The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

Inner Sanctum Underground | 1:40 PM | Third Day

Save for Fang, we all jumped like someone had shot at us when it happened, even if it turned out to be nothing particularly threatening. The stonework on the wall was shifting where it lay, grinding against itself as it was pulled aside by some mechanism, revealing a door-sized opening to what looked like a medium-sized chamber beyond, before coming to a quick stop with a satisfying clunk.

Seth flailed, raising both his rifle and scepter awkwardly at the same time. "What the--"

"Oh man!" Fang said, starry-eyed as they clasped their hands together in front of them. "A secret passage!"

Are you fucking kidding me? I thought.

"Not again," Kamrusepa spoke dryly, rubbing her brow. "And here I was, hoping we were done with the exciting part of this endeavor."

"But where does it lead..." Fang mused, creeping closer with an eager expression.

"Let's not lose control of ourselves," Kam said, holding up a hand to stop them. "Even if there's nothing else alive down here, Hamilcar might've set up some sort of automated ambush. Ran, are you still following along?"

"I kinda tuned out when you wouldn't stop talking about how our lives are gonna be ruined, but yeah," she replied, sounding like she was concentrating.

"A door opened in front of us in the middle of the hallway," Kam continued. "Can you see it? Is there anything coming?"

"Yeah, I can see it," she said. "Actually, I divined something being there when you guys were getting close, but figured it was just some out-of-use room that'd been bricked over. There's stuff like that in most big buildings." She paused for a moment. "But no, there's nothing in there. Just 3x6 square meters of space and some inanimate crap lying around."

Our group relaxed a little. Fang took another step, pushing against Kam's outstretched arm, but the latter still seemed to have concerns.

"Why did it open, then?" she asked.

"Fuck if I know," Ran told her. "It's not on the map, so it's not supposed to happen. Did you guys trigger a switch, or something like that? I don't have the eris to spare for a detailed scan."

"I didn't touch anything," Seth said, holding his hands up.

"Uh, me neither," I contributed.

"What about you, Fang?" Kam asked, looking over her shoulder.

They considered this for a moment, scrunching up their face. "I mean? It's pretty cramped in this hall, and I'm sure as heck too big for it. I might've brushed into something with my elbows or something."

"You might've," Kam echoed, unsatisfied with this ambiguous response.

"Yeah!" they said, nodding. "In a place like this, if you're gonna have a secret door, it's gonna be activated by pushing in a protruding brick or something, right? To go with the whole dungeon aesthetic." They frowned. "But then, I feel like I would've noticed that. I play so many echo games, I feel like I'm always on the alert for secret wall switches." They considered this furtively, before suddenly raising their forefinger in the air. "Or oh, oh! Maybe we incidentally said some secret word or phrase that set it off? We were saying something about the Aetherbridge--"

"This is not helping," Kam said, irritated.

"How do you know you didn't trigger it, Kam?" Seth asked.

She scoffed. "Unlike you pack of lunks, I happen to be a normal size, so my body hasn't been in a state of disagreement with the architecture."

"That's a pretentious way of saying you're short," he replied flatly.

She glared at him. "The mean human height for women worldwide is 160 centimeters, which I happen to match almost precisely, thank you very much."

"Besides," he added, "you could've stepped on something,"

"Stepped on something?" She looked at him with incredulity. "What kind of idiot would make a secret door you can open by walking on the floor?"

"I'm, uh, not sure this is really worth arguing about," I said quietly.

"No kidding," Ran replied in agreement. "I'm sorry I asked."

"Why don't you simply ask Lady Anna about the issue, Ran?" Kamrusepa asked. "If anyone would know, it would be her."

"I would, but she's preoccupied with some tricky part of the work at the moment," Ran told her, her tone hesitant. "Anyway, it might just be a proximity activation, and it's only meant to fool people when the place is under actual siege."

Kam glanced at Seth for a moment, looking hesitant. "I suppose."

"And you're sure it's safe, right...?" Fang asked.

"Yep," she replied. "There's no eris in there, and nothing else that looks dangerous."

"Okay!" They clapped their hands together, and pushed past Kam's arm. "Let's take a look!"

Kam clicked her tongue. "Cause and danger aside, should we really be getting sidetracked in a situation like this? I know everyone's getting into the spirit of celebration now that we've dealt with the immediate threat, but we're still in a hostile environment. Anything could occur."

"Kam, it's a secret room," Fang turned to say, as if the implications were obvious. "If we don't look and see, it'll haunt us for the rest of our lives!" They gestured towards it. "Besides, this place looks tiny, y'know? It'll only take a sec."

