No one said anything. The following seconds felt like an hour.
“Everyone except for Leid can go,” announced Adrial.
We shuffled out of the hall as Adrial and Leid continued their staring match. Aela caught up with me and we walked together toward Euxodia, our central library.
“I’ll bet you ten vials of a’khet that the clause is removed by morning,” she said, grinning wryly.
“No thanks. I only bet to win.”
***
Qaira Eltruan—;
Not even two hours home and I was already in trouble. I fulfilled the contract and even acted like a hero for once, and I was still in trouble. It was apparent that I couldn’t win, so I’d stop trying.
The first thing I did when I got to my room was remove the scholar uniform that I’d been forced to wear all day, every day for the past five years. Zira had mentioned that Calenus, the previous King, had forced the scholars to wear their uniforms here as well. That would have been a total deal-breaker for me.
Everyone wore their own clothes now. To the outside cosmos we were Scholar, Vel’Haru, but here we could still honor the places from which we hailed. Needless to say Enigmus was a multicultural lot.
Since the reform, none of us had been born in Exo’daius, instead transformed from extramural worlds. Gone were the true nobles; in were the tainted, dirty remnants of a dead society. All for the better. Few of us disagreed with that sentiment.
I collapsed on the bed and rubbed my forehead, closing my eyes and relishing the knowledge that I was now off-duty for at least a year. No more small talk, no more pretending to be something I wasn’t.
I reached toward my table and grabbed the pack of malay cigarettes I’d started half a decade ago. Hopefully they weren’t stale. In my other life I had injected malay straight into my veins, almost killing myself in the process, but hard drugs weren’t lethal to me anymore. I avoided them nonetheless. Old vices reminded me of bad times, and these were good times.
Malay cigarettes were the watered down version of pure malay. Celestials had commercialized them. I still got a steady supply from Yahweh whenever he visited The Atrium.
I lit the cigarette, and inhaled. Purple smoke seeped from my lips as I sighed, feeling that tingling sensation I’d grown to love. Anxiety’s icy, gnarled grip relinquished all at once. Then I noticed an incense burner that wasn’t mine resting on my bookshelf. It was half-filled with ashes, some of the powder having spilled across the spines of my most prized collections.
Ugh, Leid.
The gravity shifted and my attention moved toward the door. I sat up, just as the woman of the hour weaved through the rippling doorway. She stopped across the threshold, holding my gaze.
“Welcome back,” she said, finally.
I smirked, dropping the cigarette in my ashtray. “I think you’re the only one who feels that way.”
Leid laughed quietly. “Adrial’s just being dramatic. Your breach was nowhere near as bad as mine.”
“How mad is he?”
She waved a hand. “He’s fine. A majority of the court wants our restrictions lifted, so you’re not alone.”
I could no longer resist the urge to touch her. “Come here.”
Leid crawled across the bed, gliding over me like silk.
We kissed violently, with hair-wrenching and everything, and then she nuzzled into the space between my neck and shoulder. In our embrace Leid’s braid had come loose; black waves of hair fell across my arm and over the bed.
I arched a brow at her sudden shift. “I haven’t been here for five years and all you want to do is cuddle?”
Leid traced her finger from my stomach to chin, tapping once. “No, but we have to wait until everyone’s out of the hall.”
“They’d clear out in short order.”
“I just want to be here for a second,” she murmured. “Don’t you feel it?”
I said nothing, gazing down at her.
“The stillness,” Leid continued, concluding I had no idea what she’d meant. “The immediacy is gone.”
She looked up at me with somber eyes, and I hadn’t gotten used to them yet. For our entire lives they had been violet; now they were silver and more vibrant than my own. It was enough of a change that Leid often felt like someone else. But not right now.
I cupped her face, grazing her bottom lip with my thumb. “I always keep my promises.”
And she knew it. The reverence in her expression said it all. “I know.”
“Alright, cuddle away.”
