Author: Lurina

199: Shadow of a Shadow (𒐆) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

"They actually have an incredibly rich culture," Bahram assured me about a half hour later, back in the observation carriage. "Deeply spiritual, of course, but also much more cerebral than it might appear to us on the surface. Did you know that they were the first group in the Mimikos to re-discover a viable technique for salt-based tanning? And that when the Kingdom first established contact with them, their cattle produced milk at a 15% greater volume than our finest breeds? It just goes to show you; no matter how many old books from the Imperial Era you have stocked up and how enlightened you might think yourself, there's no substitute for the wisdom you get from tackling problems first-hand. We could all learn something from that, I think."

Tuthal, clearly ill-satisfied with simply not listening and wishing to (somewhat paradoxically) convey his not-listeningness as explicitly as possible, yawned over the final the sentence at unrealistic volume, stretching his jaw out like a lion and fanning his breath. Bahram ignored this without so much as a hint of a flinch.

"So I really do think-- And, you know, I'm sure you'd agree, Kassie-- That we have an obligation to show them some patience in these sorts of scenarios. After all, we're the outsiders, here, the guests. These are their lands we're building on. We've got to understand that, and move forward with respect. It's very important."

"Bahram, darling, you've still got a streak of dirt on your trousers," Hildris commented from the next table over, pointing a long-nailed finger.

"That's alright, Hildy," he said with a stiff smile. "I'll get cleaned a little later. Right now, I want to focus on setting the right tone after what happened."

Tuthal scoffed. "'Setting the right tone'? What does that even mean?"

"I mean, Tuth, that we should take events like this as an opportunity for reflection and personal growth. When, you know, misunderstandings like these occur, the root cause is always reactionary. Taking something that's a little alien to us, a little hard to understand, and assuming the worst without warrant. A closed mind is like a loaded gun, ready to go off at the slightest touch. It's a sad thing. A terribly sad thing."

"They shot an arrow at me!" The other man yelled, his mood instantly pivoting from faux-apathy to anger.

"Yes, well, I don't want to point fingers, but you did slap one of their children across the face. And besides, I'm sure that was just a warning shot. It didn't go anywhere near you."

"It was a meter off at most! I could have been killed. Those savages could have killed me!"

Hildris rolled her eyes, taking a drag from her cigarette as she stared at the ceiling.

After I'd taken my spur-of-the-moment decision to leap off the train, the situation had resolved quickly, though a little spectacularly. Tuthal had grabbed the boy poking around the front carriage by the collar - instantly provoking the entire tribe - and demanded he back off from our property, instantly leading to a communication breakdown due to the dialect barrier. After this, a brief brawl ensued into which Bahram was unfairly dragged, ending up being thrown to the ground and kicked several times by a youthful woman I assumed to be the boy's mother. Tuthal fared slightly better, punching a man in the face before being clobbered in return with a wooden pole; he now nursed a nascent black eye. The boy had also jabbed him in the groin, which had been moderately funny.

Fortunately, (or rather conveniently, since to some degree this had all been planned in advance) Gaizarik eventually descended himself, and it turned out he spoke their language. Somehow, he was able to defuse the situation and convinced them to move on, with Bahram eventually getting back on his feet and restraining his friend even as he continued to shout about how we ought to 'get the guns' and 'mow the cunts down'. (For the avoidance of doubt in mystery terms, I confirmed after the fact that there were not actually any known firearms on board.) After that, they'd soon departed and we were moving again. I was in a good position to monitor if any could have slipped on board at the engine carriage or the umbilical doorway, and as far as I could tell no one did. So the 'closed circle' remained ostensibly intact.

Now we were back here, though the mood had shifted somewhat. Phaidime had excused herself (suspiciously) to 'take a quick bath and calm down' in her room, and how Hildris was the one brooding alone at some remove, seeming unusually frustrated by how the series of events had played out. Irene had also departed, presumably to start on dinner, and the detective had joined us in her place, once again brooding in the corner and even smoking a pipe. A pipe. I continued to feel second-hand embarrassment.

For my part, I'd been quiet as I ruminated - or, I guess more accurately - sulked about the fact that my carriage theory had been disproven. I was certain there would have been some kind of trick. Even setting aside all the other shit, what was even the meaning of setting this on a train if there was nothing? It was like a twist on Inotian food where you didn't use any oil. The oil was the point! Without it, you might as well just eat a pile of raw eggplants and tomatoes and then kill yourself!

