The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

I wasn't going to, but I suppose... I can talk about it a little bit, before we finish.

On the day that my grandfather died, it was cloudy. Not the kind of cloudy where there's a grey haze over the sky, but the kind where the clouds tower over the open sky like great mountains, the sun shining brightly one moment before being utterly smothered the next. A liminal day, where in the afternoon it could be beautiful, or the heavens could fill up and bring forth a storm. But I knew it would be neither of those, and would stay cloudy, because I had watched a weather report.

It had been a very strange morning. My parents had been out of town for two weeks - my father was on some kind of paid trip to an island resort in the Mnemonic Sea with the rest of his legal firm, and had taken my mother with him, since they had barely anything in common at this point and the only way my father could think to maintain their marriage was by impressing her by splurging on luxuries - and my grandfather had decided that we ought to take this chance to spend a lot of time together.

Well, I say he'd 'decided', but that wasn't quite accurate. In the past few months, he'd taken an increasing turn for the worst. We'd only ever had a few dozen conversations where he'd seemed lucid - though even those had moments of strangeness - but at this point, his entire life was essentially coordinated by a personal assistant he had: A woman named Phyrra, who I only ever interacted with a couple of times.

It was the kind of peculiar dynamic that I assumed was common when powerful, wealthy people were enfeebled without a successor to step up and manage them. She hovered around his life as some combination of servant, nurse, and babysitter, doing her best to make arrangements in accord with his often only quasi-coherent desires, moving him around from place-to-place and attending to his increasingly embarrassing needs.

But like I said, I barely saw her. Because whenever we met, I took up that role instead.

Anyway. I'd been seeing my grandfather without telling the rest of the family, which was why this had been such an opportunity. Originally, it had been on Samium's instruction, but at this point it was self-sustaining. My mother... She wasn't the type of person who liked to rock the boat socially, not in any sense of the word - she seemed to depend in some ways on embracing the role. So she didn't like to come across as having any sort of problem with him.

But at this point, I knew all too well how she really felt, and what her reaction would be if she learned.

In a lot of ways, Shiko's mother... My mother, whatever I ought to say... Is a surprisingly astute person, even if she isn't very book smart. Unfortunately, astuteness will only get you so far in a situation that is absolutely fucking insane.

I'm going to skip to the end, if that's alright.

We'd gone shopping at some fancy boutique in downtown Oreskios, right by the coast - I don't think I ever processed the name, since at that point in time my thoughts were still often a little scattered. It was at the bottom floor of a skyscraper built in modern Saoic style, with a bronze skeleton and wooden hip-and-gable adornments accompanied by wide, thin windows. Everything about it screamed wealth to an excessive degree in a way that still dazzled me a little bit.

Samium was with us; the third and final time I would meet him, not counting the events in the sanctuary. He'd been visiting my grandfather while passing through the area. I didn't really like him being there, but then, what I liked and disliked at this point was so far from rational it's not really worth discussing.

We were in the clothing section; rows and rows of colorful garments were displayed in styles from all over the world, even the Duumvirate, all with Scants showing that they were produced by hand, and price tags to match. My grandfather had a mind to buy me things, so much as he had a mind for anything at all.

"A-Ah, look at this..." he said, his hands trembling as he held the rim of a pale green shawl. "This is-- This is quite nice, isn't it?"

"Yeah!" I said, my tone a little affected. "Yeah, it looks pretty."

He stared at me for a moment, his cloudy eyes seeming distant even as we looked directly at each other. "I remember that time, when-- We were down at the waterfront, down in, in, uh..." He pursed his lips. "Your friend, Aria, she was wearing one just like this, wasn't she?"

"Yeah," I repeated, trying to keep my tone soothing. "I remember."

"She always had a funny air to her, didn't she...?" He smiled strangely. "She always... Always wore grey. Even in the summer, it was always greys, and blacks, and..."

