Author: Lurina

087: Split Body (𒐃) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Inner Sanctum Underground | 2:08 PM | Third Day

"Mm. That does appear to be him," Linos said, his tone sombre. "No one else in the sanctuary has a beard like that, and it would be difficult to find one in a similar... Physical state, to say the least."

"What happened to the guy?" Seth asked.

"Didn't I mention it?" Linos asked, an eyebrow raised. "He's - well, he was, I suppose - a terminally-ill patient. He was a patron of the Order we initially brought in for treatment upon request last year, but his condition degraded quickly, and we more or less only kept him on life support."

"You weren't able to help him?" Kamrusepa inquired, with a small frown. "If I may say so, I should have thought the best minds of the Order could cure most any disease, here unbound by the Covenant. To fail to buy so much as a year--"

"I know, it sounds a little pitiful," Linos interrupted, "but you have to understand, he was in an absolutely awful physical condition. I hadn't seen anything like it since I was in school - he hadn't seen a doctor in nearly fifty years. Not for screening tests, not for vaccines, not even for rejuvenation treatments. The closest thing he'd had to medical care was self-prescribed painkillers. Despite being old enough he ought to have been starting to look at organ replacements." He shook his head. "In the past decade especially, he'd even stopped taking basic senolytics. It was madness."

"Dying Gods," Seth said, with mild incredulity.

"You could have attempted something radical, surely," Kamrusepa stated. "Outright brain transplantation is obviously not out of the question for a facility like this, if dementia wasn't the issue."

"My understanding is that Zeno offered, but he refused based on discomfort with the procedure," Linos explained. "In fact, he had a number of strange stipulations surrounding his care we were constrained by. Not to say that's wrong, of course; my own beliefs mean people often tell me I'm not acting in my own best medical interests... But in his case, it seemed like he almost had a mind to stymie any treatment which could radically improve his condition."

"You're suggesting he came here to die on purpose," Kam spoke, narrowing her eyes.

"I'm not trying to suggest anything, miss Tuon," Linos said, holding up a defensive hand. "I'm merely stating the facts as I understand them." He crossed his arms, furtive. "The whole situation is a little ironic. With the success of our experiment yesterday afternoon, we might've had a new avenue for treatment. Though, I suspect he might've turned that option away, as well."

"W-What might've caused him to act in such a way?" Theodoros asked. "Had something happened in his personal life?"

Linos shrugged. "I've no idea-- I didn't know much about him personally." He hesitated. "Well, I suppose I knew he was an old friend of Utsu's grandfather, and he mentioned being upset about how things turned out with him... But that would've been years after he apparently chose to disregard all care for his own long-term health."

"And what was it that afflicted him, exactly?" Kamruspa asked.

Linos hesitated, biting his lip. "Frankly, it would be simpler to answer what he wasn't afflicted with. We found cancerous tissue in his digestive system which we cleaned up easily enough, but with his anima script going so many years without repair, his whole body was failing from pure loss of function. Large parts of his cardiovascular system were unsalvageable, his heart and lungs had to be replaced... And we found thousands of complex mutations in his bloodstream." He sighed. "The sticking point was his lymphatic system. Something was causing his white blood cells to necrotize the tissue, and though we managed to resolve the problem superficially on three occasions, we failed to decipher the fundamental cause. I suppose we never will, now. Not as though we'll be able to do an autopsy in time."

"You don't seem too hung up on the fact that this guy's kicked the bucket," Seth commented dryly.

"Well... Again, we didn't have a personal relationship," Linos reiterated, with a twinge of guilt. "His treatment was a terrible failure on our part as professionals, and it's a tragedy that things came to such a grisly resolution. ...but to be frank, he likely only had a month or two to live. So it's a lesser tragedy-- As callous as that may sound."

"Any death is a tragedy of equal magnitude," Kamrusepa stated, crossing her arms.

Linos exhaled a little bit, a trace of irritation crossing his face, but nodded. "You're right, of course. I shouldn't try to downplay the matter."

"When might this, ah, have happened?" Theodoros inquired. "Should we be worried that there's still another culprit out there, after all? Either Durvasa, or..."