No, it's too soon to write anything off. After all, this only ruled out any initial tricks. Like I mentioned earlier, there could still be a conceit where a carriage detached and was replaced at some point down the line (literally). Alternatively, I'd only technically seen one side of the train. Even if I couldn't precisely visualize how it would work right now, there could be some kind of conceit involving its horizontal dimensions.

...look, I'm not an engineer. I don't know how the weight balancing on train tracks is supposed to work. But I'm sure you could do something.

"I'm simply saying that you-- That we acted rashly," Bahram continued. "That everyone involved acted rashly. And there's a lesson to take away from that. A lesson about, you know, giving your fellow man the benefit of the doubt. And I think-- I think that's very important."

"Bahram, darling, I really do appreciate what you're trying to do, but in this case I rather wish you'd cut to the quick, call him a racist imbecile and be done with it." She took a drag.

"I'm not a racist!" Tuthal objected. "We're from the same Party. It's not even a matter of race. It's about not being a vulgoid living out in a wasteland instead of participating in civilization!"

I was pretty sure 'vulgoid' wasn't a word.

"I... you know, let's change the subject," Bahram said in a complete reversal of his position from 30 seconds ago. "We're all still too worked up. This isn't constructive." He took a deep breath, turning in my direction. "Though, speaking of acting rashly, I do feel I have to ask-- Why did you follow us out there, Kasua? You could have been injured."

"I don't like feeling like a powerless bystander," I told him, having already decided on the response to this question. "And I picked up a few common words from steppe dialects when I was a child. I thought I might be able to help."

Tuthal snorted. "They teach you that in school nowadays, do they?"

"Kasua, that's a very thoughtful sentiment, but you mustn't put yourself in danger that way." He lowered his brow. "Tuthal and I, we're just two old men--"

"--speak for yourself--"

"--but you have your whole life ahead of you. Having known your mother for so long, I wouldn't have been able to forgive myself if anything had happened."

"I'm not a child, mister Hasallsun. I can make my own decisions about my safety."

He frowned. "Kasua, you're still..."

"I'd be more concerned for yourself first and foremost, Bahram," Tuthal interjected. "You took a beating back there. At least she looked like she was willing to stand her ground--" He suddenly cut himself off mid-sentence, raising his head in alarm. "Look! Out there. The savages are burning down the countryside!"

Hildris didn't seem to care, but the rest of us, the detective included, followed his gaze. Indeed, some distance towerward - about half a kilometer - there was in fact a huge fire raging, though it was unclear what was being burned. It was surrounded by figures on horses, and smoke billowed from the site copiously, reaching all the way up to the heavens.

...actually, now that I was looking, it had actually got pretty cloudy at some point. The sky was only intermittently visible, and the view had become a lot less spectacular than when we'd set off a couple hours earlier.

"That's probably some poor settler's farm," Tuthal concluded, sneering in disgust. "They probably wiped them out for their crops and supplies. God in heaven, we're lucky the line is still intact."

Bahram, exasperated, rubbed his brow. "That's not what's going on, Tuth. Look closer."

Frowning, he turned back towards the window. I copied the motion.

Squinting (it felt weird that I didn't need glasses in this body, actually, kind of disorienting now that I was actually trying to look at something far off) and taking a closer look at the scene, it was instantly obvious that what was burning wasn't any kind of structure, but just a big pile of lumber. More interestingly, though, it seemed the assembled group was actually more of a queue. One by one, they were approaching the fire on horseback along with their belongings, lingering there for a few moments, then moving along to a separate group at the far side. In addition, there was also a robed man who didn't appear to be part of either group extending his hand toward the flames, though the distance made it impossible to see what he was specifically doing.

"...what is this?" I asked. "Some kind of religious ceremony?"

"In a manner of speaking," Bahram explained. "It's a ritual they perform regularly in order to ward off a sort of demon that's believed to exist in the steppe. They build pyres for it, usually from wood at the approach to the Scythe."

The Scythe was the massive mountain range that crossed the southern expanse of the Mimikos, shaped - as you'd expect - like a slightly-angled crescent. There wasn't much land beyond it; in the modern day it consisted only of the relatively impoverished and underdeveloped realm of the Settler's Coast, which the Grand Alliance had given to some of the displaced Wyrmfolk after the Great Interplanar War.

