Chapter 86 - The Farm in Irttat

 

Chapter 86: The Rotting Garden 04

Three hundred years ago. The Fenrir Empire. The holy city of Aeternum. The castle of Iris.

This day marked the coming-of-age ceremony for Iris's young son, who had just turned sixteen. After today, he would officially step onto the dance floor and become the most beautiful jewel in Aeternum's social world. 

General Iris held a grand coming-of-age banquet for this beloved child.

At that time, Valentina cared nothing about any of this, and had no idea how many princes and nobles had attended the ball. The older guests hoped to use the occasion to make contact with the great general; the younger ones had already begun quietly setting their sights on petit frère Iris. 

The men of the Iris family were famous for their beauty in every generation, and by all accounts this generation's young man was the finest of all. Whether it was his flawlessly golden hair, his skin as clear as snow, or his reportedly extraordinary skill on the harp, he was by every measure the most desirable lover and the ideal choice with whom to bear a child.

When he appeared on his mother's arm, the atmosphere of the banquet reached its peak. 

The Valentina of that time had nothing to do with any of this. She was, after all, merely a clockmaker who happened to be there to deliver a commissioned mantel clock.

She was one of the finest clockmakers in the entire holy city, with decades in the trade, and countless princes and nobles had commissioned clocks from her. Through the opportunity of delivering clocks, she had glimpsed the back gardens of countless great houses, but this was her first visit to the Iris estate. 

She had put tremendous care into this occasion. The clock she had made represented an enormous investment of effort, and she had even spent her own money to ensure it was crafted to perfection.

General Iris was the most powerful figure in the empire aside from the sovereign herself. 

If young Lord Iris was pleased with her clock, she might be able to develop the Iris family as a long-term client, greatly elevating her own standing. And with time, perhaps she might even gain access to the royal palace and become the imperial clockmaker... 

Valentina was pleasantly absorbed in these thoughts as she followed young Lord Iris's personal maid through the back garden of the estate, arriving at the young Lord's study.

Passing the banquet hall, the faint sounds of admiring voices reached her ears, and she couldn't help feeling a flicker of curiosity, wanting to catch just a single glimpse. 

The most beautiful face in the empire, they said. The "Pearl of the Empire"... 

She didn't do it, of course. The composed Valentina was a capable businesswoman who knew well the value of discretion.

She simply delivered the carefully crafted mantel clock to the young lord's outer study, meticulously adjusted and set it under the maid's supervision, and then, with modest care, followed the maid's guidance back the way she had come. 

All of this was perfectly ordinary. The trouble only began when the maid was hurriedly called away by a manservant from the hall, and Valentina, who should have retraced her steps... got lost. 

It wasn't entirely her fault. The sky was simply too dark; the farther she moved from the hall, the dimmer the light became. And the back garden of the Iris estate really was impossibly winding and complex...

In any case, she wandered through the garden for quite some time without finding her way out. 

Perhaps nearly every servant had gone to attend to the hall and kitchens, because the back garden remained entirely deserted. She couldn't even find anyone to ask for directions. 

Valentina glanced by moonlight at the half-finished prototype wristwatch she had recently been working on, not yet fitted with a second hand, and saw that it was already eight o'clock in the evening. 

For some time now she had heard no human voices, and the air no longer moved.

A faint unease rose in her chest. Gritting her teeth, she decided to follow the glow of the hall's lights. 

The signs that something was wrong had already appeared on her way there. 

She should have noticed sooner: the trees and flowers standing motionless like machinery, the ripples in the lake frozen mid-surface, the fireflies that no longer flew or flickered. 

But she seemed to have unconsciously ignored all of these strange things, until she reached the long corridor at the entrance to the hall.

This was a place Valentina had never possessed the status to enter: solemn, ancient, the sort of place where one might accidentally brush shoulders with some terrifyingly powerful figure. 

But now, the terrifyingly powerful figures had frozen in place like sculptures, their smiles congealed on their faces in an uncanny way that made Valentina's skin crawl.

She walked forward, trembling.

She pushed open the door to the hall. Everything was like a motionless silent film.

The swirling skirts suspended above the dance floor were what finally made it impossible for her to continue deceiving herself. 