His gaze grew even more distant for a moment. I watched him carefully.

"I-I'm sorry," he said, blinking and looking downwards. "What was I-- What was I..."

"Aria," I said. "We were talking about Aria. Her clothes."

"Yes!" A flicker came back into his eyes, and he nodded fervently. "Yes, she was always so fashionable. Really-- Really knew how to create an impression of herself. And she was always reading those magazines..." He furrowed his brow as she smiled. "I wonder if she's doing well."

I bit my lip slightly, still smiling.

"Did you want to get this for her, █ █ █ █ █?" Samium asked patiently, stepping forward. Behind him, a clerk from the store carried all the random pieces of ridiculously expensive tat we'd picked out in a large silk bag. Apparently, that was just the sort of thing you could expect.

The world bent around you when you were wealthy. It really was intoxicating.

"Get for her...? Oh, right, er... Yes..." My grandfather cleared his throat. "Thank you, Sam. Would you like this, Wen?"

"Sure," I said, smiling and feeling indifferent. "The fabric is-- It's nice."

"Only, I wouldn't want you to feel awkward if Aria, if she... Well, if you were both wearing it."

"Um," I said, awkwardly. "That's okay."

"If you're sure, then." He passed it to me with a cheerful expression, and I in turn handed it to the clerk to be added to the hoard.

After all this time, you're probably wondering why I'm so unqualified in calling this man 'my grandfather'. I'm sure you've noticed at one point or another that often, when I describe my relationship to Utsushikome's family, I'll hesitate in some form or another; say my family, correct myself, or otherwise fall over my own words. This is because of the dissonance between what I know consciously to be true, and what sometimes feels true. Even if it ought not to.

I am a pathetic person. ...no, at this point, I suppose it'd be wrong to even say that I'm a person. I have no body of my own, no parents with whom I share blood, no home, no possessions. I'm literally already dead; a specter inhabiting someone else's flesh and blood.

That's what I know to be true. But though I'm ashamed of my own conceit, the reality is that after living as Utushikome of Fusai for well over a decade... Pretending to be her every day, in every interaction, and even recalling what should be her most private inner thoughts... And especially after deluding myself in the first few years that I could disappear, and trying to blur the line between us - the truth is that it can be hard not to think of her things as mine. To not get used to thinking of her mother and father as my mother and father. To look at her hands and remind myself that they're not mine.

That's just how people are designed, you know? At the best of times, the self is like a vacuum. It pulls the things closest to it into itself. Identity is circumstance; the doors you can open, the roles you can fit, the way people look at you, touch you, kiss you. If you have a mask with nothing underneath, that mask begins to feel like your face.

So though I'm supposed to be honest here, I'm not quite sure what honest even means in this context. Maybe total earnestness isn't really even possible at this point; that I've become a creature with even an internal nature founded on deceit, like some mythological shapeshifter.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. It's not just that I'm not a person, I'm not even really human. I'm more like some kind of grotesque parasite, burrowing into someone else's soul and tricking its veins to flow into myself. There's no bottom to the depths of my nature as an impostor. Even my thoughts aren't really my thoughts, because my brain would never have made them this way.

...sorry, I'm getting distracted, aren't I?

Well, my point is that when I say 'my mother', it feels partly like a lie.

But when I say 'my grandfather', that's not the case. It doesn't feel like anything. Because he's not really my grandfather in any sense with meaning. Shiko barely even met him, knowing him only as a shadowy figure who no one wanted to talk about and had pressured her mother financially into involvement with her conception, so there's no social connection. And his anima scripting of either Shiko or her mother had no genetic commonality (despite Linos's platitudes), being wrought for a very different purpose. So there was no ancestral connection - to whatever point that even meant anything in the modern era.

And as for the person he'd wanted to replace Shiko with... Well, they certainly weren't his daughter, that was certain.

Despite his moment of hesitation at the last possible moment, he didn't love Shiko for who she actually was. She was just some strange, perverse tool for him, just like her mother. And he certainly didn't love me.

