Glasses, Cleaned on Credit

60

That night’s events were preluded by weather: a torrential curtain of rain, whipped back and forth by tempestuous winds. Dirt, foliage, stone, glass, metal—it struck uncountable targets with uncountable impacts and wove the sounds together into opaque acoustic totality. Abandoned trams still waited at their stops. Trains were bound to their stations, some scattered clusters of vans and carts braced against the curbs, and cabins of the gondolas struggled helplessly against their cables. That highest campus of the Temple of Eternity sprawled across the boreal valley floor, exsanguinated and abandoned to its fate, its humbled clerics huddling en masse in the same gilded shelters as their congregants.

59

That rain had the strength of winter, wielded the same frigidity. It was, unmistakably, winter weather, the type of rain that the temple almost celebrated when winter unleashed its uncountable ways to inflict snow and ice. But, that night, it had brought no relief: it was well into summer, and rain was not so much as wanted for months. The weather had been manifested regardless, fully formed, suspended above Eternity; not permitted to abate, to intensify, to rot.

58

That ceaselessly-growing storm perched over Eternity showed no signs of discharging. Every passing second further impressed upon the residents the gravity of its insinuated threat: the weather is only the opening act, and the audience expects a show.

57

Just three hours before, Eternity’s myazhun rose from their posts and their beds in silent, uncanny synchronicity, troubled by a heightened awareness of the frailty of existence which was now-boundlessly amplified by their networks. Humans followed suit. Why wait? They were doomed to fall to the same primal instincts. They made increasingly awkward conversation on their way to the shelters; with the myazhun rendered mute and the animals already hiding, anything was better than the cacophony of their disorganized footsteps. They’d take any distraction from the pinpricks they felt in their gut, their heart, anywhere that held emotions—early portents of vehemence, growing.

56

The persistent silence of the warning sirens had fallen on ears not yet undeafened.

55

For nearly the entire lifetime of the temple, its residents had performed that same mutinous tradition. After all, across the temple’s lifetime (only five generations past three thousand years), every storm prediction method that found any success everywhere else in Holzhyt was worth next to nothing in those mountains. In effect, at Eternity, the warning sirens started too late and stopped too early. The technology did work: its accuracy had remained in lockstep with the rest of Holzhyt. The least-contentious meteorological explanation held that the storms of Eternity started too early and ended too late. Their windows of effect could not be detected—much less predicted—by any system that was correct. Cloaked in that silence, a storm festered whatever and whomever that caught its interest, sometimes for hours. This was catastrophic, to say the least: the vorteffectic violence at Eternity’s extreme altitude was matched only by the few other most extreme places that anyone had survived.

54

Proper precautions made most storms and their vorteffects little more than a nuisance, even if vehement emotions insisted otherwise. A storm would build, and then it would fade away, having vorteffected some few most interesting foci—whatever could cause the most trouble with what potential the storm could leverage. All that was left to do, once the storm had cleared, was to find the trouble. Residents were fed shelf-stable rations from brass-lined containers until rotten food was purged and equipment was repaired. Phones sometimes dialed the wrong numbers; whoever drew the short straw ran to summon the armada of IT workers to vivisect them and prod until they worked again. Seven generations before, a storm had decreased the gauge of a small stretch of railway track by thirty centimeters. This derailed three trains straight off the side of the same cliff before anybody realized something was wrong. A historic cluster of severe storms prevented rescue efforts from finding the wreckage for over a month. Based on the recovered remains, thirty-seven people had immediately perished, and seventeen had survived. At least ten survivors had resorted to neurocannibalism. Following Holzhan law, the remains of all suspected neurocannibals were incinerated on the spot. It took five generations of technological development before the recovery operation could be fully completed. Ninety-two people would remain unaccounted for, thought to have been vaporized by the explosions of the boilers or lost to the storms. Ever since, trains and gondolas were to be shut down until anything vorteffected could be hunted down and repaired.

53

A storm usually meant about an hour and a half in total taken out of the day to feel either pretty miserable or pretty good. Sure, people could be hit if they were slow to shelter; sure, the unlucky ones might catch something chronic. Sure, some were lost to ruinous consequents, but the odds against that had never been better: the fatality rate of such vorteffects had finally crossed 50%, and they were still projected to climb. That comfort was titanic when compared to the fates of those that survived, or worse.

51

That night’s storm was different. It had spent over three hours building and, despite the weather, showed no signs of discharging. Vehemence accumulated from the crowd hung from their necks like an omen, growing heavier and heavier. Incapable of clearing their heads, they were forced to allow their emotions to fill their throats, flood their lungs, and, soon after, crush them completely. The highest campus, by far, had it the worst, this time, its shelters reporting tears, arguments, hysteria, listlessness, and affection at levels that should be reserved for the end of the world.

