Author: Lurina

029: In Fading Image (𒐄) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Inner Sanctum Tunnels | 10:39 AM | Second Day

"Do you know," Neferuaten asked, as the door slowly swung open to reveal an almost pitch-black chamber, "why meeting places for arcanists always have a brazier, in the center of the room?"

"Oh, I do, actually!" Kamrusepa said, enthusiastic. "It dates back to when scepters just open flames suspended on rods. So as a matter of ritual, everyone attending the meeting would use them to light the brazier at the same time - symbolizing the passage of knowledge from the old to new world." She looked very pleased with herself.

Neferuaten gave her a dry smile. "That is... Indeed correct, miss Tuon, but I must confess I was only asking as a rhetorical device to segue into another point."

"Oh," she said, dejected.

"She, uh, does this sort of thing a lot," I told Kam. "It happened to Theo yesterday."

Neferuaten gave me a mock-distraught look. "This treachery! And from my own pupil, no less!"

"You can still say it, if you like, grandmaster," Kamrusepa said earnestly. "I promise to pretend I don't know the answer, and everything."

She seemed to genuinely consider this for a moment, but then shook her head. "No, there's no sweeping spilled wine back in the glass, I'm afraid." She idly took her scepter off its hook. "I'll just light the damn brazier like an ordinary person, without trying to make some pretentious point about the organization's history."

She flicked it up and spoke a simple incantation, causing the coals within the stone brazier at the center of the chamber to spring to life, filling it with light.

For all the hype, I'd been expecting something grander. It was, so far as I could tell, little more than a mostly-empty medium sized room, with undecorated stone walls and flooring, with the only apparent utility being a handful of widely-spaced shelves, lined with wooden boxes which, in turn, were fairly modest in number. Absent of context, it could almost have been mistaken for a family basement.

I say 'almost', because it did have one notable feature. In the middle, behind the brazier, was another statue like the one outside the building. This one depicted Eshk, the Dying God - or some say Goddess - of the dead. Within the mythology, they were the only member of the pantheon that hadn't been transformed by the end of the world, since death, in contrast to concepts like love and prosperity, has no opposite to which it can be debased.

'Death's inverse, after all, is not life,' I remembered learning in a long-ago theology class in primary school, 'for life's opposite is barren void, where nothing has ever lived at all. Death is merely the moment in which life comes to an end.'

And indeed, the inevitability of ones eventual demise was one of the few things that hadn't changed with the collapse of the old world. So it was fitting both symbolically and literally they appeared as they always had: An androgynous form, crowned and masked in porcelain, wrapped from head to toe in bandages of dark cloth, so long they fell over their body, almost resembling robes. Clutching in each of their hands one of the two possible fates of mankind, the truth of which was unknowable.

In their right hand, a set of scales. Representing divine recognition and judgement.

And in their left, a piece of rotting wood. Representing what at this point in our civilization seemed, to a cynical, utterly irreligious person like myself, to be the overwhelmingly more likely of the two options.

Annihilation.

"I present our most sacred of chambers," Neferuaten said, as she stepped forward. "The throne room of our palace of hubris, and the tomb for our good sense."

"What's it for?" Ran asked, glancing around.

"Initiations, mostly," she said, stopping at the foot of the statue. "Come, see for yourself."

She ushered us forward, closer towards the warmth and light of the flames, though ultimately directed us around the side of them. I realized there was something I'd missed in my initial assessment, between the fire and the foot of the statue - a slab of flat, horizontal stone with a head of false iron, shaped specifically to accommodate a human cranium.

They called these 'induction beds', and they were used to grant someone the ability to use the Power, in the ritual that was varying called the Initiation Ceremony, the Uplifting, Recalling, or sometimes simply Induction. I gave it a furtive look before turning upwards, to what Neferuaten wanted us to see.

At the base of the statue, on a golden plaque that looked newer (though not that much newer) than than rest, were a set of words written in Eme; the primeval language of the Old and New Kingdoms eras, used primarily for incantations in the present day. It read:

LET US BE THE LAST

"I'll tell you a little bit about our structure and recruitment process," she said, coming to a stop and looking at the statue for a moment. "Though there are some specific roles and honors, we essentially have two partial membership ranks, and three for full members. The former two are 'associate', which refers to any donor or indirect sponsor of the order who nevertheless has no formal duties, and 'cohort', meaning anyone who assists us but does not participate in the research itself - such as the individuals who we had escort you here from the Empyrean Bastion."

