Chapter 161: What the Flowers Kept (Patreon)

The woman sorting pairs sent the last two toward the stair and came back to Erthrix. She was a ranger, long-limbed, a recurve slung across her back and a streak of ash along her jaw that she either hadn't noticed or had stopped caring about.

"Ilse," Erthrix said, before she could start.

"Sir." She glanced at Kage once and then made a point of not doing it again. "Teodric's people are asking what they're standing on. So am I. We were just burning the valley to keep him out of it."

"I remember."

"So why are we guarding a hole? For him at that, I assume?"

A few heads turned. The two who'd been arguing about the evening rotation went quiet to listen.

Kage kept his hands loose and his mouth shut. He could have answered her. Then every Greenlander on the rim would walk away knowing their officer's orders came with footnotes from the man who'd wrecked their night. Erthrix's authority was the only lock here, and Kage had no interest in picking it.

"We're guarding it for us," Erthrix said. "There's something down there worth more than the wells, and it's tied to the wells. Somebody pokes it before we know what it does, and we lose more than we lost last night." He let that land. "Teodric gets the long version at handoff. Council gets it at noon. You get the short one. Nobody goes down. Nobody swings at anything that comes up."

"And if something comes up?"

"Then you message me and back away from it. If possible."

Ilse looked at the gap beside the altar for a long moment. "Understood."

She went. The rim picked its noise back up, the ordinary noise of people taking positions and complaining about them.

Erthrix rolled his neck until something in it popped. "I'm logging after handoff. Been up since prep yesterday."

"Who do I talk to while you're out?"

"For the stair, Teodric. He's got it until evening." Erthrix's eyes drifted to his panel. "For the deal, me. I keep notifications on. I'll wake up for this."

Kage opened his contacts. He'd shut off incoming requests after the Galleries. So he sent the requests himself, one to Erthrix and one to a Teodric he had never met.

Erthrix accepted without looking up. "If council moves on this, or somebody gets past my people, you hear it from me. Before the forums."

"That's the order I'd prefer."

"Figured."

"One more thing," Kage said. "I might come back with people."

"How many?"

"Don't know yet. With me, can be up to ten. But it depends… on today."

Erthrix's eyes left the panel. "Then confirm before you get here. Names, classes, numbers. My people have had a long night. Some of them will see a group coming up the terrace with you at the front and stop thinking."

"Fair."

Erthrix nodded, put his helm back under his arm, and turned to deal with whoever was waving at him from the eastern stairs.

Kage looked back at the rim.

The pairs had settled in at the mouth of the keepers' stair. One of them sat on the lip with her boots dangling over the shaft until her partner kicked her ankle and she shifted back. Saph had been posted on the far side of the well, as far from the stair as the rim allowed, which told Kage a little more about Erthrix's judgment. Someone was passing around strips of dried meat. Someone else yawned so wide his jaw cracked.

Twenty strangers who mostly hated him, standing between a sealed Decree and the rest of the server.

He turned and walked toward the terraces.

Hollis was halfway down the second terrace, posted at the top of a root stair with his hammer leaned against his hip. He watched Kage come the whole way.

"You're going back," Hollis said.

"Shortest way out."

"Shortest way to a weaver nest." Hollis jerked his chin at the gully below, where the third bridge crossed a ravine choked with fern. "Under that. Scouts kept it clear all night because the pulls ran through it. Nobody's pulling now." He shrugged. "It'll be full by now. Go round the fallen trunk on the north side. Longer, but it's dead ground."

"Thanks."

"Don't." Hollis picked his hammer back up.

Kage went down the root stair. Behind him, Hollis said nothing else, which was probably the warmest thing he had in stock.

A trade window opened before Kage reached the bottom.

[Trade Request: Erthrix]

The note attached was short and formatted the way Kage imagined Erthrix wrote everything: as a ledger with no adjectives.

Warden split, five ways. Coin: 9g 60s. Bracer: Hollis, valued at 12g (guild buyback rate). Hollis paid in 7g 68s. 4g 32s each.

It held. Erthrix had done the split at four in the morning, in a collapsing ruin, between orders to his rim team, and it still held.

[Received: 4 Gold, 32 Silver]

Not much. The money had never been why he'd come. He checked the herbal pouch instead.

Twenty-seven Sylvan Record-Blossom petals sat in their slot. A thousand had gone into the lattice. These were the remainder, gathered past the count on the last terraces, before the floor turned to glass. Ten of them had belonged to Mirethiel from the start.

He took the long way round the fallen trunk.

The north side of the trunk was exactly as dead as Hollis had promised: wet moss, a rotted log the size of a house, no lines of sight to anyone. Kage stopped there and opened his skills.

[Return to Domain - The Shifting Galleries]

[Cooldown: 24 hours]

Half an hour of road back to Korros, against one use of a skill he wouldn't need again before tomorrow. Tonight he'd be walking back into the Reach anyway, and the Galleries had nothing to offer him in the meantime except a door into the city. He wasn't going to vanish in front of twenty Greenlanders.

