The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

U𒊹bi𒊹ici𒊹n 𒊹io𒊹nclo𒊹u𒊹e | 5:23 PM | 𒊹5,535th Day

It just didn't add up.

When he'd given me the strange 'key', or whatever the hell it was, Zeno had told me it represented the Order's most revolutionary discovery-- One that would change the entire world. But it'd been established several times by now that the Apega project - both in its original form as an attempt to commune with entropy, and then the effort to salvage it into a much more straightforward age-reversing machine - was a decades-old failure. Everything connected to it was a relic, including this place.

So why would Zeno have described an object connected to it in such a way, when by all accounts, even if he'd helped her with the setup as Fang had suggested, he'd been as surprised by the specifics of Neferuaten's stunt as anyone?

It felt like I'd gone over this all in my head ten times by now. What was it that Anna had told me? In failure, potential was found. And that the more modest project they'd ultimately decided to pursue - causing my grandfather to finally leave/be effectively expelled from the organization - was a 'treatment for dementia' based on the findings from the Apega project.

So was that treatment something to do with Egomancy that they'd stumbled on the seeds of in trying to staple a sleeping god on to someone's pneuma? And the object I'd been given the key modification to an induction bed required to make it work?

That felt like the obvious conclusion if I only considered Anna's words... But if I went back to what Zeno had told me, it instantly fell apart.

Again, it just didn't justify the hyperbole. It wasn't that finding a treatment for associative collapse wasn't a big deal - it was a huge deal, one that would surely buy some people hundreds of years of longer life and, if it eliminated it altogether, maybe start to change our entire perspective on death as a culture. But Zeno had explicitly said that this went above and beyond an extension to lifespan, describing it as some grand inflection point in human history; something akin to the discovery of iron. Even an outright cure wouldn't merit that level of excitement.

And if it had been what he was talking about, what would giving me some random component used to facilitate the treatment even accomplish? He'd told me he wanted me to 'share in the bounty', that I had some entitlement to the change this was going to bring about because of my connection to my grandfather. What had that even meant? If it was wealth, certainly some truly world-shattering technological discovery would result in everyone involved being showered with accolades and wealth, but that was a matter of legal ownership. Having a literal piece of said technology wouldn't mean anything!

So why...?

Maybe I should have been thinking about the conversation we'd had more from the start. It wasn't difficult to work out the general misunderstanding about me that a lot of the Order, or at least Anna, had - they'd probably known about my grandfather's ambitions to resurrect his 'daughter' from the years of their relationship with him, and with that portrait which must have laid in his box in the initiation chamber, there was an obvious conclusion to draw about my identity. The only reason Neferuaten made that assumption was probably on account of our relationship.

But Zeno? He'd obviously known about that too - he'd specifically referenced how my anima scripting had been engineered to cultivate a resemblance to that woman in our very first interaction - but there was more to it than that. He'd been assuming something else altogether. Like the two of us were just playing a game, and my outward persona was nothing more than an amusing front.

"If you want to commit to this out-of-your depth child roleplay even in my company, then I can't prevent it-- Shit, I could even understand the motive."

"Unlike the others, I still retain something of a sense of loyalty, even if it's against my better sense."

From our very first conversation, I'd suspected that Zeno was a Witch - not like me, but in the traditional sense. He referenced events and folklore from the old world with a casual quality that someone born in the modern age likely wouldn't, unless they were incredibly pretentious, and his detachment from his physical body was a typical symptom for someone in that position.

And obviously, my grandfather had also been a Witch-- Obsessed with his life before the collapse to the point that it ruined him.

Had that shared trait led the two of them to cultivate a closer relationship than he had with anyone else on the council? One which had led him to an altogether different assumption, which in turn informed the value I'd be able to get from this trinket? Just what did he think was going on?

Roleplay. That word stuck in my mind as soon as I'd recalled it, like gristle from a tough piece of meat. Roleplay.

"We're going to need to fly a bit into the air if we're going to scan the top floor," Ran told the others, her eyes narrow. "We're pushing the limits of my range."