"The man who went with us mentioned that he wasn't even allowed into the transportation chamber," I mentioned. "It sounded like he didn't consider himself a properly part of the organization at all."

Neferuaten nodded. "There are a lot of rules concerning the cohort rank that were designed to make it as difficult for the oathguard to identify and prosecute those of us who explicitly broke the Biological Continuity Oath, and to confer plausible deniability to those who would merely be accessories to oathbreaking - though the penalty for that is much less severe for begin with." She looked at her scepter for a moment, still in her hand, then reattached it to her waist. "It's all redundant now, but many of the old hands still take it very seriously."

"That fellow seemed very reverent of the order's traditions in his attitude" Kamrusepa said. "...more so than the inner circle members I've met so far, even."

She chuckled. "If it's who I'm thinking of, that wouldn't surprise me."

"He mentioned knowing my grandfather," I said grimly.

"Mm," she nodded a few times. "Yes-- Definitely who I'm thinking of." Her eyes flicked to one of the shelves for a moment, off to the left, before turning back to regard our group. "In any case. As for the membership ranks, newcomers start off as aspirants - formally 'neophytes', but Hamilcar felt the term had too many negative connotations - which are severely limited in their access to our resources, and may only attend a minority of meetings. They are then raised up to the rank of companion-legionary by an inner circle vote, traditionally after 25 years, which conveys full membership."

Not much interest in the uncommitted, then, I thought.

"'Legionary?'" Ran frowned. "That's oddly military."

"'We shall be no less than an army, brothers and sisters-in-arms, arrayed together in defiance of the ultimate enemy of mankind,'" Neferuaten said, obviously quoting something, but not seeming especially excited about it. "'For those craven men and women who claim the once-noble titles of 'healer' and 'physician', yet supplicate themselves to the Covenant and its deathist impulse, I name peacemakers of the worst sort. Quislings, calling themselves noble as they cede, with gentle smiles, the very lives they are sworn to guard in unimaginable measure.'"

I saw Kamrusepa nodding. "Ubar of Kane," she said. "The founder of the order."

"Indeed," Neferuaten replied. "Let it never be said that a context exists in which young men will not try to apply a military metaphor."

Kamrusepa looked torn for a moment. "I think it's... Somewhat appropriate? Rather, we talk about many things in the context of battle - fighting disease, poverty, bigotry-- Why not death?" She clasped her hands together, fiddling her fingers against one another. "I think the most common thing that holds researchers back from the pursuit of immortality is the ingrained idea that death is so... Mundane. People could do worse than getting a little militant about it."

Neferuaten gave her a gentle smile. "Your heart is in the right place, miss Tuon. But if I may speak from personal experience, I would say the most common thing that holds researchers back from the pursuit of immortality is that it is, in actuality, absurdly difficult. And the goal may not even be thermodynamically possible."

"Oh--Oh, yes, of course," Kam said, with a hesitant look. "Forgive me, grandmaster. It wasn't my intent to be conceited. Or callous about the difficulty of the work."

"It's quite alright," Neferuaten said. "You make a fair point, regardless. A shift in framing can do much to change people's perspective on the issue... But at the risk of sounding 'deathist' myself, some of the prominent figures in the order might've served the cause better by tempering their language with a little more professionalism and realism." She sighed. "Anyway. Finally, there are the members of the inner circle - or more formally, the 'Discretionary Council'."

"Pretty big whiplash from the other name," Ran said. "Sounds about as bureaucratic as it gets."

"Oh, I know. It's great," Neferuaten said cheerfully.

"It is rather odd in its own capacity," Kamrusepa remarked. "Is there a story behind it, too?"

"Not much of one," she said. "In its original conception, the order was to be run entirely democratically; the whole membership would be equals, and vote on every single issue. However, it was decided an exception had to be made for matters pertaining to maintaining the secrecy of the organization, which were often emergencies that required swift and harsh choices. So the membership nominated a group of six 'discretionary officers', afforded the powers to do this." She reached idly into the inside of her white robes and withdrew a modest copper amulet, depicting a simplified version of an eye. "This is the badge of office, technically."

