The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

Empyrean Bastion, Aetherbridge Lift Exit | 3:18 PM | First Day

The docking process was slower and more cumbersome than the undocking process had been - artificed gravity will do that - but it was still over in only a few minutes once that lift made contact with the bastion. After that, we, along with all the other passengers, were quickly hurried out into the exit hall. Being the only one of its kind in the world (well, at least until Saoyu and Irenca stopped messing around and finished the two they were supposedly building), demand to use the Aetherbridge was very high, even with all four lifts in operation twenty-two hours a day. They kept a tight schedule, and anyone who caused a serious delay got in a lot of trouble. You heard stories about tourists getting thrown into the bastion jail if they couldn't take a hint.

The Empyrean Bastion had a long history. It had originally been constructed at the tail end of the Mourning Period as a joint project by several groups of early arcanists, though the only such faction that had survived to the present were the Sibyls. At that time, mankind's use of the Power was still primitive, so the only people who had been able to access it, let alone survive within it, were arcanists - people who could perform the math themselves and transposition from the surface, and sustain their bodies in the vacuum. After that, it had been all but abandoned during the Interluminary Strife and remained a ruin right up until the modern age, where it had been rebuilt in order to facilitate relations and trade with the Duumvirate, before being integrated into the Aetherbridge when it was erected a century later.

As a result, its appearance was a dissonant mesh of multiple styles that didn't really feel like they belonged together at all. You had the hard, angular stone foundation built during its early years, then some pseudo-organic components from when architectural Biomancy was in vogue, and finally the smooth glass and refined bronze of the most recent additions, still sleek and unblemished by the passage of time.

There was a kind of beauty in the contrast, like any truly old city, albeit condensed into a much smaller area; the whole thing was maybe a three kilometers wide. But it also had the effect of making the environment feel overloaded, claustrophobic. The human mind gets upset when it's asked to process too many distinct things at the same time. It's why wearing contrasting colors looks bad.

To describe the interior in a more direct sense, it was something like a cross between an underground complex and a castle town. There were 'open air' spaces where you could see the stone wall and glass dome that ultimately enclosed the majority of the structure, and semi-distinct buildings connected by something akin to streets within that open space. However, it was so tightly cramped and interconnected that it was sometimes hard to tell if any given area was technically outdoors or not. The bastion wasn't that big to begin with - it had maybe 150,000 permanent residents - but the result of this was it felt even smaller than that. Like the whole place was one giant complex of office towers.

The exit hall spat us out into something that straddled the line between a lobby and a town square. A large circular plaza with a depressed area in the middle for congregation, flanked by great archways that fed into the main streets, and high, slanted windows through which you could see the Mimikos below. It was paltry by the standards of Old Yru's public spaces, but was nonetheless relatively crowded. Signs indicated the direction of its various Aetherports, to which the majority of the Aetherbridge's passengers, bound ultimately for the Duumvirate, would be headed.

"Gosh," Ophelia said, as we walked through the center of the area, waiting, once again, for Lilith and her mother. Her eyes wandered between the windows and the walls and pillars of wood. "It's not like I expected at all..."

"What were you expecting?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," she said, taking in the scene. "Like a metal fortress, I suppose? But instead it's like the inside of a tree, growing amidst the stars..."

I was about to make a comment, but Kam interjected instead. "That's steelwood, Ophelia. Artificial bark. It used to be all over the place in the 1300s." She smiled inquisitively. "I'm a little surprised you don't recognize it. Isn't it rather common in Pallattaku?"

"Steelwood-- Oh, yes, I see what you mean," she said, nodding. "No, I've seen it before, but it has a much lighter colour in the Viraaki cities. I suppose it must be the density..."

"Mm-hmm, I suppose it would need to be thicker up here to keep the atmosphere in," Kam said, nodding.

"And you never see raw wood in an interior space like this," she went on. "It's always painted, or papered, or tiled with some pattern or another... Sometimes on the outside, too. Viraaki cities are very colorful. But this looks so raw-- It's striking, like a lot of Ysaran styles, but different." She furrowed her brow. "It really does feel like another world altogether."

"Have you ever studied architectural Biomancy, Ophelia?" I asked.

She gently shook her head. "Mm-mmm. My secondary school when I was studying was Zoomancy."