Because we had nothing to engrave and anchor the incantation to like we'd used back in the security center, it was only possible to explore the building remotely within the standard range of incantations. (In retrospect, we probably ought to have tried to recover Theo and Ran's drone after the Everblossom had exploded, but that was when we'd still been expecting to escape within the hour.) Thus, Ran was having to do everything directly.

"Should we really be wasting eris on this?" Seth said, anxious. "Again, we're really vulnerable. And maybe if we got out of this weird place, Kam's incantation would actually work."

"Flight is cheap," Kam said, holding up her scepter and casting the Form-Levitating Arcana." And we're almost done. If there's nothing else to see, we'll soon be on our way."

"There's definitely gonna be something up there," Ptolema said, crossing her arms. "It's a spooky phantom floor that's not supposed to be there."

"Real ironclad logic," Ran said, casting the incantation herself. Off to the side, Ezekiel muttered something. He seemed increasingly out of sorts. I kept an eye on him, starting to worry he might try something.

We hadn't found anything to indicate that anyone from the boys group had been in here so far, and at this point, I wasn't sure if we would. I was starting to have doubts again. I mean, what even was my endgame here? Part of me had been hoping they'd just confess to whatever was going on, but it didn't seem like that was going to happen. And what if they - Seth and Ezekiel - really were the killers?

There was so much I didn't understand, and my courage was starting to leave me. The constant nagging sense of something being wrong that still hadn't completely gone away certainly didn't help.

"Is there anything up there, dad?" Theo asked.

"I don't know. Some old records, maybe." He glanced back towards the entrance.

"Please be aware that the third floor is a restricted area, only to be accessed by members of the Discretionary Council," Aruru informed us.

Linos flinched, looking like he had a mind to blow the thing's head off. Kam smirked with dark amusement as she rose into the air.

Leaving the golem behind, we ascended several meters into the air, coming to meet the windows of the top floor. Unlike the lower floors, there were dark curtains drawn shut behind the glass, preventing me from obtaining even a preliminary impression of the contents of the chamber. Not that we'd have to wait very long.

My line of sight from Ran's incantation followed along to the far end of the chamber with the induction bed, eventually arriving at a doorway in the corner. I realized, with some unease, that its location was exactly parallel to that of the entrance to my room in the guest house. Even the wood of the frame was similar, the shape of the doorknob, like one had been converted into the other...

Our vision passed through it into a very narrow room that led immediately to a steep staircase, followed by a long hallway - all in complete darkness, without so much as an indication that there would be light under better circumstances. Even without being in there physically, it somehow gave the impression that the walls were closing in. Further, there were strange, dark stains on the stonework, like something had happened here right before the entire structure was abandoned.

"It's, ah." Theo bit his lip. "Rather unsettling."

"Y-Yeah," Seth said, with a stiff little laugh. "Liminal spaces, right?"

"Man, that stuff is dumb," Ptolema remarked, seemingly unaffected by the tension of the situation. "People gettin' creeped out by hallways. Like everybody lives in a loft or something."

Our view continued forward, until finally it arrived at a second door at the far end, and passed through.

Beyond the threshold was another chamber that took up more or less the entire floor, though this one was anything but sparse. Rather, it was packed so densely that we could only see a fraction of the contents.

Neferuaten, what felt at this point like a year ago, had chatted to us about how rooms in the sanctuary tended to suffer from libraryfication - and indeed, I'd seen a lot of different rooms at this point with a good number of books. But this was the first one that looked singularly like a library. Tightly-packed rows of shelves towered all the way to the roof, packed with everything from conventional books, to echo mazes, to even traditional scrolls. It rivaled the one we had at the academy. There had to be tens, maybe over a hundred thousand texts.

Something in my mind clicked. Find the archive on the top floor of the main building.

Wait, no, that couldn't--

"Woah," Ptolema said, eyes wide. "That's a lot of books."

"It certainly is," Kam said pointedly. "Not what one would expect from an abandoned building."

Linos bit his tongue.

But that was the thing. The presence of the dust - present in abundance even here - meant that, discarding a bizarrely high-effort attempt to make it look otherwise, it really was abandoned. Which meant the question was, 'why would they have left all this behind?'

As if that's even close to the most pressing concern right now.

"I don't even know where to begin here," Ran said, looking as surprised as I was. "If there's evidence among all this crap, I think we might be fucked."