"I think I can see where this is going," Ran said. "A group of people gets chosen to have special powers, the kind that, if they were misused, could easily get everyone in the whole organization killed. So obviously, the ones who get appointed are already gonna be the most trusted members, who have been around the longest--"

"And then every time there's a new sort of security scare," I interjected, "or something else that needs quick action, there's this pre-existing group people already trust. And the more that happens, the more it cements them as authority figures. So, pretty soon..."

Neferuaten smiled. "The two of you are certainly in sync. And yes, you have mostly the right of it." She tucked the amulet back inside. "Quite quickly, the power of the council grew to the point that they were the de-facto leaders of the order. So though we are still companion-legionaries in technical terms, functionally, a new tier of membership emerged. It does remain an elected position, however, reaffirmed every 12 years-- We aren't total despots." She gave a wistful snort. "Though, if Anna had anything to say about it..."

Something about this information rubbed against a loose thread on my brain. This wasn't another instance of the strange episodes of deja vu I'd been having, but the much more familiar sense that there was some connection I ought to be drawing, but wasn't quite managing.

12 years... What was it about that number which felt odd?

"Now let's move on to the recruitment process," she went on. "First, a prospective candidate has to be involved in medicine in some capacity, and ideally be an arcanist, though we do accept scholars and physicians who aren't, nowadays. Then, they have to be sponsored by an existing member. Frankly, this often works out a little nepotistic - ideally we encourage sponsorship on the basis of published work, but more often then not, it ends up spreading around little university cliques. We have a lot of friends-of-friends." She glanced to me. "Like Durvasa and Zenos, or myself and your grandfather, Utsushikome."

I nodded quickly, moving the conversation along.

"After that, applicants are subject to a few competency tests, and then an interview before the Discretionary Council," she continued. "Finally, a majority vote is held among the membership at the next conclave. Should it succeed, they are brought down here, usually with one of the inner circle, and asked to swear the oath."

"Ah!" Kamrusepa exclaimed. "'The Vow of the Universal Panacea', you mean?"

Neferuaten nodded, once again amused by her enthusiasm. "The very same."

"You might not know about this, but there's quite a lot of speculation about it from the public," Kam said, clasping her hands together excitedly. "About how exactly it's worded and what it's sworn upon, since so many people the oathguard captured refused to confess to oath breaking, right up until the very end."

I was a little curious about this, too, especially in light of the exchange Neferuaten and I had in the main hall the previous day. Because law in the Mourning Realms had been founded around the Covenant, there were a lot of ingrained traditions and superstitions surrounding the concept of an oath as something inviolable and sacred that didn't exist in the Duumvirate. Many otherwise rational people, even agnostics, felt uncomfortable breaking them or committing antipodal perfidy - swearing contradictory oaths.

(Though, that unease had died off a bit since the revolution, when it had turned out millions of people could break their oaths and get away with it, so long as it was politically expedient.)

Because they had come to hold such an important place in society, oaths had grown increasingly complicated in their construction and phrasing, starting to resemble something closer to legal contracts in their obsessive closing of implicit escape clauses and eradication of internal contradictions. The two concepts had almost merged, at this point.

"Yes, I've heard a little down the grapevine," Neferuaten said. "People thinking we have some ultra-precise wording that doesn't technically break the Covenant, thus making some of the crimes people were charged under unjust."

"Well... Do you?" Kamrusepa asked.

"In a manner of speaking," Neferuaten said. "I don't believe it contradicts, at least."

"Is it in here?" She asked, looking around.

Oh, I get it.

"Mm-hmm," Neferuaten hummed.

Ran's eyes drifted back towards the statue. Evidently, she'd seen where this was going, too.

"Where is it?"

Neferuaten gestured towards the plaque.

Kamrusepa turned, then stared at it for a moment. First with surprise, then with confusion, as if she'd been expecting to suddenly see something she hadn't before - lines this were some pulp adventure novel, and the lines in the stonework would line up to form a hidden message now that she was looking for it in the right light.

When it became clear this was not going to happen, she turned back to face the older woman.

"What," she said, almost incredulous. "Is that it?"

"'Let us be the last'," Neferuaten echoed, with a faux-reverent air.

"But that's not an oath," Kam protested. "It doesn't even ask you to swear on anything."

"Not as such, no," Neferuaten said. "Usually we... Or rather they, since honestly, I rarely do this myself... Let new members swear on whatever they like. Or on nothing at all, if they prefer."

