Conquest of Avalon

Florette I: The Research Assistant

All that power, just to end up buried under the sands. Florette brushed more dust from the statue, peering at its inscription. By the looks of it, the dialect was the same old Avaline that Christophe had trotted out when they’d first met, dating it roughly some six hundred years to the past.

Here rests Pelleas the Founder

Grimoire of Grimoires

Vessel of Khali

Beloved Father

“Impressive work, Sabine!” the Professor said encouragingly. “I never could have found the Founder’s tomb without your help.”

“Is it really, though? The inscription says he ‘rests’ here, but the Fox-Queen’s memoirs are pretty clear that Anquille Leclaire held down King Pelleas during his execution, then tossed his body into the sea in offering to Levian.”

“His head, perhaps? The sands may have preserved it beneath its slab, if indeed it lies here.” Alcock shrugged. “Much more digging remains to be done, I have no doubt. But we’ve confirmed the site beyond the shadow of a doubt, and I trust my team to see the dig through for the next few months.”

That’s a surprise. The Professor could scarcely make it a day without jumping in to correct some minor error in translation, or complain about the excavation strategy, or any of half a hundred other trivial corrections imposed, Florette suspected, mostly to reassure himself that he was still the primary archaeologist here. Scant wonder he tended to go it alone until he needed a larger team for a dig.

Ticent the Sable-Eye, the dig site’s official second, had told Florette once that it was a great honor that Sir Alcock had asked her to accompany him into the sands.

And perhaps he meant it as one, but it meant that I took all the brunt of his nitpicking. His criticisms were never wrong though, at least not with his research assistant, and by Florette’s second summer spent in the role, the Professor’s critiques had significantly reduced in quantity. And, much as it galled her to admit it, hearing such unqualified praise at their moment of triumph did go a long way to justify all the time and effort she’d put into this.

And the work is more than enough to cover the rest. How many people could say they’d been the first through the door to the lost tomb of Pelleas the Founder? Even fewer than can say they bested Glaciel in combat, or slew the sun, Florette figured, strange as it was that the latter figure was higher than zero, let alone one.

And the artifacts they’d uncovered... The old pistol alone cracked historical understanding about ancient Giton warfare wide open, in addition to exposing just how bereft of originality Magnifico’s Avalon ultimately was. What exactly it meant wasn’t entirely clear yet, but Srin Sabine would be able to complete her capstone project writing on it before the world was even yet aware of its existence.

The inscription on its handle was difficult to parse, to be sure, flowing and looping as if drawn by the finest fountain pen, yet etched into the metal with a sturdiness that had kept it visible despite centuries buried under the Giton sands. The two full words, d’Armes and Étienne, were easy enough to understand, even if it was baffling that they were written in Imperial, but the abbreviations before them were maddening. Respectively, an M and S were set before each word, with a couple smaller letters each whose flowering script made them all but impossible to identify. M. for Mister or Monsieur? Mlle for Millenium, or one thousand? The S was even more confounding, looking closest to an ‘St.’ but the second letter could plausibly be a lower case L or an I, or even an Middle Avaline glyph that had yet to be deciphered.

The ancient Grimoires had been wont to encode their letters, usually using simple substitution ciphers that amounted to an alternative alphabet. Considering how thoroughly the Fox-Queen had defeated them, in large part by predicting the Grimoire host’s movements with uncanny accuracy, Florette doubted that it had posed a significant obstacle in its day. But in the present, it meant that every fourth discovery had to be analyzed for letter probability—in Middle Avaline, no less—and, if sufficiently brief, might deter proper decryption entirely. Multiple fragments were short enough that two entirely separate meanings “worked” with different letters substituted, and no clear winner in the contest.

None yet that they’d found had written mostly in the normal alphabet with one exception, but the ancient pistol was strange enough in general that the possibility had to be considered.

The M 1892 engraved on the barrel, clear and legible as it remained, was if anything more maddening than the words, making the pistol just under a hundred years old by the old calendar — if it was a date of manufacture. Simultaneously far too young to rest in this sealed tomb and far too old to post-date the pistol’s very existence.

If indeed it was a pistol. The design—save for the six-chambered cylinder in between the handle and the barrel and the broken ring at the base—looked remarkably similar to the small arms Avalon sent with its soldiers off to war, but not so identical that it defied all other explanations.