Instead Leid straddled me, lifting the dress over her head. “Never mind, I forgot how good you look. Let’s fuck.”
*
After all the lust was out of our systems (for the next couple of hours, anyway) Leid listened to the serials I’d archived into attica, her expression switching between amusement and confusion throughout. I smoked another cigarette, staring at all the ripples across the black glass ceiling. We laid half-naked in bed, just like old times.
Once upon a time Leid had been my scholar—back when I was a nothing lesser junkie disguised as a ruler. She’d raked me through the coals, vivisected my personal being and grip on reality, all to make me better. It had taken a thousand years and a lot of rolling heads to straighten me out, but she was a patient woman. I wasn’t a saint and would never be one, but I’d felt a lot prouder and hated myself a lot less since. Hell, I’d even made (and kept) new friends.
“Your smoke is getting in my face,” Leid murmured, fanning it away.
I exhaled. “Tell me the difference between me smoking a cigarette and you burning incense.”
“The difference is that it’s not right beside me, in my face.”
“You smoke cigarettes in your room.”
“Yes but not right beside someone, in their face.”
I sighed and ashed the cigarette. I felt good enough anyway.
“How’ve you been?” I asked. I had been waiting for her to say something, but had also momentarily forgotten that this was Leid and she never spoke about herself unless asked. Different eyes, same wife.
“Alright, for the most part. Adrial still treats me like a sickly child.”
“Given the situation, I can understand.”
Leid rolled her eyes, saying nothing else. She acted like it was no big deal that she was the first of us to awaken out of expiration. Members of Enigmus had offed themselves prior to her. They’d had their reasons, but I had found a workaround. I’d had to convince the former King to let me test things out by decapitating him.
Like I said, these were good times.
“Nobody’s stopping you from going anywhere,” I said, breaking the silence.
“Yahweh keeps poking at me,” she said, ignoring me. “He’s trying to build a zero-point chamber to study my genetic material.”
I lifted my brows. “He find anything?”
“Not yet. He’s having trouble replicating expected particle behavior here so the ZP chamber is delayed.”
“Makes sense,” I said, shrugging. “We would have to know which universe we were in to understand its laws.”
Except, on the surface it seemed like particles behaved normally in Exo’daius. They collected and formed into things like chairs, food, and even incense ashes all over my books. But at the quantum level things didn’t add up. These were particle behaviors that didn’t match the size or charge of extramural particles. Which led me to believe that Exo’daius was in a fourteenth universe (that was already a given) and its laws of thermodynamics were completely foreign.
And strange. So strange that somehow everything that we collected extramurally did not combust or disappear when we placed them in our world. Which then led me to believe that not only did this fourteenth universe have foreign laws of thermodynamics, but it also held particles of all the other thirteen known universes. Quite the mindfuck, right?
All thanks to that vague property, we were able to slip between universes through distortions in the space-time continuum.
That was how we made a living.
The gradual change in Leid’s expression from warmth to wane sounded my alarms. “Anything else?”
She looked away, sullen. “I’ve been having nightmares.”
I hesitated, a little thrown off by that.
“They’re bad enough that I’m too scared to sleep. Adrial’s taken notice.”
“Have you tried any substances? Talked to Yahweh?”
“None of the substances are working. And no, I am not talking to anyone about this.” She hugged her knees. “Just you.”
“They’re only dreams,” I said. “They aren’t real. The necessity of sleep is real.”
“And how exactly can we know for certain what’s real or isn’t?” she asked, slightly annoyed.
I frowned. “Real things happen. Not-real things don’t happen.”
“It feels like it’s happening, real or imagined.”
Leid was seldom scared of anything, so my interest was piqued. “What are these nightmares about?”
Just as she was about to respond, an icy sensation traveled down both of our spines. We looked at each other, knowingly.
Attica had finally found a match.
