Author: Lurina

209: The 1,000,000 Ways to be Murdered by Utsushikome of Fusai (𒐄) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

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10:15 AM | Anuem Suburbs | March 28th | 1403 COVENANT

Lilith, grasping the piece of thin, sharpened wood she'd found in the garden tightly, slowly scraped it against the canvas. The sound as it made was rich and gravelly, satisfying in a way that felt almost animalistic. The paint broke off in crumbs and sometimes peeled in longer flakes that would twist into spirals; oil on canvas, replicated in the exact same structure as the original artist's work. Their intent unraveled.

They came, as they always did, at exactly 10:15 PM. Nothing was so constant in Lilith's life, and yet somehow her mother still always managed to be surprised. She heard her downstairs as she cursed to herself in the kitchen, stomped over to her bedroom, finished dressing herself, then finally headed to the front door. This process took more than a minute, but they didn't knock twice; they knew better than that at this point.

"Good morning," a friendly voice intoned after it creaked open. There were three people who came; two men and a woman, always dressed in business casual attire, like middle-tier office workers. This was one of the men.

"She can't come today," her mother told them instantly, her voice tight. "She's not feeling well."

"Mrs Eshkalon," the man said - his tone unreprimanding, but firm - "you've said that every week for the past month."

"It's a difficult age, on top of everything else." A pause. "She's been having one of her episodes."

"All the more reason for her to come, then. The sessions are about supporting her particular needs."

"You know very well her 'needs' aren't the same as the other children."

"Even so, she's always more relaxed once she's there."

"That's not what she tells me."

This was a lie, although in retrospect it was unclear if her mother was conscious of this. In truth, Lilith had no strong preference between attending the group and staying at home. She enjoyed school (where the staff had learned to leave her alone the overwhelming majority of the time) more than either option, but at the group the tutors and carers would fuss over everyone, and at home her mother would fuss over her, so it was more or less a wash. The drive, at the very least, was annoying, so given the choice she'd probably prefer not to bother, but actively resisting would likely expend around the same amount of energy, so there wasn't much in it.

"Mehit, please," the man said. "With the holidays it'll only be for two hours today, and master Kane was looking forward to seeing her."

There was a pause, but she inevitably relented in the face of this scarcely-concealed blackmailing. "Fine. Give me a few minutes. I'll fetch her."

The door slammed shut, and she heard her mother stomp up the stairs with audible frustration. (This wasn't something Lilith processed at the time - as a child, it simply never occurred to her to make inferences about what other people were thinking.) A few moments later, she pushed open the door to her bedroom.

"Lili, it's time for your-- Oh gods, put that down!"

Lilith saw no point in responding, continuing to scrape her makeshift knife against the canvas from her spot on the window sill. The original image, a saccharine scene depicting a cat batting at a flowerpot, was still largely intact, though the corner where a beam of lamplight had originally been depicted has been mostly stripped away, leaving a blur of abstract colors and, at the very end, hard lines, which was what Lilith had really been curious about. In moments like these, she remembered wishing she had the ability to remove herself from time, to 'pause' reality like it was an echo game (although she didn't particularly like echo games, despite the fact that everyone always assumed she did). But her mother quickly advanced on her, grabbing at her wrist and wrestling the piece of wood from her hand.

"What are you doing?" She reprimanded her, more tired than angry. "I just bought that painting!"

She stared up at her mother. It wasn't that she didn't have an explanation for her actions. She's watched a program on the logic sea about the concepts of underpainting and pentimento, and had wanted to see an example for herself. On top of her burgeoning interest in painting, Lilith had what could only describe as a fixation on getting to the bottom of a particular thing. One time she'd been playing in some ruins out in the woods and had found a pipe full of overgrown foliage, and after pulling it loose, a deluge of built-up filthy water had flowed freely. This had inspired a feeling so euphoric in her that she'd been striving to replicate it ever since, so far to limited success.

However, though she felt she had a good grasp of language on a theoretical level, whenever she tried to convey her thoughts to others, something always seemed to go amiss, like there was a whole second layer to the exercise that was completely beyond her perceptions. When she tried to explain herself, it usually made things worse.

She made a token effort regardless. "It's. You bought it for me."

"To hang on your wall," her mother said, tensing. She never hit her - whenever it seemed like she might, all the energy seemed to hit a wall and fade away like a failing motor - but she often seemed like she wanted to. "Don't you remember what we talked about? About everything in the house having a different job, about letting them do their jobs?"

