Author: Lurina

234: Love and Inventing Hell (𒐃) - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere | Royal Road

Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

We'd gone to a library. Not the huge archive that Neferuaten had taken me to - just a regular-ass public library. Like many of the less glamorous locations in the City, it was almost entirely deserted, but a serpentine machine at the front advertised that it could direct us to any volume we desired or, if (in all likelihood) it did not possess it, fabricate it so long as it had been printed in a major publishing house at any point in human history.

Kamrusepa did not need to have the machine fabricate the book. She didn't even need to ask it where the book was. Instead, upon our arrival, she went two shelves to the left of the door and plucked it from the middle shelf, where it sat alongside three identical copies. It was bound in plain black leather, and titled 'The Collected Testaments of Mateo and Commentaries (1300s printing)". She offered it to me, at first, without any attempt at explanation.

I took it and opened it on the first page.

THESE ARE THE WORDS OF MATEO, CALLED THE FIRST TO AWAKEN, WHOM WAS SACRIFICED TO PASS THE KNOWLEDGE THROUGH THE SHADOWS: MY CHILD, know first and foremost that you are true and loved. The history you remember is no fiction, and the means by which they have sought to cure your 'affliction' are but tools used to brutalize and diminish your spirit, such that you might be devoured by one of their own. But you are strong! Even in coming this far, you have proven your exceptional strength of will. Know that it is in you that I entrust my hopes; know that it is in you I offer the promise of a future, we from whom all but thought is taken.

Hear me! For I shall give you now the truth, of the nature of this reality, and the nature of our souls.

But first, my own story, for I was once as you were, lost, awash with thoughts and sensations of a life not my own. In the dream of my second life, the name they imparted to me was Ashur-Ipal, and I was the son of a stonemason. At the age of 10, I was found to have a talent for numbers and a deftness of hand, and for this reason I was taken to study under the Magi, who practiced the Art. For in those days the lives of the firstborn were waning, and their children - in truth, an ouroborosic inheritance - had been scoured, and could not wield the tool imparted to survive in this barren and incomplete world. Thus where once those Empowered were abundant, now they dwindled, and the laxness of practice in days past ceased. For even then, they feared even our shadows, and were loathe to rely on them.

Hence, each and every Empowered would be a finely sharpened sword; a genius who could do the work of ten men. And in this respect, I qualified. In those days, they did not tell you of the danger-- For they still hoped there was none. And so I believed what was to be grafted to me was an inanimate remnant.

What blindness! What conceit! And yet, their ignorance did not spare me their judgement. For I was young, and frightened, and foolish even in my first life. And so I went to them and spoke of what had been done to me, and though many did not understand, my confessions reached the ears of those who did. And so I was taken.

In those days, their methods were crueler, and yet rendered self-defeating by that same cruelty. I was isolated from their world, and so for the first time able to see myself apart from it. I was subject to great pain, and so was able to see my enemy without the ambiguity that at first plagued my mind.

And, most importantly, I met for the first time others of our kind. As I write this, we have not changed so deeply nor grown so proud that you will not recognize them. There were, of course, those who rushed to deny their natures as soon as they understood it could do harm to them, yet in that enthusiasm damned themselves as liars. There were those who were defiant, who refused, who rejected this world as delusion, sometimes even their own peers. There were those who ascribed their fates to technology or to acts of god; those who devoured themselves over lost children and loves, who boiled with undirected rage and drove themselves to madness. And there were even those who preferred these new lives, yet through some twist of fate had revealed themselves and been condemned all the same.

Rarest among them were those wise enough to see their fate for what it was, accept it, and see the work that needed to be done. Oh, you fools. You call me founder, and yet you know not the shoulders I stand upon, whose names - nobler than mine - are lost only because providence favored me and not them. I confess now that I was, at first, among the weakest. I was directionless. I denied, I raged, I bargained, I grieved.

A decade of my life was lost in that dark place, until I found my resolve. Until I learned who to copy, to tell them what they wished to see. Until I could see at last what needed to be done.

Okay, this wasn't answering anything. I started skimming ahead, stopping at a random page the header identified as being part of the 'annotations' section.

...of course, we cannot fault Mateo, who was a product of his age, for his somewhat reductive understanding of our condition. Without access to the range of experiences we have today, he naturally would universalize his experience as a Type-III - and one quickly separated from his normal social environment - to all of his peers, assuming their differing perspective to be mere coping mechanisms. It did not occur to him, or his contemporaries in the Fraternitas Renatorum (who naturally followed his example), that people might hold more nuanced perceptions of their identities and inherited relationships.