It's over, Valentina. You must be dreaming.

She was on the verge of tears with no tears to shed, and collapsed onto the floor. 

Valentina never managed to leave.

All those things she had once been curious about, longed for, and never dared look at directly now stood before her like sculptures, available for her to gaze upon for as long as she pleased. 

The ancient golden longcase clock. She had always wanted to take it apart and study its old craftsmanship. The prized vintage wines in the cellar. She could have sold everything she owned and still not afforded a single bottle. The legendary “Wind Rose”, rumored to have passed through three generations of royalty, a pink diamond brooch pinned boldly to the collar of a royal son. 

And the Pearl of the Empire, whom she had once been momentarily curious about — 

Breathtaking at first glance, yes. But one can only stare at a frozen sculpture for so long before it becomes merely a thing. 

Everything here was shadow; she couldn't touch any of it with her hands.

Valentina spent an indeterminate stretch of time in panic and terror. Motionless time is tireless. 

Gradually, she finally calmed down and began searching for a way to escape.

She began to inspect the garden.

The first thing she discovered was that she was trapped inside the garden and could not leave. 

Using the iron railings wrapped in roses and climbing vines as a boundary, some invisible wall blocked her path and sealed her inside. 

This place had become an isolated space, like a shell stranded on a sandbank. The realization only deepened her agitation. 

Even though the garden was spacious, being trapped in time produced none of the suffocating confinement of being trapped in space.

Like a caged bird stranded upon a sandbank, Valentina spent some time in despair before slowly rallying herself and carrying out a careful search of the grounds.

Take it slowly, she told herself. There's no need to eat or drink. No aging. I have endless time to find a way out.

Because time was plentiful, her search was extremely thorough. She pressed her face close to the wall's decorative carvings to examine them, looking for any hidden mechanism.

It was the most blunt-force approach possible, but she persisted stubbornly through a long and lengthening search, growing slower and slower as she went.

Whether it was her meticulousness and tenacity that deserved admiration, or whether she was simply afraid of the despairing result waiting for her when the search finally ended, the persistence eventually yielded something. 

The mantel clock she had delivered, the reason she had come here in the first place, sat quietly on the desk in the young lord's study. Its second hand continued steadily onward: tick, tick, tick. Obstinately, it kept moving. 

Valentina held it up with extraordinary care, weeping tears of joy.

She had believed it was the beginning of her successful escape. But after that, her searching and every method she tried produced no further progress.

This silence continued for an indeterminate length of time. By then she no longer had the energy to keep track, and only sat holding that steadily ticking clock in a stupor.

The second turning point was a temporary fluctuation in time.

She was lying in the center of the hall, looking up at the eternally unchanging moon, when she suddenly heard a clamor of voices.

Valentina leapt to her feet and found herself bathed in looks of disgust and astonishment from the young lord beside her. She had barely managed to stammer a sentence before everything froze again. 

She gazed upward at the moon in a daze.

The familiar arrangement of wispy clouds overhead... had it changed, just slightly? 

Valentina's knowledge was too limited; what her eyes could tell her was too little.

As an ordinary human, she had not been able to extract any information from this sudden change.

But after that, her senses within this world seemed to sharpen — or perhaps the stability of this world itself had weakened, allowing her to occasionally glimpse shadows from other worlds drifting through the air. 

She gradually came to understand that the space imprisoning her was drifting somewhere unknown. 

At times, it encountered other spaces, or... worlds?

At the moments when worlds overlapped, her own space seemed to become somewhat less stable, and it was then that she could perceive the passing of another world. 

This realization once filled Valentina with terrible despair, because it suggested that her own space might never resume functioning at all. 

But at the same time, a faint and contrary hope stirred within her: among those fleeting glimpses of other worlds, might there one day be one close enough for her to seize, to climb aboard, and leave this place? 

Even if not, those shifting, flickering glimpses gave her a sensation of life she had long lacked, reminding her that she was still alive. 

Of course, the occasional fluctuations in time within her own space continued to feed a kind of self-anesthetizing hope. Every time things stuttered and time seemed to flow again for a moment, she allowed herself to imagine what it would look like if time were truly restored. 