Lilith couldn't quite recall what she was talking about. Her memory had been getting better lately, but it was still foggy and confused more often than not.

Her mother sighed. "Never mind," she said. "It's time for you to go see your uncle at your special group. Do you remember the rules?"

She did remember this. "Don't. Agree to go somewhere alone with anyone, even uncle Hamilcar. Don't let them touch me with anything that seems strange. Don't-- Don't believe anything they say without talking to you first."

"One more," her mother prompted.

"Don't tell anyone who isn't in the group what happens," she finished reciting. "Anyone except you."

"Good girl." Her mother kissed her on the forehead. "Let's go."

They left her room, which was in the loft, and descended the stairs to the house proper. It was a large place-- Too large for two people, with a smaller number of massive rooms as opposed to the more labyrinthine design one might find in a traditional mansion. Sparse furniture was separated by vast gulfs of tile and carpet, so large for someone Lilith's size they almost felt like fields. Lilith didn't know why they were still living here, despite everything.

They came face to face with the man, who had a shaved and a skinny face locked in a perpetual ivory smile, and often wore a partial wrap around his scalp that matched his brightly-colored tunic and shawl. "Hello, Lilith!" he said cheerfully.

LIlith said nothing, looking up at him without expression. Her mother seemed to interpret this as a factional gesture, putting her hand on her shoulder, though in truth she was simply indifferent.

"We'll just be out for a little while today. How are you feeling?

"I'm fine," she replied emotionlessly. This was one of her stock phrases.

"See? She's well enough," he told her mother reassuringly. "Now, come along, LIlith. Everyone will be waiting."

She stepped forward, her mother's grip offering resistance for just a moment.

Unlike how Lilith understood it used to be hundreds of years ago, the Mimikos largely didn't have 'villages'-- Replication arcana had replaced agriculture, so there was no longer any mainstream reason to live outside of easy travel distance from a city. However, their house was about as far out into the suburbs as one could get while still being part of a metropolitan area. Every house - almost mound-like, smooth and crisp in their angles, wrought of lamp-baked seamless earthen stone - held dominion over a yard that could satisfy an amateur episkyros team, not even having borders so much as extending as far as their owners deigned to discipline the surrounding woodland. So every time they did this, it was a long carriage ride into the urban center.

There was a small mercy today: Only the woman ever tried to speak to her, so she could spend that time on her logic engine. Her mother had only bought it for her recently, and she'd largely been using it for reading. Lilith read a lot of books, though not always stories like most people her age. Even back then, she liked things of calculated logic and reason, meaning delivered intentfully to a sharp point. It wasn't that fiction never did this; truly good literature could be just like a piece of visual art, every choice building on a series of motifs to a climax, but this was uncommon. Mostly it was meandering and strange in the same way she found other people to be generally, the drippings of a mind that felt clogged in a pipe, coming to know resolution. Very frustrating.

When she'd tried to explain this to her mother, this had gone predictably awry and she'd attempted to get her into mystery novels, which she'd instantly hated. After that she'd put forward a subgenre of fantasy where the characters overcame problems using mathematical abilities, which were better but often too inspecific and bloated with extraneous plot that distracted from the numbers. Her latest attempt had been better. She'd bought her a book on music theory by a man named Constantios of Phires, though large segments were quotes from much earlier writers named Aristoxenus and Archytas, who themselves expanded on a system of musical logic laid down by Pythagoras himself. Lilith did not like listening to most music - sounds overwhelmed her too easily - but the logic was beautiful. It was good when things fit together.

Lilith was not capable of vocalizing the idea to herself at the time, but she wondered if the draw she experienced towards ordered things came from the disorder within her own mind and sense of self. ...but no, that was probably too cute an explanation. Even before what had been done to her, she'd had certain tendencies. People were eager to ascribe aspects of their nature to experiential cause-and-effect, but humans were ultimately just another type of machine. Free will did not exist, and perception was the product of neurological processes. If someone thought differently to others, it was probably about protein bonding, not trauma.

Much, much later, she told this to her husband, who had said something like 'there must be a certain comfort in that'. This was also wrong.

