Chapter 85 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 85: The Rotting Garden 03
A dim light gradually filtered through the chaos, slightly dazzling.
Lucita closed her eyes, then opened them again —
Her feet found solid ground.
Before her was a summer garden in the night.
A narrow gravel path. On either side, shrubs were dense enough to swallow a person's shadow. Fireflies hung between the trees like stars, their soft green glow dim and steady. The damp fragrance of flowers and trees, carrying the moisture of a nearby lake, drifted everywhere.
Beside the path was a small lake. Half-open blue water lilies pressed close to the surface, and the water reflected the lights from the castle pavilions.
The still ripples were coated in a layer of dark gold.
A graceful Romanesque long hall stood beyond. The first floor’s ceiling soared high; a row of floor-to-ceiling glass windows, each taller than a person, ran along the wall. Lamplight inside stained the entire garden with a soft, diffused glow.
Behind the windows moved silhouettes — the clink of glasses and the shadows of expansive skirts swaying in the dance hall, as though pressed into the glass like prints.
The wind had stalled. The clouds had stopped. A clear amber full moon was cradled by delicate wisps of cloud in a sky of deep blue.
Lucita reached out to pluck one of the fireflies, but her hand closed on nothing.
Everything here was shadow, which was why it all stood motionless, like a clumsy watercolor painting, frozen in place.
She had passed through every kind of world layer, yet this place gave her a sense of strangeness she hadn't felt in a long time.
Lucita tried to perceive the truth of it.
She passed through the sound world, the scent world, the spirit world, the color world, the spatial world, one after another…
She nearly lost herself threading through thousands of world layers, yet found nothing unusual.
All the world layers — every element and every force that composed a complete world — were still.
She frowned, rubbing the fingers that had grasped at nothing, and walked forward.
Along the gravel path, over a small stone bridge crossing a stream, then through a low gate, nothing seemed to change.
A fairly typical noble garden arrangement. With Lucita's limited understanding of the human world, drawn mostly from books, she couldn't make out anything unusual.
The main gate was open. The doorwoman stood in a neat waistcoat, bent slightly in a bow, apparently flattering a pretty young man who was just entering.
Even as translucent shadows passing through, Lucita instinctively stepped around them, as though they still existed in the same dimension as she did. A needless gesture that brought her useless comfort.
The hall inside was not crowded. Magnificent dresses in a spectrum of colors, graceful young men and uncles, quite pleasing to the eye, and pearls and jewels of every hue casting brilliant light in the lampglow.
She skirted the dance floor and walked to the center of the hall, and it was there that she finally noticed something wrong.
On the gold-and-red embroidered carpet, a floor covered in shards of glass. From the larger pieces, one could tell it had once been an elegant wine glass.
Crimson wine had soaked half into the carpet; the other half hung suspended in the low air, caught in the act of being flung to the floor, the splattered droplets like thick blood.
Some shards of glass were also frozen in the low air, as though they had struck the floor and been flung back up again. Mixed with the splattered wine, there was a certain ruined and absurd beauty.
Beside this, a young man in a yellow dress was staring in horror at the spot where the glass had shattered, as though someone had once been standing there.
Someone had seized his wine glass and dashed it to the floor.
The young man had been startled, and had turned this way, perhaps hadn't yet had time to react before time stopped…
Lucita followed the carpet forward.
Ahead was the center of the hall. A staircase rose in tiers, ascending to the far depths of the hall, its upper end lost from view.
She climbed.
Halfway up, the view above came into sight.
A middle-aged woman in a deep crimson cape and iron armor stood with one hand on a longsword, commanding the eye at the center of the scene.
Her expression was grave; her authority needed no anger to assert itself. She stood near the exit on the left side, head slightly bowed, saying something to a beautiful young man.
The young man wore a deep green silk dress, its many-layered skirts studded with clear green gems. Gold hair fell loose across his shoulders; his slight frame was luminous white.
He wore an expression of gentle compliance, lips just barely pressed together, hands folded — restrained and refined.
Though Lucita had no particular ability to appreciate male beauty, one incontrovertible fact presented itself: this was the most radiant jewel in the entire hall.
Even the knights stationed at the pillars, swords in hand, had let their gazes drift discreetly toward this young man; the other young men and attendants clustered around him paled by comparison.
If this were a painting, the middle-aged woman and the young man would be its center. The arrangement of people and the gradations of their dress all guided a viewer's eyes to notice them first.
Lucita's gaze, too, was claimed by this focal point before she could look away, and only then did she shift her attention to take in the rest of the scene.
And so she finally saw, upon the throne at the very center: a woman in a drab, dusty gray waistcoat.
The woman was utterly out of place in this hall.
She wore a worn leather cap, a matching old waistcoat, and boots whose toes were powdered with dust, a deep crease cutting across the middle of each.
Beneath the armrest of the chair sat a small oak toolbox. It looked to have seen many years of use. Its owner had clearly treasured it, and the lacquer had worn to a smooth, rich patina.
The woman was young, somewhere around thirty. Her cap pulled low over her face, she lay reclined in the throne, radiating exhaustion from every pore, as though caught in some uneasy dream.
