom, except the woman, unnaturally tall with golden hair falling from beneath a white veil and gauzy robes floating in the water around her shins, served as both the instructor and the lone student seeking out answers to her own arcane questions.
Hroptatyr waded forward, trying to maintain poise despite the added complication of the water, “I have long wished to visit your laboratory. It is quite an honor indeed.”
“My rooms always welcome a fellow Pillar of the King,” Rhinedottir replied bitterly.
Her voice was strange, uncanny; perhaps the average citizen would never notice, not least because Rhinedottir was rarely seen amongst the proletariat, but to one with keen ears such as Hroptatyr and who frequently was present during the times when Rhinedottir had been summoned before the King, it had become quite apparent. The top tones were those typical to a mature but still-youthful woman, but underneath there was a faint rasping echo, as though her voice itself was somehow…rusted.
She continued to ignore his presence and move around between the heavily-laden tables. Despite the clutter, Hroptatyr noted observational logs by each flask and jar, tub of strange soil and bubbling crucible. Clearly this was the workspace of the restless mind.
“To what do I owe your visit?” She asked again, either unwilling or unable to hide her annoyance at his presence.
“Well—academic curiosity, but—”Hroptatyr said, gesturing toward the floor and his heavily soaked mantle. “You seem to have flooded?”
“I have not,” Rhinedottir replied calmly, still engrossed in her observational records, “This is a cistern.”
“A cistern?”
“Water is the basis of life. My work requires direct access to it. And since our fair kingdom does not have the privilege of access to the sky,” she lifted her face to the vaulted ceiling with a scowl, although the bright, cool light erased any new creases on her remarkably—unnaturally—youthful face, “I have seen to building myself a laboratory that serves as a receptacle for the water that falls to the land above.”
“And you could not keep it in tanks?”
“This is sufficient.”
“Indeed,” Hroptatyr grimaced, lifting his hems a few inches out of the water and dropping them back down with an unpleasant, wet splat. “And what is the source of this light?”
“The sun,” she said simply.
“We must be a mile deep underground, and directly underneath the city!” Hroptatyr exclaimed in indignation, but Rhinedottir raised her eyebrows sardonically.
“Surely a scholar such as yourself can consider more advanced possibilities?” She said haughtily with another roll of her eyes, “In this case, a system of tunnels and reflective mirrors to bring the light in from the surface, with some alchemical augmentation to enhance the light at this depth.”
Hroptatyr gazed up at the streaming sunlight with new wonder. A cistern which gathered droplets of water from the land above, tunnels that reflected the sun and brought it into this underground grotto in the deep, deep city, in order for new life to flourish here. Rhinedottir had long fascinated him; not least because he had no doubt that she was many, many years older than him. She had once been a student of the Universitas Magistorum herself—under his own predecessor’s predecessor. The rumor that surrounded her, whispered behind fearful and revenant hands along the underground thoroughfares of the city, was that as a young woman—thirty, seventy, ninety years ago?—she was already an unmatched prodigy in all of the scientific fields the Universitas could offer. But before she could graduate with the highest of honors the Universitas could bestow, she suddenly fell severely ill and vanished from the city for several months. When she returned, she handed in her resignation to the school and became fully consumed with her own independent pursuits; a sequence of increasingly dangerous and unadvisable self-experimentations, which increased her height, altered her voice, and slowed any signs of aging in her until it ceased entirely. It was this final feature in particular that had earned her the epithet of “Gold,” not only because her considerable skill allowed her to craft her own wealth, but because her face and body seemed by now to be untarnishable by the passage of time.
She folded her arms. “What,” she said again, more demandingly this time, “is your purpose here, Hroptatyr?”
Hroptatyr tossed his head as though to shake out the bother of the water at his feet and the wonder of the light spilling from above. “Well, to congratulate you, of course,” he smiled with tight lips, “On Vedrfolnir’s prophecy.”
Rhinedottir scoffed, shifting her folded arms so that she was holding her elbows, and turned away to inspect the experiments that she had laid out on her benches.
“You are displeased?”
“I am unmoved,” she responded, lifting a round flask from its burner and peering into its effervescent contents, “Whatever shall become of me will be a result of my achievements. A prophecy is of no consequence until it is fulfilled, perhaps hundreds of years in the future. I shall not let a vision distract me from my research.”
“Spoken like a true woman of science,” the Sage nodded auspiciously.
Rhinedottir placed her vial back down on its stand with an exhale through her nose, and made another mark on the observational log there. “And is that all that you have waded down into my laboratory to say?”