In an inverse between the relationship between her house and the city, Asharom the country was not technically in the Asharomi Desert, but it was close enough to barely matter, the landscape flat and relatively desolate outside of the shores of Lake Shembet. When the Mimikos had first been divvied up on paper by the different Parties in what would later become Old Yru following the Exodus, the Mekhian and Ysaran groups had ended up bordering it due their cultural familiarity with the climate on Earth, but in truth the Ironworkers had never intended anyone to live in it at all. Since the Mimikos had been engineered to accommodate human life from the beginning, the overwhelming majority of its surface was dead in the middle of the thermal neutral zone, but a few areas were more inhospitable due to filling roles in the ecosystem. The Asharomi desert, located at a volatile intersection in the bowl's atmosphere, had been intended to provide a well of soil nutrients to be carried in all directions around the Mmenomic, while also acting as a carbon sink. It was the planetary air filter, as it were, made as small as possible but unable to be omitted completely.

However, as was the case in every Party save the Uana (at least as far as anyone knew), there was a faction of Ysarans who radicalized against technology and modern culture and turned instead towards religion and an idealized form of traditional living, and as a result forged out an existence on the frontier: The Asharomi. It was their philosophy, which spoke of an irredeemable guilt held by the human race - for the loss of Earth, for the abandonment of the majority of the Parties on the surface of the moon, and for deeper sins that were ascribed as causing the vacuum collapse - that led to the reformation of the Old Pantheon established by the scions of Alexander into the Dying Gods, the only version that remained prominent in the present day.

But unlike most of those groups, which became the losers of the prisoner's dilemma which faces any group that abstains from technological and administrative advantage for reasons wise or not, the Asharomi bucked the trend and survived. Benefiting from being the closest neighbor of Mekhi, which prospered above all other nations during the Mourning Period and First Resurrection, they developed a service economy and became a center for arcane learning. Providence, or perhaps an unconventional wisdom, continued to favor them through the ages: The harsh conditions of their lands led them to have vastly larger stockpiles of food when the Interluminary Strife arrived, and their position behind Nad-Ilad meant they escaped the Rhunbardic Empire without even having to make any concessions. And their leaders proved willing to cede just enough ideological ground in the wake of change to prevent being left behind.

The result was a nation (federation, to be technical) that felt like it should not exist in the modern world, a theocratic oligarchy in a secularized, mostly-democratic present. That dissonance was visible even just on the drive into town. The clothing was ultra-conservative and out of time, the buildings - all of the same minimalist, almost monolithic style - were out of time, and the neighborhoods on a broader scale were missing many elements that would be otherwise be considered mainstays: Coffee shops and teahouses, flamboyant restaurants and convenience stores. Everything was functional, reserved, and even the people moved differently, traveling as families instead of individuals.

(Except for the golems. They were everywhere, humanoid, equine and canine, dragging anything from boxes of groceries to towering mounds of building materials down the long, straight streets.)

Of course, Lilith knew nothing else at the time. After all, she'd lived here for her entire life. And everything she remembered...

Well, that was something altogether different.

Asharom was divided into four 'Temple States' (confusingly, the phrase 'Temple State' was sometimes also used for the entire country) oriented around cities pledged to a patron god. Anuem, devoted to to Anue - God of Heaven Undone - was the oldest and ostensibly the most important, but in practice it had been upstaged by Ithazor, which was placed more fortuitously to the south, where Viraaki, Mekhi and Ysara all met at the Tourmaline River. The city was still large and home to millions, but it had the quality of a mausoleum. The sky line was dominated by low-rise and yet massive domes of pale brick, with the occasional bronze tower similar to what you might see in greater Ysara. Smaller structures - multi story houses - filled the cracks between haphazardly.

It was outside one of these domes that they finally came to a stop. The man left the front of the carriage and opened the door for her, offering a gloved hand.

"Come along, miss," he urged.

She ignored his hand glancing upward at their destination. "Winter place," she stated simply.

"Yes, mister and misses Jeramaka are.. busy, so we can't use their house today." For the first time, a different, more troubled expression crossed his face, which was again something Lilith did not process at the time. "So we'll be meeting at the other spot. It'll be like a little vacation."

Lilith wasn't sure what she felt about this. She didn't care for unexpected change.

Nevertheless, she eventually hopped out. They both dropped their veils, then walked together to one of the entrances, which had no doors, being merely square gaps in the stone sometimes covered by a heavy curtain.

The inside was a lot more lively, almost resembling a bazaar on the quieter side, with stores in all directions encircling a large statue of Nalo in the middle of a pool of water. Due to a quirk of Asharomi doctrine, a much wider range of services and activities were available on religious property than outside of it, and so society had slowly become oriented almost entirely around these massive temple-complexes. This wasn't quite the ridiculous technicality it appeared at first glance; many new rules had to be followed regarding conduct which weren't in force otherwise, and everything closed twice a day for afternoon and evening prayers. It had the effect of de-facto segregating non-believers, or at least people who wouldn't pay religious lip service, from most of society, which her mother complained about often.