Everything about her declared she did not belong in that seat, but Lucita's bewilderment lasted only a second before something else claimed her attention —
The woman's body, leaning against the chair, had just slid down slightly.
The movement was tiny, but thanks to Lucita's extraordinary dynamic vision, and the contrast of the eternal stillness all around, it was magnified infinitely in her eyes.
Lucita's pupils contracted. She began to study the woman in earnest.
Looking carefully, she could see the woman's chest rising and falling in slow, shallow motion, not very visible, but unmistakably marking the rhythm of long, deep breaths.
Lucita had spent enough time in this silent, eternally motionless world that she had nearly lost her sense of time passing altogether.
That feeling of being unmoored, like duckweed with nothing to mark the hours, was deeply unpleasant.
This woman before her appeared to be the only "change."
She was alive. She was moving.
She had to be something extraordinary, perhaps even the key to the secret this world was keeping.
She might be dangerous. But in this phantom world, Lucita had no ability to exert any kind of will, to bring about even the smallest change.
If there was only one road before her, she would walk it in the end.
Lucita moved without much hesitation, reached out to test the waters, and tapped the back of the woman's limp hand. "Hello."
She expected waking her would be difficult, perhaps requiring special methods. Instead, the moment she touched the woman's skin, the woman sprang upright.
Lucita: ...Fine. I've clearly been reading too many novels.
The woman saw Lucita and suddenly went still, staring at her for a long, long moment.
The expression on her face was too complex for Lucita's limited experience to decipher, so after a moment's pause and uncertainty, she simply pretended not to notice it. "Hello?"
This single syllable seemed to be some kind of trigger. The woman let out a long breath from deep in her chest, and settled back against the headrest.
Lucita said nothing and waited for the woman to speak.
The woman opened her mouth, but no sound came for a long time.
She seemed to be calibrating something: her lips pressed together and parted several times, until at last she got it working, and produced a strangely halting word: "...Hel — lo."
The intonation carried a faint echo of Lucita's own pattern.
A preposterous idea rose in Lucita's mind.
She took up the thread of conversation to find out more: "Could you tell me where this is?" At the same time, she opened a slit into the spiritual cosmos, observing the spirit world.
Sure enough: in the spiritual cosmos, this was a dense field of stars.
Every star had stopped turning. Stardust drifting through the cosmos had settled over them all like sediment, as though they were ruins that had lain unchanged for many years.
Only one star still turned slowly. It looked immense, but its rate of rotation was visibly sluggish and lagged compared to a normal mind-body, like an old, worn cog that had grown too heavy.
Her spiritual tendrils crept closer.
Despite this mind-body’s apparent scale — it was built from many accumulated layers of thought — drawing close made it clear how very old it had become.
Its cocoon shell had grown fragile, so that the constantly outward-leaking spiritual waves were far stronger than those of an ordinary person.
But sensing carefully, wherever Lucita's tendrils reached, she found only gray and despair.
In this spiritual cosmos that seemed to have been forgotten by time, the fact that it continued to turn at all was a kind of miracle.
Lucita had posed her question and was waiting in silence, when at last the woman assembled a laborious string of words: "This is... the Fenrir Empire. The holy city of Aeternum... the estate of General Iris."
Now Lucita was on familiar ground.
The history of the Fenrir Empire reached back two hundred years.
This empire, named for the moon, had once unified the continent and maintained a century of strong rule. Until in its final years it declined and was swallowed by three noble houses, giving rise to the three kingdoms of Spring, Kenting, and Eaton.
Aeternum was their holy city, the capital at the empire's height, which had even been daring enough to name itself "Eternal."
As for Iris, a celebrated imperial general, around whom countless people had written books and biographies, both in her lifetime and after. Lucita could not have been more familiar with the name.
General Iris had been most active in the early period of the empire's founding, at the peak of its power. She had accumulated accolade upon accolade, only to die in the end from a cup of poisoned wine, an unexpected consequence of mutual suspicion between her and the king.
Which meant this era was approximately three hundred years in the past.
No wonder the mind-body was so vast and layered, so unlike an ordinary person's. It had been accumulating thoughts for three hundred years.
Lucita's conjecture was confirmed.
This was a living, breathing person trapped here.
She didn't know why time had stopped in this place, but this woman was clearly and lucidly awake. Without doubt she had been imprisoned in this silence for far too long. Long enough that even her language had begun to degrade, until she could only produce a few broken, labored words.
Now it was the woman's turn to ask: "You... are, what kind, of person... how did you, come in, here?"
"I don't know either." Lucita skipped the first question, which was harder to answer, and said honestly: "I only heard the sound of a glass breaking, and the next moment I was here."
A glass...
The woman's gaze dropped slightly. She rose from her seat and walked forward a few steps.
Down through the staircase below, the shattered wine glass — half of its fragments suspended still in the air — continued to hover in the low stillness, crimson as blood.
Yes, it had been so long. Long enough that she had forgotten the normal world had gravity; that a broken glass normally fell to the floor, rather than holding this position unchanged for three hundred years.
She had grown so accustomed to the sight.
And when had the glass broken, again?
She sank back into confused thought.
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