For one thing, there was no way to be sure it even functioned, nor that it ever had. “It might easily have been decorative, or ritualistic,” Florette remarked. “Ancient Giton society has no shortage of functionless objects, at least so far as our knowledge goes—the Grimoire’s regalia, the leaky wineskin, the blunted spear... If they copied the form of a pistol without knowing how to make it work, it might look just like this. Perhaps their Grimoire saw modern pistols in a vision of the future, or—”

“Cease your squalid speculations, Sabine,” the Professor rebuked, interrupting an admittedly rambling string of thoughts. “Scholars modern and ancient alike firmly agree that visions beyond the present day are not possible, as you yourself have remarked. I would think your time with Lord Monfroy and his ‘professional organization’ would have elucidated that, if poring over the writings of dozens of ancient sages weren’t sufficient on its own.”

“It’s the conventional wisdom,” Florette conceded. But I know what I saw on the Isle of Shadows. That gleaming city could only have been the future, and the Great Binder herself could find no other explanation.

“It’s true that we should not accept the conventional wisdom where reality contradicts it, but baseless speculation brings us no closer to the truth. This question is not beyond resolution, even if the answer lies beyond the bounds of our respective expertise. Nothing good will come of hardening our mind towards expectations of a certain result.” He nodded to himself, then smiled. “All we need is a quick stop in Charenton on our way back. The Prince of Darkness is well familiar with the intricacies of black powder, and more than capable of dismantling and reassembling the artifact without damage, perhaps even of restoration. Then we can be sure of its function, be it for warfare or ritual.”

“Is that wise?” Florette asked. Don’t take me wrong, the idea sounds great, except for the part where Luce recognizes me and has me hanged. Even four years on, it was hard to imagine Prince Luce forgetting the pirate that had murdered his cousin and imprisoned him on his ship. “He’s more a politician than a scientist, these days, and no historian beyond an amateur interest.”

“You know the Prince?” Alcock asked, surprised at the detailed description.

“I haven’t had the pleasure,” Florette lied. “But we’ve seen ‘scientists’ break our finds before, through carelessness or malice. And this is one-of-a-kind. Disassembling it could cause irreversible damage.” Florette had worn this cloak too long to panic, let alone to let it show, but the prospect of exposing herself to the Lord Protector of Charenton carried far too much risk for next to no gain—not for nothing had Florette found ways to duck out of six separate dinner invitations, eventually sending Rebecca alone. Please abandon this idea, Professor.

“Hmm... Perhaps you’re right. But I’ve been too long away from my loving wife, and I promised her I would return once we found the lost tomb. You’ll have to bring it to Charenton yourself—I’ll write you a letter bearing my seal, and the Prince will not ignore it, especially once he realizes the magnitude of our discovery. He’ll—”

“We don’t know what he’ll do,” Florette interrupted, even knowing that the Professor despised it. “Nor that he’ll let us have it back. Let me take it to Rebecca, and she can examine it in the Cambrian Tower. After hours. No one need to know until we’re ready to make the announcement.”

“Hmm...” the Professor hesitated, running his fingers through a neatly trimmed beard.

“Surely you wouldn’t want word to break out in the middle of your sorely-needed reconciliation with Lady Alcock? You’d be hounded by every fanatic and journalist from Forta to Serpichon.” It brought to mind something Camille Leclaire had said back in Malin, in the midst of their thankfully-brief partnership: “Lying really isn’t all that difficult; you just have to live in the reality you’ve constructed for yourself. The hard part comes when you must turn those lies towards productive ends. To get what you want, everyone should walk away satisfied, appetites sated by your deceit.”

At least, that was the spirit of it. Florette hadn’t thought to write it down until almost a year later, after she’d almost cracked in front of Rebecca. Not an admirable figure by any means, Camille was admittedly a master of lies, and it would be a fool to discard her advice in the midst of such a prolonged, crucial deception.

“Perhaps it is best to keep it quiet,” Alcock admitted, to Florette’s hidden elation.

Before the Autumn Spring, she’d probably have let it show, perhaps even visibly sighing of relief. But Srin Sabine was a well-worn face in Florette’s collection, her quirks and contours effortless to remain immersed in.

“Rebecca’s a good lass, and at this point you could supervise her in your sleep. In fact, I daresay you do so regularly.” He chuckled at his own terrible joke, and somehow Florette found herself doing the same.

I’ve been away too long. Though it wasn’t without some apprehension that she’d be going back—serving at Sir Thomas Alcock’s pleasure was no easy task, but it paled in comparison to her writ in Cambria.

Between the College, Monfroy, and Blaise, I’ll scarcely have a moment to breathe. The pirate carpenter was understanding enough, a welcome replacement for the perpetually-irritable shipmaster, Cordelia, but he was keenly aware that Florette’s time with easy access to the College was running out, and his research requests were only growing in anticipation of her graduation.

Monfroy’s demands were less consistent, the Lord of Louche often waiting months before contacting her, but the missions were never easy, and seldom quick to resolve. Much of the fallow period had to be spent catching up on everything else, and what little remained was spent on more pleasurable things, like plotting his downfall.