Or maybe I'm only saying that to offset my own responsibility.

At the restaurant

We shopped for about two hours, and then went to lunch at the in-house restaurant on the upper floors. White marble and varnished wood, a graceful circle around an open kitchen, an extremely nice buffet that no one seemed to actually eat at because it was of marginally inferior quality to the stuff you could properly order off the menu. We sat at a table that was too large on chairs that were too tall, next to a view of the bay. The docks reached out before us like spindly, broken fingers, and the blue expanse of the ocean crept upwards towards the horizon all the way to the edge of the bowl of the Mimikos, the towering cloudscape a stain of bright milk where bright sky met bright water.

Everything was, again, so luxurious. Wealth, wealth, wealth. I was like a glutton. I gobbled it all down in chunks, though it wasn't the same as it had been.

The food was also very good. I was eating peacock focaccia.

My grandfather had gone off to the lavatory for a few minutes, escorted by a member of the staff, leaving Samium and I alone for a few minutes. It was the second to last time we would speak directly, both for that day and the next many, many years.

We'd been silent, but he spoke out of the blue.

"You seem unhappy," he said.

I didn't look up, cutting off another segment of the flatbread, rolling it over, and sticking it awkwardly with my fork. I was out of the habit of using cutlery, since my-- My mother usually only made Saoic food.

"...I'm, uh, sorry if I'm being rude," I said mutedly. "I didn't think we'd meet again."

"Well," he said. "I did say we probably wouldn't."

I didn't respond. There were a lot of thoughts still going through my mind after what had happened over the course of the last two weeks, so I think I was hoping he would just sort of disappear if I didn't acknowledge his presence.

"That's not what I meant, though," he said, his tone a little somber. "I mean that you seem unhappy, well, generally."

I still didn't say anything, taking another bite.

"He doesn't have long," Samium told me. "I've read the reports. Within another year, he probably won't even remember you, let alone me." He cleared his throat. "After that, failure of the brain's more essential systems comes quickly. They'll keep him alive on paper, but... Well, you won't have to be troubled with any more of this."

"It's no trouble," I said, reflexively.

He nodded. "I see."

Silence.

"Might I ask you a question?" Samium eventually inquired, his tone careful. I still wasn't able to look at him.

"Um," I said, and drank from the cup of coffee next to me. "....sure."

"Is he happy, do you think?" There was a note, just a little one, of desperation. "Since you met him?"

I hesitated. My hand came to rest on my abdomen.

The other reason that I say 'my grandfather' is that it's a good alternative to saying his name.

"I don't know," I replied. "I suppose so."

People have sides of them you will never see. I've said that before, haven't I?

I had misunderstood the person my grandfather was. Dementia is, in many ways, a revealing disease. Just as you get the purest, most unrestrained impression of a person's inner world when they're a child and they haven't yet learned to hide it, so too is it revealed when the more complex layers of the mind begin to fall away like a tattered curtain. The layer of separation between a thought and an intention becomes less and less distinct; all action becomes an extension of the self.

"A-Ahh," Samium said, before we could finish our exchange properly. "You're back."

My grandfather had returned with a member of staff, who seemed to have collected some food for him. It was a bowl of fancy green-colored soup (probably pea, though I'm no culinarian) along with what looked like a glass of milk and some bread. He seemed disoriented, looking back and forth between our table and counter behind us.

He spoke weakly. "We-- Where..."

"Here," I said, standing half-way up and trying to guide him by the shoulders. "Your seat is here."

"Oh! Oh..." He smiled distantly again. "Yes, of course. I'll just..." He looked down at the tray, and furrowed his brow. "Is this mine? I wanted something a bit more substantial."

"It's for your health, remember?" Samium said reassuringly. "We'll have something larger for dinner."

"For dinner... Well, alright," he said, settling into his seat.

