The Stars' Praise

[Seven Xu]

Though my soul may set in darkness
it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.

Summer 79, 512 AV

It was a far cry from Iraltu’s Observatory, but it topped the false tile sky he’d spent many an evening under in Alvadas. The astronomy tower was empty, its carved stone pillars casting long shadows across an aged wood floor. Seven had all but lost the lameness in his gait and he moved with the unconscious grace of his parentage; he floated across the floor like some pale specter wrapped in dowdy grey cotton. Even his eyes seemed robbed of their colour in the darkness—more black than red, some fire long gone out.

Victor had little interest in the tower—he could see the stars just fine from the ground, he’d remarked before Seven had left—and so the halfblood made the short journey from their inn to Zeltiva’s university, all sprawling stone buildings and a hundred lifetimes of knowledge, alone. He stopped a half-dozen times to open the notebook tucked beneath his arm to scribble a note or to further the lines between one point and another. The map to the observatory was crude when he’d finished, but there would be time to refine it later.

The same weathered notebook was stretched across Seven’s small lap after he managed to fold himself on a bench overlooking the harbour. Clutched in his pale hands, above weathered pages and faded ink, a brass telescope drank the light of a thin crescent moon.

It’s been too long. The instrument was turned carefully between bone-thin fingers, appraised in slack-lipped silence; a courtesy more often reserved for intricate oil paintings. It was cooler than the balmy salt air, had a pleasant weight, and when he stared into the polished brass, he could see his face.

Seven lifted it skyward, peered through the eyepiece, and exhaled a laugh.

“Gods.”

[Hadrian]

With the windows open to the summer breezes, the astronomy tower's observatory was quite pleasant, though Hadrian had a way of not noticing such things. He was vaguely aware of someone coming up, but as they did not approach, he kept his gaze westerly, or a bit north of that. He had used maps and one of the magnetic devices here present to gauge the general direction of Wind Reach on the other side of the continent. There had been theories in Avanthal, prophecies in Mura, and in Zeltiva he sometimes came up here to gaze toward the supposed source of the djed storm, observing the djed as if he might find some secret clues in the ebb and flow of that which was all. Eventually he gave up, let his eyes cut skyward to admire the stars. They were pretty pricks of light, the spangles of Zintila. But he knew more about them mathematically than in point of fact, something he needed to rectify if he was going to remain on the faculty. A professor should know about things. He thought about this lack in his own education as he began to walk toward the stairs to go home, but he caught sight of a familiar aura. "Seven?" he called out softly. The observatory was not well lit, the better to see the stars. It really was a small world. Here was a man who could probably point out the places he knew: Swalden, Shoyden, Fyrden. "What are you doing in Zeltiva?" he asked as he approached.

[Seven Xu]

Even as a white sliver in the sky, the moon felt too bright, and the tepid moisture that wafted off of the water made the air itself wobble. Summer was dreadful for star-gazing; winters treated the sky better with its nights clear and crisp and cold, but Seven could not will the seasons. If he could cut through the humidity, push it out of his sight, perhaps he wouldn’t have to. The beginnings of a shield manifested in his mind, djed bunched and pushed at his fingertips, eager to pour over the eyepiece as some water-repellent lens.

“Seven?”

The shield wouldn’t have worked had he succeeded to weave it; the moisture was in the air, and it would remain in the air, even if he looked through a lens that refused water’s passage. The voice made him jump and tense his shoulders and nearly drop the scope, but he managed to clench it between his wiry fingers. The shimmering violet went forgotten, and he turned with an open mouth toward the source of a voice that nagged at his memory with its familiarity. Hungry pupils eclipsed blood-kissed irises, compensating the dim moonlight; where humans saw dim grey shadows on abysmal blackness, Seven recognized detail. A gasp left him.

“Hadrian.” He stood. Pale brows knitted together, and his head tilted. The halfblood was a small black-and-silver outline with his back to a yawning window. “I could ask you the same thing,” he said, “I thought you were headed for Ravok.”

Or was he mistaking Hadrian with another? Seven’s palm tingled. Gods, the things he’d seen since he left Sylira’s shores a year ago; it was a wonder he could remember anything. Alvadas was no more than a memory now, and he liked it that way. He bent to place the telescope on the bench and wiped his hand across his thigh to disperse something he only knew as invisible—he was an unwilling mage, and for all his intelligence, often confused secrets with safety.

Seven took his bottom lip beneath a jagged line of teeth to suppress a growing smile.

“Well, I’m here to learn, I guess. So, hi.”

[Hadrian]

"Well, I was. A year go." He was back now, but that didn't bear saying as it was quite evident. "I'm here to teach; that is, to learn by teaching. Hello." His smile wasn't exactly warm, but it was clearly pleased. They had met briefly in his hometown before he had gone north with Kendall and Sondra, Ethan and Cathan. So much had happened since then, but here they were in another city with two separate years behind them, stories to tell, and perhaps even lore to share. It really was a small world, was MIzahar. "What have you come to learn?"

[Seven Xu]

Seven nodded, turning to the sky again. “What stars see.”

A collection of bony fingers found his hairline sticky and pale. “I went to Alvadas,” he offered, as if Hadrian had asked. “Well. I followed someone, but I hated it there. Illusions, trickery—even the sky turned inside out when you looked at it. The only things that brought me joy turned to poison beneath Ionu’s roof. So I left, brought what was left of my happiness with me. I hoped this place would suit me better.”