Tuthal snorted. "Ridiculous superstition."

This was a pretty funny thing for him to say, since the mainline Rhunbardic religion, Atarism, was also superficially based around fire worship. (Though I guess that's the kind of observation only an atheist would find profound, since obviously the actual doctrine was incredibly specific and complicated.)

Suddenly, the detective spoke up out of nowhere. "What sort of demon?" he asked.

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Oh god, it was so forced. He hadn't even been part of the conversation, and he raised his voice almost to the point of shouting just to be heard from the other side of the room! It felt so obvious he was artificially sniffing around for some kind of plot detail that I had to suppress a cringe.

Bahram seemed a little perplexed, but answered, raising his voice - though significantly less - in turn. "Well Noah, if you're curious, I believe it's a creature called an Uqartul. It's a sort of shapeshifting monster that normally takes the form of a horse with a white pelt, but the tribespeople believe can imitate the form of anything living. It steals valuables and abducts newborn children, if the stories are to be believed... though, I might be mistaken as to the details."

Weird, I thought. That's the second obscure monster from rural Rhunbard I've learned about in the past week.

But then the other shoe dropped.

The monster was a shapeshifter. It imitated the forms of other creatures.

In other words, it was a mimic. And it was feared by the tribes of the Zythic Steppe.

A mimic of the Zythic steppe.

The Mimic of Zythia. That was the name of the scenario at the top of the guide!

This had to be important. Brazenly metagamey as it was, Noah had no doubt had the same hunch. Well, however stupid he looked, I wasn't going to interrupt him while he was fishing for hints. I had Kasua look in his direction and raise an eyebrow, but otherwise remained silent.

"What does the fire have to do with it?" he asked.

"The flames are supposedly the beast's weakness," Bahram explained. "You expose it to the fire, and it forcibly transforms back its original shape. It's to do with their cultural concept of dhag, or purification, that associates flames with a return to a neutral or natural state - as one would expect from a culture whose favored landscape is so uniform."

"Like the original inhabitants of Europe," I said.

Bahram blinked. "What?"

I didn't know why my brain had dredged this up all of a sudden. "They burned their settlements to the ground at the end of every generation. Created a clean slate." Had I actually verified this was true? It was probably true. Kamrusepa wasn't the type to make things up unless it benefited her in some material way.

"I... I suppose." He scratched his head. "I'll have to take your word for it, Kassie. I must admit that my knowledge of history tapers off at around the the early New Kingdoms era."

"Why are you letting this nosy prick intrude on our conversation?" Tuthal chimed back up, as if the conversation had been anything especially worth defending. He looked towards the detective. "What's wrong with you, man? If you want to talk, come over here and do it like a normal person. Or is this how they do it in the Mmenomic? Snooping on other people's business until you have some inane question, like we're putting on a little private play for you?"

"Was just curious," the detective replied, taking his pipe out of his mouth and letting the smoke roll between his lips. "Not spent much time in this part of the world before."

"Well keep your fucking 'curiosity' to yourself!" He looked back at Bahram and I, gesturing incredulously and lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Look at him, lurking in the corner like a bloody voyeur. He's probably plotting how he's going to murder us."

"Oh, calm down, Tuth," Bahram, whose intractable patience nevertheless seemed to have significantly eroded in the wake of the earlier fiasco. "I told you, the man's a private investigator. He probably just... does this sort of thing without even thinking about it."

"Oh well that's just fine then," the other man shot back, glancing over his shoulder briefly. "He might be watching us like an owl waiting for shifts in the duff, but he's a professional, so there's no reason to be disquieted."

"It does make me a little uncomfortable to have him be watching us so blatantly," I agreed. Unsettlingly, I felt like Kasua was increasingly falling into the pro-Tuthal camp. "When I talked to him, he wouldn't even explain what case he worked on for Rastag that got him invited here in the first place."

Tuthal looked incredulous. "That's why he's here? He just did a job for him?"

"That's what he said."

Bahram cleared his throat. "Yes, well--"

"Actually, speaking of that bastard, Kasua and I were wondering about something, Bahram," Tuthal pivoted abruptly, as if the idea had just jumped into his head again and he now felt compelled to wrangle it before it slipped away. "I never actually heard what it was that killed him."