Kamrusepa sighed, her expression irritated.

And so, we followed Fang into the chamber. It was, as they said, relatively tiny - maybe the size of the front room in a single-person apartment - and nothing stuck out as instantly spectacular. There were some bookshelves on either side against the stone walls, and a set of four benches facing a wooden book-stand at the far end. The only thing that struck me was that the room was actually lit, an arcane lamp hanging from a chain overhead.

Still, something about it felt unsettling to me. I couldn't quite put it into words. Nothing looked strange; the furniture was the same pseudo-classical stuff found all over the sanctuary, it smelled musty and slightly damp in the way the whole underground did. But for some reason, my mind recalled the sensation I'd felt when we'd come upon Durvasa's horribly maimed corpse. There something recognizable had been disfigured radically in a way that was threatening and wrong.

"Looks like kinda a cross between a library and a chapel," Seth commented, glancing around. "Maybe like, a schoolhouse?"

I glanced at the benches. They were a little short. They could've been meant for children, but it was hard to say.

"Rather small for a schoolhouse, to say nothing of the placement," Kam replied. "Though it's clearly intended for performative reading of some manner."

"Maybe it's some sort of secret archive for the Order...?" I suggested.

"I've never heard of an archive designed for an audience," she said, raising an eyebrow. "But I confess I'm somewhat stumped in terms of better suggestions."

"I'm gonna take a peek at these books," Fang said, pointing to the side.

"I'm gonna sit down," Seth intoned with a tired sigh as he stepped towards one of the benches. "This walk has been taking more out of me than I thought. ...ugh, dusty," he added, as he plopped down on the seat.

This must not be a place people come often, then, I noted to myself.

While Kam watched the entrance, I kept moving towards the back of the room alone, my eyes wandering for anything that stuck out.

I spotted only one thing I hadn't on my initial look, and that was a glass display cabinet in place of a bookshelf at the far end of the right wall. It was conspicuously almost empty, to the point that I suspected that it had been cleared out at some point not too far in the past (there were trace outlines of dust and disturbance in the green fabric lining its interior that seemed to corroborate this) but one object remained.

It was a statuette, maybe a foot tall, depicting two figures in a scene that looked like it was probably from mythology, though it wasn't anything I personally recognized. A man, tall and long-bearded, was thrusting what looked to be a spear into the air triumphantly over a dozen collapsed robed figures, all of whom clutched hammers. Only one of them actually had an exposed face - with long hair indicating they were supposed to be a woman - but it was featureless and smooth, clearly indicating them to be some sort of inhuman creature.

Looking at it tickled something in the back of my head, and it took me almost a full minute to realize why that was the case. I'd seen the male figure earlier in the weekend. It'd been when Neferuaten had taken us to visit the men's entrance to the sanctuary, and there was a statue of him instead of a mural; though the beard had been absent in the prior instance, the face was extremely similar. I'd assumed him to be one of the founders of the Order, but she'd told us he actually pertained to something completely different.

Still, I hadn't thought it would be this different. Was this from some other immortality myth I hadn't heard of?

"...huh," I heard Fang say, their tone confused.

I turned to face them. They were still standing at the bookshelf, and seemed to have been reviewing a few, having now accumulated a modest pile on a nearby bench.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I, um." They let their mouth hang open for a second, seeming to be processing something. "I can't read any of these?"

Kamrusepa snorted. "I thought you were a true polyglot, Fang. I didn't know there were languages you couldn't speak."

"Hey, I only speak the six big ones!" they protested, but didn't seem like they had their heart in the banter, their eyes flicking back to the page. "Uh, but seriously, no. That's not the problem."

"Then what is the problem?" Kam inquired. "Are they written in invisible ink, perhaps?"

"No," they replied. "...but I mean, I guess that's not far off?"

She frowned. "What do you mean?"

"It's like-- I mean, just come take a look," Fang said. "See for yourself."

Kam gave an irritated shrug and stepped over, and I did as well, my brow raised curiously. Fang helpfully flipped the book they held around and presented it for us to see, and--

...I understood instantly why they'd struggled to put it into words.

My first thought was that it was in code, but from what I knew, code generally either used pre-existing script simply arranged in a manner that came across as nonsense, or sometimes very simple symbology or iconography that wouldn't be too difficult for people to learn - and when it did, it tended to be for fairly simple messages anyway. This, however, was something very different. The pages were covered by a not only very complicated but completely inscrutable and alien script, made up of tightly-packed curled lines that seemed to flow into one another in a manner evocative of cursive, but more extensive.

