Chapter 89 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 89: The Rotting Garden 07
Lucita opened the book.
On the inside cover was a circular frame of text entwined with vines. Both the fragile, yellowed pages and the old-fashioned floral lettering testified to the book's great age.
The frontispiece bore a black-and-white portrait, a face that felt familiar the moment she saw it, just like the author's name.
She searched through distant memories connected to herself and recalled who this person was.
The clockmaker of the former dynasty, once trapped in a frozen moment of time: Valentina.
Temporal magic, the third-level subdivision of the research-magic branch within space-time magic, had appeared only once in history: in the genius who founded it, Blanche. After that, no one ever touched its threshold again. So much so that many considered it nothing more than a legend and refused to acknowledge it as a legitimate branch of research magic.
Lucita had once pored through an immense collection of research-magic texts in the Spring Tower, and she could say with certainty that throughout recorded history, there had never been a second human being who mastered temporal magic.
As for these books, she had borrowed them one by one from the library herself, each registered under her own name. It was even less likely that this book, one she had never heard of before, could have been among them.
Valentina...
She traced the faded portrait on the frontispiece and felt a faint shiver run through her.
Valentina had refined the clock inlaid with the Sea of the Twelve Months to the highest degree of perfection. Through that process, she had touched the threshold of temporal law and survived within a tangled knot of time.
And now, Lucita had released this clockmaker, who had come to understand time through centuries of imprisonment, from the frozen moment that had held her captive. The timeline had been rewritten. The person who now existed in the world was no longer the ordinary master clockmaker Valentina, but a temporal mage who had attained enlightenment through three hundred years of confinement: a legend of dazzling brilliance.
She pulled out the desk chair beside her bed and opened the book to its first chapter.
***
Valentina's life was extraordinarily legendary.
Before the age of thirty, she ran her family's dilapidated clock shop. Her exquisite craftsmanship earned her fame far and wide, eventually allowing her to break into aristocratic circles.
It is said that one day, in the course of her work among clocks and timepieces, she suddenly awakened to the power of time. At the coming-of-age banquet of General Iris's youngest son, she employed that miraculous power, a small-scale time stop, to prevent a famous assassination attempt. From that day onward, she became an honored guest of the kingdom.
The newly-come-of-age jewel of the empire, the young man of the Iris family (forgive the book for not providing his name; he is referred to below simply as "Petit frère Iris"), was captivated by her wisdom. He chased her ardently, and in the end the two formed a love match that shook the world. Remarkably, it even persuaded this great mage to remain faithful for several years.
Perhaps because Petit frère Iris possessed exceptional beauty and talent, several of Valentina's daughters surpassed their mother in both appearance and gifts, achieving considerable accomplishments and status. Or perhaps because Petit frère Iris, being a mortal, carried no extraordinary magical lineage to pass on, none of their children inherited Valentina's genius for magic, and temporal magic once again vanished into discontinuity after her death.
Beyond this, Valentina's faith was said to be most peculiar.
Before the age of thirty she had worshiped the Mother God Gaia, as the vast majority of ordinary people did. But after thirty, as a mage, she abandoned her faith. A portrait hung perpetually in her study.
The portrait depicted a young girl who looked very youthful and unremarkable, with the characteristic dark eyes and dark hair of southern people.
When others asked about it, she would only say: "I don't know the deity's name. But she gave me a revelation."
Valentina lived to the age of sixty.
After becoming a mage, her status rose meteorically, but her temperament grew strange and distant. She rarely involved herself in political affairs and rejected Petit frère Iris's declarations of love on several occasions for precisely that reason. Only after the noble boy severed all ties with his family did she finally accept this beauty.
But in the final years of her life, she began to leave the study and clockroom where she had long resided. With wealth bestowed by the royal family, she commissioned the large-scale construction of temples known as the Nameless Shrines. The largest stood at what had once been the heart of Fenrir and was ultimately destroyed in the fires of war.
Inside the Nameless Shrines stood sculptures of the cold-eyed, dark-haired young figure whose portrait she had kept in her study.
It is said that Valentina's final words had nothing to do with her lovers or her children. In her last hours she murmured repeatedly: "Perhaps I will finally meet you again."
As for whom she would meet, mainstream opinion held it was the nameless deity who had given her revelation, though other theories also circulated, such as a lover from her youth, and so forth.
***
Lucita did not leave her room that evening.
At dinnertime, Violet came up herself to knock on the door, and received a polite refusal.
The footsteps gradually faded away. Lucita lit a sturgeon-eye lamp in the dim amber light, and by its glow turned to the next page.
Valentina's system of temporal magic had been developed further beyond what the founder Blanche had established.
Besides the most famous spell, "time stop," she had substantially expanded her predecessor's work. Brief temporal regression, acceleration and deceleration of time, and many other applications had all been developed further under her hand. At the age of fifty, she had even brushed against a fragment of foresight. Yet all she saw was layer upon layer of mist.
Lucita's finger rested on the words "mist" and did not move for a long while.
By the time she had finished the book, it was the middle of the night. Yet Lucita felt no hunger, and had no desire to sleep.