"But--" She hesitated. "But then, why would so many people act like they weren't breaking the Covenant?"

"Maybe they truly believed their interpretation of the Biological Continuity Oath was more accurate than that of the Old Yru Convention, or the government councils before it?" She shrugged, putting both palms in the air as she leaned back a little against the statue's pedestal. "Honestly, I'd imagine the stories have been overhyped a bit. People's enthusiasm tends to get away from them, when it comes to things like these."

"But, that's..." Kam furrowed her brow, a little dejected. "Why would you even swear an oath at all, then? Why bother?"

Neferuaten chuckled. "I think you might be under something of a false impression of the attitude our membership tends to have towards all these, miss Tuon," she said. "Before the revolution, everyone here knew we were criminals by almost any sense of the word. That we were breaking our vows by becoming part of this. The order has always emphasized that to new recruits, and I, incidentally, was no exception. I heard the speech when I joined as a neophyte, nigh-on 300 years ago." She looked upward wistfully. "I still remember what it felt like, the day when I realized I was choosing to live the rest of my life partly in the shadows... Or so I thought at the time. It's a harrowing feeling."

That's right, I thought. When we saw the version of the Covenant yesterday, she said it was done in hopes that its presence would make the authorities look favorably on them. Not that any of them really believed in it.

There was something valiant in that attitude, even if I wasn't romantic enough to believe in it completely.

"For that reason, this oath here--" She tapped on the plaque. "--isn't meant to bind people to the order over the Covenant, or justify some legal or ethical escape. By being here at all, it's implicitly expected that an applicant will have decided that they view this as more important than loyalty to some words." She glanced down at it. "Instead, it's just a sentiment that the founder wanted scholars to genuinely believe, if they were to join our cause. To hold themselves to our better nature."

"What does it mean, though?" I asked. "The last of what?"

Neferuaten looked towards Ran. "Miss Hoa-Trinh, you read a lot of novels, I understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," Ran said, a little flatly. "That came up earlier, when we were talking about the mural."

"Right, of course. Stupid question." Neferuaten shook her head. "What do you think are the most well-known types of story about immortality?"

She frowned. I didn't get the sense that Ran would particularly care for being recruited into a rhetorical device like this. "I don't know. Vampire stories, stories about people wishing for it and then it going wrong somehow. Stuff where it's the motive of the villain." Her expression implicitly said: this is what you want from me, right?

It didn't feel like Ran was ending up liking Neferuaten much, which made me a little sad. Even if it made sense. They were very, very different people.

"A fine enough answer," the older woman said, with a nod. "A bunch of grisly tales, as I'd expect." She was quiet for a moment, looking over the shelves again, as if there was something she was expecting to see in this room that was somehow eluding her. "The desire for immortality is a close to uniquely human one, and the smaller a form of life is, the more distant they are from it. A microorganism will instantly give up its existence if it serves the collective of which it is a part, but even many higher mammals will not show close to the distress we do when death is impending." She looked downward. "We are able to fear death only because of our ability to know ourselves. Because we can comprehend the fact that, from our point of view, the universe itself will cease to exist upon our demise, leaving nothing. And because our powerful memory affords us the ability to recall youth and vitality, long beyond the passing of both."

"But," she went on, "we are still animals, and social ones at that, dedicated by nature to the preservation and propagation of our species. And we have evolved to sense betrayal of the community in favor of self-servitude." Her expression grew slowly more serious. "This gives man a contradictory nature. Most human beings desire not to die, but when they see an urge to subvert death in others, they intuitively smell the seeds of that betrayal - of someone who considers themselves above the collective, and who would harm it for their own preservation." She placed her hands in her lap, her gaze firm. "And those feelings are not unwarranted. On many occasions throughout history, individuals with great personal power have sought to use it not for the common good, but for attempts at prolonging their own lives. From the ancient lords of the Old Kingdoms, who buried themselves with their living slaves in bizarre rituals to attain eternal life, to the Iron Princes of the Imperial Era, who sought to transform themselves into machines as the world crumbled around them-- With knowledge or without it, the essence remains the same."

When the grandmaster got like this, her voice, in contrast to her usual animated tone, grew very level, almost emotionless.