For example, the custom was that they first took a blessing from the priest - standing at an altar in the shadow of the statue - before doing any shopping. There was a queue for this, which they spent about 5 minutes in, at which point they came face-to-face with a bearded man with a white veil but otherwise black robes.

At least he seemed to have the right attitude, moving things along quickly. "Bless you, son of Nalo. Daughter of Nalo." He gave them each a small ceremonial gold coin. "May you each find prosperity in humility, until the rebirth of this world."

"Thank you, father," the man said.

"May you each find prosperity in humility, until the rebirth of this world."

They walked through the leftmost hall, passing numerous people and storefronts for specialized services, though the only ones Lilith ever stopped to look at was the clock maker, which often had interesting internal workings on display, and the carpenter, which always made such a racket that she couldn't help but look. Mostly she stayed focused on her logic engine. (Right now she was reading about the concept of a Mordent.)

As the man had alluded to earlier, it was currently mid spring, which meant it was Akitum season, Akitum of course being the most significant holiday in the Mimikos on an international level. Originating all the way back in the days of the Emegi, all Ysaran cultures had an especially long history with the festival, but in Asharom it was comparatively minimized compared to more local religious affairs. Still, a little bit of decor had been put up around the place, mostly consisting of rope bearing sheets of colored cloth with floral designs. In the corner of her eye, she could see that a handful of stores had taken it more seriously, with stalks of wheat and elaborate stuffed dragons-- Meant to represent Tiamat, the great sea dragon of myth, though in modern days this was usually rendered as 'Tamath', and she'd been significantly softened into a sort of mascot character. Lilith collected at least one

Most children her age were excited, but Lilith didn't particularly care. She was, in at least the sense of getting gifts, a bit of a spoiled child. Both her mother and uncle seemed to give her the things she asked for with little resistance.

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Eventually, they passed the storefronts and came to larger establishments that included small offices. One, an extremely grey and plain looking one with a sign simply reading 'Bethna Shipping and Storage', was their ultimate destination. They went inside, approaching the woman at the desk.

"Hello," her escort said.

The woman's eyes flicked between the two of them, obviously recognizing them. Still, she pretended not to. "Good morning. May I help you?"

"I'm here to discuss compensation about a damaged package of mine, registry 174951. I was told it incurred damage from a water spillage."

The phrase changed every time. Lilith did not understand the point of this, even 200 years later.

"I understand, sir," she said. "You'll need to head to our fulfillment department on the fourth floor."

"Thank you." He gave her a polite nod, with a hint of a knowing expression.

They made for the elevator and indeed rode it to the fourth floor, but instead of heading to the 'fulfillment department', walked several meters down a nondescript corridor until they arrived at a service closet. The man closed the door behind them - sealing them in for a moment - and then the rear wall was abruptly removed, revealing the woman who sometimes picked Lilith up clutching a lantern. She looked a little haggard today, her black hair half loose from its bun.

She looked to Lilith with a friendly smile, then turned to the man, regarding him with a considerably less charitable expression. "You're late," she mumbled.

"Sorry," he muttered back. "Got stuck in traffic."

She sighed. "Come on. They've already started class."

They followed back through the revealed passage, which led to a steep set of metal stairs. They descended for a couple minutes, then finally came to a heavy bronze door. She pushed it open.

The space beyond was, today more than most days, a strikingly strange contrast of atmosphere that set her aesthetic teeth on edge. Structurally - and, well, fundamentally - it was a basement. A few damp rooms with grey stone walls and a low ceiling suspended by a mix of wooden and metal poles. A large quantity of boxes, some open and with goods literally spilling out, betrayed its true purpose as part of a warehouse. It was, in a word, grim.

On the other hand, everything possible had been done to disguise this grimness. Large, homemade rugs had been set down. Nice furniture (though most of it of the lightweight sort) had been organized to form a number of mini-lounges for people to have private conversations in comfort. The walls had been adorned with a mixture of paintings, hangings, and childrens art, and the lighting was all warm color-filtered gas lamps. There was even a little kitchen with a stove and washbasin set up.

If there was something which could be said to inspire sadness or genuine misery in Lilith, it was things that attempted to do something earnestly but failed miserably. This room was trying to cultivate a domestic atmosphere, but everything was wrong. It was lipstick on a pig.