50

Something had caught the storm’s gaze, and its interest seemed to grow ceaselessly.

48

That widespread performance of self-preservation had made invisible the flight of the dark cyan raincoat and unobservable its struggle beneath the black veil of water. Its efforts to dodge the amber gazes of the streetlamps sent it ricocheting haphazardly down the narrow stone path. The human smothered by the coat and soaked in his own vehemence, coerced frantic speed from the neglected capsule for his brain. His suit had chafed away a rather unprecedented amount of skin for some time, with no end in sight. At first, he’d considered mere layers of his flesh a price small enough for him to pay, but weight of that sacrifice had increased with each excruciating step. He assured himself it proved the importance of his work. After all, there was always truth to be exhumed, to be preserved in the records, to be put on display for the people of Holzhyt. By his estimation, the pursuit of truth should be treated the same way (as should the pursuer (and the sacrifices required)).

44

He’d spent some of his mere forty-seven years exploring the bounds of his integrity; the rest, he’d spent questing to transcend them. He’d evoked of himself a bloodhound in pursuit of the eidolon of the mythical Fox of Alpiyet herself (without a warrant, as usual). But, as eleven years of deficient foresight culminated at the worst possible time, that night, he just wanted anyone to believe he had principles, to believe he was great, to believe him at all, more desperately than he ever had in every single year of those paltry forty-seven. Few did, by that time; of those he did, he had decided most were crackpots.

43

The cleric had careened through a gallery of evolution in functional design. Simple assemblies of limestone, preserved for over two thousand years, yielded to marble towers with intricate facades, which yielded to bronze-plated industrial behemoths (all now entombed in hermetic stucco and gilded glass). He’d reached the last two centuries’ of developments by then—increasingly abstract and evocative shapes; sharp angles and ghastly curves of concrete slathered in white hermetic stucco; furious scarlet, green, cyan, and black sigilic brands. Of course, the rain hid all but dark shapes—distorted by his skewed perception, growing doubt, the prescription of his glasses (by then, years out of date), and the water streaming down the lenses—peering at him with an unnerving curiosity. With landmarks swallowed by the weather, if he’d gotten lost, he’d have been completely unaware. Worse, the road had been narrowing for some time. Luckily, the cleric could keep hold of his sanity: Holzhan zoning regulations meant the walls weren’t actually closing in on him—at least, not at the rate they had appeared to be. He knew his mind was simply playing tricks.

42

The cobblestones had pitched upwards exactly where they shouldn’t have; the cleric didn’t notice until he’d already pitched forward. A groan made off from his lips with some of the skin from his knees. He lay there on the ground for just a moment, basking in the horribly dirty water that flooded his clothes, to allow both his bearings and his breath to find him again. Neither would for some time in that corridor of silhouettes. It seemed to him, if he remembered the map, that he’d encountered that hill a few minutes too early. He isn’t lost. He’d read the map fifty-six times already. He’s just disoriented. One can forgive that, in this weather. He will find his way. He has, after all, read the map fifty-six times. We know he will find his way.

41

And, so, he sprinted. His panting, made staccato from his pounding steps, soon became just as strained as before. His legs burned with his speed’s deficiency, hampered as it was by the steep incline and the violence his clothes continued to enact. He’d scream out his feelings, scream at the whole world, but that would only exert him more. When the ground leveled out again, but, for the sake of discretion, he might have hollered in ecstasy. Before he could gain any relief, the ground soon inclined again; he managed to keep his balance. He gave up, by then, on tracking his progress through geography. For a fair fraction of an hour, at least, he’d maintained an emphatic belief that his journey will soon end. That had only become more grating the closer the walls had grown. Yet, he pushed himself forward, step after step, even as his claustrophobia forced him to angle his shoulders sideways, else they get scraped, his coat get shredded, his body get wedged between the walls, entombed in concrete, drowned by the rainwater flooding in. He knew he was close. He had to be. He needed to be—

40

The wind distorted the veil, revealing golden glimmers of his destination: the Neuro-Semioeffectic Research Complex, that sprawling behemoth at Eternity’s peak. Crucially, it revealed the two people standing in front of it. His shock-induced collapse onto his ass reduced his profile, but he knew that wasn’t enough to hide him. Without a single moment wasted, he scuttled to the side of the road and failed four attempts to infiltrate a hedge. He fought back the horrified, hysterical noises that threatened to boil over (though the rain, louder than before, he thought, strangled anything that escaped) and stared at the guards with wide eyes. Of course he knew the building was guarded. Guards should have sheltered long ago. They were permitted to—the highest court of Holzhyt had enshrined that Dolao into legal canon many generations before. Why they remained within sight of the storm was far beyond him. If they were so suicidal, the least they could do was get it over with and get out of his way. Tonight, their odds are spectacularly favorable, once-in-a-lifetime in their favor! Not that any of them know it, not that that explains it. His whole plan was contingent on nobody being alive exactly where they stood. Yet, there they stood, wearing their white uniforms.