The fire in the center of the room flickered, for a moment, the lights dancing around the ceiling as she spoke, and casting the side of her face in stark orange.

"With that in mind, it's no surprise that we have so many stories of vampires and liches, of excessive greed and vanity gone terribly wrong." She exhaled softly. "Selfishness. That is what the fear of death brings out, more often than not."

Kamrusepa was looking different, too. Considerably less happy and enthusiastic than the earlier parts of the tour.

"To be honest with you four," Neferuaten continued, a little more casually again, "I don't have the greatest of respect for Ubar of Kane. Much of the organization of the order betrays a staggering lack of foresight on his behalf, and his rhetoric left it without much public sympathy for generations. But I do agree with his decision of how to frame our goals. To make our pledge one of selflessness, right at the root." She leaned forward, pushing her black hair behind her ears. "To hope not for oneself, but for ones children. That they might inherit a gentler world."

Ah, so that's it, then...

Let us be the last.

The last to die.

She finally broke into her usual smile again. "Of course, it's more of an aspiration than an absolute rule," she said, climbing back to her feet. "Practically speaking, we've had more than our fair share of egomaniac arcanists who act as though they've stepped right out of the Mourning Period." She snorted. "Such is the way of things, I suppose."

Kamrusepa shifted a bit where she stood, her eyes wandering around the room, her face a bit flushed.

Neferuaten turned towards her. "You look as though you have something on your mind about all this, miss Tuon."

"Oh. Um, well..." She cleared her throat. "I don't know-- I don't wish to speak untowardly, grandmaster."

"Come, you needn't be like that," Neferuaten said. "I'm not going to think ill of you if you don't quite agree, especially not at your age. Speak your mind."

The girl scratched the back of her neck, her long hair flopping over the side of her arm. "Well, it's just... I suppose I didn't expect to see a sentiment like that here. That whole planting-trees-you-will-never-see-grown trope people like to throw around."

Neferuaten raised her eyebrows. "You don't agree with it?"

Kam furrowed her brow for a moment, but then shook her head. "Well... No, I don't. I don't think there's anything wrong with being a little selfish in ones motives-- Countless great things have been accomplished by the strength of it as a motivating power, of wanting to see the tree grown yourself, and I think that's perfectly wholesome." She broke eye contact for a moment; it was obvious that, even with Neferuaten's reassurances, she felt uneasy about speaking against someone she so clearly admired. "In fact, think of what we could accomplish if that were universally true! If people had a reason to care about the future, because they knew they'd see it."

This was the same argument she'd made after her presentation, albeit shifted a little. 'If you ask me, all politics, all this maneuvering of power we've been doing since the dawn of time, is treating the symptom. Trying to merely offset the human condition in lieu of solving it.'

But while back then she'd been arguing that people acted maliciously and stupidly because of their fear of death, here she seemed to be saying it's inevitability was holding them back.

I caught a glimpse of her eyes. They were filling up with the strange passion she always showed during these conversations. Not the crackling anger she'd displayed at dinner, but something else. A hunger. A longing.

"Selfishness as a driver of human will certainly isn't to be underestimated, it's true," Neferuaten said. "But so long as scarcity exists, I think it will always be a dangerous impulse - one that will drive people to actions that hurt others."

"I don't even think it's fair to truly even call it selfish, though," Kamrusepa said. Her tone was more uneasy than usual, but still had that underlying quality of stubborn defiance I'd come to associate with her. "It's only because people dying that way that it's even conceptualized that way. In the old days, we called stealing bread selfish, but now we rightly recognize that a scenario where the only way people can eat is by breaking the law is-- Well, insane."

Neferuaten considered this for a few moments. "It's not as if I disagree with you on principle," she said, looking down at her crossed arms. "But we do not live in an ideal world, miss Tuon. In the past, the wealthy and the capable would hoard food out of fear of starvation, condemning others to starve in turn. Perhaps it would not be fair to levy accusations of self-centeredness at them from our comfortable present, knowing that the world around them was harsh in a way we could never understand... But one could hardly characterize them as the heroes of their age, all the same."

"That's hardly comparable," Kam protested. "You can act out of your own interests without hurting others. Focus on figuring out how to grow more food for yourself, then pass that knowledge down."