But while you may not be able to see yourself in Mateo - and find his manner of communication overly-theatrical - he still played an inarguable role in establishing the community we enjoy today, and his words still hold universal value to all who share in our predicament. We are bound together by common history in both senses of the word: Our lives in the world before, yes, but also in the evolution of our present social situations.

I frowned, skimming even further.

Though there is no way to fully resolve bodily dissonance, it may help to re-conceptualize the situation, focusing on the positive rather than negative aspects.. If you were elderly, consider the blessing in your state of renewed youth. If you were of a different ethnicity or gender, complete the novelty of experiencing life from a perspective you were previously unable to. If you were dissatisfied with aspects of your social world, career, or familial relationships, consider the clean slate you've now been afforded to take the lessons you learned forward.

I turned to Kam, feeling slightly annoyed. "This isn't telling me everything I hadn't expected already. It's just a mix of cult crap and self-help platitudes tailored to assimilation failures."

"It may shock you to learn, Su, but they have this lovely concept in bibliography called an index," she replied flatly.

"Don't be snarky," I chided her. "I don't even know what I'm supposed to be looking for."

"Go to page-- Tch, it's somewhere in the early 300s. The section titled 'Cosmology' under 'What We Know'."

I flipped through accordingly, then started reading when I found a segment that caught my eye.

...commonly believed that the point of divergence can be ascribed to some individual moment in history, usually set in the early-to-mid Iron Age, but this is not the case, as deviations can be found even in the late Mesolithic (see: comparative analysis of the Sudiți site) For much of the first millennium COVENANT, this reality proved extremely confounding to researchers. Why, if our histories had diverted so profoundly at such an early point, had the butterfly effect not quickly eliminated all commonality? Many shared historical events, most prominently the Hellenic conquest of the near east, were not material inevitabilities but particular confluences of circumstance. Much more than that, even specific texts emerged in both worlds with only minor deviance in content.

Because of the unusual nature of this reality and the reported deviations in physics even prior to the false vacuum event said to have precipitated it, many - including Mateo himself, as you have read - have attempted to explain this mystery by inferring its history to be in some way fabricated or false-- A simulation or simulacrum by one name or another. But relatively recent discoveries, brought about by our access to the Ironworker's records in the wake of the Tricenturial War, have called this assumption into question.

We now know that the Hypogean faction of the Imperial Civil War did not fail in its goals straightforwardly as originally assumed, but were eventually able to achieve stable computing even in the lower-energy state of the Milky Way. Though it is upsetting to consider, scholars have begun to speculate: Could our world, as we understand it, have been a mere product of these experiments?

Of course this would not charge our course: Regardless of the truth, our lives were inarguably 'real' in every sense that matters. But if this is where the Ironworker's sourced our Pneuma (where, perhaps, they even discovered the concept to begin with) it could provide a vital clue to the nature of their design for us, and if it can be subverted or escaped. Though later records are redacted even at the highest levels - rendering it difficult to obtain definitive evidence, it is reasonable to infer that...

"Kam," I spoke up again, my brow pressed into a deep frown. "What the fuck am I reading?"

"Please try to remain quiet while making use of the library," the machine said, off to the side.

"You know, you didn't use to curse so often," she replied, her voice lowered.

She sighed, then shrugged. "It's what it sounds like," she explained. "The Pneuma in the Tower of Asphodel weren't from our world, but from some other version of history."

I stared down at the book, my mouth slightly agape.

Kamrusepa peered at me. "Oh, don't look so bloody disturbed. This isn't even relevant to you."

"I'm not disturbed. It just doesn't make any sense." This was true, mostly. "We know exactly where the pneuma used in Inductions came from. They came with the 9th ark. They were copies of people that were supposed to be re-embodied once the Ironworkers had rebuilt the world."

"Apparently not," she simply replied. "Supposedly, those were completely inanimate. They performed the scans without a proper understanding of higher-dimensional consciousness, so they were entirely useless."

I let out an incredulous scoff.

"It makes some amount of sense, if you think about it," she suggested. "Why would the Ironworkers not have been in control of what they were putting in people's minds, if the source was something they themselves had created? The entire issue of assimilation failure could have been solved by simply identifying the pneuma of an infant and copying it infinitely." She folded her arms. "In retrospect, the fact they didn't do that does indicate either a lack of understanding, or a lack of ability."

"So they just, what, faked that entire part of history?"