Hroptatyr’s thin-lipped smile widened. “Certainly not,” he said, “His Majesty is curious about the new offering he may expect from you. He is pleased with the Rifthounds you have provided, and is willing to provide you with another morsel of the Abyss for your next endeavor, if it should, ah…hasten the process.”
Across the flooded cistern, on a platform raised out of the water and bathed with the most light in the room, was a long, thick stone table, upon which was laid something equally long and rectangular, shaped not unlike a casket, but draped in a white sheet. The ceiling above it held the widest opening for the sun to bathe the platform in pure, natural light. Hroptatyr’s eyes fell upon it, and Rhinedottir followed his gaze with a steely expression.
“It is not yet ready.” She said stiffly, “My work is sensitive, I shall need to take the appropriate amount of time.”
“But soon?” Hroptatyr made an advance toward the platform, a gentle wave of water following his step, but Rhinedottir moved amongst the maze of tables and benches to stand in his path.
“I shall inform His Majesty when it is ready.”
“Will you?” Hroptatyr clasped his hands behind his back, regarding the woman before him with narrowed eyes, “I must confess, Lady Rhinedottir, it does seem your interests have strayed from your loyalty to His Majesty of late. Could you perhaps be distracted by a new pursuit?”
Rhinedottir stood her ground, arms still folded. “And have you been demoted to the position of a petty messenger, then?” She frowned, “Or perhaps a very obvious spy?”
“Spy, Rhinedottir?” Hroptatyr matched her sour expression, hanging back from her towering obstinance, “My, my, you injure me; do we not serve the same king?”
She regarded him closely, her lips thin with an indignation tightly leashed behind them. Service to King Irmin and his obsession, and the Abyss Heir he kept at his side as they hoarded that immeasurable power. He had allowed her to do as she pleased with the condition that she supplied him with her creations, fed them to his schemes for slaughter and purge and even entertainment. But his latest request, even more ambitious than the dragon or the hounds, had provoked an old ache. Yes, the desire for achievement, the hunger for innovation beyond the limits of human accomplishment, but also something innate, visceral, and long dormant.
“The ‘Primordial Human Project,’” Hroptatyr interrupted Rhinedottir’s reflection. “I must admit, as a seeker of knowledge myself, that I have been jealous of your capabilities. Although, the creation of a human-like creature capable of harnessing the Abyss as the Heir is able to do is still perhaps not, strictly, a human.”
Rhinedottir’s gaze grew colder still. “What do you mean?”
“Well, we must consider what traits define a human,” Hroptatyr crossed to one of Rhinedottir’s light-bathed tables and stroked the leaves of one of the plants that were nurtured there, “I would argue that reason and complex emotion are what set us apart from the common monster, and that that is something that cannot be artificially molded. Imitated, certainly; my Field-Tillers appear to be aware of their surroundings and make decisions due to their engineering, but they are not possessed of ‘self.’”
“Do not compare my work to your hideous inventions, Hroptatyr. We are by no means similar in our interests, and I am busy.” Rhinedottir marched over to the plant that Hroptatyr had touched, crumpled up the observational log, and snatched the plant up to dump into a nearby basin of discarded pots and rotting plants. “I told you not to touch my experiments. Your oily fingers are not a welcome variable.”
Hroptatyr shrugged, and made an overdramatic pantomime of hiding his hands behind his back again. “I wonder if I might see it.”
“See—?”
“Your homunculus.”
Rhinedottir bristled at the word. It was disdainful, irreverent. How dare he speak so imprudently, this man who claimed to be the gatherer or all knowledge. An odious wretch, with whom she deigned to share her loyalty to the King.
She closed her eyes, tempering her patience. “I have already told you. It is not yet ready.”
“Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” Hroptatyr continued, fixing her with his shrewd gaze as he walked, as casually as he could with the water splashing around his feet, closer to Rhinedottir. “His Majesty the King has directed me to witness your progress and report to him of its status, so he might decide when it will be time to utilize it.”
“I will decide when it is time,” Rhinedottir snarled, and almost seemed to grow slightly taller over him as she moved to stand between the Sage and the light-bathed platform.
“That’s just the thing, you see,” Hroptatyr sighed, “His Majesty no longer trusts that your interests are aligned with his own. If you will allow me to see it, I shall report back of my confidence in your efforts and your continued loyalty and dedication.”
Rhinedottir squeezed her eyes shut, as one might do before arriving at a revolting, resigned decision. While she knew Hroptatyr would never directly lie, he had in many occasions in the past proven only to serve his own purposes, and to follow orders from the Vinster King with the finesse and strategy he required in order to fulfill his own ends. She turned on her heel, skirts twisting around her legs in the water, and allowed Hroptatyr to follow her up the steps, lifting their feet out of the water, toward the light-bathed platform where the large cask was shrouded beneath the white sheet. She sighed, and gently slid the sheet away from the cask.