Or coming home to Rebecca.

Or being the Blue Bandit. Despite the danger it posed, that role was the one that most threatened to consume all else, for that was when Florette felt most like herself. If not for Christophe, there to hold down the fort while Florette kept up appearances in other arenas, Srin Sabine would have collapsed long before Florette had better learned to tighten the mask.

As it was, she was merely constantly busy, ever pulled in opposite directions.

“Alright, Sabine, I think we’ve done enough to call the day here. I’ll spend tomorrow and the lendemain briefing the Sable-Eye on the specifics of this dig, then we’ll depart.” He waved the torch he was holding, bouncing the shadows all around the recently-unsealed tomb. “Take the figurines with you, would you? Climbing in and out of this place is an epic poem, and I’d sooner avoid a second trip.”

“With pleasure,” Florette answered, concealing her surprise. The Professor I know would have us clambering up and down until midnight, taking only one heavily-padded artifact at a time. He must really want to go home.

Florette felt much the same, in truth. Though only at the tipping point between Winter and Spring, the desert was already becoming inhospitable, the endless search for history sunken beneath the sands wearing on her more with every day. For the Professor, surely, it was all the worse, since Florette, at least, returned to the College every year for classes.

Between his research and his wife, Sir Thomas Alcock had barely returned to Cambria for more than perfunctory visits. Though perhaps his marriage to a ‘blackhearted foreigner’ has something to do with that too. Florette had heard that particular appellation from Professor Landry, but he was far from the only academic at the Cambrian College to share the sentiment. Regardless, the inhospitable isolation was clearly beginning to wear on even the night-indefatigable Thomas Alcock.

Not that I’d mind getting a good night’s sleep for once. Florette picked up the padded basket of figurines they’d found buried with a painted wooden board, the one helpfully labeled “The Chaos Angel” in Imperial on the underside of its base just barely visible, poking out of the cloth wrap. A swirling tangle of wings arrayed around a barely-visible core, its form was an uncanny match for the light-and-shadow depiction of Diurne in Mahabali Hall. Alcock hadn’t drawn the connection though, and—as tempted as Florette was to air out this minor truth for better historical understanding—she wasn’t entirely sure it would be wise. Easy enough to “remember” the resemblance later, if she changed her mind.

“Stand still,” Alcock said, as if Florette didn’t know the procedure by heart at this point. “I’m passing up my torch.” The smoke risked pooling in the room otherwise, dusting artifacts with unwanted soot and burning up their air before they were quite finished breathing.

And so the room went dark, the air filled with the sounds of Alcock scrabbling up through the breach they’d made in the door. Dark, that is, save for the glowing green wing of the figurine. Unwrapping the cloth a bit more showed that the entire statuette was glowing the same color, though none of the other pieces were.

Alright, I think that’s reason enough to use whatever info we’ve got to figure out what the fuck this thing is. It’d probably be worth showing it to Crete too, once she got back from her travels.

“Have you ever heard the legend about Diurne and Nocturne?” Florette asked the Professor once they emerged from the tomb into glistening sands and twilight skies, more stars visible over Giton than a Cambrian could count in a week.

“I can’t say that I have, I’m afraid.” The Professor dusted off his gloves, then peeled them off.

“That’s not a surprise. Not exactly the kind of thing in Avaline history books, and its veracity is pretty questionable. But the Chaos Angel looks exactly like soldiers of Diurne, at least according to a depiction from an ancient Mamela artifact I saw.” Monfroy’s refurbished light-and-shadow display in Mahabali Hall was far from ancient, of course; even prior to its restoration, its life was measured in centuries, rather than millenia. But it had been adapted from a series of carvings, stored high enough up in Chaya to escape the Inferno Aerion’s wrath. Florette had gone to see them on her second visit to the Isle, then been shocked to see how faithfully the Mahabali Hall display had reproduced them.

“Then it’s worth following-up on,” the Professor agreed. “Far more so than your Walston Market idea, at any rate.”

“That was a joke,” Florette clarified. “All I meant was that the board and pieces looked a lot like a boardgame Kelsey bought there. I don’t seriously think it’s worth finding the vendor.”

“Ah, my apologies. The resemblance to a boardgame is rather uncanny, I must concede.” Say what you will about him—and I have, repeatedly—he’s not too proud to admit when he’s wrong. “Perhaps King Pelleas fancied play so much it was buried alongside him? We’ve found stranger.”

“Though glowing is a level beyond.” Florette carefully lifted the Chaos Angel, rotating it in the air until she could see through to the dark core. “Then again, the Grimoire was the High Priest of Khali and the King. If anyone had the power to craft a spiritual working into a figurine just to play a game, it would be him. The Founder lacking a reputation for such whimsey hardly disproves the possibility.”