39

The temple guard didn’t wear white uniforms.

38

If there was a worse time for his glasses to have been severely out of date, he couldn’t think of it. Squinting barely helped—he was just about certain they were human, and that was the best he’d got. To him, those white suits they wore seemed thick, puffy, presumably aneffectic (a provocative choice, from a meteorological standpoint). No guard from the temple wore that sort of suit. No common guard wore thick plates of armor over their suites, if that was what those were. No common guard carried, instead of their standard issue rifles, something that looked more appropriate for war. That equipment, that hubris, and—he suspected—enough trust in occult pseudoeffectics to risk staying out during a storm this powerful… His heart plummeted straight through his gut: they could only be soldiers of the Counteroccult Security Force, the dogs of the Ministry of Frost. If they were ordered to stay, they’d stay; they wouldn’t leave until they were ordered to leave. Frost chucked its mutineers past the thresholds just to see what would happen—as far as he knew—as far as anybody knew, as far as he knew.

37

He couldn’t think of a single reason why they were there, not single fuckup he’d made to attract their attention. He was so sure he hadn’t fucked up. He’d spent the past nine days surveilling that entrance, tracking shift changes, and, specifically, taking note of the guards’ equipment (and he had specifically noted that they only carried simple rifles). Even that night’s duty roster, which he’d just obtained five hours before, was apparently woefully misinformed about the change in staffing. If Provost Tzyensa had known about Frost sending its hounds, he would have said something—the last thing he wanted was anyone (especially the cleric) to attract so much high-profile scrutiny to the temple.

36

Something had changed. Something must have changed. It was the only logical conclusion, vague as it was. The heresy could have gotten worse. It could have broken containment. He forced himself to dismiss the ideas: the campus would be swarming with CSF soldiers and containment specialists, and they’d be paying far more attention. He’d heard such a swarm had happened when Ihczya of Overlook and Axye of None had been discovered, but they’d been transferred away once the heresy was sealed, leaving just inquisitors behind. No swarm, no leak, and this was not a swarm.

35

The cleric’s thoughts spiraled, gradually accelerating, already smashing each other into flotsam. He managed to drag one to the surface just long enough to read it: “Were his contacts compromised?” Which ones? How many? He’d long since lost track of how much information he’d obtained under the table, all the people he’d dealt with, everything he shouldn’t have traded in response. If any one of them had cracked, he’d already be blown. More thoughts breached the threshold: “Was this an ambush?” “How did they know where he’d be?” “Was that why they were staying in the open so long?” His psyche screeched as he tore it apart, half-examining the shreds for anything remotely helpful. The only possibility the cleric could grasp at was that, somehow, the Ministry of Frost must have had better weather prediction than Eternity. Secret weather prediction. That would be the sort of shit they got up to in that temple of theirs, defiantly nesting in the southeastern corner of reality. It would explain how they could deploy their soldiers so early, arriving just in time to catch him by surprise. The cleric could only guess how much of that was made possible by whatever semioeffectics they could squeeze out of that ill-fated darling of the limelight, Eternity’s fallen star. “Why did they need better weather prediction?” For all he knew, the Provost of Frost just decided to put soldiers there for fun. The thresholds must have bored them (whoever they were).

34

He lifted his head from the ground to surveil the guards as best as he could. Through fortune (luck that he thinks is good, really) the soldiers hadn’t noticed him, too busy staring uneasily at the particularly turbulent sky through the visors of sealed helmets. As they shifted around, quick, silvery lines flickered from their uniforms; he thought they might be sigils of silvery thread, so carefully sewn as to preserve the aneffectic integrity of the suits. Sozha sigils, by the color. Again, were it not CSF, he’d wonder if they were suicidal, and he hadn’t ruled out that they were taunting the storm. But, with their (allegedly) extreme training, their (allegedly) preternatural discipline, and their (allegedly) blind delusions, they remained impossibly calm. The cleric thought it might have been some kind of apathy.