In any case, this first room was filled with people - adults - doing everything from talking to playing games at the rear. This made sense. If they were, indeed, late, the other children would already be in the next room.

Some of the nearby adults were talking as they stepped in. "...horrible. They apparently left their documents at an airshop dock. The Oathguard came for them in the middle of the night."

"Fuck me, you don't think we're compromised, do you?"

"No, they followed protocol, at least," he replied, shaking his head. "Nothing left at the place either. Burned it all to ashes with the Power."

"You think there's any chance they're alive?" the woman he was talking to asked.

"Well, I always used to say that Adam was like a cockroach. He wasn't a fighter, but he knew a lot of tricks." A sigh. "It's slim, though. The report said they had bodies."

"The Oathguard is trying to cover their ass lately, though, with their funding being pulled."

"Yeah, but it's a slim hope."

Lilith scanned the room. There was no sign of her uncle, who personality aside did not have the sort of build which allowed for being easily missed. He wouldn't be in the classroom, either, so that left either the lavatory or what she'd heard the adults call the 'business rooms,' a series of small interconnected chambers filled with disused pipework.

The man who'd escorted her nudged her shoulder. "Go on. Mary. They'll be in the usual spot."

She looked up at him for a moment, then nodded, putting her logic away.

Crossing the room, she entered the only other of comparable size, which was also a dingy chamber but was decorated very differently in a way that was moderately less bothersome. This one was set up to look like a classroom. A series of wooden desks were arranged before a blackboard, most of which were occupied by children, though their ages varied far more widely than one would see in a real school. The walls were decorated with assorted educational paraphernalia - including a world map, though not of the Mimikos - and a crate full of books aside the teacher's desk.

While most of the stuff here stayed between visits, even during the off-season, the books and a few other items were always removed at the end of a day. This Lilith did understand in the present.

The teacher, a cheerful but perpetually tired-looking woman who wore a scepter at her waist and her blonde hair very short, stopped the lesson upon her arrival. "Mary! I thought you weren't coming."

Lilith said nothing, moving silently to her desk. Another child, a boy with a dog-like nose, snickered at her for unclear reasons.

"We just finished our reading session," the teacher - who they called miss Fallows - told her regardless of the obvious fact that Lilith did not care. "But I know you prefer to go at your own pace, so you can catch up by yourself if you like." There was a flash of what older-Lilith would understand as unease or guilt, and that was all the specific attention she got.

She inserted herself onto her seat against the far wall. Unlike at normal school, she wasn't allowed to have her logic engine out during lessons, so there was nothing to do but read the book placed on her desk as miss Fallows suggested. Like all the ones here, it had a black cover with no title that gave it a slightly eerie appearance, especially considering it was handwritten.

More notably, it was written in a language that did not exist outside of these sessions, one that had taken her a rather long time to pick up despite the ways in which she was more capable than other people her age. For this reason she did not like the reading sessions, which was unfortunate, because outside of break time it was one of the only three things they did in the class, the others being history and Eme lessons.

So she hesitated for a little bit, her eyes wandering around the room. It escaped her attention at first glance, but she noticed that there was some decoration here, too. In this case it was much humbler, mostly consisting of papyrus cut into the shape of eggs and rabbit heads.

She idly opened the book. The title was present on the first page.

It read, 'The Wizard of Oz.'

"Now, I know everyone here is excited for Akitum this week," miss Fallows said in the background, "but today we're going to be learning about a different holiday that's just as special, and in our world was held around this same time of year. Does anyone know what this holiday was called?"

One of the older children rolled their eyes, seeming annoyed that this was even being asked, but a younger girl stuck her hand up. "Easter!"

"That's right, Clair, well done," The teacher praised her, letting out a small sigh with her smile. (Clair was not her real name; Lilith had met her on the outside and knew it was Ashtarra. No one at the sessions used their real names.) "Now, Easter was also a sort of spring festival, but the things you did were very different. Like Christmas, it started off as being about just one religion from a little part of the whole, but eventually became popular the world over. For those of you that are a little older, we'll talk about the religious parts later on, but for now we'll start with the fun stuff!" She held a piece of chalk up in the air encouragingly. "The main thing people liked to do at Easter was to play a game with chocolate eggs-- Or, chocolate shaped like eggs, I mean to say. Someone would hide them all over a house, or a garden, or sometimes even bigger areas, and people would try to hunt them down. Whoever found them got to eat the chocolate!"

"Are we gonna have an easter egg hunt?" One of the children asked skeptically.