The pocket watch in her palm gave off a faint warmth. Among the four colors of the world's layers, life and spirit shone with a deep green radiance, and there were even faint signs that the two were beginning to merge. Since the dragon-kin's heart had ceased burning, the world-space layer had gradually stabilized into a calm, satisfying aquamarine. As for the magic layer, though it remained a glaring orange, it seemed slightly lighter than before.
Was it because temporal magic had been developing?
In the soft lamplight, the glow fell across her profile. Her eyes reflected the trembling orb of flame.
She glanced at the crescent moon drifting westward and, amid the faint chorus of cicadas, lay down and buried her face in her pillow.
In the heavy summer night, she came once again to that river.
The waters rolled on. Lucita suddenly understood Gaia's sorrow.
With every passing moment, possibilities were born. And possibilities died. Change a single node, and an entirely different outcome would unfold.
Just as Lucita had unwittingly released Valentina. Time had turned a corner there, leading toward a completely different ending.
Perhaps many people had ceased to exist because of it. And perhaps many others had found happiness.
And so the gods had no choice but to remain detached, keeping themselves apart from the affairs of the world.
She looked ahead along the flow of the river. At the visible horizon, the current cut off abruptly. Only the timeline upon which she stood stretched onward, disappearing into an impenetrable mass of fog.
That was the end of time.
Lucita had many questions.
There were countless possibilities here. So why could she see only one?
"There are many possibilities, but there is only one of you." Gaia's voice suddenly sounded beside her.
Lucita started and looked up, but saw no figure anywhere.
"Where are you?"
"I am everywhere."
Lucita's nerves went taut.
She suddenly understood: a deity possessed no fixed form or appearance. Neither unreal nor real, Gaia manifested herself through the mountains, the birds, and the beasts she had created. In the void, where there was nothing to inhabit, she was everywhere and nowhere at once.
This realization gave Lucita a faint unease.
But Lucita did not show it. She simply asked: "What do you mean?"
"I created this world. All living things are my children. But you are not. I do not belong among the possibilities I can extrapolate. You are the true you. A singularity."
Lucita understood at once.
Wherever she stood, that was her timeline. It advanced together with her own passage through time. No one could foresee it. There were no alternate possibilities.
From the moment she arrived in this world, a Lucita appeared upon a particular timeline. From that point onward, everything became unpredictable. All branching possibilities dissolved into fog.
"So when I changed Valentina's fate, the subtle alteration occurred in this single, unique timeline, rather than branching off into a new possibility." Lucita looked at Gaia, laying out her conjecture.
Gaia nodded.
Lucita dipped her fingers into the cold waters of time, stirring small ripples forward, but her gaze drifted toward the distant end of time. "So precisely because it cannot be extrapolated, my timeline does not fracture right away, instead it has opened into the unknown."
"Yes."
"Like a game. How it unfolds depends on my choices."
"I understand now." Her fingers pulled abruptly from the water. The ripples her hand stirred scattered like fine rain on the surface.
Her eyes sparkled with delight. "I will play this game well."
***
In the middle of the night, Lucita's eyes snapped open. She sat up from the bed.
The crescent moon was still there. The cicadas still sang. The night was sultry.
She pushed open the bedroom window. Night wind surged in, drying the fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead.
As the sweat cooled, her stomach began to rumble quietly.
Only then did she realize she had not eaten for a very long time.
Rubbing her stomach, she slipped quietly from her room, picked up an oil lamp, lit the corridor sconces, and tiptoed downstairs.
Some of last night's dinner remained in the cupboard. Since portions had been bought for three people and only two had eaten, there happened to be exactly one serving left.
She touched it. The pan-fried pork belly was cold.
Lucita thought for a moment and simply switched on the kitchen light, put the cold pork belly back in the pan, and fried it until it crisped up again with a ring of golden-brown edges, rendering out a little more fat. The aroma drifted out with the cooking smoke.
She quickly closed the kitchen door, then opened the window to let the smell out, transferred the meat to a plate, and sprinkled it with the black pepper they kept in good supply, along with a little rosemary, a precious herb in this land.
The leaves in the vegetable basket still looked fairly fresh; she wasn't sure whether they had been bought at noon that day, but in any case, for Lucita, anything before noon felt like events from hundreds of years ago, she couldn't quite remember.
She tore off two leaves of romaine lettuce, washed them, and wrapped the fragrant fried pork in them for her meal. She took a bottle of chilled wheat ale from the small frost-box they had brought along, poured herself a full cup, and drained it in one go.
Having eaten and drunk her fill, Lucita's eyes began to droop.
She looked at the unwashed pots and dishes scattered around the kitchen and spent two whole seconds wrestling with her conscience. In the end the drowsiness won. She decided she would sneak down and tidy up tomorrow morning.
But as it turned out, no one can wake up early on a weekend morning, especially not after staying up until midnight.
The next day, Lucita was jolted awake by Violet's shout from the kitchen downstairs, confronted with the scene of utter chaos: "Lucita——!"
Still half in a dream, Lucita pulled the blanket over her head with annoyance, rubbed her eyes, and went back to sleep.
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