It was glass, a tank the full length of the stone table, filled with a murky substance that glinted and refracted the sunlight and made it difficult to fully discern the detail of what was suspended inside, but it was clear enough that the glass cask housed a human body.
The body appeared to be male, and of a size and musculature that suggested an age somewhere between nineteen and twenty-four. Long white-blond hair clouded around the face in the fluid, obscuring the features in full, but every once in a while ebbing to reveal a tenderly curved cheek.
Hroptatyr stared down at it in shock. He had expected some sort of deformed foetus, or else a vaguely human-shaped creature with brutish features, and not what appeared to be a real fully-formed young human man.
“Shades,” he swore in a breath, “Isn’t it just a dead body? Is your plan to reanimate a corpse with added components? I knew you were mad, Rhinedottir, but—”
“He,” Rhinedottir replied tersely, “Is entirely new to the world from my formulas. Right now he is a corpus, sustained by this fluid, but when the time comes that I shall complete the alchemical design for him to draw breath and begin his heart, he will be able to live on his own in normal conditions.”
“Fascinating,” Hroptatyr lowered his face closer to the cask, trying to discern the bones beneath the skin of the hand that floated near the glass wall. “What is it made of?”
“Chalk.”
“I—chalk?”
“The dragon was formed of humus,” Rhinedottir continued, “and it was certainly sufficient for such a project, but far too rich and absorbent, much too prone to corruption. The Rifthounds are of alfisol, but too basic and moist for ideal stability. Chalk is pure and incorruptible, the finest of sediment and, I have found, provides the ideal level of stability.”
Hroptatyr knelt at the cask now, still peering through the murky fluid to try to catch a glimpse of the corpus’s face. “Surely chalk alone cannot make a man?”
Rhinedottir paused, before responding, “My first attempt could not sustain a human form quite to this stage, and I was forced to dispose of it. It was missing a crucial component, despite the perfect formula.”
“What component might that be?” Hroptatyr straightened, folding his hands inside his sleeves, where he gently ran his finger along the folded edge of the letter from the mysterious “A” that was still tucked there.
Rhinedottir took her time to answer, but finally only replied, “It is no business of yours.”
“Not even for your fellow academic?” The Sage scowled in mock insult.
Rhinedottir did not answer, but instead pulled the white sheet back over the glass cask, hiding the inert corpus in the glittering, murky liquid from view.
“It is impressive,” Hroptatyr said with approval, “I shall tell His Majesty that his newest servant shall be ready soon.”
“I told you already,” Rhinedottir responded, her tone growing icier, “That he is not yet ready, and I shall determine when the time is right.”
“It is perfectly ready,” Hroptatyr said with a laugh, waving a hand at the covered cask, “That body is perfectly suited for His Majesty’s expectations.”
“I should like him to grow a little more, in order to have the visage of a fully-formed man,” Rhinedottir said, a soft expression suddenly veiling her usually-stern face, “So he might navigate his perpetual life from that point with as much ease as I can give him.”
“Navigate—? Lady Rhinedottir,” Hroptatyr’s shoulders slumped in sudden fatigue at her words, a tone of pity lacing his words, “This creature will not navigate any life. The King intends to lock it up and serve it to the Abyss in order to siphon that power. It shall be a great offering from you in his pursuit, my dear, but it certainly does not matter what visage the thing assumes.”
Hroptatyr watched Rhinedottir closely, and noted that her fingers trembled ever so slightly, and that her lips had paled.
“Unless,” he narrowed his eyes at the woman, and tried to force the twist of a smile away from his face. “My, my,” he said softly, “Are you perhaps entertaining doubts?”
She placed her hand on the covered cask to ease her shaking, touching near to where the corpus’s face floated. “It is my life’s work, that is all. He is…” she swallowed, and tossed her head as though to clear it, “He is mine.”
“You have plenty of lives left, I suspect,” Hroptatyr’s smile twisted wider, despite his efforts, “It is an open secret that you have already achieved the goal of immortality. Soon you may move on to your next lofty pursuit, and forget all about this one. Vedrfolnir’s prophecy has laid out your destiny, and it is certainly far beyond this lifeless husk.”
“Immortality is the means, not the goal,” Rhinedottir said. Her strange voice was quiet, and her eyes did not lift from the covered cask. “I needed the extra time to achieve my desires, and my mortality was standing in the way. I have spent a lifetime in toil to reach this moment, and I…well, I shall not like it treated cheaply.”