His hand slipped down his scalp to palm his neck, where flesh rose and shimmered like the moon’s face on calm water, and he wondered what Victor thought of the sheltered city, older than the world any living man knew. He often wondered if Victor thought anything of anything at all.

“Maybe it will, but I’m still too tired to tell.”

[Hadrian]

Hadrian nodded, understanding what was said and unsaid, he thought, though one could never understand another person entirely. Alvadas had been a strange experience for him, too. Attempted murder and subversion by illusionists on the ride over the Suvan Sea, strange and stranger events everyday within the city proper. That Ionu itself had played victim when another monster taught Hadrian to hypnotize only confused things further, but perhaps with time he would develop further in control of illusions, or perhaps the deity would lose interest in him altogether. "Alvadas was a treacherous city," he agreed, though now with Eyris' grace, he could see through illusions too. His own disappeared when he sought to see reality, though he still wondered what reality was. "Did it make you question reality? It did me. I am still trying to figure it out." But he glanced up at the skybowl, picking out where he thought certain words lay. "Teach me where Swalden flies?"

[Seven Xu]

“I learned a lot about myself from Alvadas,” he conceded, thumbing the rise of a linen collar around his neck. He’d soon need to find a shop to replace what was left of his clothing—everything had turned to near rags, and he’d taken to borrowing Victor’s shirts when he couldn’t find motivation to wash his own.

Hadrian spoke of stars, and Seven broke away to approach the open window. Such quantity of unmarred glass he hadn’t seen since he’d left Lhavit; it seemed to make little difference to the sky whether the windows were open or shut. He pressed one hand against it, leaving behind an oily stamp.

“It’s there,” his middle finger thumped against the window. One star stood brighter than its siblings, grand and gold. It wasn’t high on the horizon, only managing a palm’s width over the bay. “If you look at it through a telescope, it looks a bit fuzzy—that’s its ring.” Seven squinted. “If I remember my schooling at all, it’s all made of some stone called memosite. The ring, that is.”

[Hadrian]

So Hadrian wasn't the only one who had gone introspective over his sojourn in the city of illusion. He nodded, then listened and watched as he got the impromptu astronomy lesson. He knew the coordinates for Swalden, or its rings, at least. In his head, he tried to calculate the... But he caught himself, refrained. If he dove into the depths of his own mind, Seven would feel excluded, perhaps offended, and Hadrian didn't know if he had sufficient information to mathematically devise anything at this point. Later tonight with quill and parchment, he would try to discover something new. "I should like to meet the Lady Zintila," he mused. "I have so many questions." He had an offer to make, too, but perhaps it were best he was capable of doing it. He was far from being able to accomplish what he hoped to, both in skill and lore. "And it's true, the memosites. Would you like to see one?"

[Seven Xu]

Zintila. The name drove prickling warmth up his neck. It seemed strange that Her name would be spoken then; but maybe it wasn’t, being that She was the Lady of Stars, be it folk tale or theory. The lines had been blurred, and some long-forgotten fire in Seven’s gut had been rekindled in the dead of winter.

Hadrian said something. No, he’d made an offer—an odd one, at that.

“I … yes, very much.” Seven drove the vacuity from his face with a series of rapid blinks. “But they’re up there. In the sky, swirling around that world some thousand leagues straight up.”

There had been a man in his youth, a foreigner who spent his afternoons in the plaza peddling all means of corked bottles and jars of moss and coloured water, claiming they’d come from other worlds. He’d boasted himself a powerful mage, a summoner, able to open windows to worlds as easy as one slid glass away from stone to feel a night’s cool breeze. Seven bit his lip, considering the associations he’d used for those worlds that shone brighter than the stars.

And then he turned to Hadrian, white-blond brows high over an incredulous half-smile. “Show me.”

[Hadrian]

Hadrian nodded and began first to explain things with illusory visual aids, indicating the wall with his hand as mathematical calculations appeared scrawled in light. It was a useful teaching tool, was illusion. "Swalden." Pictures lit up the wall, views of what he had seen through the portals he had opened, vast glittering expanses of the memosites sparkling in the light of Swalden's distant sun, or cast in shadow, gleaming in whatever light they could catch. "Coordinates, 8492841047291777." The numbers appeared, and the calculations appeared all around it. "Anyway..." He cast his hand toward the ground, not relying on illusion or anything that wasn't lighting itself to work in the darkness. Res poured forth and shaped itself to match his will: one outer ring; a ring within that with sixteen smaller circles arranged around it like pearls on a necklace; from the pearls at the cardinal points, lines drove toward the center; where the lines connected, another small circle appeared. "The memosites share their memories, so a minimal circle is all that's necessary. You needn't use a more complicated circle, such as a focused circle, because one memosite is much the same as the next from what I've experienced. Nor need you use a more controlled, but more volatile 6-circle, which helps contain dangerous summons, as these are benign creatures." He pricked his finger and touched it to the outer ring of glowing res, which instantly began to turn red. The reality within it seemed to swirl in on itself, warping and becoming finally like the surface of water, with a strange light shining from within. Clever eyes might catch impressions of the gas giant that the rings of memosites orbited, but soon that was less interesting as a stone rose up from the water, haloed in the djed he used to hold it there, though it came of its own will, or such will as it had. "You just have to think at it," he told Seven. "Ask it for specific memories, then be ready to share your own in exchange."