Havel, capital city of Auderheim

  Parsley

  He sat on the rooftop of a church. Parsley was here when it was built, when the fire burnt the city of Spree, nowadays known as Havel. The gigantic city stretched before his eyes. Towers and churches stood tall like trees in a plain. Even from a distance, where the colors of distant buildings faded, Parsley could still see the runes carved into the tower. Words for blood. This beast, a singing mountain. This song, a mortal song. This word, a people’s word.

  On its top was a bell-like structure, surface matted like sandpaper, its metallic body blended into the intricate stem of the tower. As if the tower were a mushroom, it was the broadcast tower, the center for the complex runic web of Havel. He wouldn’t dare to think how many marks were spent building it.

  There wasn’t much to do for him other than writing talismans, especially when he was waiting for someone who was never used to being punctual. Despite the constant traveling, Parsley seemed unable to get used to life in the West. He missed the smells and colors of Siyuenese cities, but returning there meant pain. He can’t seek help from the Court of Silu, even if their goals were identical. The Codex craves to scorch his skin, quench his flesh, and grind down his bones into powder.

  As he stared into the traffic, looking at the distant horizon, thinking about the time before the meltdown of Siyue’s burnt codex, he heard footsteps from behind. Light, slow, but careless.

  “Canvas, does it look like he remembers?” Parsley asked.

  “He looked clueless as hell, but perchance he’s putting on a mask,” Canvas responded as he sat beside Parsley. His jacket flowed in the wind, hand on his knee as he patted the tile of the church. As if patting a sleeping dog.

  “Herald Romily church, survived three wars, two fires, one revolution, she stands tall, I’ve sketched her twice, today was the second,” Canvas said, leaning against the tile as if he was sleeping on a sunchair by the beach.

  “Don’t you think it’s interesting, a doctor turned Letter-Writer, scholarly talent turned into Existence’s blessings?”

  “I’ve met Romily once. She was shorter than in the sculptures,” Parsley said, taking out a blank yellow paper. He held an ink brush in the other hand and started to write. The paper folded between his fingers as his brush turned and left trails of ink. Writing down words unpronounceable, using techniques unique to himself.

  With the last stroke, he finished the talisman. Parsley held it against him, letting the wind blow against it. He felt its scent, the tiny scent of talismans. The scent was unique to his own talismans. Parsley did not feel proud of his mastery, nor let down. The mastery is just experience built up from years and years of practice. As he watched the sunlight pass through it, he put the talisman back and waited for it to dry. Parsley looked at Canvas, his grey eyes closed as he fell asleep.

  Feeling that there were no waves of casting, Parsley searched within himself. It was a hard feeling to describe, similar to imagining something appearing before his eyes, forcing a fleeting rhapsody to solidify into marbles. As the strange feeling passed, a crown fell into his hands. The thin metal crown, colored in gold, stayed in his hands. Cold, frail, and delicate. It was bent into a wave in the center of it, where a black gem was held. Despite its appearance, holding it felt like holding glass, as if it could break any second. His fingers brushed the crown, as if stroking the hair of a loved one.

  “Master…I’ve found my answer, but do you remember the question?”

  …

  Remnant tide

  Suiming

  The horizon was jagged with ruins. Suiming walked on the withered grass, holding the sheathed sword as he half-jumped, half-danced through the remnant tide, snapping fingers while he skidaddled forward. On the way, he encountered a few abnormalities, one of which had messed with his coordination, and one tried to trick him into believing he was in a psych ward. As he looked at the map, Suiming hummed a song. Quiet, almost silent. The melody dragged on with each note,m. He had forgotten the tune’s name, only remembering singing it in the long nights, singing it on rooftops, under a tree’s embrace. Suiming looked around. There wasn’t anyone around, he sensed no flux of Realm-art, no scent of abnormality. Only his humming persisted.

  “Should be here…” he muttered to himself. Wind blew his hat, shifting it as the hat barely clung to Suiming’s head. Suiming raised his head, squinting in doubt. Unlike last time, the endless ebb and flow of eternity had devoured most of the structure. Its walls had fallen down, dead vines shrunk between the bricks, as if shivering. Suiming could figure out the base of a watchtower, but the heavily rusted, crumbled metal framework reminded him of a planetarium. The structure felt like it was a sand castle. Bricks seemed to fall into dust if he laid his fingers on them.

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  Realm-art: dance of a stardust

  The colorful cloud formed before him, stars accompanying it as they spun in their orbits. Suiming shifted to stars, and the scene within the nebula changed. In it, the castle stood tall. He saw somebody walk into it, their figure covered in a messenger’s jacket, rushing to go into the ruin. By experience, he stopped the scene and let the nebula and stars drift away. There are times when curiosity would harm him.