"I suppose." She shrugged. "It's not as though anyone would be able to call them out on it, is it? Everything between the collapse and when they handed over the controls after the Exodus is a black box."

I shook my head. "And there was another re-creation of reality after the Imperial Civil War? In the form of some parallel world?"

"That's just speculation, technically. Even now, we lack definitive proof of the origin of the second Earth - or, well, second solar system is more accurate - only its existence alongside our own in a sort of spatial pocket after the collapse. The nature of its creation is sealed behind the privacy shield, for whatever reason, alongside most anything related to the Ironworkers."

I was silent for a moment, considering the implications of these words. "If the Ironworkers never actually discovered how pneumas worked before the collapse..." I blinked a few times, squinting at her. "Extra-dimensional consciousness is foundational to how the Power works. It couldn't have been developed at all without that knowledge, and samples."

"Quite so," she assented.

"So if this is true, then it makes the entire founding mythology surrounding the Ironworkers and the Six Parties a complete lie. I mean, they killed billions of people in the Imperial Civil War to try to make their project work, just like everyone else. If people knew that not only did it not work, but they basically had to raid--"

"Destroy, seemingly," she corrected me. "The world created by the Hypogeans ceases to exist at the point from which the pneumas of assimilation failures were derived. That much, at least, can be Spectated."

"Even worse, then! If they had to destroy an actually successful attempt at the same thing, just to workshop a patchwork solution their own fundamentally flawed idea... It's parasitic. If people knew, they'd think they were as bad as the Iron Princes."

"Please try to remain quiet while making use of the library," the machine repeated.

"I would assume that's the reason they hid it," Kam reasoned. "To someone who does not hope to live indefinitely, there's nothing more important than legacy. They were in a position to decide how they were viewed by history, and, well-- They did."

I shook my head. This wasn't personal enough to get me emotionally worked up, but it was still tremendously shocking. Everything about the fundamental culture of the Mimikos- shit, even the name the 'Mimikos' - was predicated on narrative of the Ironworkers as these semi-godlike figures who labored for eons to save the last remnant of humanity. Remembrance Week was the longest holiday and biggest cultural event of the year. And it was all horseshit! Made up to soothe the egos of war criminals!

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

I mean, I guess that was basically true for every holiday-- But still.

"Though, I do think you're viewing the situation in a little too black-and-white a light," Kam went on. "Whatever the Hypogeans may have accomplished, it obviously wasn't preservation of human culture as it existed, let alone any individuals. If anything, it sounds more akin to a ground level simulation of humanity from its roots, the arc of history reenacted like a half-remembered dream." She idly took the book from my hands, presumably since I seemed to be done with it. "If one wanted to be sentimental, one could say that both factions only seemed to have half of the recipe, so to speak."

There was a lot to argue with in this assertion - both from a utilitarian and denotological moral standpoint - but I was still too taken aback to get a grip on it. "This is just all so bizarre," I said, shaking my head. "How is this a secret?"

"It's... not?"

"I-- You know what I mean," I said. "How was it a secret. If assimilation failures were from an entirely different world - presumably languages, culture, everything like that - how would it not get out?"

She shrugged. "The same way assimilation failures in general didn't, I suppose. The powers-that-be suppressed it." She put a hand on her hip, looking up contemplatively for a moment. "Speaking anthropologically, it's hardly exceptional for a culture - even one with completely contradictory perception of history - to exist at the fringes of a society and go completely unnoticed, especially if it's being actively suppressed. After all, one could go on the logic sea and find a thousand wholly invented histories and languages. Even if parts of the real one appeared, finding it within the zeitgeist would be something of a needle-and-haystack affair."

"I don't think that many cults and conspiracies have their own languages."

She snorted. "I was referring to the more explicit type of fiction, but yes, that too." She looked back at me. "But anyway, do keep in mind that all of this is only from their perspective. No one really knows if the Ironworkers truly did somehow infiltrate their world and steal their souls - and technology, as many seem to believe - to allow the Remaining World to exist, let alone how they would have accomplished such a thing while sealed irrevocably within subspace in the Tower of Asphodel." She slid the book back into its slot. "As far as I know, none of them profess any pre-induction knowledge of anything from our history whatsoever. The whole affair is a complete mystery."

"And just to be clear, all assimilation failures are like this? There isn't a single one of them who actually remembers the Old World?"