The Drafting Room was exactly where he'd left it: the desk, the manuscript ledger lying open on it, and the pale flame turning slowly in the air above a giant book. The quiet was enormous after a night of hammers and fire. Kage stood in it a few seconds longer than he needed to.

Axiom Entity.

The Curator had carried that tag. The guardian under the Reach carried it now. Two caretakers left behind. He didn't know whether the classification meant anything beyond "big and old and do not touch," but by now he figured Morpheus didn't hand out labels for decoration.

Ask the flame. Check the Registry. Later.

He walked out through the Galleries' exit and into the Artisan's Quarter.

Korros was barely awake. Shutters going up, a baker's boy dragging a cart of loaves over cobbles, the canal smell drifting in from Greywater on a wind that hadn't decided which way it wanted to blow. The clock in the corner of his vision read 06:48.

His DMs pinged before he'd gone ten steps.

[Lily → Kage] wait you're online??

[Lily → Kage] its 6:48. in the MORNING. did you sleep

He considered not answering. She would only send more.

[Kage → Lily] Will.

[Lily → Kage] thats not a yes

[Kage → Lily] It's a plan.

[Lily → Kage] kage.

[Kage → Lily] Still on for 14:00?

[Kage → Lily] Hard stop at 15:30. Got something important at four.

[Lily → Kage] YES. zara made a doc. it has headers. she color coded the headers

[Kage → Lily] I have an escort job. NPC.

The typing indicator flickered for a while.

[Lily → Kage] an escort quest. anything more?

[Kage → Lily] Details at the meeting.

[Lily → Kage] ok ok!! but you're sleeping after. i'm serious :pleading_emoji:

He closed the window. Mirethiel first, while her shop was quiet. And open, hopefully. Then Lyra's verse. The debut was close enough that it couldn't wait for another night, and he'd been dodging it for too long behind more urgent things. Log out after that. The Salon at four. He would confirm the evening arrangements before he went to sleep.

He went to the Chromatic Thread.

The shop's front shutters were half up. Through the gap, morning light lay across racks of drying skeins. Mirethiel stood at the long vat in the back, sleeves pinned to the elbow, drawing a paddle slowly through a bath of deep blue. She lifted a test thread, held it to the window, frowned at it, and lowered it back in.

The bell over the door rang. She didn't look up.

"We open at eight."

"It's me."

That brought her head around. "Did you find them?"

No greeting. He liked her a little more for it.

"I did."

Mirethiel set the paddle across the vat and wiped her hands on a rag, and then she properly looked at him. Her gaze went to the hem of the coat she'd dyed for him, gone grey with ash. Then to the dried sap on his boots, and the scorch along one sleeve where a mage's fire had come closer than he'd liked.

"I asked you to pick flowers," she said.

"You did."

She pointed at a stool beside the counter. "Sit before you fall into my mordant. I won't fish you out."

He sat, opened the herbal pouch and laid ten petals on the counter in a short row. The violet in them deepened against the pale wood, and gold crept in at the edges as the window light shifted. Seventeen stayed in the pouch.

Mirethiel went still for a moment. Then the craftswoman took over, and her hands moved faster than her questions.

She pulled a shallow porcelain dish from under the counter, unstoppered a squat jar, and let a single drop of clear binding medium fall into the center. A sable brush came out of a roll of oilcloth. She wiped it twice on clean linen, though it already looked clean. With the back of the brush, she pressed the corner of one petal into the medium.

Color bled out of it in a slow ring. Violet first, then a gold so deep it read as amber where the medium thickened.

"Old petals go brown inside a minute," Mirethiel said, mostly to the dish. "Fresh ones last maybe five before they muddy."

They waited. The ring held. After five minutes, she tilted the dish toward the window, and the hue shifted as the angle changed, slower than the light itself.

She took a scrap of silk from a drawer, grey and plain, with the faint warmth of a low enchantment stitched into one corner. She drew a single line across it with the pigment. When she pressed two fingers to the enchanted corner, the line brightened along its whole length, violet sharpening to something nearly electric before it eased back.

"That," she said, "is what I've been trying to make for eleven years." Then her eyes came up to him, narrow. "These are much better than what I've ever gotten."

"Managed to… freshen them up, a bit."

She held his gaze long enough to make clear she'd noticed the evasion and was choosing to let it sit for now.

The quest log stirred at the edge of his vision.

[Quest Updated: The Chromatic Thread - Master's Palette]

[Objective Complete: Gather 10 Prismatic Duskbloom Petals (10/10)]

[Rewards Received: +38,800 EXP. Reputation: Mirethiel Vael increased.]

[Reputation with Mirethiel Vael is now: Respected.]

[Pending Reward: Premium Dye Access (The Chromatic Thread), ???]

[New Objective: Return to the Chromatic Thread tomorrow to collect your final reward.]

"I'll need a day to make the base," Mirethiel said, already pulling a second dish toward her. "Come back tomorrow, and I'll have the line ready to bind. You'll have first access." A pause. "Don't take that lightly. Understand? I don't give first access to anyone. And for free, too… these will cost a ton."

"I won't."