"But if the result in the meanwhile is that you end up having stockpiles of food, while they have none?" Neferuaten clicked her tongue. "Actually, never mind that. We're speaking too broadly, and losing sight of the core point." Her eyes focused on her. "Does it really bother you so much, the idea of working towards something you might not live to enjoy? It's not like it's an imperative to act without regard for yourself at all. Just one where it's not the limit of ones perspective."

Kam hesitated. "It does bother me," she eventually said. "To be frank, the absence of those kind of sentiments is part of what drew me to the Great Work in the first place. People shouldn't have to regard these things as a zero-sum game, for people to be seen as... As evil, if they're not willing to ritually self-sacrifice for the benefit of their replacements." She said the word with a harsh, deliberate intonation, as if it were vulgar. "I care about other people in the here and now. But I can't care about anything in a future where I don't exist. I don't even want to think about it."

Neferuaten nodded. "You're not comfortable giving up everything for a greater good, even in abstract," she said. "You don't feel the world has earned that from you."

"I--" She stopped, then frowned for a moment, her face getting a little flushed. "I don't know if I'd use a word like 'earned'. That makes me sound like the only reason I feel this way is because of some chip on my shoulder." She closed her eyes for a moment, then reopened them, resolve in her gaze. "I don't think anyone should be forced to put something before their own life."

Resolved or not, she'd sounded oddly self-conscious for a moment, there. Had the grandmaster hit upon something?

"That's the core of it, then? Before anything else, you want to keep living."

"Well... Yes," Kamrusepa replied, her words stiff. "I don't feel like that's something to be ashamed of."

Neferuaten looked at her for a few long moments, her gaze more thoughtful than judgemental. In the silence, I could hear the distant sound of water being pumped. We must've been close to the Sanctuary's sewage system. In the light of the fire, I could see the thickness of the dust in the air.

Eventually, she shook her head and broke into a crooked smile. "You have more of that uniquely human awareness I talked about than most, miss Tuon. If you'll forgive me saying so, it's a little sad, to see from someone such life still ahead of them." She sighed. "But I'm hardly going to judge you."

"Do... You think I wouldn't be a good fit for the order, because of this?" Kam asked, anxiously.

Neferuaten laughed. "I wouldn't worry too much about that. As I said, we have plenty of members who violate the sentiment far more than I'm sure you ever would in practice, and are much less honest about it to boot." She smiled more widely, but there was a bittersweetness in it. "But in all honestly, now that the Biological Continuity Oath has been reinterpreted, they'll probably be leagues of organizations like ours soon enough. Why not find people who you know share your beliefs unambiguously? It does make life a little easier."

Kamrusepa looked towards the ground. "No upstart conclave could compare to the order, grandmaster."

Neferuaten stepped closer to her, with some sympathy in her eyes. "Gods above. This all really does mean a lot to you, doesn't it?" She gave her an affectionate clap on the shoulder. "Come on, cheer up. Don't let my indulgent philosophizing get to you."

She didn't say anything, but nodded, after a moment.

"What about the rest of you?" Neferuaten asked, stepping back. "What did you think?"

"Oh, uh..." I scratched the side of my head. "I think it's sensible, I guess. If you had a situation where there was promising research into something that could maybe give a tiny extension in lifespan to the very elderly today, versus a treatment that could give a massive increase to lifelong health span if administered to people who were still young... Well, obviously the more humanitarian thing would be to pick the second. So I could see it redirecting people away from bad impulses, if only passively."

That's not really why you like it, though. No, that's because of your creepy martyr complex.

Neferuaten nodded. "A straightforward and sensible answer, as I'd expect from you, Utsushikome." She looked to my side. "And you, miss Hoa-Trinh?"

"It'll probably good publicity, now that the order isn't hiding from polite society," Ran said. "You're right about the stuff from earlier, ma'am. There was a whole rumor about your group killing a baby to drain their life force."

Neferuaten looked offended. "Gosh, only one baby?" She tapped a finger against her arm. "I'll have to call a meeting after all this is over. We must step up our game." She turned to regard the only person who hadn't spoken.

Theodoros didn't even seem to realize he was being spoken to a moment, staring into the middle distance. Eventually, he blinked a few times.

"O-Oh," he said. "Sorry. I don't really know..."

Neferuaten raised an eyebrow. "Are you quite alright, master Melanthos?"

"Uhh--Yes, I..." He stopped, then frowned, shifting his arms uneasily. "Actually, is it alright if I step outside for a second? I need to check something on my logic engine."