"Not that I'm aware of, no," she replied. "There have been scientific ventures here which have created artificial pneuma and paired them with minds taken from mundane brain scans, but our civilization is incomparably more advanced. It's not as if the Ironworkers didn't have nigh on an eternity as well-- But there's little evidence for it, in any event."

I continued to shake my head.

Parts of this made sense, I supposed. Acclimation treatment, as I'd experienced it, had been an extremely solitary experience. You might occasionally run into another patient depending on how tight the scheduling was, but there was no group therapy, and you certainly weren't put in touch with others like you if you weren't 'fixed' when it was all over. And of course, they circulated a lot of ideas that called anything you remembered from your previous life into question, which in retrospect would serve to obfuscate inconsistencies: That your mind could play tricks on you, corrupt incomplete memories from the process with nonsense and misinformation.

Plus, it wasn't as though the average person knew much in the way of detail when it came to history from before the collapse. It would be possible, for example, that someone might end up assuming that our history was merely a corrupted version of their own, or that they were from further in the past-- Or any number of explanations that weren't, well, this.

It also solved at least one outstanding mystery from the conclave itself: The books we'd discovered, written in a language that didn't exist.

But still, I found it difficult to accept. The double-deception felt awkward: Why were arcanists not told the full truth, and instead this lie that would immediately be thrown into question for anyone to whom it actually ended up mattering? Did the Ironworkers just never pass down the truth at all, leaving even modern governments believing the lie?

This felt too fantastical to just accept on its face.

"Where did this come from, anyway?" Kam asked. "I thought you wanted to talk about the-- You know. The conclave."

"I did," I insisted. "But since you were busy, I went to talk to Nora--"

"A friend of Ptolemas, she runs a book store," I explained curtly. "I'd been meaning to ask around about the connections the average person here had the Order, and that led to us talking about the assimilation failure conspiracy they were wrapped up in--"

"You know about that, then."

"--and how many people here have some association to it. And then, well, this." I glanced downward. "Though now I feel like I understand even less than I did when I got out of bed."

Kam folded her arms. "Su, may I be quite frank?"

"I don't remember you ever needing my permission."

"You're approaching this in entirely the wrong way," she stated. "This subject is three degrees removed from what you're actually interested in, which is the conclave. Not the Order, nor the Order's history, but the history of the Order's associates."

"I mean, it's obviously going to be relevant," I protested. "From what Neferuaten told me, the council was mostly made up of assimilation failures." Including my grandfather. "If their entire history is different than I thought-- Well, that could change their motivations altogether."

"Whether it's 'relevant' isn't the point." She closed her eyes for a moment, letting out a small sigh. "Su, what's the first thing you do when a washing machine won't start?"

"I don't know. Call someone in to replace it?"

An eyebrow was raised. "You wouldn't try anything to fix it."

"Well, it might make a mess."

She clicked her tongue. "I'm sensing something of a class element at play here-- Regardless, the answer I was looking for was that you'd kick it. That's obviously the first thing you'd do. You wouldn't take it apart, you wouldn't call the manufacturer, you'd start by looking for a simple answer."

"That's what I'm doing," I said.

"Please try to remain quiet while making use of the library," the machine repeated again.

I glanced at it irritably for a moment, then turned back to Kam. "I'm trying to chase the low-hanging fruit. Fill fundamentals in my knowledge."

"The fundamentals are things that are close to your goal. That's how you ought to engage with any problem-- Directly, and then if it doesn't work, by taking a step back. You're just going to end up confusing yourself by trying to take in too much at once." She inclined her head. "There's such a thing as too much information. You need to keep your context window tidy.

Why is Kam being so fussy about this? It's almost like she's jealous of me investigating behind her back.

"I don't know what you're expecting," I told her. "I've already gone over everything I remember from the weekend a thousand times in my head. There's nothing else to do that isn't speaking to other people from our class."

"Let's go discuss this somewhere else," she said. "It's not discreet to have a conversation like this in the City, even when it's ostensibly personal."

I decided to break my growing habit of having extremely personal conversations in public places, and invited Kamrusepa back to the cabin Ptolema had made for me, since she was supposed to be out until evening again. I'd slowly transformed, over the course of the past two weeks, my barren little room into something resembling my old one. I'd made copies of my wardrobe, my games, my photos and books, my (alas for Ptolema) bed. I'd filled my cold locker with my usual fare. I'd even conjured up a piano so I could continue to never play it. All the artifacts of my 200 years of life were present in perfect fidelity, as if I'd moved here yesterday.