I think I mentioned this before, but I was by no means a language expert; it'd been a struggle for me to even get to the stage of speaking the three I did reasonably eloquently. Still, though, I felt more than confident in my ability to at least recognize them on sight. I knew the different styles of script from the Six Parties and the Duumvirate, and even those from the Lower Planes. I even had passing familiarity with some historical ones.

This, though, I'd never seen anything like this at all. If it was code, they'd gone above and beyond.

"Well, that's... Odd," Kam said, biting her lip. "They're all like this? Front to cover?"

"Yep," Fang replied, flipping through the pages to demonstrate. "Weird as hell, huh? Again, like. See for yourself."

I took them up on it, reaching for a random book on the shelf. Even as I did so, however, I noticed something I hadn't at a greater distance and which almost made the act redundant; the spines of the books, and specifically the titles. All of them were written in the nonsense-script, seemingly without exception. And I noticed that there actually seemed to be quite a variety, at that: Thick old tomes with leather jackets, smaller affairs with laminated vellum covers, even slim ones that might've been for children. If this was some archive for the Order's secrets, that made less than zero sense.

There weren't many that belonged to the latter category compared to the others, but I picked one out from the bottom shelf. It was, in fact, a children's book, illustrated in pastel watercolors. The front cover depicted an elaborately-styled title in multi-colored text framed by blower buds - text that, of course, I couldn't read - and what looked like a... Siamese twin? They were a two-headed figure, with four arms and four legs, smiling brightly and making a cheerful pose.

I frowned.

I flipped through the pages, and found the plot was simple enough for me to understand in spite of the text. It started off with a main character, the aforementioned... Person, or maybe two people, frolicking and playing with animals in a field. But then a lightning bolt came down and struck them, apparently splitting them into two 'normal' people, causing the half left behind to cry. After this, the plot consisted of them searching various locations and speaking to various wild creatures in a bid to track their literal other half down, before finally succeeding and recombining at the end of the story, the final page being a depiction of a party held in celebration of this.

I looked closely at the final page. The animals who had appeared up until that point were crowded around a cake-covered table, their hands thrown joyfully into the air and their eyes drawn as little upward-facing triangles, while the protagonist embraced themselves with all their arms.

It felt almost ridiculous to pick at the specifics of the content when everything about this was so bizarre to begin with, but still, something about even this felt strange. Of course, stories about an unusual protagonist with some kind of fantastical problem coming to accept themselves were common in children's books... But normally that would manifest in concepts along the lines of 'The Bear With The Really Small Feet', where the story would be about the bear learning that it was actually good to have small feet because it made him great at ballet or something. Comparatively, the imagery in this case felt unnecessarily mundane and physical, and the tone off, somehow. The main character had no internal arc - they were happy about their state from the start instead of resenting it, and the only conflict came from trying to restore the status quo.

So... What was the moral supposed to be, exactly?

"This is very odd," Kamrusepa repeated as she flipped through her own chosen book, frowning deeply. "This one uses Ysaran words occasionally in normal script, so it can't simply be code for existing writing, or those words would be converted, too. This sort of formatting only crops up in-- Well, in genuinely translated works."

"I know, right?" Fang said. "I noticed that, too."

"Could it just be a really ancient language...?" I asked, not even convinced of the notion myself.

"This one I'm reading looks to be a school textbook," she said, showing me to demonstrate. Indeed, the page depicted what was clearly an annotated periodic table. "Why would you produce a modern book in a long-dead language?"

"I mean... You wouldn't," I said. "Not normally. But maybe it's someone's personal project? You know-- People start getting really strange hobbies when they pass a couple centuries."

"Could even be a completely made up language," Fang suggested. "I mean, nerds love making up languages."

Kam didn't seem satisfied with this answer either, exhaling audibly through her nose. She shook her head. "I don't want to get caught up in speculating about this right now. There'll be plenty of time to ask Anna or Linos - or Zeno, if he's woken up from his hiding spot, assuming whatever state he's left his true form in is capable of speech - when we get back. I'm sure there's a relatively simple explanation."

"This is a really frustrating conversation to listen to without being able to see what the hell you're talking about," Ran said.

"Uh, sorry," I said. "I didn't know you were still listening."

"I'm being a bit more vigilant this time since you don't have anyone to watch over you if shit hits the fan," she replied. "But it's not good for my eris reserves, so seriously. Hurry back."

"See?" Kam said, a hand on her hip. "Let's grab a few of these books and get going."