Of course, however it went, these were all useless fantasies.

Everything here was a shadow, which meant she was nearly powerless to act. Her own will was entirely stifled in her hands, and the frustration was maddening.

Later, she had finally discovered one small thing she could do. Perhaps the chance was slim, but at least it was a chance.

When the time fluctuations in this space happened to coincide with the overlap of another world, she seemed able to seize the opportunity and do something to attract the attention of the adjacent world. 

Valentina waited a very long time. At last, a moment came.

In the instant time fluctuated, a shadow descended.

She reacted with quick eyes and quick hands, snatching the wine glass from the young lord's grasp at the center of the hall, and in an act bordering on desperation, hurled it at the shadow. 

Crack.

The glass did not pass directly through the shadow. It struck an invisible wall of air that had not been there before, then bounced off and hit the floor, shattering into fragments.

Time froze. The fragments, mid-bounce, hung suspended in the air.

It worked. Maybe it worked —

Valentina thought with fierce excitement: even using only a glass, she had used an object from flowing time to successfully touch the boundary of a passing world!

Would it produce any effect on the other world?

She didn't know. 

She had no chance to find out.

The attempt felt like her final struggle. In the waiting that followed, Valentina found herself exhausted beyond all endurance; fatigue mounted like a tide and swallowed her whole. 

She stopped trying.

The clock that had once gone tick, tick, tick had long since run out of power and stopped. She placed it in her toolbox, cherishing it the way a drowning person clings to the final straw.

But she knew at the same time, in her heart: it was only straw.

Valentina sat upon the empty throne and looked down at the silent world around her, like a king at the end of all things surveying her domain. 

Untiringly, she lay here with open eyes. She dozed here. She lay here looking up at the moon. She traced the shapes of the wispy clouds in her mind, then, after the next fluctuation in time, began once more to observe the new cloud formations. 

This was the last remaining change in the world, and the last activity left to her. 

A person without some anchor truly would go mad here.

By now, all her old hopes and all her old exhaustion had faded away together. Her heart was still water, not a ripple upon it. 

If Lucita had come in the very beginning, Valentina would have been frightened and afraid.

If Lucita had come while she was still trying every possible method, Valentina would have been beside herself with joy.

If Lucita had come when she had already fallen into exhaustion, she would have felt a kind of relief —

But now that Lucita had come, she only started slightly, lifted her eyelids, turned the problem of how to form words slowly in her mind, and then, mimicking the other person's intonation, offered a greeting: "...Hel — lo."

The moment when the glass had shattered, Valentina could no longer remember clearly. But it had certainly been a very long time ago. 

How curious. So the last attempt had still worked in the end?

Valentina asked slowly: "You... where, do you, come from?"

"Three hundred years in the future." Lucita gave a figure she had calculated. "I come from two hundred years after the fall of the Fenrir Empire. Three hundred years after the era of Iris."

"Fenrir... it fell, in only a hundred, years?"

The news from the outside world surprised Valentina for a moment.

After all, when she had been alive, Fenrir had been the only empire on the continent, and was in the full bloom of a power that had only recently been established.

A clockmaker living in such a prosperous age had always believed Fenrir seemed more open, more vital, and surely destined to outlast the previous dynasty by a considerable margin. 

But such is the way of things. Who can predict?

Valentina thought of herself, and felt a faint sadness.

She remained here, yet she had outlasted even Fenrir. 

And where would her own resting place be, when all was done?

She no longer held hope for herself, but still asked out of idle curiosity: "You came here... do you know how to get out?" 

Lucita shook her head. "I didn't come in on purpose."

Noticing that Valentina seemed rather listless, Lucita pressed further: "Could you tell me more about your situation here?" 

"I'm a clockmaker. I came to deliver a clock." Valentina said simply. "I got lost on the way back, and then I don't know why it became like this. I don't know anything."

"Everything was normal? Was there anything unusual?" Lucita asked.

From the shattered fragments of glass, this clockmaker had attempted to break something open with the wine glass, and that sound had truly reached Lucita's ears.

She must have known something to make such a relatively accurate attempt.

"Unusual..." Valentina opened her toolbox.

← Previous Chapter Next Chapter →