Biomancy specializing in animal biology. I scratched the side of my head. "I suppose I probably ought to have guessed that."

She smiled, and let out a small giggle, putting up a hand to her mouth.

I stole a glance at her luggage; she had a shoulder bag and two trunks. One was normal, but the other was small and rigid, tied on top of the first with linen belts. It was hard to spot without deliberately looking for it, but I could make out a row of six narrow slits on the side that allowed air to pass inside.

I bit my lip, slightly.

A moment or two later, I spotted the two absent members of our group. Mehit, wearing a fatigued expression was tugging her daughter along by the hand. Said daughter seemed disinterested in keeping up, her eyes once again on her logic engine.

The woman heaved a sigh as she approached us. "I am so sorry--"

"Ah, Mehit! I'm glad to see the two of you made it," Kamrusepa interrupted cheerfully, before she could launch into another full-scale apology. Something about her sudden use of the woman's first name felt too personal to me, with the disparity in ages, and the fact we were classmates with her daughter. "I was starting to get worried you hadn't caught the lift!"

"Ah... No," she replied, her tone a little hesitant. "We had a little trouble finding the rest of you after we'd boarded, that's all. Where were you?"

"The top floor," Kam replied.

"I see. That would explain it," she said, fixing a strand of her hair that had come loose. "I only checked the first four. It didn't feel appropriate to keep walking around once we'd started moving."

Her hand tensed a bit as she spoke the words. She probably wasn't telling the full truth - it wasn't hard to move around the interior except for when the transpositioning itself happened. But as we'd seen with Ophelia, it was very common for people to find the whole experience uncomfortable.

"Well, then!" Kam said, reaching into one of the many bags on her platform. "Now that we're all here, I have the instructions--"

"Woah, I forgot how weird this feels..."

The interjecting voice was Ptolema's. She was hopping a little on the spot and moving one of her arms up and down. The motions were lighter, less stiff than they'd be on the surface, a product of the reduction in gravity. If I remembered my local trivia properly (and that's a rhetorical qualifier, because I'll have you know I'm a master when it comes to inane factoids), they'd originally planned to emulate the Mimikos's gravity in the same vein as on the aetherbridge, but had lowered it slightly to assist workers in the reconstruction of the bastion's interior. However, by the time the construction was finished, everyone was so used to the lower gravity that there was a tremendous backlash to the idea of changing it.

It wasn't hard to imagine why. It was an addictively liberating feeling. Supposedly, if you spent too long up here, you not only needed physical therapy to re-acclimate, but counseling, too. Having to go back to lugging one's body around all the time made people literally depressed.

Ptolema continued making the motions, smiling stupidly to herself. "Now that I'm thinking about it, I remember jumping all over this place when I last came here. Like--" she pointed to a intricately-designed ornamental fountain in the middle of the area, built around a raised marble platform. "I got super excited as soon as we got off the lift and started to notice it, and tried to see if I could jump all the way to the top of that thing in one go."

"Did you make it?" I asked.

"Nope!" she said, with a strange amount of pride. "Didn't get hurt, though! Well, I guess I did get myself and a bunch of strangers really wet."

"Bet your parents loved that," Ran muttered to herself.

"Anyway, it's really bringing me back to when I was a kid," Ptolema continued. "Hey, Lilith! Is this your first time here?"

The teenager didn't look up from her device. Her eyes had the half-glazed-over look of someone interfacing heavily with a logic bridge. "Yes," she said.

"It's nice, right? Feels great."

"Yes," she repeated, narrowing her eyes slightly.

"I don't really think this is Lilith's sort of thing, Ptolema," I said.

She considered this for a moment, then let out an awkward laugh, scratching the back of her head. "Uh, yeah. I guess you're right. Kinda too old, right?"

I'm not sure that's the problem, I thought to myself.

"Lili's never been a very... Physically active child," Mehit said, "But yes, you're right. She is certainly too old to be jumping around in public."

"Ahem," Kamrusepa interjected. "While I'm glad you're having fun, Ptolema..."

"Oh! Right, right," she said. "The instructions. Sorry."

"Mm-hmm," Kam said. "According to this, we're to travel to an address towards the periphery of the fortress. Layer 1, 87 Doricine Quarter." She squinted. "There's also some directions."