His hand trembled as he carefully took a spoonful of the soup, raising it to his lips. I moved to intervene, guiding his arm as best I could without outright acting like I was trying to feed a baby.

"Thanks," he said, as a little fell from the corner of his mouth.

I nodded and smiled. Then I looked down at the bowl below. The surface shimmered slightly in the reflected midday lamplight.

One of the things I loathed myself for the most was that, if I'm being honest, I didn't hate him back then. In the present I had managed to hate him; you can learn to do it with enough practice.

But at the time, though I certainly wasn't actually growing fond of him in the way I'd been before I understood... I only really conceived of him as irritating. If you think little enough of yourself, matters which ought to inspire deep horror become simply banal. Humans find the sight of rats and other vermin squirming around in sewage disgusting or even frightening, but if you're a rat, that's just your life. You don't get upset every time feces gets in one of your wounds.

My mind was adrift from reality, like a shred of driftwood carried away in a storm. I lived in a dream world of indulgence and self-delusion, swallowed by a story I was telling myself. My grandfather no longer had a place in that story, but like Samium, he would be gone soon, so it didn't really matter.

I felt nothing genuine. Less than nothing.

"Um... I'm sorry, Wen," my grandfather muttered. "Where is this? The architecture-- Doesn't it look funny? Wen..."

"It's alright," Samium said, soothing him. "We're just at a restaurant."

"It looks so strange," he continued, frowning deeply. "What's that in the sky?"

But you know, in retrospect, I wonder if even hating him for the reasons I did was just another act of cowardice and self-deception. Looking at the situation objectively, from my perspective, he was really more deserving of pity. He'd done a lot of deeply disturbing, selfish things, but when faced with his own death while still in possession of his senses, he'd briefly become a halfway decent person.

And I'd...

Well. The fact was, I'd stacked the deck. People had known enough to expect me to hate him, and so I'd done that, because it was an easy thing to do which felt right. But I'd kept them in the dark about why they ought to despise me a hundred times more.

In the end, he was a scapegoat.

"That's the edge of the world, ...█ █ █ █ █." I spoke, my tone hesitant.

"What? No." He frowned deeply. "It looks like a wall... No, it's a bowl, isn't it?" He laughed stiffly. "Gods, I'm sorry. How did I forget something so basic? I'm not myself today." He looked back to me. "Reminds me of what you used to say about life, Wen."

No, the real reason I hated him was because what Ran had said to try and reassure me in the cafe was wrong.

We were, in truth, very much alike.

...sorry, can we come back to this?

𒊹

U𒊹bi𒊹ici𒊹n 𒊹io𒊹nclo𒊹u𒊹e | 5:02 PM | 𒊹5,535th Day

"A-Alright," Linos spoke, with surprise and a sharp intake of breath. "I guess it did grant them an advantage!"

So much for the power of the gods. This was the second piece of what amounted to stage magic in the last couple of hours.

"For fuck's sake!" Kamrusepa yelled at him, her high-class manner of speech increasingly slipping again. "Why didn't you say something back then?! If we'd known it was just a stupid trick and where it was coming from, we might not have played right into the culprit's hands! The others could still be alive!"

"I-- I didn't think of it!" Linos said with what seemed like genuine anxiety, throwing his hands in the air defensively. "It didn't occur to me with everything else going on!"

"You are lucky you are even more overtly incompetent than you are duplicitous, sir, or I would be very much inclined to suspect ill-intent at this point," she went on, through gritted teeth.

"Kam," Ran said tersely. "Stay calm. If we start throwing out actual accusations--"

"Calm?" she replied, indignant. "I think I'm being practically saintly for the situation!"

"Wait, so, does this mean the culprit's been workin' from outta here this whole time?" Ptolema asked, frowning as she took another look around the surrounding area. "If they set something like this up?"

"Maybe not the whole time," Seth said. "It could have been on a timer. But judging by those footprints, someone's been in here."