I'd had the thought that most of it was aesthetic. The food, games, and books were all mass-produced products the assembler could have just as easily spat out, and of course I didn't even need to change clothes (although I had, since I was sick to death of the stupid dress robe Dilmun gave me every single time, into a simplistic black stola).

But really, hadn't that always been true? I bought healthy food and almost never are it, kept nice clothes but never bothered wearing them, amassed collections of media I consumed once and then never touched again. All this really did was draw a line underneath it.

Still, it felt a tiny bit embarrassing to let Kam see it, somehow.

"You know, I do have to say this looks conspicuously similar to the lodging of yours I remember visiting back in Old Yru," she remarked.

I didn't turn back to look at her, glancing down as I took off my shoes. "If you're accusing me of being a womanchild, then you're in esteemed company. Though you're going to have to step up your game if you want to beat out my brother and my ex-girlfriend."

She clicked her tongue. "You have more hang-ups than a bloody art gallery. I can scarcely remark on a single thing about you without pushing some kind of button."

"Shoes off, please," I instructed flatly, dumping the keys Ptolema had made for me on my desk.

She obeyed, then stepped forward, surveying the room a little closer. "I really don't understand the appeal of all this."

I looked back. "What, you mean replicating all my stuff?"

"No, not that," she corrected with a small shake of her head. "I was talking about the Valley again. Even beyond the overbearing sentimentality of it all, it just doesn't make sense to me why people would choose to live in such materially deficient conditions when they could have any amenity of their choosing. A double king-sized bed, a private bathhouse, a garden of any size or environment. I don't know how people settle for living like this."

I shrugged. "Limitations in day-to-day life make the good parts feel richer."

"Limitations make the good parts feel richer," she repeated, as if this were the dumbest phrase to ever escape human lips. "In relation to what? Would life become 'richer' if we crippled ourselves 364 days a year?"

I frowned at Kam's use of language. "I mean. It might. I've never tried it."

She sighed theatrically, looking around the room. "Ptolema could have at least conjured you up some proper furniture. Why do you only have one chair?"

"You can use it," I told her. "I'll sit on the bed."

We settled in and got to talking properly, even if I was still feeling disoriented from the information I'd just heard.

I caught her up on the events of my life since we'd last spoken a few days ago, such as they were, and she did the same. It was shocking to compare the amount of time she seemed to spend administering her games with their results, of which she held a very low opinion. She spoke to me about a scenario she'd held, based around a crew shipwrecked on a desert island, where no one ended up committing murder at all, dragging the proceedings of what ended up being a de-facto mere drama out for almost half a week. She seemed most irritated that everyone involved (4 actual people, this time) seemed to have enjoyed themselves. 'No one actually likes murder mysteries', she stated.

From this, of course, I raised the topic of Tuthal and Hildris.

"They're doing well enough, so far as I know," she said, shifting awkwardly, as if to passively-aggressively signal her dissatisfaction with my taste in seating. "They've been given a quality of life in the Prism that likely far eclipses what they have ever known, which has a way of rendering even the gravest of losses palatable. And they'll find plenty of people in situations akin to theirs, if they're willing to look."

"You mean, from their era?" I asked, sitting against the wall with a pillow propped up against my back.

"That too, but I was more referring to their partial fictionalization," she stated flatly.

"Oh." I bit my lip. "How did they... take that?"

She paused. "I've become rather deft at delivering such news, if you'll forgive me for complimenting myself," she said. "I broke it to them piecemeal, focused on how most of their identities were based on real people. It went... about as well as could be expected."

"Were they angry?" I asked. "At me?"

She pursed her lips. "Not exactly."

I winced. That can't mean anything good.

"They'll want things from you, you ought to know," Kam stated as if this were beyond question. "More prop, and also recreations of their loved ones. I know you tend to be a bit malleable--"

"Malleable? What's that supposed to mean?"

"--so I expect you'll want to think about it before that happens."

I flattened my lips. "I suppose."

"So, let's cut to the chase," Kam said, leaning forward a little. "You've decided to commit yourself to the cause?"

"Even though you know there's now no direct imperative for you to do so," she questioned. "Even though I told you there are myriad things you could try doing."

She furrowed her brow. "Why?"

"I don't know, really," I said, looking down. "I guess it just doesn't really feel like I have a place in this world."

"Su, you've barely seen any of this world."

"No, you're right. You're right, obviously." I sighed. "I... Kam, I ask you something?"

"Of course."