"Of course," Neferuaten said, with a nod. "Let me know if there's something you need help with."

He looked at her hesitantly - then me, briefly - before turning to leave. I watched him with an uneasy look.

"That was odd," Ran said. Kam nodded along with her.

"Mm," Neferuaten said, with a nod. "I'm not sure it's my business, but one of you might want to take him aside later, if you can find the time." She clicked her tongue. "Pity, though. I was about to finally get to the point."

"The point?" I asked.

She nodded. "We have a second tradition which is also connected to this room, and to the one I already discussed, if only in spirit." She set off away from the statue, towards the shelves, and began to pace along the length of the chamber. "Whenever someone joins the order, they are asked to show their commitment by surrendering something of value to them."

"What," Ran said, skeptical. "Like collateral?"

"Symbolically surrendering," Neferuaten corrected herself. "And not a physical object, but something that consumes their passions. Like a hobby, an interest, a favorite thing... Or sometimes something more abstract. Like a fixation on a place or memory. Sometimes, people even give up relationships..."

"What's it for?" I asked. "Rather-- Why is it done?"

"I'm not sure, to tell the truth," she said, stopping to look closely at one of the boxes. "It's not in our charter. It's just one of those things that someone did, and everyone started copying... Until not doing so became a faux pas." She ran a finger along its wooden surface, the dust clinging to the tip around her nail. "If I had to take a stab in the dark, I'd say it's to do with grief."

I started speaking. "You mean, uh... If they're not doing it out of fear of death, people are drawn to a cause like this because of loss. Of people they loved having died. But even if death is defeated, those people can never come back, which means the impulse is in some way misplaced... And people might eventually become aware of that, and despair." I nodded to myself. "So instead, something else is taken to serve as a proxy for that pain. Something that could conceivably be returned if the task was actually accomplished."

Neferuaten turned to me suddenly, her expression one of bafflement. "That was very eloquently put, Utsushikome, and almost exactly what I was going to say." She furrowed her brow. "Has someone explained all of this to you before?"

I blinked. "Uh, no, I don't think so. It just... Felt obvious, somehow."

Where the hell had that come from? It'd felt completely natural in the moment, but when I tried to retrace my steps mentally, it led to dead ends.

Neferuaten hummed in mild concern, then went back to what she was doing. "Utsushikome's inexplicable development of precognitive abilities aside, that is more or less the popular theory. Aside from a simple show of being willing to commit personal resources, it's so people can feel loss associated with the order, and its central task. And to link that to other things they have lost."

"That seems rather peculiar to me," Kamrusepa said. "If I associated a job with losing something I loved, I rather think I'd be more inclined to go off it completely."

Neferuaten chuckled to herself. "Ah, you should count yourself lucky, miss Tuon, because that was spoken like someone who has either not yet experienced much loss, or is much better at managing it healthily with it than I am." She moved to the next shelf. "Grief is addictive! Worse than most drugs I've tried, and believe you me, I've tried quite a lot. Like an abusive partner, it beats you savagely night after night, only for you to start missing it and come crawling back. Doing the old dances, over and over again. It is at once the death of the soul, and its solitary salvation."

Kamrusepa frowned, and looked for a moment as if she might say something more... But then doubt seemed to overtake her.

"Now, in each of these boxes," Neferuaten digressed, "is a symbol - or in some cases, something more than that - of the thing that each member has chosen to surrender. Entombed here, until the Great Work is finished."

"What exactly do you mean by a 'symbol'?" Ran asked, looking around the room herself, now.

"Anything, really," she interjected. "So long as it represents what they've given up. Perhaps the better term would be a memento mori." She smiled, coming to a stop at the other side of the statue. "I don't expect you to understand it quite yet, but the main reason I brought you down here was so that you might acquire a better sense of what the order is, as an organization, before everything that is to happen later today. What we value, what we choose to give up. And how many of us hold those ideals in good faith."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because you are the first people in a very long time who are being permitted to pass judgement on us," she replied, with sincerity. "And unlike some of my colleagues, it is my desire that that judgement be made from a place of full understanding, rather than a carefully limited one. Now," she gestured towards a shelf. "If you'd be willing to indulge me for a few minutes, I'd like you to take a look inside some of them."