Kam glanced at him for a moment, but seemed to stop herself from saying something, evidently biding her time.

I could tell that she, and at least Ran, had caught up with at least the greater part of the conclusions that drew me here.

"I'm, ah, still a little surprised a place like this even exists," Theo said, prodding the edge of the grass with his feet nervously before turning back in the direction we'd come from. "It looks like you can see the other bioenclosures pretty plainly from here... At least, the parts that are still lit up. You probably could monitor people to a, er, limited degree, but I'm not sure it would make up for how difficult it is to get here..."

"Yeah, especially considering that it'd be tough to even get here while the Power was shut off in the other bioenclosure," Ptolema pointed out, scratching her head. "I mean, you'd have to hold your breath, I guess."

Theo nodded absently, then looked to his father. "Dad, is there any monitoring equipment here?"

"No, Theo," Linos replied worriedly. "Like I said: It's not in use. And even when it was, it was-- Well, niche." He glanced around uneasily. "We really shouldn't be here. It's not safe."

But just because the boys - potentially, or maybe likely excluding Theodoros, I wasn't sure - had been lying to us, and had somehow known about this place and had some interest in it, didn't mean they were necessarily involved in the murders.

Throwing everything I could bring to the fore that seemed connected at the metaphorical wall and seeing what stuck, a few things came to mind. Assuming that Fang hadn't been talking completely out of their ass back about how they'd been led to the sanctuary back in the main hall despite apparently having lied to us about the date of their arrival, and assuming the theory Kam and I had developed about their group not having arrived from the Aetherbridge held true... Then something began to take shape.

Either before or when the boys had just arrived in the sanctuary, there'd been some kind of fight in which Seth had been injured. And Sacnicte had seen something which she went on to use to extort Seth (at this point, I doubted it had just been the fight, which had seemed like a somewhat strange explanation even back when I'd first heard it). Following this, Bardiya, Seth and Ezekiel had discreetly scouted this place out.

And something had seriously disturbed Theo. He'd wanted to talk to me about it on his first day here, but by the second, something had happened to put him off. With these details, a rough hypothesis, more based on intuition than logic, could be made as to an order of events.

Prior to the weekend, the Order (or at least someone in it, like Neferuaten with Fang) must have made arrangements with the four of them to travel to the sanctuary separately, probably significantly earlier in the day than us, for an unknown purpose. We'll call that purpose 'Purpose X'.

Whatever Purpose X was, it led to some kind of internal dissent within their group. A fight - or perhaps discipline by whoever was handling them on the way here, at a stretch - and then a plan to take some manner of action concealed from the Order. So there would be two layers of secrecy: First Purpose X, then this act of subversion.

Theo, who seemed on the periphery of all this, had probably wanted to tell me about this plan, or maybe just the situation in general... But had been forced into silence by the other members of the group? That felt like a total guess.

Finally, they'd confirmed the location of this place while covering their tracks.

To do that, they'd have to have known it existed in the first place. And have a reason to want to be here.

So... Whatever we'd find here... There was a good chance it would have some connection to Purpose X. Information about it? A way to escape from it?

I shook my head. My thinking is getting too abstract.

In a way, after the insane bombshell Fang just dropped, this all felt like small potatoes. But somehow, I couldn't shake the sense that if I could just understand what was going on here, everything else might start to fall into place.

"What exactly is the purpose of this part of the facility?" I asked Linos.

"It's really not relevant," he replied, agitated. "I don't know how you knew how to find this place, but again: It's abandoned. We should focus on getting to relative safety first and foremost. For all we know, Lilith and Mehit could already be trying to send help. And the culprit could be out there doing whatever they like in the sanctuary at large."

"Sir," I insisted.

Linos flinched slightly. "I-- Utsu, I never pushed the issue of what you were doing back up in the intensive care room, and I'd really appreciate it if you could return the favor right now."