“Certainly. His chroniclers would have every motive to depict him flatteringly.” Alcock took the statuette from her hands and held it up closely to his eye. “Doesn’t it sort of remind you of those new glowing watches? The color’s the same, at least.”

“Haven’t seen one,” Florette said, to keep it simple. Christophe’s neighbor, Helen, had asked if the Blue Bandit could look into the facility where they made them after some of the workers had started getting sick, but it hadn’t really gone anywhere beyond the usual—poor ventilation, cramped quarters, long hours, capricious terms of employment... She’d offered to sabotage, but Helen’s sister had warned her off from doing anything yet, so the matter was momentarily shelved.

The walk to their camp passed through the ruins of old Giton, at this point mostly just low stone walls and sand, darkened by the dust of long-crumbled mud bricks. They’d swept enough of the sand aside to get a good idea of the layout, but properly parsing out the nature of the ancient settlement would take decades of work, if not centuries.

“Chin up,” the Professor had said in a brief moment of frustration from Florette over the scant hope of ever gleaning the truth in her lifetime. “We are ever the bridge between past and present. The future is no different, and they will thank us for this discovery even as they curse us for our limited understanding.”

That had been easy enough to accept, considering that Florette had already written her deeds into the history books before turning twenty, and was sure she’d do it again a hundred times before she died. Historians of the future could figure the rest out.

Back then, the Professor had been animated, their search so close to its conclusion. Tonight, he looked exhausted as he dismissed her for the night. “Not a word to anyone but the Sable-Eye, and only when you’re sure no one’s listening. Breaking this news in the wrong way, before we fully understand its implications, would be a mistake.” Not in the least because it would interrupt your vacation with your wife, I don’t doubt.

But that suited Florette fine. Things were complicated enough already. “So I shouldn’t show our findings to the Prince of Darkness, then?”

“Please, cease your perfidious performance as a wise ass when I know you to be capable of so much more.” The Professor let out a faint scoff. “But you do have the right of it—royalty needs the most carefully tailored message, rather than the least refined.”

Definitely suits my needs. “Why royalty in particular, though?”

“The Grimoires tend to minimize their desert origins as much as they can get away with—that’s why they weren’t an option for funding this expedition, unlike the others. The emphasis on their legitimacy travels through the line of Alice Grimoire and the Great Binder, from Harold the First moreso than any before him. Directly continuing a line of Khali devotees, practitioners of human sacrifice, is the sort of truth better swept under the rug, to their mind.” A flash of anger crossed his face. “As if they don’t have the power to confront the truth rather than run from it; as if the entire Giton civilization is without value because their practices differed from our own. It’s shameful.”

“I see.” A useful excuse to keep Prince Luce out of things on an ongoing basis, then. “Thanks.”

“The pleasure was mine. You know how fond I am of musing aloud.” The Professor nodded to himself, then began walking quickly back to camp. He clearly wasn’t in the mood for pontificating any further at the moment, whatever his predilections. He pulled ahead of Florette, practically racing to reach his tent by nightfall, and left her alone in the ruins.

She lingered in front of a large stone in what they were pretty sure had been gardens, a memorial whose inscription had endured the ravages of time. Remember Martine, it said. Beware the face-stealer.

Words well worth considering, Florette estimated, for all that Lamante had been nothing but helpful to her so far. Word of her callous murder of Lunette had spread far and wide, even to Cambria, albeit distorted by the Avaline hatred of all things spiritual. One particularly amusing account had insisted that the face-stealer had fired a cannon at the moon to break it in half, slaying the spirit by attacking the base of her power.

Florette had no doubt the true explanation was far more mundane. Lunette had long been weakened for want of followers, losing her sages to Avalon and Corro to Glaciel after the White Night. She’d probably been lured into an ambush and slain by a binder, just like the last several spirits to die.

I suppose binders haven’t been terribly original in their schemes, myself included. But then, if it works, why should we be? Until spirits adapted to the new threats they faced, the tactic would continue to be effective.

But there’s at least one spirit who won’t go down that easily: The Maiden of Dawn. After her ascension, Leclaire had quickly begun insisting that she be referred to as ‘The Spirit of Dawn’, the ‘maiden’ retired, so Florette delighted in calling her that at the slightest opportunity. But annoying Leclaire alone would be far from enough, if the time came when she needed to be stopped.

That was a problem for the future though, and Florette had no shortage of others competing for her attention in the present.

I just have to get through a few days at Lady Alcock’s, then it’s back to Cambria. Hopefully, things had calmed down there in her absence.