III
INTRIGUE OF A DYING UNIVERSE
Yahweh Telei—;
I THOUGHT I WAS HAVING a stroke. A sharp tingle ran down my spine and a red light appeared to the left of my vision. It throbbed with my heartbeat.
I froze, equipment resting slack in my hand as I took in the new feeling with trepidation. When I was certain that it wasn’t a stroke, I eased myself and focused on the red light. Each pulse emitted a frequency that my mind translated into language:
Match, match, match
Research Quadrant Three (RQ3) vanished around me as my conscious sped through the vacuum of space. It slowed through a hazy, microwave background and stopped on a constellation pattern outlined by the same red iridescence. Next to the image, a script of Exodian flashed.
AVADARA, CELEVIS-alpha
After five years, attica had found a match to our query. I had forgotten all about it until now. My heart thumped with excitement as I suppressed attica and placed the equipment down on the table, vacating RQ3. It wasn’t a moment after I’d reached the hall when Adrial pinged us for an impromptu meeting.
Qaira and Leid were already at Euxodia when I arrived. Pariah and Aela had been there for a while, still holding their translucent sheets of encrypted information from whatever they had been archiving. Adrial, Sapphi and Zira walked in together. Half of the room hadn’t even known attica was querying anything.
“Alright,” sighed Adrial, taking his place behind the podium. At his presence the podium came alive and blue electricity snaked around it. “For those of you who look incredibly confused right now, let’s catch you up.”
The obsidian sphere atop the podium levitated, hovering inches above its post. A tetra-dimensional screen melded into existence from nothing in the center of the room, revealing what I’d seen in my mind: the constellation, pulsing red.
We gathered around.
“During the celestial war on The Atrium, Oraniquitis Loren had a note in her possession. It contained a single word, Codebreaker, with a drawing of this constellation,” began Adrial.
“Oraniquitis had a note?” Zira repeated, raising a brow. “Why?”
“We don’t know for sure, but we think her intentions were to pass it to herself after taking possession of Qaira’s body. She’d left a demon with instructions to give it to Qaira after the war.”
Everyone looked at Qaira.
Qaira said nothing, eyes on the screen.
No one really talked about the celestial war, me especially. It was during the celestial war that I’d suffered a fatal injury and was forced to become a scholar. Back then I had been beside myself at the idea of exile; now it was just an uncomfortable memory. Mostly I was homesick, as an angel’s environment was quite the opposite of Exo’daius. But I wasn’t an angel anymore.
“Why would the Scarlet Queen want anything to do with a constellation in a dying universe?” asked Sapphi.
“Not just any universe,” said Leid, nodding to the script. “Celevis-alpha is well-familiarized with our kind. Whatever sentient life remains wouldn’t welcome us back. That’s where Philo is.”
A few of us looked quizzically at each other, me included. It seemed only Qaira, Adrial and Zira knew what Leid was referring to.
“Same galaxy, too,” stated Zira.
“Can’t be a coincidence,” said Qaira.
The rest of our expressions went blank as we combed attica privately for information on Philo.
Razekhan inhabited world.
Race declared extinct.
Forty percent match to our genetic material.
Suspected cause of extinction: war with an extramural sentient race.
No further information on that last fact.
Philo was located in Celevis-alpha Avadara. Only a hundred light-years away from the constellation’s coordinates.
All of our confusion turned to intrigue, simultaneously.
“Maybe Oran planned to go there after she took back Enigmus,” said Qaira.
“What could be there that would interest her?” asked Pariah.
Qaira shrugged. “Something interesting.”
“Thank you for the insight,” said Pariah, frowning.
Adrial rubbed his chin, studying the constellation. “Oraniquitis knew something we don’t. Not surprising for a Proxy.”
“We have a constellation in the middle of a galaxy, conveniently in the same galaxy and universe as our predecessors. That still leaves,” Aela squinted, calculating something in attica, “forty-two million possibly post-inhabited planets in the system. Even for us, that’s a lot.”