He'd gotten the thing he'd left the city for last night. Some EXP, a reputation bump, a dye line that would, hopefully, one day stop his outfit from turning into a clown costume every time he swapped a glove. The modest payoff he'd expected, before the forest had other ideas.

Mirethiel was no longer paying attention to him.

She set the second petal flat in the new dish and wet the brush. Kage stayed on the stool and watched, because he needed something he didn't have yet.

The guardian's terms had been specific. Willingly, and knowing. He couldn't walk her down a keepers' stair on a half-story, and he couldn't open with your ancestor tended a root-choir in a sanctuary that was eaten by… silence? and expect anything but the door. Elves lived long enough to have heard every grand story an adventurer could invent. He needed a way in that she could test with her own hands.

She was already working.

Four short strokes from the base of the petal outward. One long stroke down the center. Then she rested the tip of the brush on the petal and held it there without moving, lips shaping a count under her breath in a language Kage didn't know. The rest lasted longer than it should have.

Then the strokes again. Four short, one long, the held rest.

Kage knew that hitch.

He recognized the count from the root-chamber of the Echo. The bloom-weaver with the Vael sigil had trimmed petals while her lips kept time with the choir. The song had continued after that pause, and she had continued with it. Mirethiel kept lifting her brush before the next phrase.

"Where did you learn that?" he asked.

Mirethiel didn't look up. "Learn what?"

"The count. The pause."

"My grandmother." She drew the long stroke again. "It's how our family prepares the difficult pigments. Always has been."

"The pause seems long."

"Every apprentice I've had says so." The brush tip settled and held. "It does nothing anyone can measure. I've tried leaving it out. When I was younger, I tried everything to shave time off. Without it, the color goes flat inside a week." She lifted the brush. "So I don't leave it out."

She started the next pass, and stopped halfway through it.

Kage watched her frown. She leaned closer to the dish, then reached for a third petal, laid it in a fresh drop of medium, and began again, slower, watching the petal instead of the brush.

"Look," she said. "Here."

He leaned in.

On each short stroke, the petal went violet. On the long stroke, it went gold. During the held rest, it slid to a soft rose and stayed there, and stayed, and kept staying, long after the rest had ended.

"It isn't following the medium," Mirethiel said. "Reactive pigments drift with the binding strength. They brighten when the matrix is strong and sulk when it's weak. This is doing the same colors in the same order, every time I make the same mark." She tapped the brush handle against the rim of the dish. "And this, here, is where a binding closes. Every pigment I've ever worked closes on the rest. This one won't."

"What's it doing instead?"

"Waiting." She said it like a word she didn't enjoy. "When a loom pattern is missing a pass, the threads sit like this. Open. Holding a place for something." She looked at the rose-colored petal for a long moment. "Whatever my grandmother taught me, it's the beginning of something. It isn't all of it."

Kage hadn't seen any of that. He'd watched the colors change and thought pretty and reactive and nothing else. It had taken someone with years of failed dye baths to see something more in it.

He'd planned to tell her after the meeting, with something to show for it. She'd just put the proof on the counter herself.

"They were recording things in these," he said.

Mirethiel's eyes came up from the dish.

"Recording what? With what?"

"Whatever they wanted kept. So, probably everything."

"Who?"

"The people who planted them."

She looked at him skeptically. "I have boiled thousands of these petals, Kage. My mother boiled thousands before me. If they were full of voices, someone would have heard one."

"Did anyone finish the pattern?"

She didn't answer that.

"You worked with Duskblooms, the things you commissioned," Kage said. "I restored these to what they used to be. And I heard the part you're missing."

"You heard—what? From where?"

"In the Reach. The whole pattern."

Mirethiel took off her spectacles and pressed the bridge of her nose.

"Then let me hear it. Quick!"

The rhythm was easier to remember than the pitch. Kage tapped her count against the counter, held through the pause, and hummed the phrase that followed. The choir had carried it from voice to voice while the bloom-weaver worked beneath them.

Mirethiel put her spectacles back on.

"Again. Slower."

He repeated it. Her brush moved just above the dish, following the count. At the new phrase, she brought it back toward the base of the petal.

"That would return across the first pass," she said.

She took a fourth petal and settled it into fresh medium. Four short strokes. One long. The held rest. Kage tapped the next entry, and she turned the brush back against the earlier strokes, closing a small circle on the final note.

The rose brightened to gold. A woman's voice came out of the dish.

Mirethiel's brush jerked upward. The voice cut off after four notes.

She stared at the petal. Then she drew the dish closer and lowered the brush again.

"From the beginning," she said.

Kage gave her the count. She repeated the strokes, holding through the pause and following his timing into the closing pass. This time she kept the brush in contact.

The voice returned. It sang quietly, without accompaniment, a few bars of a melody Kage remembered hearing among the flowers in the Echo. Beside him, Mirethiel's lips moved through the opening notes.

They stopped at the pause.

The voice continued into the phrase he had supplied. Mirethiel held the brush steady until the last note faded. The petal settled back to violet beneath it.

She set the brush across the dish.

"Do you know it?" Kage asked.

"The beginning. My grandmother sang it while she worked."

Mirethiel looked at him over her spectacles.

"She said hers did too."