"It's kinda tricky to eyeball it, but I'm like, 95% sure that rigor mortis has set in?" Fang discerned. "Yeah, definitely. The knees are way too stiff."

"In that case," Linos began, "I'd guess it happened early on, before we even arrived in the main building. Hamilcar would have had plenty of time to tie up that loose end." He slowly bit the edge of his lip. "It does nip the idea that the remains we found could have been his instead of Durvasa's. Though I suppose it's still not impossible they were somehow fabricated..."

"This means that somebody else could still be alive out there, right...?" Ptolema asked.

Linos nodded. "Potentially, though again, it could just be picking up Zeno's body despite its unusual nature. There's no way to know for sure until we've completed the survey." He glanced to the side. "Well, Zeno offered a chance for Anna to make a... Direct assessment, but only after we've exhausted all other options."

"Hm," Kam hummed, not seeming entirely content.

Linos sketched a note down on a piece of parchment. "Alright, we best keep this moving. Miss Hoa-Trinh?"

Ran blinked, having been preoccupied. "Uh, right," she said. "Is there anything else I should check here?"

He considered this for a moment. "Check all the bedrooms closely, then move down to the kitchen area," he instructed. "Barring the security center, they're probably the most likely place a survivor would choose to hold up in a place like this - one way in and out, and either no window or a second story one. We should keep an eye out for the golem patrols, too, and anything else suspicious.

"Okay," she said, and nodded. She glanced at me with concern for just a moment.

I heard all of this conversation, but I wasn't really present in a complete sense. The moment I'd seen Samium's body, it'd felt like my skin had turned to ice.

He's dead, I thought, trying to process it. He's... Dead...

I still didn't know what had happened in the discussion I'd supposedly had with Samium, and why I'd lost my memory; whether it'd been something he'd done, or the news had been so bad that I'd psychologically blocked it out, or if time really was somehow looping and the phenomenon was borne of the process addling my mind, in the same way it'd felt like I was seeing the future. And I didn't know what secrets the strange book I'd received from him held.

But I knew one thing: If there was a way to excise my memories of the past 12 years, and those of my old life, it wouldn't be simple; nothing involving the human mind was. It'd require comprehensive diagnostic and sophisticated treatment, probably involving the False Iron tools used in Egomancy that the Covenant had rendered illegal years ago. Even if Ran's out-there folklore about the books was correct and it had some genuine mind-altering power, there's no way it would be as simple as just reading it. To imagine otherwise was pure fantasy.

Which meant... That even if I had seen him, even if the outcome had been positive... It wouldn't matter, because it would be impossible for him to follow-up on it.

Because he was dead.

"I should let you know before we get to it that there's no direct route to the guesthouse from the catacombs," I heard Linos state in what felt like the distance. "We explicitly cut it off from the rest of the sanctuary in that sense as a precaution against invaders. You'll have to take a passage to the arboretum, and then follow the route we originally arrived by."

"Is that the only way to and from there other than the proper gateways?" Kamrusepa asked, tapping a finger against her lip.

"As far as I'm aware," Linos replied. "Well, I think there was a tunnel that directly connected the guesthouse to here a long time ago, but it was demolished during a much earlier renovation."

"I'm not seeing anything in the bedrooms," Ran stated, her tone a little more careful than usual.

"Yeah, me neither," Seth added. Ptolema, who was sitting next to him, squinted despite the image being broadcast directly into her mind.

"It, er, looks like whoever was in that room got up in rather a hurry," Theo commented as the view passed by Neferuaten's room. He was right; the sheets were disturbed, and a few things from the bedside table looked as though they'd been knocked over.

"That's Grandmaster Amat's room, if you recall," Kamrusepa stated. "Were I to venture a guess, she was probably abducted there prior to us finding her in the state Su did on the rooftop. Hamilcar again, most likely."

"Ehh, I dunno," Fang said, inhaling through their teeth. "It doesn't fit right to me. I mean-- Since we're on the topic, the whole modus operandi for her death is like, weird? Being hung from the bell tower doesn't fit with the other crimes at all."

"I don't per-se disagree, but let's hold these thoughts until we can take a closer look at it in a moment," Linos said. "Not much point in theorizing if we have to throw it all out the window not ten minutes later. Miss Hoa-Trinh, let's do another pass before we move on. I want to be absolutely sure we're not missing anything."