"Let's not lose heart," Kam said, rolling her tongue along the inside of her cheek. "After all, there was something interesting laid out right for us on the 1st floor. Maybe fate will see fit to treat us with kindness a second time." She looked to Linos. "I'm terribly sorry to be so consistently pushy, sir, but why is this here?"

Linos didn't reply for a long time, simply staring downwards towards the road. When he finally did, his voice was oddly quiet and even, like he was barely holding something back. "...this is our old archive, miss Tuon," he explained. "Before we moved everything to the research tower."

"Is that right?" she raised an eyebrow. "And why is it--"

"Please stop this," Linos interjected.

Kam frowned, looking a combination of confused and irritated. "Stop asking you questions? Do you really feel that you're in a position to object, sir?"

He shook his head. "It's just not fair," he almost whispered. "It wasn't supposed to turn out like this."

She blinked. "What?"

His whole face scrunched up, and he rubbed his eyes. "There's nothing more I can tell you," he said. "It's just a variety of books related to and on our research we accumulated over the years. There isn't anything more to it than that." He ran his hands down his face. "For god's sake, can we just get out of here? Why did you have to bring us here, Utsu? However much you think it's going to bring things to light, it's not--" He cut himself off, shaking his head. "It's just not."

The tension in our group was growing more and more palpable. What was Linos hiding? Why did it feel increasingly like there was something going over my head?

I really was tired.

"Su," Ran said. "That note you found mentioned an archive on the top floor."

So I wasn't the only one who noticed. Kam obviously hadn't, though, because she almost jumped a bit at the realization, her eyes going wide. "Y-Yeah."

"And it turned out to be years old, right?" she went on. "Maybe it was pointing to this place."

"Not years, only a little over a year," Kamrusepa, who nevertheless picked up on the point quickly, observed. "And I believe the phrasing was 'find the archive in the main building'. Rather a peculiar way to refer to a facility that's apparently long defunct... Unless, perhaps, whoever wrote it isn't quite up to date on the state of things here." She chuckled slightly, her eyes gleaming with a strange energy. "I suppose that would make perfect sense for the coordinator. Yet, I wonder if there's another explanation..."

I frowned at her, wondering what was going through her mind.

"Geez," Ptolema said. "I'd almost forgotten about all that. I guess whoever wrote it must have wanted us to find something here... Well, wanted somebody to find it, I guess."

I nodded as she spoke. The question, though, was what? And how had such an old set of instructions ended up in my hands in the first place?

I noticed Seth was making a listless expression, his eyes gazing into the middle distance. This has shocked him. He quickly recovered, though, turning his head towards the rest of us. "I mean, this could be a coincidence. I mean, you guys did find the armory using those directions, and that seems a hell of a lot more like a 'main building' to me."

Kam stared at him for a moment. "Mm," she hummed.

"I, er, don't think it ever came up..." Theo said, "but did you leave the notebook unattended between the time you first got it from the class coordinator and when you found it, Su?"

I considered the question. Right, I'd thought about this earlier, too. "Well, I put it with the rest of my luggage, and I didn't look at it until the night we were first here. So it was locked in my room with the rest for a few hours."

"But other than that?" he prompted.

"I think the only time it was out of sight was when I handed it over to Sacnicte to take to my door while I was talking to Linos," I explained. "That would've been for about fifteen minutes, I suppose."

"Ran, why don't you keep us moving while we're musing on this?" Kam requested. "As Seth pointed out, we need to be careful with our eris supply."

"Sure," Ran said, our view of the room shifting slowly forward.

My eyes scanned the surrounding shelves, trying to get a better impression of the texts being kept here. One detail I was only just absorbing that set this place apart from a normal library was that almost all the shelves were behind locked glass casing, though when I say 'locked', I don't mean in a particularly serious way - just your standard old-fashioned mortise lock that even I could probably break open with a blunt object, if not just shatter the glass.