"How much time do we have?" I asked.

"It says to arrive at about 4. So-- Lilith, do you have the time?"

"It is 3:21," she replied curtly.

"So, about 40 minutes." Kam nodded, apparently satisfied with this time frame. "Well then! We best get moving, no? Better safe than sorry, just in case we have trouble finding the place."

"I agree," Mehit said, nodding. "I won't be able to relax until we're there and all of this is said and done."

"Excellent!" Kam grinned widely, and turned towards one of the archways. "In that case, I think we need to start with this passage over here--"

𒊹

Another way that the Bastion felt like an old city was that the street layout was psychopathic. Apparently none of the architects who had designed the thing piecemeal over the centuries had held much respect for their predecessors visions, because the map made it look like three different schools of urban planning had got into a knife fight with no winner, and that was before you considered that the thing had multiple floors. It was labyrinthine enough to give a minotaur a run for its money.

Remarkably, we managed to avoid getting completely lost despite this. This was largely due to Ran being familiar with the layout and correcting Kam when she was about to make mistakes, although Kam never seemed to acknowledge this was happening, let alone consider the idea that she might be better suited for the role of leading our group than her. It was a fairly typical situation: Again, Kamrusepa was liable to cut off her own scepter-hand before surrendering any sort of authority, no matter how undeserved.

That being said, we still walked for more then 20 minutes before we had a clear idea of where exactly we were going. Fortunately, the gravity made it feel like less of an exertion, otherwise my feet probably would have started to chafe in my sandals.

We didn't talk much during the trip at first. Though we weren't exactly intensely close, our group had developed something of a dynamic over the course of the couple of years we'd been studying together - but the presence of Mehit disrupted that, making the mood slightly awkward. I especially had been quiet.

We eventually ended up in a very long and narrow street with only a few dozen people trudging through it, likely leaving work. We were close to the outer walls, here, and could see them looming overhead alongside all the other buildings and structures. I could even spot a ladder that went all the way up, presumably for if there was some issue that prevented the use of the Power. It was slightly rusty, and looked spectacularly dangerous.

At the top of the walls was a line of tall statues, constructed by the original builders of the bastion. No one in the modern day knew who they were supposed to be, but the speculation was that they were figures from the old world, since the arcanists of the Mourning Period had still recalled it. They looked down on us with impassive stares from their half-eroded faces, framed against the stars visible through the roof.

"Shouldn't be too long now!" Kam said, smiling cheerfully. "Just another handful of streets. ...though, I do rather wish they'd included a map..."

"On the left here," Ran said.

"Are you sure?" Kam raised an eyebrow. "It says, 'on your second left'..."

"They're probably counting alleyways. We passed one a second ago," she said. "Besides, at this point, I could find my way to the address myself."

"Oh? Have you been around this part of the bastion before?"

"No," Ran said, shaking her head. "But this whole place is designed on a grid system. The same patterns repeat over and over throughout the whole city, with only a few exceptions around some of the historical structures. And this part is new, so there are no historical structures."

"Ahah," Kam said. "Useful to know if I'm ever sightseeing."

Ran grunted, her gaze wandering upward. "There's not a lot to sight-see, outside of the college. They keep you out of all the interesting parts unless you're on special business."

"Such as?"

"The walls," Ran said, pointing up at them. "The first time I came here, I tried to get up there and take pictures of the statues, but they don't let you unless you have special permission."

"Is that so? Pity." Kam said. "...though, I suppose it's hardly illogical. If some of the Grey Flags or some such blew open a hole in the glass and compromised the atmosphere, this whole place could turn into a tomb in a matter of minutes. Or worse yet, crash into the Mimikos. Now that would be something to see..."

"I didn't know you liked taking pictures, Ran!" Ptolema said, ignoring Kam's apparent fantasizing about mass deaths.

"Yeah," she replied, impassively. "Photography is one of my hobbies."

"What kinda stuff do you take pictures of? Just old monuments or whatever?"

"Yeah," she said. "Sure. Historical things."

"That sounds fun," Ptolema said.

"Absolutely."

After that, the conversation died off for a little bit.

We turned a corner to another, near-identical street, and a minute or so passed in relative silence.