"Okay," she said.

Ran held my hand tightly, which was good, because it otherwise might've slipped. I stared at the floor, my eyes out of focus.

If Samium was dead, then this whole trip had been a failure. ...no, it wasn't just the trip. We'd spent years searching for him. Half of the reason I'd become a healer in the first place was to establish the connections I'd need to find an Egomancer, and ideally him specifically, since he'd been the one to work with my grandfather. We'd been pursuing that goal for almost a decade.

And now...

My mind scrambled to find paths forward. Maybe we could try to find another Egomancer. Maybe they'd know what to do with the book.But there were almost none with deep expertise left in the world. The golden age of the discipline, before it became taboo, had been half a millenia ago-- And the procedure to attach my pneuma to Utsushikome's hadn't even been developed, but had been the product of personal research relatively recently.. Who was to say any of them would have any idea how to help, or hell, even understand the problem? Wasn't it more likely they wouldn't?

Samium had been one of the authorities, one of the only people to risk oathbreaking and continue looking into the subject, bound on that fanatical, lonely cause with my grandfather. There could be no one else in the world with that sort of knowledge. How long would it take to research from scratch? How could I even persuade them to do it? I'd been able to make some things happen by virtue of being from a reasonably wealthy family, but when push came to shove, I wasn't anyone important. Just a random girl with a bizarre and illegal problem. Nobody would want to get involved in something like that.

And anyway, just how much of Utsushikome's life could I live? Another ten, twenty years? I'd made extensive notes regarding the major developments in my - her - personal life and what I'd studied in case things had panned out, to apologize as best I could and try to give her the choice of either carrying on from there or pretending to be an amnesiac. But that'd already become borderline absurd; it'd been thirteen years, and any pretense of 'preserving' the life she'd had was already on shaky ground. How could anyone cope with waking up with twenty years of their life missing, with no one around you even recognizing it'd happened? Or thirty? Or fifty?

This is delusional, a voice rang out from the back of my head. You're worrying about things that don't even matter because you've been avoiding the obvious truth since you woke up.

What was the obvious truth?

The obvious truth is that what you already expected came true, the voice said. You spoke to him, and he told you that there is, in fact, no mystical means of selectively erasing memory, or otherwise reversing the first stage of an Induction. You've known that, not even that deep down, for a decade.

I shivered. It felt like the world around me was disappearing, and I was sitting in a dark room.

The brain is just flesh and blood. It doesn't divide itself cleanly into different sections based on when or how certain parts of it came to be a certain way. And even though one pneuma might be differentiated from another at first, they constantly form connections, too. The only way they can be told apart is if they never form them to begin with. I was sweating. You know the science of how it all works. And yet, you pursued a fantasy where there was some miracle beyond your knowledge waiting at the end of the rainbow.

If he'd told you anything different, you would have made notes. You would've made time to tell Ran without a moment of hesitation. There's probably no fantastical explanation for your memory loss at all. You just blocked it out because you didn't know what else to do.

Give up. It's over.

No. It couldn't be over. It couldn't be hopeless. What would I do?

You should die, the overwhelmingly loudest voice said. Take off your mask and walk into the hall. One of the golems will probably find you before too long.

No, that's crazy! My sense of fear and self preservation recoiled. Forget all of this shit for now! We need to focus on getting out of this place alive!

No, we can't give up,my sense of hope, distorted profoundly over the years, said. We should go and search Samium's room. Maybe he gave a complicated answer, and there'll be a hint. Or details to find someone who worked with him. We can still make this okay!

The only things you need to change are in your head, another, more desperate voice said. If there's no way to fix things with the Power, you'll just have force your thoughts to bend instead. It's okay. You haven't failed. There's nothing more you need to do. Utsushikome of Fusai doesn't need to be saved because you are Utsushikome of Fusai. Everything else is just a nightmare you had. Just a nightmare...

"Um, Su," I heard Kam say in an unusually concerned tone. "Are you... Quite alright?"