The other man blinked. "We talked about this. There was an accident while he was working on-- On one of the trains."

"Don't be obtuse," Tuthal spoke flatly. "I mean what happened specifically. It's not exactly ordinary for a man to die performing to be killed whilst performing routine inspections, or whatever the fuck he was doing."

We must have been on the right track, because Bahram looked more uncomfortable about this line of questioning than he had anything over the course of the entire journey so far. His face flushed. "I'd... rather not go into it, honestly. It's a little grotesque."

"My God, man. You can't say that much and then not explain." Tuthal narrowed his eyes intensely. "What did he do? Fall under the track and get crushed? You'd think that would have made the news."

"Uh, no," Bahram said uneasily. "If... you must know, it was an incident with the engine." He swallowed the air. "He'd been taking the company's rebellion against him increasingly poorly, and I believe he was throwing himself more into tweaking the machines exactly to his standard as a result. Trying to re-establish a sense of control over what he could, as it were. But..." He averted his eyes, wrinkling his lips. "There was a miscommunication while he was adjusting one of the pipes, and the warning system failed as the automatic start-up kicked in. And he, well..."

Even despite his usual flippancy and the massive chip on his shoulder, Tuthal seemed struck, raising a hand to his mouth. "Are you telling me he was cooked alive?"

Bahram hesitated, but gave a grim nod. "I was going to put it more delicately, but... yes, that's more or less what happened." He lowered his head, his expression grave. "I only heard about it second hand myself, but... to tell the truth, it's so horrific I've been trying to avoid thinking about it. When I imagine him in there, trying to get out..." He shivered. "Well, I say that, but the most frightening part is that his body wasn't even close to the hatch. It was curled in the corner, like as soon as he realized what had happened he accepted his fate without complaint."

Tuthal was silent for several moments. Eventually, he spoke in the closest tone to shame I'd heard from him over the entire night, though it might have been closer to dumbfoundment. "I... I don't know what to say."

"Yes, well." Bahram sighed deeply, pulling himself up a bit. "As I was saying, Tuth, one must always be conscious of one's own lack of knowledge."

"Words to live by, darling," Hildris intoned distantly.

Bahram obviously wanted to leave it at that cute little bookend, but a followup question came instantly to my mind, and for once there was no doubt it was appropriate for Kasua to voice, though her bluntness was socially painful to execute. "How did you know it was him?"

The older looked confused. "Pardon?"

"How did you know it was his body?" Kasua rephrased. "Presumably, since they didn't know he was inside the engine when they started the train, no one saw him physically go in. And his remains would have been burnt to a crisp after the fact." She squinted. "So couldn't it have been someone else?"

Bahram seemed genuinely baffled by this chain of logic for a few seconds, staring into the middle distance. When he finally rallied, his tone was suspiciously measured compared to his pained sorrow from a moment ago. "Kassie, the police have methods to discern this sort of thing. The body wouldn't have been reduced to dust. They can perform an analysis on dental records and bones and the like."

I noticed Hildris and the detective's moods had both shifted, too. They were both watching the interaction closely.

"Actually, now that I think about it, they might well have employed a Diviner," Bahram continued. "He was an important man, after all. So there could be no mistake."

But Tuthal, sharing a brief glance with me, seemed ill-convinced. His mouth was curled half-open in a strange expression, and he spoke his next words with an implication I wasn't sure I grasped. "...even a Diviner can be mistaken," he said. "It's not unheard of."

Bahram reacted to this strangely too, shock passing through his eyes for a moment before falling into an uncertain silence for several moments. "Y-You're being silly," he eventually said. "I mean, what are you even trying to say? That it could have been some misunderstanding?" He raised his hands into the air before letting them drop back down. "There was no one else there it could have been, and he's gone."

I wanted to conclude that my theory was confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt at this point. The body being compromised ought to have been the silver bullet, the Howdunnit of Rastag's 'death' resolved in the cleanest possible way. And Tuthal's remark just now seemed to be implying - unless I was reading between the lines - that Rastag had some influence in the police or with the arcanists they employed which could be used to fake this sort of thing; narrative economy suggested this would be connected to the stuff about their deceased classmate, which would probably all come together as some sort of dark backstory in the near future.