I blinked. "That's... Allowed?"

"It is," she said. "With one exception, though you needn't worry about that. Otherwise, there would be no way to tell the practice was being undertaken in good faith."

"Putting it like that makes it sound like it's enforced," Kamrusepa said.

"Mhmm. Quite seriously, in fact," Neferuaten said. "People have been expelled for violating the taboo. It's seen as an act of considerable disrespect, both towards the rest of the membership, and towards the cause itself."

"Gods," she said, eyebrows raised. "That's... Rather harsh, for something unrelated to the actual work at all." She again sounded a little dejected.

I couldn't wait to see what objectionable lectures she'd convert this all into, once she'd had some time to stew in it.

"If someone cannot be trusted to hold one thing as sacred, then they cannot be trusted to hold anything sacred at all," Neferuaten said, before turning away from us. "But I've already said too much. Go ahead and take a look. Then we'll head back to the surface."

I nodded, while Kam gave an uncertain look, holding the gaze on the grandmaster for a few moments before moving on. Ran didn't look particularly enthusiastic about the task, but was the first to move towards a box.

I followed her lead, though headed for a different shelf instead. There were about 20 on each, and a total of eight shelves, which put the order's rough headcount at something in the range of 160 - assuming this place was only for extant members. I moved over to one, and, wiping dust away from the oak surface, lifted the lid.

On the inside of it was a name I didn't recognize: Abraham of Rett-Zar, and...

What looked like, oddly enough, a small porcelain doll, so old that it made me nervous to touch. The paint was worn away, and its red dress was so drained of color that it was left as little more than a pale pink, and the paint on the flesh had begun to fleck away, with whole areas missing outright.

Somehow, there was a quality to it that seemed profoundly creepy, and not just in the way that all old dolls were. It was hard to put into words, but there was an aura of immense morbidity I felt looking at it, like I was staring into the crib of a deceased child. Beneath the musty odor of the aging material, I count just about smell a hint of something like disinfectant.

I frowned. Was there a way to tell what this was meant to represent? I turned it over--

I startled at the words, jumping so much that I bumped against the wood, scattering dust around the area and prompting a funny look from Kamrusepa, who was a few shelves away. Ran was standing next to me, a careful expression on her face.

"Gods above, Ran," I said. "Don't do that!"

She glanced at the doll for a moment. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't think you'd be so taken in by that thing."

"I-- I'm not taken in by it," I protested. "I was just... Thinking about something."

"Right," she said, and lowered her voice. "Listen. Don't you think this might be a good time?"

I blinked. "What do you mean?"

"We're all split off from one another," she said, before nudging her head in Neferuaten's general direction. "And she's off on her own."

Oh, I thought. That sort of good time.

"O-Oh," I said, suddenly hesitant. "I don't know... She told us we don't have a lot of time..."

"Su," Ran repeated, her tone patient, but firm. "You remember what said, right? Last night, before dinner?"

"Yeah, but... But I..."

My words died in my throat. The moment dragged on, the silence heavy.

"...are you scared?" Ran eventually asked.

I scratched the side of my head. "Y-Yeah."

"I understand," she said, looking downwards. "But do you really want to give up? After all this time?"

I shook my head, breaking eye contact. "That's not the kind of scared I mean."

That she'll shut it down, I thought to myself. Or that we'll find out it was too late. That all of this will have been for nothing.

"I don't know if I'm ready to face it," I said. "The moment of truth."

"Yeah, well," she said, a little agitation slipping into her tone. "It's not going to get any better. And even if she tells us we can speak to him, they'll still be at least one or two more of those yet." She put a hand on the side of my arm. "So suck it up. You can do this."

"Y-Yeah." I looked downward, trembling a bit. "I'm sorry. I'm being stupid..."

She shook her head. "No, it's okay. I get it." She levelled her gaze. "But still. You have to get it done. Put us out of our fucking misery, alright?"

I nodded, silent and stiff.

She nodded in turn. "Right." She took a step back. "Well, good luck. Try to be tactful about it, okay? Don't lose your nerve."

I muttered some word of assent, and she stepped away, moving to one of the other shelves.

I set the doll back in the box, then stood there for about another minute, just staring at the wall. Listening to my breathing. Then, I slowly turned to Neferuaten, who was now standing by another shelf herself, at the back of the room.

I closed my eyes.