I blinked, looking up at her. My vision was blurry, but her expression seemed to be one of disquiet and concern. All around, people were giving me similar looks, an uncomfortable atmosphere prevailing in the room. Ran, especially, seemed disquieted, her face flushed.

Though only a moment, it took a strangely long time for the parts of my brain to talk to one another, and for me to realize what was going on: I'd started sobbing quite violently. Tears were still streaking down my face, and my brow was contorted into a pained grimace.

Somehow, despite everything else I was feeling, I still experienced a sting of embarrassment.

"A-ah, um," I said, at a loss for words. "Sorry. I don't know... I don't..."

"Aw, shit. Sorry for being tactless, Su," Fang said apologetically. "I kinda forgot Neferuaten was like, your mentor for a sec."

Kamrusepa's eye flickered with awareness. "Oh... Of course, how foolish of me. Pardon; the fault was mine for leaping to speculation about her death so indelicately." She frowned awkwardly. "So many dreadful affairs have taken place over the course of the night that I fear I've let myself become a little distanced."

"I think we've all had to," Seth said, nodding. "I get it, though... Kinda keeps coming back and hitting you. And I guess you knew her even better than Bardiya, Su-- Ugh, fuck." He rubbed his eyes. "Sorry, this isn't helping."

They've all got the wrong idea. Not that it was stupid of them. I probably ought to have been crying over Neferuaten, and there was no way they could have possibly known what was really going on. ...except for Ran, of course, who seemed to be avoiding meeting my eyes.

"No... It's okay," I said, my voice wavering.

"If you'd prefer, Su, I can do the next part without you," Linos said sympathetically, also seeming a bit thrown off by my outburst. "I doubt they'll be anything too dramatic, really... If you did miss anything when you saw the body, I'm sure it won't be too hard to pick up on."

"Are you really going to change the whole plan just because the Saoite waif got a little upset?" Ezekiel said, with a look of distaste. "Dying gods, half the women in this class might as well be children."

"Master Ilaadbat, it really is not that vital," Linos said coldly, at least by his standards. "Please try to show some courtesy."

Ezekiel scoffed.

"You, uh, wanna borrow a tissue, Su?" Ptolema asked, rifling through her pockets. "I think I've got a clean one."

"No, I think I have a handkerchief..." I said, reaching for my bag and fiddling through the contents.

"I'll give you a little more space," Kam said, letting go of my hand to shift over and take Ptolema's instead. The actual reason was probably that I was drenching her palm in sweat, but she was too polite to say as much.

I found the handkerchief, and dabbed it against the side of my face.

The others moved on, going back to commenting on the bedrooms, only giving me occasional uncomfortable glances. I stared into the middle distance, my expression blank now that I'd snapped out of my reverie enough to consciously control it.

Eventually, they seemed to accept the fact that they weren't going to find anything, and after a brief, second attempt at trying to contact Balthazar, the golem was turned back the way it came, returning to the tunnels and taking a new path. I thought about letting go of Ran's hand so I wouldn't have to focus on all of this, but I didn't want to stick out even further.

But I couldn't escape the sinking feeling of dread washing over me repeatedly. I didn't know what to do. Things wouldn't stop happening just because of my personal crisis.

People need a vision of the future in the back of their minds in order to function. You could call this 'hope', but that might be too narrow a term considering its exclusively positive connotations - someone can find a reason to live entirely motivated by a sense of duty, or even by purely negative emotions like spite, after all. At a level more fundamental than people's higher-minded conceptions of their lives, the will is fueled by goals. Without a goal, people stop moving.

I needed... A goal. Even an unlikely one. Something to cancel out the antipathy I felt towards my own survival.

I decided to embrace the impulse that wanted me to investigate Samium's room. Even if the possibility of finding a solution was now minute, I could at least try and find clues as to what had happened in our conversation. Or maybe it would bring my memories back to see the place directly. So that I could at least decide what was best to do next...

To do that, we'd have to escape this place alive and return later, or else definitively deal with the remaining culprit or culprits.

Thinking about that, a little focus returned to me.

I must've still been making a strange expression, because Ran and Theo were still giving me troubled glances.

