Chapter 87 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 87: The Rotting Garden 05
Inside the toolbox was the clock she had come to deliver.
This clock represented almost the whole of the first half of her life's work. Its base was carved from a piece of ice-white oak from the far north, which she had treasured for years. Set into the gold-thread-bordered face were twelve perfectly round sky-blue gemstones, still as brilliant as the day they had been mounted, clear and deep as suddenly crystallized drops of seawater, untouched by the years.
These were a famous set of gems known as the Twelve Months' Sea, part of the Iris family's collection, or perhaps more accurately, spoils from the empire's founding wars. Young Lord Iris had personally entrusted them to Valentina, hoping she would set them into her clock.
Valentina had fulfilled that commission. But in the end, the clock had never reached young Lord Iris.
Her hand drifted indifferently over the gemstones before coming to rest on the ornamental finial atop the clock's casing.
Because of the technical limitations of her craft at the time, that single point on the clock body had required brass cross-screws harder than the surrounding material, fastening the main body to its decorative fittings.
And it was the only point where one could see the evidence that time had left a mark on the clock's body: a thin ring of fine verdigris.
She pointed at that ring of verdigris and said: "When time first stopped, it was a brand-new clock."
The clock seemed to have been abandoned by the rules of time. While everything around it remained frozen, it had continued moving forward at its own pace, never ceasing to age for even a moment.
If the reason her toolbox had been spared from time's grip was because she carried it on her person, linked to her, then why was this clock, left behind in young Lord Iris's study, the other exception?
She had never been able to understand it. Eventually, she had given up trying.
Lucita looked at the golden mantel clock before her and touched its hands.
Long since halted in the flow of time, the hands had silently abandoned their daily rhythm of morning bells and evening prayers. Now they stood apart from the river of time itself, merely observing.
Then —
At Lucita's touch, the golden hands trembled faintly, like the wings of a butterfly startled from a long dream, stirring a ring of minute ripples.
That faint disturbance was like a drop of water falling into a desert: it evaporated instantly, yet, like a reminder, made the person standing within it suddenly aware of the surrounding heat.
Lucita drew her hand back as though she had touched something electric.
She frowned thoughtfully.
A moment later, she stood and walked slowly outside.
Through the hall, past the dancers and the shimmer of silk, she pushed open the doors and stepped once more into the garden.
Her feet on the ground felt as though she were walking on clouds. Step by step, unhurried, she moved as though thinking something through, surveying her territory.
This was, at its heart, a desert of time.
Time had abandoned this place. Anyone who arrived here was like a fish stranded ashore, left only to suffocate in an unchanging and dried-out eternity.
Until a drop of water fell — thin, feeble, trembling on the edge of dissolution, vanishing in an instant.
But for a desert, even that tiny aberration was impossible to miss. Lucita had felt it the moment it appeared.
It had been the sole remaining thread of time-force within this space, transmitted through the hands of a clock three hundred years old.
The rules of time were not unfamiliar to her. But only now, in a world where time itself had run dry, when that faint thread of time-force brushed against her fingertips, was the true nature of temporal law finally conveyed to her.
Like entering a vacuum and only then understanding what air truly is.
In the back garden: blurred streaks of cloud like an oil painting, a pale moon, groves of trees, and among the trees, fireflies frozen mid-flicker.
Lucita reached out and gently plucked one — a soft green firefly — held it for a moment, and then opened her fingers.
In Valentina's stunned gaze, the instant it was released, the firefly slowly flew away, drifting farther and farther until it disappeared into the blurred depths of the trees.
Lucita slowly closed her eyes.
And somewhere, from a perspective beyond chaos, a pair of clouded eyes trembled slightly and slowly opened.
Lucita rose from the river of time.
Countless possibilities flowed through that river like threads, gathering into a waterfall of silk. At certain crossings, chance would tie a looping knot, and in that moment one possibility would come to an end.
From this vast perspective, the isolated space was nothing more than a small knot within the river of time, neither the first nor the only one.
And the thing that made this space unique was not Valentina, but the clock.
Lucita looked down, observing this knot in time.
Here, the clock shimmered faintly, as though on the verge of merging with time itself, the only green thing in this desert of time.
It had been refined again and again from the spiritual essence of heaven and earth and the remnants of fallen stars. And so, a clock made of mortal materials had managed to produce a thread of time-force. That same thread had granted its creator, Valentina, a faint affinity with the laws of time, enough for her to survive the catastrophe in which time itself had knotted and stopped.
Though whether remaining awake through it all was a blessing or a cruelty, Lucita could not say.
Lucita gave a gentle shift and untied the small knot.
The looping cycle that had persisted for so long returned to its proper course. Other than Valentina, who had spent three hundred years wandering the ruins of time, nothing seemed to have changed.
Time resumed its flow forward.
Clouds drifted. Fireflies wandered. Extravagant music poured once more from the hall.