Miss Fallows laughed nervously. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves." She walked over to the blackboard and began drawing something that Lilith wasn't paying attention to. "Now, the story people had was that the chocolate eggs were brought to the world by a magical bunny called the Easter Bunny. That's Easter Bunny." She'd switched briefly to the other language. "Can you all say that? Easter Bunny?"

"Easter Bunny," the class recited, with varying degrees of terrible pronunciation.

"That's right!" She nodded. "People would treat the Easter Bunny the same way they do Tamath for Akitum. They made all sorts of gifts and decorations to look like him in the spirit of the season."

"What kinda gifts did people get for Easter?" 'Clair' asked.

"Well, Easter wasn't a time for giving gifts in the same way Akitum is," miss Fallows explained. "That was at Christmas instead."

"Then what did they do at Yalda?"

"That's, uh, a little complicated," Miss Fallows said hesitantly. She was doing her best for someone who was very obviously not a real teacher. "But Easter was like Yalda in the sense that it was mostly about eating. You'd have a fun egg hunt in the morning, then eat a big meal with your family for lunch or dinner. Traditionally that would be lamb, but sometimes it would be pork in places where that wasn't popular. We'll be sampling some Easter food later, so look forward to that!"

"What about the chocolate eggs?" The same boy from a minute ago asked.

"--but first, let's take a look through an Easter Fact Sheet," she said, withdrawing a bundle of handwritten parchment from the chest. "Take a look through it, and then we'll have a little quiz. There'll be a prize for everyone if you can get more than 7 questions right."

Before anyone had a chance to complain, she quickly began divvying up the sheets. Lilith, disinterested, began reading instead.

Sometimes, back then, it felt to Lilith as if she were living in a dream.

It wasn't just that her own mind didn't make sense. The world itself did not make sense; a sea of churning chaos with only the most intermittent islands of order. People acted in ways she could not understand without explaining themselves; her mother, her uncle, her teachers, even the few other children she was vaguely associated with in a way she supposed made them friends. People said things they didn't mean, and contradicted themselves at different times constantly. The only refuge she had was in solitude.

Other things, too, were also confusing in a more passive way. When it came to these sessions, what was confusing was the past-- History.

At this point in her life, not even yet close to 10 years old, Lilith was in some ways very intelligent, but in other ways even more clueless than her peers. On paper, she had already attained many skills; she could paint, she could speak three and a half languages (Ysaran and Mekhian, plus the Asharomi dialect, plus some of the one they taught her in the sessions), she could read at a near-adult level, she understood algebra and geometry and kind of understood calculus. But these were points of knowledge that existed divorced from any practical context. She could not have, for example, gone into the clock store they'd passed by earlier and bought something, because commerce, decorum - what could be touched and what could not be touched - and even more fundamental extrapolations between the physical and the personal that were intuitive to most seemed to elude her. For example, she often damaged things she'd never touched before when she first held or carried them, as how they could interact with the strength of her arms and the shape of her body felt ambiguous.

(Was there a time when this had been different? She wasn't sure. She couldn't recall.)

As a result, she understood just enough of what was being taught here to know that something was deeply odd, but couldn't comprehend why.

When Lilith had gone to normal school (her old normal school, before they sent her to the different one where the tasks were more complicated and they mostly left her alone) they'd taught her about the history of the world. She recalled most of it: Originally, humanity had evolved somewhere outside the Remaining World on a planet called Earth (this was pronounced differently in the sessions, 'Ur-thha' vs. 'Er-eh-tuh'). Many cultures had arisen independently in different regions, and over the course of millennia they'd slowly come into contact and developed more sophisticated technology in a series of leaps; the invention of writing, iron smelting, steam engines, logic engineering, etc. Many great nations had risen and fallen, and in the last few centuries, humans had even moved to other planets.

But eventually, something went wrong (it was difficult for her to understand exactly what had gone wrong, because they'd taught her about it at a special lesson with a different teacher she didn't know, and had spent more time talking about a complicated set of rules everyone had to follow to stop it happening again than the thing itself) and that world had been destroyed. So humans had fled here, to the Remaining World, and eventually a group of (people? gods? angels?) called the Ironworkers had created the Mimikos for them to live on. And then that led into the more recent history that was in dramas and so on.

But in the sessions, they taught a different history. In this version, humans had still evolved on Earth, but almost all of the details were different. The best thing Lilith could think to compare it to was, well, the way that fraternizer golems worked.