I watched as Ran's golem traveled through a long underground passage I hadn't seen before, eventually emerging at a stairwell in the wooded area of the arboretum. The everblossom towered overhead imposingly as it pivoted towards the entrance of the passage we'd taken earlier, before proceeding down that long hallway at a quick pace. The whole process took about five minutes, during which some of the others continued to speculate.

"Actually," Fang said, "I said that a minute ago? But pushing the guy out the window doesn't really fit with the modus operandi, either."

"Huh, guess that's true," Seth said. In the background, Linos nodded uncomfortably.

"Like, if you break it down," they went on, "it kinda seems like there's been three, right? Putting aside Vijana, who died way earlier, there's been the big spectacle crimes that are obviously meant to come across as supernatural - with Durvasa and Bardiya, I mean - and then two where it comes across more like they were just killed in a totally mundane way... And then what happened with Saci and Yantho, which is somewhere in-between."

"Not exactly a vast swathe of evidence to assume a pattern from," Kam said flatly. "One could just easily conclude that the killers are simply playing it by ear."

"I mean, yeah, I guess?" Fang fiddled with their bangs, thinking. "But to turn it around, why would you go to so much effort to keep up a narrative for most of the deaths, only to turn around and not bother with two of them at all? It feels like it makes the whole concept pointless."

"You're saying there's two or three killers?" Seth asked. "I thought we knew that already. ...though I guess it'd make things even more confusing if Hamilcar wasn't the one to murder Neferuaten or Samium."

Fang ran their tongue on the inside of their cheek. "No, I don't think it's as simple as that. I'm still piecing it together, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like something real weird is going on here."

"Fucking profound observation," Ezekiel muttered.

"I'm startin' to think speculating about any of this stuff is pointless," Ptolema said, scratching her head. "I mean, we still don't even know why Yantho died. I feel like all we can do is stick together and not let anyone do anything funny."

"I had a theory about that, actually," Kamrusepa chimed up. "Yantho's death, I mean to say. Is it possible that he was some manner of imposter-- Or rather, that his body was being controlled remotely in the same manner as the professor does with his?"

"That's an incredibly rare technique, isn't it?" Seth asked. "Even for Neuromancers."

"We must not rule anything out based on chance alone," she replied, narrowing her eyes. "Hamilcar, at least, was a very experienced arcanist. It's entirely possible he could have picked it somehow, since he'd have access to Zeno's research. Then it would have been a simple matter of creating a body that replicated Yantho's physical appearance, and having it die at an opportune moment." She tapped a finger against the side of her arm. "The fact that he can't speak would make it all the easier."

"You saw that thing in his weird puppet's spine, Kam," Seth told her flatly. "There's no way we would have missed one of those when we were examining Yantho's body."

"Tch, that's true..." She glanced to the side.

"I... don't want to say it," Theo said, his tone careful. "But. Do you think there might actually be something unearthly going on?"

Kam scoffed. "This again." She peered at him, narrowing her eyes. "Theo, there's no such thing as supernatural phenomena. And nothing has occurred over the course of today which can't be explained rationally - I was spitballing towards the fantastical a moment ago, but Yantho could have just as easily been killed by a very subtle poison."

"I don't know," he replied, shaking his head. "A few minutes ago, when we looked at the way those doors had been ripped open... And without even using the Power..."

"A golem could have torn it open, or, as was mentioned, properly managed explosive force," she said. "The last thing we need right now is to descend into hysterics."

"It's not just that." He held his arms together, looking towards the ground. "Back when we were in the guest house, when I was in that room with Bardiya..." He swallowed. "I didn't want to say it back then, since I was sure it would, ah. Make people think I was even more suspicious. But... When it was happening, when he was being lifted into the air... I thought I saw something behind him. Dragging him up against the barrier."

"Why would you only mention this now?" Kam asked, her tone terse.

"Well-- Because it's impossible. There was no space for anything to be dragging him. It was like a ghost. It was there and it wasn't." He kept looking down, his knuckles tight. "I was sure it was just some trick of the light, since it was so dark. But back when I rushed out in the conference room, I thought I saw it again. In the corner. The same shape..."

"What shape?" Seth asked him.

"The same one you saw in the hall. Or in the story Saci told." He swallowed. "Like a cross between a winged creature, and... I don't know. Some sort of insect."