It wasn't weird unto itself that they'd be sealed up for protection, since the library probably contained sensitive material that wantonly making replicated copies of could be dangerous. But I wondered why you'd even bother if you were going to go about it in such a low effort way. Even if this had once been part of the 'main building', it wasn't as though it was likely to be subject to the kind of casual theft that was likely the most it'd deter; the sanctuary was already an incredibly secret, tightly-controlled environment. And besides, most people who came here were arcanists anyway, for whom a lock like that would be no obstacle at all.

So why bother? Maybe there was an engraved component, too?

"Ran," I asked, "can you cast the Anomaly-Divining Arcana on these bookshelves?"

She looked puzzled by the request, but shrugged slightly. "Sure." She spoke the words again. "Nothing."

I scratched my head. Why am I even bothering with minutiae like this...? If there were any incantations, they'd have long failed anyway.

I decided to pay attention to the actual books instead. Linos's description proved simultaneously accurate, while also completely failing to convey the scope of the collection. Just from the few shelves we were passing, I could see volumes covering everything even tangentially related to the pursuit of immortality - medical books and research, yes, but also physics, philosophical theory, environmental and social sustainability, even fiction. It was obsessive in its exhaustiveness, the kind of collection you'd expect to see hoarded by an unimaginably wealthy obsessive more than a group of scholars.

This was, now that I thought about it, exactly the sort of thing I'd been expecting to see the entire weekend from what I'd known about the Order. I just hadn't expected it to take too long.

Oh, and there was banned material too, and not even particularly hidden. Research on the Wyrm and their technology, on Egomancy and artificed superintelligence, on extreme bodily modification and the kind of transcendent re-engineering of the human species that the Covenant had buried 1400 years ago. Modifying the human brain to improve intelligence and re-engineer base instinct, control systems to manipulate and subvert the cognition of whole populations, dissertations on building new humans and transhuman beings from scratch; no taboo, however great, went unviolated.

"Gods," Kam said, apparently so taken by the sight herself that her zeal faded for a moment. "The scope of this."

"Y-Yeah..." Ptolema said anxiously. "Feel like I'm committing some kinda crime just by looking at this stuff."

"Look," Theodoros remarked, pointing upwards (even if this gesture was essentially meaningless, since everything in a 360 degree view was being broadcast directly into our minds all at once). "They even have science from the old world. The Kecharitomene Monopati, the scrolls of the old magi..."

I shifted my attention, and sure enough, he was right. At the back of the room, on the highest shelf, were a series of ancient scrolls that must have been as old as the Exodus. They were labelled in Syriac, but I understood enough from the similarities to Ysaran to make out rough translations: The Construction of the Iron Vessel. The Affixation of the Iron Vessel to the Flesh of the Cerebrum. The Signs of Proper Synchronicity. The Growth and Blossoming of the Iron Vessel and Ascendance of the Newborn Immaculate Lord...

These were records of the fundamental technology of the Iron Princes, the rulers of the Imperial Era in its final millennium; the means by which a human mind could be slowly transferred to a machine of iron. This was beyond forbidden knowledge. If the Grand Alliance knew there was a copy of this here, they'd have a starspire blow up the entire site from space.

It was a story everyone knew. In the latter days of the old world, society had become exponentially prosperous but incomprehensibly stratified, with every member of the ruling class possessing a trillion times the wealth of the average person, with an anima script so augmented they were practically a different species not only from society at large, but even one another. So when a means to transcend their mortal bodies altogether was discovered, they abandoned research into conventional longevity - stopping at about 700, not far from what we'd made our way back to without iron - to attain an existence beyond humanity.

They'd covered the sun in photovoltaic panels, and built minds for themselves as vast as oceans, where they could rule over their own artificial realities like gods. The rest of the human population lived and died by their leave, either as specks of detritus on Earth and the smaller colonies spread about the solar system and its close neighbors, or in a lesser state of transcendence within their domains. It was paradise and hell at once. All progress ground to a halt, and the distinction between real and unreal ceased to matter.

That is, until the vacuum collapse, its point of origin so conspicuously close on the galactic scale to mankind that some people still speculated we'd somehow caused it ourselves, or that it had been an attack by extraterrestrials so advanced they were beyond our ability to even perceive, like elephants stepping on an anthill.