“And dangerous,” cautioned Zira, looking between us. “Nobody likes Vel’Haru there and we can’t blend in with anyone.”
I thought back to when we’d thrown the Proxy statues off the cliff, into the gorge. Adrial had ordered us to clear out the corpses in the Sanctuary during the reformation. All of the true nobles were gone and so were their macabre traditions, he’d said. Qaira had foregone the pleasure of dropping them into the abyss, hurling the kyothera instead, which had flown off into the haze at the edge of our world.
The proxies had looked nothing like their successors – they were gaunt and tall, with long, spindly arms and talons for fingers. If they represented the kind of sentient life existing in Celevis, then Zira was right.
“We have molecular markers from Philo archived. Send another query through attica to locate any planets in Celevis with similar markers,” proposed Leid. “That should narrow the pool.”
“Start in the direct vicinity of the constellation and span outward,” advised Qaira.
“How long do you think the search is going to take this time?” I asked, crestfallen that we had to wait even longer.
Qaira smirked. “Less than five years.”
*
All the excitement made sleep impossible. Qaira, Leid and I spent the remainder of the evening in Adrial’s room, talking about recent developments.
Earlier Qaira had pulled me aside and asked for something to help him sleep from my pharmacy. When I inquired why he was having trouble sleeping he’d gotten defensive. I relented and gave him a 10 mL vial of a potent sedative, instructing him to mix it with a (non-alcoholic) drink.
Several hours later, cognizance settled in when Leid abruptly fell asleep on Adrial’s bench. She was dead to the world; face-down against the cushion, arm hanging over the edge, fingers brushing the stone floor. I shot Qaira an accusatory glare and he paid me a waning grin.
“Leid’s been having trouble sleeping. She’s too proud to tell any of you.”
“Did you put it in her glass of wine?” I exclaimed. “I told you not to mix it with alcohol!”
Qaira rolled his eyes. “Oh no, will she die?” Then, to the unamused expression on my face he added, “I had to mix it with alcohol o
r she’d have felt the meds and caught on.”
Adrial laughed quietly. “Well, you’ll be in my prayers once she wakes up.”
I sipped my wine. This was our third bottle tonight.
Get-togethers were frequent for us. We were the closest in the Court, as we shared over a millennium of history. Qaira had started out as my enemy—nine hundred years and a lot of pointless deaths later, we’d fought side-by-side in the celestial war. Up until fifty years ago I’d been the Commander of the Argent Court, of Heaven, now I was a scholar-in-training among an umbrella race of brilliant minds. We liked to think the Court of Enigmus selected only the brightest applicants of lesser species—;
In reality, the brightest minds were usually stored in the bodies of derelicts with a ton of baggage. Over half the court consisted of exiled rulers, Adrial’s newest guardian being named Pariah attested to that. He had come from a sentient race that existed only as conscious waves, known as the Chorus. Their sole purpose of existence was to subjugate and control the minds of other intelligent species, using their victims’ bodies to exact their galactic plundering.
The details are fuzzy as Pariah had never gone into specifics, but before he was recruited he’d taken over the mind of a Melekonian and worked with Adrial and Aela to annihilate his own kind. Melekonians were a humanoid race and Pariah’s physical shell was similar to ours. On the taller side, somewhere between Qaira and myself, dirty-blonde hair and laser-red eyes that held no pupils—like IR beacons, digisynthetic. Pariah’s real portrait was like electroencephalography during a seizure, if that made any sense.
“Don’t tell her I told you two,” warned Qaira.
“It wasn’t a secret.” Adrial cast a wary gaze toward Leid. “I’ve only seen her sleep once this week. She spends all night querying attica. Zira said he’d found her on the edge of the cliff. When he called to her she seemed disoriented, surprised.”
Qaira’s expression fell, and he grew concerned. “She said she’s been having nightmares. Supposedly they’re scary enough that she doesn’t want to sleep.”
Dysphoria: Rise (Hymn of the Multiverse 6) Page 2