A bird and a spider.

"This is fucking ridiculous," Ezekiel cut in. "He's just throwing shit at the wall to cover for the fact he was still the only person who could've killed Bardiya, now that you've all gone soft on him and will eat it up."

"Can it, Ezekiel," Seth said sternly.

"None of you can ever accept the truth that's staring you right in the face," the other man went on. "That's why I'll still be surprised if we get out of this alive."

Seth stared at him bitterly, shaking his head.

Even though he was an unpleasant person, I couldn't help but feel that Ezekiel probably did have the right idea on some level. Regardless of whether or not Theo was culpable of anything - which I still doubted - the remaining accomplice among our group would surely seize on any chance they had to twist our understanding of events. From their perspective, that was only logical.

...only logical... No, was that really putting myself in the shoes of the culprit? After all, if you took the information we now assumed to be true... From the very beginning, none of this had been remotely logical.

Goals. I'd just been thinking about that concept a moment ago. If Hamilcar's goal had just been to wipe us out, the method he'd chosen had been terribly ineffective compared to the resources at his disposal. He could have simply scripted the sanctuary's defenses to wipe out everyone on the upper levels in advance. Part of me still expected that to happen. There was no real reason to bother giving us a fighting chance; a pretense of a 'game'. It was the opposite of pragmatic and rational.

So his - their - goal couldn't simply be 'kill us'. It had to be something more complex.

Something I'd read a long time ago about sequence killers was that often, the 'killing' part wasn't per-se the point. They didn't mind it, of course; one doesn't become a serial murderer without a taste for blood for the same reasons that vegans don't generally become butchers. But what was more important than the death was the utility of the death. It fulfilled some purpose to them, some function, even if that function was based on logic which would seem insane to anyone but themselves.

Or to put it another way, rather than the murder being the point unto itself, it was more like a human dying was simply a required step in a broader process. A component of a ritual.

So, if the goal wasn't to kill us... The question was, what was the ritual? Their actual goal, which differed from the one they'd gone to such means to communicate?

"I... believe I saw something like that as well," a voice suddenly said from the other side of the room.

I turned my head, even though I was only half-tuned into the conversation, because I was surprised by the speaker. It was Mehit, who was stepping slowly down the stairs. Her expression was fatigued, yet serious, her eyes surprisingly focused.

A few people stared at her in surprise, and Linos in particular seemed taken off-guard by her appearance. "M-Ms Eshkalon," he said. "How are you feeling?"

"Fine, thank you," she said, with her usual note of terseness. "Once again, I appreciate all of you tending to me while I was unconscious."

He nodded slowly. I couldn't see from where I was sitting, but I noticed him glance towards where Lilith must have been bound up. "Of course. We were just in the process of a remote analysis of the building, where we're attempting to discern if there are any other--"

"Yes, I heard," she interrupted him. "I apologize for interjecting, but I couldn't help but overhear part of your conversation, and in interest of getting to the bottom of this matter, I felt a need to recount my own experience."

She really just isn't gonna say anything about her daughter having shot her and her brother-in-law having been secretly grooming her, huh?

Not like I was one to critique people for being repressed.

"Go ahead," Seth said. "I'm willing to believe almost anything at this point."

"Very well," she said, with a nod. "It was the first night we'd arrived in the sanctuary, at around 1 AM. I was... Having a little difficulty getting to sleep, so I decided to take a walk around the grounds. I looped the building first, then started walking alongside the glass, curious if I might be able to see anything in the ocean in the darkness-- I only had my lamp with me as a source of light." She narrowed her eyes slightly. "That was when I caught a glimpse of it."

My ears perked up.

"It was only for a moment, so at the time, I thought it was just a trick of light. I would still wager that were the case, but..." She clasped her hands together, frowning. "I thought I saw something standing on the floor of the ocean, with light emanating from its body. It was quite distant, so I couldn't truly make it out. But I remember recalling that it resembled a bird, possessing a long, beak-like face."

Theo looked a little shocked. "H-How long did you see it for?"

"Perhaps ten seconds," she said. "It looked to be walking aimlessly, but then suddenly vanished. I spent a while longer seeing if I could catch another glimpse, but ultimately decided it was just my imagination, and put it out of mind. ...until now."