"Answer the bloody question!" Kamrusepa yelled at him. For once, her tunnel vision comes in handy.

"F-Fine!" Linos said, through gritted teeth. "Look. I explained everything that was happening with the Apega project, didn't I? With our efforts to find a means to communicate with the entity?" He gestured his hand outwardly. "This is the site that was used for those experiments. That's the reason for the... Unusual character of the flora."

"Kinda an understatement," Seth said.

"Experiments plural," Kamrusepa stated.

"Well, yes, we didn't go straight to trying to implant a child with an alien intelligence, miss Tuon," Linos replied flatly.

"Why does this place look so much like the entrance?" Ptolema asked uneasily. "It's creepy."

Like I said, now that I was looking a bit closer, it wasn't quite identical to the guest bioenclosure. Other than the absence of the entryways and the trees being slightly different, the building at the center, though of an eerily similar design, was larger; three stories instead of two. The bathing area off to the side was also a little smaller.

"That's... Complicated, and even less relevant," Linos explained. "The short version is that this used to be the entrance, but it became unusable because, well... Look around you."

"And you made another that looks basically 100% the same?" Ptolema asked. "That's weird."

"The whole facility is a recreation of another place," Ran said. "So it makes sense. The weirder part is the little differences."

"I'm not joking when I said it's dangerous here," Linos reiterated. "We left this place in a bad state. The grass being enough to cut your guts open isn't the end of it - there are probably even worse anomalies up ahead."

He was obviously trying to get us not to investigate the area, but at the same, my gut told me that this wasn't exactly a lie, either.

Still, it felt like we couldn't back down. If the truth didn't come out about what close to half of our group was hiding, then even if they weren't culpable, that lack of knowledge could get us killed. If there really were two groups - one centered around Hamilcar, and another capitalizing on whatever he had been doing - then it went without saying that the second had to be significantly informed about what was going on behind the scenes. They could easily play us against each other.

And that wasn't even factoring in Fang's posthumous revelation. If this really had all happened before, somehow... if we were trapped in some kind of time paradox... Then what if they weren't the only one passing down information?

Or more yet, what if someone actually remembered?

"Kam," I said, looking to her. "Before we take a look inside, can you do the test? To see if what Fang said was true?"

"'Before we take a look inside?'" Linos cut in. "We can't--"

"Fine," Kam said, taking out her scepter. "I still think it's an absurd idea, but let's get it out of the way." She glanced about suspiciously. "Su, Ran, you come over and share the incantation. I don't want there to be any room for doubt."

"What about the rest of us?" Seth asked.

"You can grab their hands too," Kam clarified. "I don't care."

This time, absolutely everyone ended up deciding to observe the result, for understandable reasons. Theo linked with my hand, Ptolema with Ran's, and so on and so forth.

"Here's how this is going to work," Kamrusepa explained. "I'll cast the Time-Inferring Arcana twice, with one second between the two. If the result is unchanged or more than a single second apart, then that means that normal linear time is somehow... Compromised," she explained. "Though again: That shouldn't even be possible. The incantation literally draws from the Tower of Asphodel itself. Unless we're trapped in some kind of bubble reality..."

"I mean, it did sound like that was what the note was saying," Ran commented.

Kam clicked her tongue. "I'm just going to do it."

She awkwardly raised her scepter with the hand that was gripping mine, and spoke the words.

But instead of comprehensible information, what flowed into my mind--

G*&^R97ehrf78T^&8674g8876^&*RF&gr84hH67%re%5W686^*d

--was pure noise.

"Ahh!" Theo jumped slightly. Several other people also flinched a bit.

"What was that?" Ptolema asked, grimacing a little.

"I-- I don't know," Kam said, and bit her lip. "Sorry, my index means that I sometimes get a little junk data when I'm divining. Usually I can just offset it, but every so often it's a little worse than normal." She looked strangely agitated. "I'll do it again."

Once again, she spoke the words--