Outside of custom-made units capable of greater intelligence, there were two common types of social golems in the Mimikos circa 1409: Ambassador golems and fraternizer golems. Each had their own advantages and disadvantages, and ambassadors were designed to perform duties where there was no margin for error. The golem that they had at normal school to help when the teacher wasn't around was an ambassador golem. It was extremely competent at the limited tasks it did and had a lot of knowledge it would impart eloquently if asked, but if you tried to talk to it about anything of its wheelhouse, it would always flatly answer that it didn't know and that they should ask the teacher, despite the best efforts of some of the more rambunctious members of the class.

But one time they'd gone on a trip to a museum, and the one they had to answer questions about the exhibit was a fraternizer golem. Fraternizer golems were designed to more closely resemble humans in their behavior, and if they didn't know something, they would try and guess. They would also respond to new information given to it, attempting to assess if it was true or false and responding imperfectly.

However, golems were stupid. So if you talked to one for long enough without it resetting its internal logic - as they were scripted to do between conversations - their sense of reality would slowly begin to unravel. They'd get or be told some detail wrong, and extrapolate from that incorrect information, and then extrapolate from the wrong conclusion they arrived at after that. Eventually it would feel like everything they said was a guess, even what actual knowledge they had been scripted to possess blended up into a soup.

The way the 'second' Earth was described felt like that. The early parts of the history were basically the same, but at some point, a lie was introduced into the mix. And after that, it slowly diverged into complete fantasy. The Empire of Hattusa collapsed far earlier, before even the New Kingdoms era, and Minoa - the center of what would eventually become Inotian culture - was destroyed in a volcanic eruption. A rival tribe to the Umbricans, a footnote in ordinary history, became so powerful it reshaped all of civilization in its image, creating among many other things the alphabet used in the book she was reading. The group that would become the Uana, instead of discovering Asia and uniting the two continents, wasn't even talked about at all.

What was odd was, from what little Lilith could tell having somewhat 'read ahead' of her peers, that this didn't quite happen irrevocably. Even after the inflection point, for a while - though it was difficult to tell for exactly how long - the two accountings had details in common. For instance, she'd learned a little about Plato, an extremely influential philosopher, in both classes, and both Platos wrote very similar things and had very similar lives. But the background circumstances of the world's they lived in were completely different. The Plato she'd been taught about in school had been a much more political figure, spending much of his later life at the Assyrian imperial court in Nineveh, which ruled over Hellas, the original homeland of the Inotians, at the time. But in this other world a completely different empire, based already in in the later imperial capital of Babylon, failed in its ambitions to advance beyond Hatti, and Plato instead spent much of his later life in Syracuse, which was beset by far greater political turmoil. He also had a student - Aristotle - who was supposedly almost as influential as him, though apparently his writings had been lost. It was if some force was conspiring to make things play out a certain way, yet at a certain point simply yielded, giving up.

It was all extremely strange, and when dwelling on the matter, Lilith was constantly beset by the nagging feeling that she was missing something obvious, or perhaps forgetting some detail she already knew. Despite her difficulties, she understood the concept of causality. Obviously, there could only be one actual history - there couldn't be two pasts that both led to the same present, existing completely in tandem. So what was going on?

"Miss," one of the students complained, a little boy with a rotund face. His name in the sessions was Mark. "Wut does a 'fas' mean?" He pronounced the word awkwardly.

"Ah-- Good question," the teacher commended him. "'Fast' means a time where you don't eat any food. It's the same thing as 'Tevath'."

"If you have trouble remembering it, think of how 'vath' sounds like 'fast' if you say it fast!" She frowned. "O-Oh, wait, no-- The pun doesn't work if you don't... never mind."

"Tevath was in that other book we were reading, wasn't it?" Clair asked. "Why would an Ysaran word be in one of these books?"

"Ahah, that's a little complicated, Clair," she answered carefully but soothingly. "Your reunification is coming soon, isn't it? You'll understand then."

The girl smiled enthusiastically.

Miss Fallows was notably vague when it came to these broader questions. What what the relationship between this history and the one they knew? Why were they being taught this, and why were they not allowed to talk about it with anyone outside of the sessions? She would only ever refer back to the same idea and story they'd been told from the very start: That this world they lived in now, of the seven planes and the Grand Alliance of the Mourning Realms and the collapse that ended the Imperial Era and the Power, was real.

It was just not theirs.