So it wasn't a hallucination?

"Ms. Eshkalon," Kamrusepa spoke to her, with polite condescension. You could hear the degree to which her opinion of her rationality had tumbled over the course of the past few hours in her tone. "With all due respect, what you are describing is quite impossible. We're deep enough underwater that not even a golem could stand upright. If I may venture a guess, you likely just saw something reflected in the glass and got a funny idea in your head."

"I do not think so," Mehit told her. "There was no source of light but my lantern present, and I leaned it behind my back during the moment based on that very assumption."

"Then perhaps someone in the abbey turned on a light, or something simply got in your eye," Kam continued dismissively. "We mustn't let ourselves get overexcited - this is how urban myths propagate themselves. One person makes a claim, and then everyone else starts trying to fit their own strange experiences into the mold, until everything descends into patent absurdity."

Mehit frowned, looking a little irritated. But I wasn't about to let this rest.

"No, I-- I think I might've seen it too," I said, speaking up against my better sense. "Exactly it, even."

She sighed, irked. "Not you too, Su. I thought I could count on you to be logical."

"It's not a matter of logic!" I declared. "I really did see it. During the break in the presentations, when I was sitting outside with Ran... After she went back inside, I saw something on the ocean floor in the same way. Humanoid, with a beak."

"Huh," Fang said. They'd seemed a little tuned out for this part of the conversation, but this was starting to get their attention again.

"This is getting kinda crazy," Seth said, his tone wary. "So we have, what, five sightings of this same thing? Saci's story about seeing it on the rooftop, Theo's story, what happened out in the hallway after we went to save Mehit... And now this from Mehit and Su." He frowned. "You think this thing might actually exist?"

"We shouldn't be correlating all of those together," Ran stated. "There's a big difference between thinking you saw a ghost in the dark and being chased by something obviously physical."

"Thank you,Ran," Kam said. "I had thought we'd already established that the thing that performed the ambush out in the hall was Hamilcar in disguise-- Or at the very least, that's the overwhelmingly most likely explanation." She bit her lip. "I suppose it's possible that the culprit has been going out of their way to fabricate these sightings to build up the narrative of their serial killing, but even if that is the case, it still lends zero credence to any sort of supernatural explanation."

"I dunno," Ptolema said skeptically. "Like, how would you fake something like what Theo saw using the Power? When there's physically no space for it?"

"I maintain my doubt as to if Theo saw anything at all," Kam stated firmly, "and wasn't simply deprived of his senses by the horror taking place in front of him."

Theo frowned, looking towards the ground with a complicated expression.

"Hey, Theo's dad," Fang called out to Linos. "Is bird-spider stuff associated with anything you know about? Anything to do with the Order that might lead somebody to pick it up?"

"N-Not that I'm remotely aware of," he stated, a strange anxiety in his tone. "If anything, the scenario calls for some sort of mythological animal from the Epic of Gilgamesh. But there's nothing from the text along those lines at all."

"Huuh," Fang said, followed by a low hum as they tilted their head to the side. For a moment, it looked as though they were going to say something, but instead they just stared.

What did the culprit want?

Both of the messages we'd received from the culprit under the guise of Aruru - or the guise of their associates, in the case of the original blackmail - had been fixated on the transgressions of the Order, of its 'sins'. That went for our meeting with Hamilcar, too, and of course the note ostensibly from Vijana. But what exactly did that mean? Realistically, people wouldn't commit mass-murder over something as banal as life-extension research, even if they had Covenant fundamentalist views.

Why were they being so unspecific?

It was strange. The longer this went on, the more I felt like that both the Order's staff and the culprit were complicit in hiding something about the Order and its history, taking care to step around it and only allude to it in vague terms. I'd sensed that in all of my conversations with Linos, even as he'd reluctantly given up information - and of course, it made sense in his case. If the Order had some sort of dark secret, they'd obviously want to keep it just that; a secret.

But why would even someone trying to enact punishment for that 'sin' be complicit, too?

I frowned. It was like Fang said. Something was very off.

"We're here," Ran said, as the golem arrived at the walls of the abbey.