33

Something had stolen his gaze while he wasn’t watching, taking it towards the sky. That untarnished memorial for dashed hopes, ruined lives, and horrific tragedy—that pride of Eternity—had commanded him to be negligent to the consequential vulnerabilities. In clear weather, its corpse could be seen at the threshold of campus, glaring at everything within five kilometers from its perch high up the valley wall. That ineluctable specter of its creator bore down upon a temple forbidden to forget; that the temple still functioned in its presence was a testament to Holzhan resolve. The highest point of its brambly exoskeleton, near the center of the building, stood five stories tall just a year before. In their attempt to scrub away the heresy of the machine, Frost’s inquisitors shuttled in their cranes by rail and brutally caved in its cranium. For the first time, the entire temple bore witness to extreme aneffectic design, the protections taken to safeguard Axye’s machine from vorteffect: unimaginable amounts of gold lining the inside, more than most could ever dream to requisition (according to what he’d overheard from the people that were forced to rely much more on brass). Apparently, not even that—nor the other best efforts of Ihczya and Axye—could save them from a simple storm and the sheer power of irony.

32

The effectic organs of the machine, seized into a golden stasis, formed violent twists which snaked around each other in a near-perfect illusion of chaos. It was the final contribution of Axye of None to her field, and she seemed to treasure nothing more in her short excuse of a phantom existence. The consensus, campus-wide: it was the product of her unassailable drive, vectored by fame to her collaborators. All hopes of understanding that hulking monster had been buried with her, trapped in her hands and behind her teeth, and they all rotted just as fast (not that she’s permitted to do that sort of thing these days). Nevertheless, the cleric was assured it was a masterpiece of semiosigilic design, if not sigilic design entirely—something which would remain completely unparalleled for years, if not decades, given how long the investigation was going.

31

That night, little but white-gold shimmers pierced the rain. The shattered dome and its twisted innards; the brass plates protecting whatever sealed its windows, its ventilation organs, and every other of its orifices. Their glitters guided the imagination along the facility’s outline, dot to dot to dot. A thick slab of concrete that glimmered gold (likely brass—no, surely gold) stood sentinel—a perfectly smooth wall, perfectly featureless—perfectly sealing away that perfectly circular maw, the back entrance to the stairway leading to the hallways that once deposited researchers into the now-abandoned laboratories and workshops. One wondered why soldiers were needed at all.

29

Pure spine-crinkling instinct launched him upwards. When his mind finally caught his body, it managed to freeze him in place just before he could stand up straight, before everything was exposed for all to see. He stared at the guards—at the space where the guards had stood—at the space where guards had not stood for some time. His heart could have stopped from sheer relief. He bolted the way he came, letting the veil fall back over it all. His trajectory, like an insect’s, curved towards the warm glow through the half-opaque windows of the red phone booth. He grabbed onto the handle of the door and pulled—

28

A folding door. It had a folding door. He could have sworn the door had swung open before, just like every other door on every other phone booth. This booth had a folding door. He must have forgotten it was a folding door. He’d used that phone before—hadn’t he used it within the last week? Wouldn’t he have noticed? How did he not notice? It must have been, across the entire campus, the one, single phone booth, the only phone booth, with a folding door. In fact, he could have sworn that he’d never seen a folding door on any phone booth at Eternity. How had he forgotten this one had a fucking folding door? His mind refused to resolve it; endlessly repeating questions swarmed through his head, which buzzed and buzzed, harder and harder and louder and faster and—

25

Folding door, no folding door, why not, why—he could no longer permit any of that to matter: these questions, he determined, were useless. They bore implications that he determined were meaningless and implied consequences that he determined were below his notice. He refused to entertain them any further. Useless, useless questions. He refused to permit any of them to matter. He pushed into the door hinge, uselessly: it refused to buckle in, even with increasing force and impatience.

24

He backed away and squared himself; he disregarded all fear of the consequences; he took thousands of strikes to his eardrums from the rain, and a thousand more to his person. He braced his nerves, and, shoulder-first, he heaved himself into the door.

23

The bang, the shrieking of rending metal pierced his consciousness. His knees gave way with all the poise imparted by having known that sort of sound for some of his mere forty-seven years. They relinquished the remnants of their skin in much the same way. With his hands above his head and his eyes locked to the ground, he huddled against the booth. “I’m a cleric!” he screamed in a voice tainted with pure desperation. “I’m a cleric! My name is Kiortain Tleirn! I’m a Cleric of Sygrad!”

22

The impact of every drop of rain flooded his ears. With each pulse of Tleirn’s heart, he was deafened; the blissful, overwhelming vulnerability persisted for mere moments before the noise filled the aural void and slammed, again, against his eardrums. Each cycle, subtly, had come faster, had grown louder.

21

“I’m with the Chalet Office of Holzhyt! I’m an investigator!”