A maid caught sight of Valentina standing blankly before the banquet hall and hurried over. "Hey, weren't you supposed to head back already? How did you end up here? Oh, when did you bring the clock back out? I'll pass it along to the young lord for you. She doesn't have time to see you today..."
Valentina said nothing.
She could not tell whether the sudden resumption of time had left her unable to distinguish dream from reality, or whether she had simply been struck speechless by the quiet, fathomless dark eyes of the intruder beneath the scattering fireflies, eyes that had regarded her with such calm.
In that moment, she had felt herself and the garden become almost one, both turned into pages of a book casually leafed through and left behind.
Lucita had arrived without explanation and departed without explanation, yet she had shattered Valentina's three hundred years of solitude like a bubble bursting in an instant, like a nightmare abruptly broken by waking.
Lucita paid no attention to Valentina's thoughts. Seeing that nothing else seemed amiss, she turned her attention elsewhere and drifted onward along the current of time.
She walked while looking downward, reading as she went.
Valentina's knot had been corrected, but Lucita could not immediately locate the point in time to which she herself belonged.
A single timeline could stretch from the moment the world was first shaped in Gaia's hands all the way into some unimaginable future, until the destruction foretold in Gaia's prophecy, where the river eventually ran dry.
In Lucita's eyes, however, the distant endpoints of her own timeline did not resemble the disasters Gaia had described. Instead, they lay veiled in haze, impossible to see clearly.
Was this the future Gaia had spoken of, the future that had begun to blur and branch into possibilities because of Lucita's arrival?
In any case, the timeline was too long, and her sense of scale in time had deserted her entirely.
After only a short walking, the torrent of information was already close to overwhelming her mind.
Lucita quickly concluded that this approach was unworkable and simply stopped, stepping ashore.
She had no idea what composed the riverbanks. The ground beneath her feet was damp and cold, and in every direction there was only chaos.
She sat down cross-legged.
If anyone could help her now, it was perhaps the Mother God Gaia.
She was not particularly alarmed. Outside time, everything remained motionless for her.
She would wait for Gaia to arrive. Then she could return home, to the very moment from which she had departed.
For now, there was only one person and one river.
The river surged onward toward the end of time.
Lucita said nothing, and watched: countless forests turned from green to white, oceans rose and fell with the tides, star rivers turned, sun and moon came and went.
In the earlier stretches of time, there was no sign of the long-lived races. Perhaps she had not yet traveled far enough forward. She saw only humans growing from the earth, vitality passing from bloom into decay, returning as dust to the soil, buried beneath magnificent tombs and crumbling wilderness, leaving behind no trace.
Their individual lives were astonishingly alike: an endless procession of toil and striving, willing or unwilling, bustling like ants while leaving behind flashes of brilliant craft and science. Those lights endured a little longer and slowly changed the face of the world as the timeline advanced.
There was war, too. From this vantage point, the generals and kings who appeared so magnificent to those who lived beneath them, those towering figures who illuminated entire eras, looked little more than slightly naive toy soldiers.
Most people seemed cast from the same mold, appearing briefly in waves, one after another.
Lucita felt a deep and crushing sorrow, and a single tear slipped from her eye.
The tear fell into the river, raised a small ripple, and quickly vanished.
Her perspective drifted forward until it settled upon a dry summer in the Fenrir Empire.
People ran joyfully into the rain, catching water in every container they could find, then ran out into the wheat fields in frenzied delight.
Lucita watched them through a season of harvest.
And yet that year's harvest seemed to make little difference to the course of most people's lives.
Life and death are not in human hands.
The nation she observed still collapsed, as so many similar empires had throughout history.
She slowed slightly to examine the details. This belonged to a different branch from the one in which Fenrir had existed.
In this branch, Fenrir endured for several centuries before fragmenting amid endless warfare, never dividing cleanly into the three stable kingdoms.
Freed from the constraints of temporal law, Lucita watched from outside for a very long time.
Countless thoughts washed through her in the river's current.
Until mountains became plains, plains split into seas, volcanoes fell cold, and rivers ran dry.
Only then did Lucita realize with a start that somewhere along the way, the span of time she had been observing had long since stretched far beyond mere centuries.
She shifted slightly.
Here beyond time and space, there was no dust, no cobwebs. She simply withdrew her gaze and felt an indescribable exhaustion and a profound emptiness.
Having been washed by the flow of a thousand years, her mind had become firmly anchored and steady. She no longer needed Gaia's help.
Finding her way back to her own timeline required only a moment's search, and there she saw herself: standing at dusk before an abandoned cemetery, carrying a bag of rice seed.
The familiar-yet-strange smoky purple twilight remained exactly as it had been.
She let out a long breath and sank beneath the water.
An immeasurable primordial silence passed. When she opened her eyes again, she was looking at the familiar back wall of her own garden, and the street beyond.
The evening sun burned all the way to her feet.
Lucita dropped the bag of seeds in her hands, sat down upon a large half-buried stone at the edge of the cemetery, looked at the slanting light beneath her feet, and remained silent for a long time.
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