Hroptatyr pinched the corner of the letter inside his sleeve, creasing it with his fingernail. “Do I take that to mean you will not offer this creation to the king, despite his expectations? Do not tell me you have become attached to this one.”
Rhinedottir did not reply, but Hroptatyr noted her jaw tighten.
“My Lady,” Hroptatyr arranged his face into another expression of pity, “This work is no different than the other monsters you have made, other than its form and appearance. A monster in the shape of a man is still only a monster. You shall let this one go, hand it over to the King like a faithful servant as you have done so many times before, and he will allow you to follow your next pursuit.”
Rhinedottir lifted her chin, eyelids still lowered as her gaze was still fixed on the covered cask. “What if I do not hand this one over to the king?” The sentence was a question, but her tone did not follow suit.
Hroptatyr drew in a resigned breath. “That would be treason, Lady Rhinedottir.”
“And what could he do then?” Her eyes snapped open and she lurched her upper body at him, a grimace of rage upon her face, “This child shall not wake until I perform the alchemical rite. Until then—“
“If that is the case, King Irmin’s Enforcers will come to claim the servant he has demanded from you,” Hroptatyr drawled, unbothered by Rhinedottir’s sudden rage, “They will smash this little glass box and let the fluid that sustains the wretched creature all run out, and you, my esteemed colleague, will have two options: you will either wake the creature with your alchemical formula and submit him to His Majesty’s service, or you may allow the body to expire and waste. What would you do then?”
Rhinedottir’s hands balled into fists, clenching the sheet within her fingers, considering how many Enforcers she might be able to belay at once. Three or four, certainly.
“So,” the Sage shrugged, suddenly playing a casual air as Rhinedottir considered the possibilities he had posed. His fingers inside his sleeve tore off a creased corner of the letter from the enigmatic sender, “Think about it. I should think it an easy choice. After all,” he turned his body toward the exit of the laboratory, taking a couple of steps back down into the shallow water but keeping Rhinedottir’s face in his periphery, “It’s not as though the creature issued from your womb.”
Rhinedottir’s face did not move. Her hands did not unclench, but her lovely, unnaturally young face turned decidedly hideous.
Hroptatyr waded back through the laboratory, allowing Rhinedottir the opportunity to compose herself and pretend to inspect the plants that surrounded the table with the cask, until he stopped and, with the air of a sudden new thought, said, “Although, I might be able to offer you a third option.”
She continued to busy herself with the plants, but after some reluctance, answered, “And what might that be?”
“Well, certainly you must have noticed,” Hroptatyr began, “That the King has grown less and less satisfied with Vedrfolnir’s prophecies of late. He has begun to feel that Vedrfoldir.’s talents no longer favor our great nation. And we both know that if Vedrfolnir’s eyes have turned toward less favorable visions, then we ought to prepare for…well, a moment of upheaval.”
He sneaked a glance over his shoulder. The woman had stopped actively inspecting the potted plants, and was now staring rigidly straight with her face turned away, and he knew she was listening closely. Silently, he slipped the letter out of his sleeve and tucked it amongst a stack of disheveled documents on a nearby table.
“There have been whispers from the other Pillars,” He went on, “Surtalogi, in particular, that King Irmin might in fact be leading our great kingdom into ruin with his pursuit of the Abyss. I expect there will be an opportunity in the future, or perhaps a necessity, for he and I to act in the better interests of ourselves. If we might rely upon your aid in that moment, Lady Rhinedottir, perhaps the grip of the King’s purposes could loosen on us all.”
He left, wading back past the stone tables and dragging the heavy, waterlogged door back open so he could pass back into the hall, which suddenly seemed incredibly dark even despite the torches along the walls as the sun-filled underground cistern closed off behind him.
Rhinedottir allowed herself one more moment to stand with her hand on the cask, the glass still obscured by the sheet.
“Perhaps it could.”
She, too, descended back down to the watery floor, and continued her routine of inspections at each crafting bench and flask; but out of the corner of her eye, she noticed an altered detail. Disorganized as strangers to her laboratory might consider her, she was always meticulously aware of anything that was ever awry. And something had been added to a stack of documents on her second distilling bench, a torn corner poking out from beneath a newsletter. She plucked it out, and immediately identified the wax seal featuring Alice’s clover with heart-shaped leaves. Surely this was Alice’s response to her latest letter—but how had it suddenly arrived here…?
She opened the letter, and read through the message in Alice’s sweet, curling handwriting—but at the bottom of the page, an extra section had been written in newer, bolder ink that the rest of the message, as though it had only just been newly added.
My my, what a nuisance—It appears this letter has been intercepted. You definitely do keep your enemies close, dear sister.
I do hope we see each other soon.