20

Whatever his phantom assailant had yelled at him, Tleirn couldn’t hear it, as if the rain already wasn’t bad enough.

19

“Please! I can’t hear what you’re saying! I-I’m not looking at your face!”

18

He waited. His leg had started to vibrate. He waited. He groaned in a sudden frustrated antsiness. His frustration flared into a need to complete, even at the risk of death. He was trained in firearms, well beyond the general education. He could shoot his way out with the pistol under his shoulder. “People will notice if I disappear!” he screamed, purely for the sake of distraction. Unable to reckon with what will not be his final moment, if he plays his part, Tleirn shot up and turned around. His hand slipped across the opening of his jacket, completely missing his chance to draw his gun, leaving him completely vulnerable—

17

There was nobody there. There had never been a gun. There had never been a gunshot. He never had an audience that he can possibly see. He’d smashed into the metal of the door. It had squealed. Completely mundane.

16

Tleirn’s eyes darted back to forth to down to up to back to down to forth to up across the door. He identified the hinges, supposedly stainless steel (as the temple was notoriously strict about these things), and the small patches of rust they had hosted. Its tendrils slowly, meticulously explored outward. Tleirn had never known rust could grow at such an unnervingly observable rate. He’d never witnessed it, either. He could all but hear some cassette player fast-forwarding the rust, bringing it to the ultimate destruction of the booth. These things happened in a storm. Everyone knew that. To see such accelerated destruction (with his own eyes, no less!) unnerved him.

12

Tleirn couldn’t escape the feeling that he was being watched. What he could do was actually make some progress like a good boy! He kicked at the hinge; blow by blow, one fifth of a meter at a time, he extracted an opening from the door. This time, the shrieks only drove him closer, closer, and closer to complete abandon, until he shot across the threshold and grabbed the handle with both hands and throttled it violently! He kicked at the hinge! He wriggled through the smallest gap possible! He slammed! slammed! slammed! at the door until it had nearly warped back into place! Heregained his senses! He regained—slowly, with every strained gasp—his senses.

11

He pulled his hood off by its useless brim. He closed his eyes, and he took a moment to breathe. He let the ringing in his ears and the fog on his glasses fade away. His telephone booth floated, adrift in the soundscape of the rain’s frustration—pattering against acrylic and drumming against metal in futile attempts to strike him. Just for a moment, he was safe from the assault. He threw away a thought spat out at him from the deepest recesses of his mind: “Wouldn’t it be nice to stay forever?”

10

He did not stay, returning instead to a blurry, distorted view of the inside of the booth. The rain had coated his glasses. He might as well have left them behind. The irritated patter of the drops Tleirn haphazardly shook from his glasses joined the noises of their kind on the other side of the walls. The lenses were still covered in stubborn splotches, and that was before his thin, sopping, salt-and-pepper hair of his threw more onto them. His grandiose attempt to sweep it aside did little more than to further expose a face toed the line of how ashen one could get before being forced into a doctor’s care. He checked his watch: 23:28. Not that it told him how much time he had left, but it must give him no small comfort to pretend he has the agency to be late.. Acting on instinct, he pressed his right thumb and index finger to the top and bottom of his frames. He’s positioned himself perfectly, ready to play his part, ready to kick the machine into gear, ready to be a part of something special. He must set the machine into motion, and we will operate it from there. Tleirn closed his eyes, steadied his breathing, and beat back his growing paranoia with screamed notions of lenses cleaned—images of his glasses, free of spots, accompanied by approximated emotional signatures of satisfaction and that release of annoyance from the absence of distortion from grease and distracting, fuzzy dots; feelings of relief from putting on one’s freshly-cleaned glasses again and seeing clearly in every sense—clear as cold, sweet spring water, and nearly as satisfying as a new prescription. With every exhale, he effectively rammed that idea into the sigil contained within the frames of his glasses.

9

Never run with scissors. Never effect during a storm. Keep clear of train tracks and very clear of the edges of subway platforms. Never, ever effect during a fucking storm. It didn’t matter matter what, it didn’t matter why. Never. But most, as a matter of legal principle, hardly ever effected anything beyond reasonable danger, sticking to the sharp focus spikes (faster than a stray thought) that operated the sichanic interfaces that flooded the modern era. It was easy to forget those were still effects. One found it easy to forget they counted, every once in a while. especially when one had professional effectic training. Some of latter refused to consider them meaningful effects, as if that’s enough to save them. But, fundamentally, effecting was effecting was effecting, and the storm was always opportunistic.

6

By the time that mutinous worry had breached into his consciousness, it had already been too late to stop what was about to happen, to scream, to even regret his choice.