Even with decades to prepare and theories on how to stop the problem, or even just to outrun it, society instead fell into chaos. The Iron Princes killed each other, many having developed priorities which were utterly alien to any ordinary humans. Most people were dead before the collapse actually approached, and even when the final plan was put into motion, the survivors fought over who would get the chance to survive like crabs in a bucket. The Tower of Asphodel hadn't meant to only contain about 100,000 people.

It wasn't as if the technology would even work in the modern day; obviously, it was all founded on iron. But even the principles, on the off-chance they could be adapted for the Power and modern logic engines, were unspeakably dangerous. Anathema to the Covenant, and its aspiration - however often theoretical - of a united, fundamentally equal, and discernibly human race.

"How the fuck do you even have copies of that?" Ran asked Linos, with a frown of disbelief.

"Our Order has been around for a long time, miss Hoa-Trinh," Linos replied in a small voice.

"It shouldn't even exist," Seth said. "I thought they, like, blew up the ship that was trying to ferry copies into the Tower." He hesitated. "Or, well, some shit like that-- History isn't exactly my thing."

"I'm surprised you haven't heard the story, Ran," Kam intoned. "Since I know now that you like to follow folk rumor. It's said that a group from Uana party had it engraved into their memory before the end of the world, and then transcribed the entire thing from scratch early in the Mourning Period."

"Fucking Uana, huh," Seth said flatly.

"Is this what you didn't want us to see, dad?" Theo asked, looking down at his father.

Linos didn't reply. He looked downwards at his hands, seeming to be deep in thought.

"It certainly is about as incriminating as it gets," Kamrusepa remarked. "But we're not looking for evidence that shows the Order breaks the law-- We know that already. Under normal circumstances, I'd probably find this all rather exciting. So you needn't fear, Linos." She smiled to herself with an almost sadistic quality. "No, let's keep our goal in mind. We need to find who's been in here - who set up the projector. Do that, and we have our culprit."

"Is-- Is it really that simple, though?" I asked, unable to stop myself from glancing nervously at Seth.

"Well, we'll see, won't we?" She chuckled darkly to herself. "Let's continue, Ran."

"Yeah," she replied. "Alright."

In spite of her cavalier attitude, I don't think even Kam was prepared for what we were about to see.

Ran advanced our view forward to the middle of the room. Here, as you'd expect, there was a gap between the rows of shelves where one could walk between them, and indeed, all the way to the back of the very large hallway. It wasn't obvious from outside on account of the lighting, but within the vision - where the Power showed us everything in perfect detail regardless of lighting - I could now see that the windows on this floor were all stylized with cultural symbols representing immortality: The ankh, the tree of life, the ouroboros. It was like a cathedral for defying death.

Additionally, a prominent piece of the decor became visible that hadn't been until now. Hanging from the ceiling by several heavy metal chains, at the highest point of the slanted rooftop, was an art fixture. Appearing as though it was wrought from silver, it depicted an idealized man with wild hair and a beard - Gilgamesh, I had to presume from the context clues - standing atop the world, his head held high.

Not the current world, mind you, but the old one; a sphere with three great continents. The statue held both arms in the air in triumph, each clasping something: On the right, a serpent, its neck broken and hanging limp. On the left, a flower of which the petals bloomed into the rough shape of a bright red heart, veins and all.

But that wasn't all we saw. Because nailed gruesomely with spikes of dark wood to the metal of the left arm was Lilith, her body hanging prone and the fabric of her robes half-undone and trailing down to her feet. And on the right, in a similar but much more gruesome state - blood having flowed from multiple wounds on her chest all the way down her dress - her mother.

But though this was a shock, it wasn't what made everyone - Linos, Ezekiel, Kamrusepa, everyone ­- audibly gasp. No, I suspect that was the third body, hanging directly from the neck, body nailed directly into the heart of Gilgamesh with what looked like a piece of ivory.

It was Anna. But not the Anna who'd been with us the for last several hours until she'd met her end in the contact paradox. No, this was an Anna who couldn't exist.

The old Anna we'd met the first day. Her worn-down body stripped nude, every wrinkle and scar from her countless body part replacement surgeries in plain view. And on her flesh were carved words.

I CANNOT BE DECEIVED

I KNOW ALL

I SEE ALL

THERE IS NO ESCAPE