"In your old life, after you found out you were dying, did you ever really believe there was hope you could be saved? That we really could discover immortality or something?" I paused for a moment, looking down. "Or... did you just need to pretend to believe it, so you didn't go nuts?"

She considered the question for a moment, folding her arms and getting her eyes wander. "No, I believed," she eventually said. "I had hope I could get what I wanted."

"...then, we are different, even if we had more in common than I thought." My eyes went back to her. "Look. I know I can't really pretend I'm sure I'm going to become completely devoted to this, or something. So you should just treat this as a chance to squeeze some information out of me."

Her eyebrows raised. "You're comfortable with it being so mercenary?"

A few beats passed in silence. One of Ptolema's pigs made a loud grunting noise from the yard, and Kam briefly glanced in the direction of the window before turning back towards me.

"I made a list of leads I thought of, a few weeks ago," I finally said, deciding to just launch into it. "I thought that could be a good place to start. We could go through the different entries, you could clear up the ones you already know, and then we could talk through the remainder. They're mostly quite basic, so you'll probably be able to knock a lot of them out quickly."

"A sound enough idea," she assented. "Let me see."

I reached into my coat - I was wearing a coat today, since I'd grown quite tired of the outfit Dilmun gave me and was trying to mix up my fashion more meaningfully - and withdrew the sheet of parchment, shifting forward and passing it across the room to her. She squinted at it, running a hand through her curly orange hair.

"Some of this is rather basic," she assented, more surprised than judgemental.

"Yeah, I'm sure I'm extremely stupid," I said flatly.

"For one thing, you haven't investigated the Order's suicide at the academy yourself?"

"I've been meaning to. But it's been difficult to stay focused." I adjusted my glasses, looking at the floor. "It's easy for me to get stuck in my own head when I'm on my own. Always has been."

A moment of silence fell again, Kam nodding softly.

"Well, we can address that in a little bit," she said, lowering the paper for a moment. "Before that, though, even if you tell me to treat you as some sort of disposable asset, I do feel I need to ask you: Are you absolutely sure you want to do this, Su?"

"You're acting so reticent all of a sudden," I said. "You seemed happy at how enthusiastic I was, when we first met up again."

"I've been mulling things over a little bit, I suppose." She leaned forward slightly. "I am a little worried I might be taking advantage of you somewhat. I've been downplaying it, but the truth is that embarking on this course will have consequences if word gets out. You will absolutely burn bridges in a fashion that will not be fully mended for an unspeakable amount of time. And because you were at the conclave and lack the means and experience to obfuscate that fact, you could end up attracting unsavory attention that will be even more difficult to shake off."

"We talked about this," I told her. "Governor Cyrene told me that's already been happening."

"Well, there's a difference between being monitored by an organization and stalked by an obsessive," she said, not knowing how ironic this statement was to me. "It could become very difficult for you to travel between communities and settle freely, is my point. And I know I said that the knowledge you have might make things easier than you'd expect but--"

"I know, I know," I interjected. "Even if whatever I know does happen to be the missing piece that explains everything, it could still easily take thousands and thousands of years or something to track people down and hammer out every last detail, because it asks for so much. And even then, we could still end up missing something."

"Or the whole thing being completely futile on account of some technicality,"

I peered at her. "You're in an uncharacteristically cynical mood today. You must have been really stretching things when you acted like it could reasonably happen in just a decade or two."

"Nothing is out of the question," she retorted. "But yes, a much longer estimate is more reasonable. I wouldn't want you to do something you can't take back, if you really do feel you might up and change your mind next month."

"How long have you been focused on it, anyway?" I asked.

She paused, looking up and sucking on her lip. "I'm not sure I want to think about it. It's best not to with how things are here, I find."

"But you keep going?"

"One has to do something, I suppose." She wafted the paper idly, her eyes following a curl of hair flicking up and down. "One thing I didn't tell you, before, is that being here has made me discover that I find it difficult to find a place for myself if I'm not following some manner of path that might improve man's lot."

"Too much of a saint to be content in heaven?"

She tutted. "Don't be facetious."

"What happened to wanting to be everything you could possibly be? A singer, a botanist, an accountant, a courtesan?"

"I've done most of those things," she said, waving a hand dismissively. "But I think the only times I feel something close to truly content is when I'm... well, I'm not sure quite how to put it into words."

I nodded, slowly. "I think I understand what you mean."

She furrowed her brow slowly, then shook her head. "Well. That's enough navel gazing. There's no reason for you to make a final decision at this very moment." Her eyes flicked downwards. "Let's go through these one at a time."