Once, the story went, there had been two worlds with fundamentally different natures, existing separately. But then a great evil, envious of the great wisdom, grace and power of its people, had come to their world - to Ur-thha - brought calamity, and stolen them away, forcing it to do its bidding. And so that they would not rise against it, it then split their souls in two, leading them to forget who they were and comply in silence, living among those native to this realm.

But one day, a great hero rose up and made a crack in the vault where the great evil had kept the other halves of their souls. And now, slowly, they were remembering who they were and finding one another. Yet the great evil's power was great, with many of the unsplit humans tricked into doing its bidding. So for now they much gather their strength in secret, until the time when they can rise up against the vault. Until the time they could be free.

But that would a long time yet, and for now all they needed to do was stick to their studies to prepare themselves for the time when the two halves of their souls would be reunited.

Lilith did not know the word 'bullshit' in any language, but if she did, it would probably be the one she'd use to describe this story. The biggest question she had was what exactly the 'great wisdom, grace and power' they were supposed to have possessed was. From everything she had read, the history Ur-thha made it sound like a much worse place than the normal one, beset by disaster and relatively primitive right up until the end of the material. There was nothing about them colonizing outer space, and it seemed like they hadn't even figured out basic medicine. In a word, it sucked.

Miss Fallows had handwaved this by saving the way the two worlds worked was, again, just fundamentally different and the same things weren't always possible. But there was a way that the adults in the sessions talked about Ur-thha that seemed more about feeling than anything material, like it was some lost utopia where everyone had been happy just by nature.

Lilith's mother had told her not to trust anything they told her in the sessions without telling her first, but she had to admit she found it difficult. What did it mean to 'trust'? Was there anything she could be sure of, from any teacher, that she couldn't confirm with her own eyes?

Even that sometimes felt unreliable. Though it had been getting better, days would still sometimes vanish for her, and she often had literal dreams so vivid they seemed more real than reality, even when she was doing impossible things. Since so little seemed to connect, it felt easier for her to stop questioning, and just exist passively. And yet she couldn't stop questioning, even when it felt like reality was unraveling at the seams.

The lesson continued. She read a couple chapters of the book, which was about a person from Ur-thha (or at least she assumed so) going to a different world with bizarre rules and characters. Were they making her read this for a reason? Was she supposed to identify with this character, or was it just arbitrary? More chaos?

One more thing was consistent.

Every time she came to these classes, her uncle wouldn't be around at first, just like it had been this time around. But eventually, she'd turn towards the glass window of the doorway and notice him watching her, almost standing guard outside the door. For some reason, even though he seemed to command some kind of respect, no one at these events ever seemed to speak to him except for the servants.

She knew what would happen. After it was over and she left, he'd pull her aside. And he'd ask her, in his strange and mechanical voice, three questions:

'How is your mother?'

'How have you been feeling?'

And finally, ' Who do you feel like you are today'?

Lilith would always give the same responses to the first two questions: That she was fine, and that she was fine. The third varied and usually led into lengthier conversations, him prompting her to explain her mental narrative as best she could, an effort that struck her as ultimately meaningless, since she lacked the words to accurately describe the truth even to herself, and with most people even that didn't work. Recently she'd been getting tired of it, which had led her to give the same blunt answer: That she was Lilith of Eshkalon. That was what everyone called her, after all. There was no need to overthink it.

Still, there was a sense in the back of her mind, even if she couldn't put words to it. She knew was not like the other children here, somehow. The adults looked at differently, with a strange expectation and bittersweet longing. And within herself, there a pulse. A sense of something built to. An idea calcifying in the pandemonium.

He was waiting for that. She could sense it. He always had the same look in his grey eyes that her mother had when she cooking a meal, or lining up a shot when she was practicing in the garden. A hunger. An anticipation for the piece to fall into place.

She read the book some more, then looked back up. He was still watching her.

Another few minutes. Again.

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A note from Lurina

This chapter ended up being way more dense in terms of worldbuilding stuff than I intended compared to actual things that happened. The combination of a new setting, a new perspective (functionally, since we've only ever got chapters from a much older Lilith) and a semi-big reveal brought out some of my worst impulses. Still, at least it was pretty meaty.

After a year of pretty much unrivaled occupation of the top spot, the writer of the latest megahit progression fantasy story on RR has taken an interest in topwebfiction and deposed me. Unless I get the kinda outrageous numbers I was getting in the first month or two I started advertising it, I don't have much chance of beating them, and that's probably fine. But please take a moment to vote anyway. https://topwebfiction.com/listings/the-flower-that-bloomed-nowhere/ Thank you.

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