But something about all this was starting to feel a bit too cute. After all, a burned corpse was such a stereotypical turn in mystery fiction - basically just a remixed version of the beheading trope I talked about earlier, but absent even many the limitations placed on that scenario, like age and skin color - that nobody could hear such a thing described and believe there was a chance in hell the victim was actually dead.

Combined with how I'd already been bait-and-switched with the carriages, it made me start to think that maybe this was a double bluff of some kind. I mean, hadn't these people been doing this for centuries, millennia? Even as a scenario for beginners it was starting to feel too easy.

...no, that's not right.

It's not that it was just easy, per-se. A lot of these plot elements were indeed very basic, but they weren't just basic. Like, I've been talking about 'mystery tropes' a lot here, but the truth is that there are a lot of different types of mystery stories. Hard mystery, soft mystery, dry mystery, dramatic mystery, supernatural mystery, super-orthodox mystery. Plus of course spinoffs that hewed varyingly close to the source genre depending on the author, like hardboiled stuff. And all that's just the broad strokes.

When I talked gender-oriented twists earlier, for example, that's not, like, common. It's a trend I'd witnessed specifically, but I only conceptualize that as a specific thing because of my taste in literature. The median mystery fan probably wouldn't even have noticed. And whether it was my tastes of life experience, that was true of a lot of little details I'd encountered so far.

So it wasn't just an easy mystery.

Rather... it was a mystery that felt like it had been made familiar to me specifically.

Around the time that this was happening, Ptolema of Rheeds was in her house. It was mid-afternoon, and she was frying eggs. She did not intend to eat these eggs (well, maybe she'd eat a couple) but rather, she just found the activity helped her think, and in a world in which anything could be effortlessly created or destroyed there was no reason not to do it. So, she did it.

Sometimes her friends would ask her why frying eggs in particular was the activity she liked to use for this, and because she understood that people were more endeared to you if you had good reasons for things, she'd tell them that she used to do it for her dad every morning in the latter half of their childhood, and so considered it sentimental. This was, however, a lie; not in the sense that she hadn't cooked her dad eggs, but rather in the sense that there was any connection between the two whatsoever. She just liked to cook eggs. There was nothing more or less to it than that.

After frying about seventeen eggs and thinking about seventeen things, her resonator hummed. She set the pan down and looked at it.

Slowly, she frowned.

A few minutes later, she moved to another Domain. It was a new one, with only one other person present, but they'd already clearly spent a modest amount of time customizing it. They were in a dark, icy canyon, the ground beneath their feet was grey and lifeless. Stars shone vividly overhead.

"Hello, miss Rheeds," the figure opposite her said, despite the fact that she was presently not herself, on the off-chance there'd be others present for this meeting. (Though the figure knew she disliked this, so whether it was trying to be affirming or annoying was an open question.)

Ptolema-who-was-not-currently-Ptolema ignored this. "What's with this setting?" she asked, looking up at the towering canyon walls, dwarfing anything she'd seen during her life in the Remaining World.

"It's Hinshelwood Crater, of course," the figure answered.

Ptolema's brow flattened. "Very funny."

The figure laughed.

"What do you want?" she asked, almost openly hostile.

"I just wanted to hear your assessment on how things are going," the figure explained. "How she's been acting over the past couple of days in person."

"It's been fine. She went to the thing."

"You know I mean more specifically than that. What has her mood been like? Has she brought up anything troubling? That might betray any meaningful loss of motivation?"

Ptolema was silent.

"Miss Rheeds."

"You know I'm not comfortable with this," she said. "It's not what she agreed to."

"Su wanted to do what's best for everyone here," the figure argued back calmly. "She wouldn't want to jeopardize things for another epoch just because circumstances have changed somewhat."

"Yeah, but she consented to that," Ptolema retorted. "This is different. It's manipulative."

The other figure waited patiently.

"...she's more brittle than you thought she'd be," Ptolema eventually elaborated. "I shouldn't have left her alone in town. She keeps thinking about just giving up."

"I see." The figure considered this. "Well, we expected her to wobble between resignation and resolve at first, but it has been a lot more delicate than even that." It nodded. "We'll need to get her a more substantial emotional hook more quickly."

"I don't know why you're saying 'we'," Ptolema said. "But do what you want."

Then she left.