  Suiming closed his eyes. Drawing in a cold breath as the dust urged him to sneeze. The tingle around his spine assured him that this was the ruin. Suiming opened his eyes, casting his Realm-art, and walked into the remnant of a gate. By Ferr’s notes, the beacon was located in the basement of the structure, where a rift between This World and the Realm of Gaps was located. Storm of different scents smothered him. The neutral scents, the unpleasant scents, and the occasional bone-chilling lack of scent crashed onto him as the pain in his wound intensified. Suiming could sense the countless entities that once were there, that persisted beyond the rift. The great emptiness beyond this plane whispered into his ears.

  “No wonder why Ferr can’t get it back…tsk, it is what it is,” Suiming said, scratching his chin.

  He wandered into what seemed to be a courtyard. In the center of it was a dead oak, around it withered white lilies. They looked as if they were specimens, carefully contained in a glass jar. Bricks laid into circles around the oak, soil lifeless and pale. Even the sun didn’t seem to warm the place up. Suiming cleared the perimeter of the courtyard. Around the remnant of the walls, he found pieces of cloth, a rusted lantern holder, and a knife. He picked up the knife made of metal that didn’t reflect any shine. Its blade was filled with grains similar to impurities in mineral salts. Holding it, Suiming didn’t feel anything. As he thought about what kind of material made it, he put it in a satchel that was hanging next to his sheath. Suiming’s eyes locked on a fallen pillar. He felt the strong scent and flux of the rift. Without a doubt, he took out the outsider and began to write. This time, he decided to recite some of his favorite folk tales from the book he read on the train. Suiming put the period, and the light blasted off. Dust fled into the air, obscuring what was under the pillar. Lights of Suiming’s stars pierced through the mist. Right now, Suiming couldn’t rely on the sense of a caster to detect anything arcane, the rift would cover up and mix with any scent. The light didn’t show anything coming from the mist. As the dust settled, leaving a dark entrance open, Suiming walked into it, hand on the hilt.

  Stars pave the way forth, his breath sang the ode to his trailblazing. The staircase downwards seemed to stretch into the darkness, beyond Suiming’s stars, even beyond the darkness itself.

  Suiming descended down, fast, but cautiously, scanning for anything on the ground as he went. After about a quarter, he reached the end. The moment he laid his foot on the ground, the floor let out a long, echoing creak. He felt little scent of anything, only the echo of the sensation from before lasted.

  The creak was scratching his ears as Suiming looked at the illuminated parts. Stems of metal, fans, and flappers made out of wood connected into some unnamed form, at the end of the chamber, were an entity of dark green with white writings on them. The classroom looked distorted, the legs of the stools spiraled together with the seat. And the blackboard? The blackboard was filled with words in Yellian. The writing pierced deep into the blackboard, strokes stabbing Suiming’s eyes, its form and serif splattered across the board.

  The show must go on, the show must go on, curtain calls are not now, curtain calls are not now. Great citadel, empty citadel, TSOTD. TSOTD, let us into your endless play, where curtain calls never come.

  As Suiming felt puzzled by the acronym, he immediately halted his curiosity like a dog owner pulling the leash. Although the possibility was slim, Suiming wouldn’t risk learning the true name of an Existence, knowing the true name of a few Existences was already a curse. He approached the blackboard, drawing the blade as its dark azure runes shone dimly like the Silver Arm in a light-polluted city. Suiming passed the empty tables. When he walked, no dust floated to the air; only the persisting scent of some kind of cleaning agent lingered.

  Suiming stopped a step away from the blackboard. His Realm-art’s light glazed the dark green as it painted it with bright highlights. The texture of it was identical to a common blackboard found in old Euthian schools. He felt no scent of abnormality from the blackboard, and with the back of his palm, he dragged his hand across the board, cleaning off all the writings. His heart drummed fast, feeling for anything that might come up to him as he got his hand covered in white powder. Seeing that the board was as clean as a blank canvas, Suiming let out a sigh of relief. Classroom, classroom, when was the last time I taught a lesson?

  As he reminisced about the past, he turned to glare at the classroom. The room felt different from this angle. He was familiar with this feeling, the feeling of authority. Suiming remembered the last time he stood in a teacher’s place. The day Josh’s class graduated. His table was filled with flowers, his blackboard covered in colorful drawings, and his hands full of sweet gifts.

  Suiming smiled. He still remembered the young students’ hopeful, curved lips, their cheerful eyes, and his best wishes for their future. While he fell into nostalgia, Suiming didn’t forget to search for the rift. His eyes scanned the classroom again as he tried to sense that chaotic scent.

  Then, his eyes stopped.

  On the second row, the second seat from the right wall sat someone.