"We leaving already?" Seth said, sounding weary. "I was just getting settled in."

"You'll have plenty of time to settle in when we get back," Kam told him.

"Yeah," he replied, trying to push himself up. "I guess so."

We left the strange chamber, stepping back into the hallway, and curiously, the door closed behind us a short time later. Seth took this as evidence that the theory about it being proximity-activated was right after all. On the other hand, I was overcome by the feeling that something was going completely over our heads, and a disquiet lingered within me. I kept looking back to the book I'd taken with me, feeling both the strange urge to flick the illustrations again, but also a sense of unease, like I was carrying something dangerous.

Who cares, anyway? A part of me thought. It's nothing to do with who the last remaining culprit is. Besides getting out of here, that's all that matters.

But even though I was aware of that, the experience almost stuck in my mind more than the spectacular affair that was our encounter in Hamilcar.

However, it quickly turned out that I was alone in that probable error of priorities. While a less shameless person might've at least waited a few minutes, no sooner had we taken twenty steps than Kamrusepa dived right back into her attempt to trick Seth into revealing something.

She was at least a little devious about it, though. Instead of directly returning where she'd left off, she acted like a step in the conversation had already happened - or at least, been assumed - and left him to try and put it together.

"So as I was saying a minute ago," she said. "We had to go through some of the same business with Ophelia. She was feeling rather uneasy as we approached the jump, so we ended up prodding Su to tell one of her jokes to distract her." She glanced slyly at me as part of the performance, which made me feel awkward from two separate directions at once. "Which, well, it certainly did."

Seth looked at her with a puzzled expression, rubbing his eyes. "Uh. Sorry, what?"

"Oh, I was just saying that you weren't the only person who had to babysit a little bit through that affair," she went on. "Though it probably sounds like you had a harder time with Theo. Ophelia is one thing, but Theo can't even look out the windows on the tram line in the upper city without getting queasy. It sounded like you had rather a difficult time on your hands."

Seth blinked a few times. "...yeah," he replied. "I mean-- I dunno what he said, but it wasn't a big deal or anything."

"Of course," she said, and then smirked at me like she was a genius who'd just uncovered something scandalously damning.

I wasn't so sure about that. It was true that we had no idea what Theodoros's reaction had been to the Aetherbridge - and that there was a possibility their group hadn't rode it at all, but had arrived at the sanctuary via some other means, as Fang apparently had - and that Kam had fabricated a story she'd 'heard' about that experience, and then baited Seth into 'pretending' to confirm it.

But was he really pretending? The trouble with inventing a believable story was that, well, it could easily have really happened. Theo was morbidly afraid of heights. Seth was a little protective of him. It was hardly some fantasy scenario.

There was no contradiction, just inference that happened to line up correctly.

I furrowed my brow, trying to remember if there was anything I'd heard from Theo that could be used to extrapolate an actual contradiction. I remembered, during the first day of our tour, him saying in passing that he hadn't eaten anything in a while, but that felt awkward to use, and not definitive anyway - even if I tried saying that I'd heard they'd had a meal in the Empyrean Bastion to cheer him or something, he could've just been being melodramatic.

I cursed myself for not being able to come up with anything. Still, it was unambiguous this did cast a little more suspicion on Seth. Though I didn't know where that left us right now. Sacnicte would've been the person to pick at to try to confirm the story he'd told me about him and Ezekiel... But of course, she was dead. And I couldn't even ask about his presentation that Ezekiel had destroyed in the hopes of finding some link there, because I didn't remember seeing how it had actually gone.

I shook my head. What would it mean if he really was lying, anyway? If the boys hadn't traveled using the Aetherbridge, it stood to reason they probably had some separate dealings with the Order that we'd been excluded from, and they'd chosen to keep it a secret. But why would that be predicated on gender, of all things?

Leaving out Ezekiel, Bardiya, Seth and Theodoros were/had been close - closer than most of the girls in our glass, excepting Ran and I - but not at the exclusion of everyone else. Seth was probably better friends than Ptolema than either of those two, and Theo and I had... Some sort of bond that he at least considered substantial. And I knew Bardiya had some sort of acquaintance with Ophelia.

So... Why?

With that question still in my mind, we soon returned back to the hallway leading into the security center. To my relief, I saw Anna at work and Ran beside her, watching for us expectantly - I saw her sigh in relief as we appeared. As many precautions as you could take, it was always possible to subvert arcane communications and impersonate others, so I'd had a tiny fear of us returning to find an ambush and everyone dead.

All things considered, though... Things had worked out.