Wisher Beware

My entrance was a quiet and mundane affair. Up until I said who I was supposed to meet. First I was met with dismissal, then with disbelief and disapproval. Up to the moment, when someone in charge looked at the scroll and confirmed my task. Then it was disaster and dismay instead.

Apparently, missives to this person were a common occurrence. Missives with a murk attachment, however, were not. In the true fashion of bureaucracy, I was pin-ponged from person to person, with each unwilling to send me directly to my destination but also afraid to suffer the consequences if my presence was actually important.

I took it in stride, busy observing the intricacies of the magical compound. The tower loomed above my head. I actually noticed an interesting pattern: magical inscriptions were common, magical items, however, weren’t. If I looked hard enough I could see lines and squiggles at the oddest of places. On the stones around flowerbeds, pillars supporting pavilions. Even on benches in the park.

Magical items weren’t just around. They were displayed. The main pathway, that I’ve managed to cross thrice by now, each time with a different escort, had twelve glowing orbs acting as lampposts. Spread apart to cover the entire path, and still be visible from any spot. Found nowhere else. Clearly a limited commodity and extreme symbol of wealth.

Unfortunate. I really wanted to see one up close, and try to figure out how and why does it emit a pale blue flame. I wondered if it released heat as well.

We stepped into the grand hall, I haven’t seen before. Clearly serving some arcane purpose or a ritual. The walls were spartan but engraved in a myriad of symbols. A giant figure on the ground, full of curves and pointed stars. A giant mandala made out of gold and precious stones. Four pillars at the corners.

We stepped inside a servant and a guard beside me. And before I could ask a question about what we were doing here, everything turned white. Blinking out the tears from my eyes, I’ve noticed that the door moved from one wall to another. Or we were in a different but similar room. Or I just turned around.

“Be awed. You have stepped into the Tower.” The servant proclaimed pompously, eyeing me like dirt on a fancy cup.

So it was the second. I ignored his treatment. Wasn’t the first time, I’ve experienced something like that and, frankly, it shouldn’t matter soon, as long as I don’t screw up. Instead, I was overwhelmed by curiosity.

“We’ve teleported? How does it work?” I asked a clearly startled servant. “Does it bend space and link two spots together? Or does it simply break us apart and then rebuild us here?” My nanites were present and active, as such I was past the initial concern.

The servant opened and closed his mouth silently, like a fish. The guard looked green to the face. As if she had eaten something bad.

“Enough with your gags! Shut up and follow me!” How rude. A simple ‘I don’t know’ would’ve sufficed.

And so we went higher, climbing multiple floors and innumerable staircases. The servant wanted to lead us to another portal room, but the guard insisted on stairs instead. I didn’t mind the exercise, I wasn’t sprinting like mad and all this walking showed me more about the inner working of the tower.

Unfortunately, there was plenty to see but no time to actually explore. Hurried by a cranky servant I let my heart break every time we walked past a splendid library, filled with arcane tomes and bored spiders. Or an alchemical laboratory, filled with glowing vials and shrooms that made you glow instead.

The place was also occupied. I could see the resemblance with my Domina everywhere. We walked through a veritable anthill of red and orange. Foxes of every kind working, researching, arguing. And tails. Lots and lots of tails. I smirked to myself. Two days ago I’ve seen a first wermage. Now every large room we were walking by had at least ten.

I guess there would be enough clientele for the tail soap line.

After some time we had arrived. The servant ripped the missive from my hands and disappeared into the office, while I stayed outside with a guard. It was still hard to grasp the social structure of this place. The servant was clearly a slave but yet worked with authority greater than a guard, a free citizen herself. Who was a part of this extended household, judging by her vulpine face and copper hair. Both were wer, most likely, climbing multiple floors in quick succession didn’t phase either of them. And yet, she clearly followed him most of the time, while he clearly accepted her suggestions without snapping, like he did whenever I tried to ask anything.

I shook my head ruefully and walked toward the window. The social structure was way more complicated than I thought. There were evidently multiple hierarchical ladders without any obvious comparison is status between. Ugh. And I was falling into this bog of interpersonal politics head first at breakneck speeds without realizing it. Up until today.

She was indeed a ‘smart cookie’ with her lesson.

I looked out of the window feeling the fresh air on my skin, enjoying the view in front of me. We weren’t really that high from the ground, forty floors or so. But, since all other city buildings rarely reached past four, the view was spectacular. I could see the manors of the city. Islands of green among the spiderwebs of stone. The river bisecting it like a sapphire snake that was leashed with a multitude of bridges in return.

The distant port, filled with sails, a tint of salt felt even here. The sea, full of fishermen and traders arriving and leaving. The hills of green around the city with roads expanding away like roots. And like roots they were full with moving carts, constantly supplying Samat with food and other produce. The city lived. And, like a giant set of hearts, seven towers floated above it all. Surrounding a giant open plaza devoid of people. A place of worship and yearly sacrifices to the gods of magic. Useless and intangible.

My eyes narrowed at a particular detail.

“The Tower, it is moving.” Each tower had an amplitude, floating up and down. Hard to notice from the ground, but standing inside one it was obvious the motion was immense. “But, I feel nothing. Why?”

“Magic,” The guard responded and then continued with worry in her voice, “Why should we feel anything?”

“Because we accelerate with the Tower, and yet my body does not perceive acceleration. Does it mean it is actually somehow locked in space and time? But then we would be flying west with enough speed to grind us to dust across the hills! And yet I feel the gravity. Does it mean it somehow selectively warps the world around us? Or does it mimic the pull of the earth instead?”

“Enough! It works because the Gods willed it to be like that! Who are we to question their design.” She barked with annoyance in her voice. Her hand gripping a pillar, knuckles white. “And step away from the window!”

I shrugged my shoulders and stood aside while contemplating in my head how something like that was possible. For the first time after my talk with Irje, I grew frustrated with my inability to sense magic. Having it right now would’ve been invaluable.

A servant exited and left telling us to wait. That was to be expected, from all that I saw I was meeting a rather prominent figure in all regards. Even a letter from his student wouldn’t make him drop everything and meet a slave with unknown potential. We waited more, the guard visibly uncomfortable with my presence until eventually I was called inside. Alone.

Virnan Kiymetl Shah was exactly like Albin described. I watched him quietly as he peered over my scribbles in contemplation. His face set as his mind worked at the problem in front of him. Not senile. He had large silver ears and fox tail tinted in grey, languidly moving as he lied on his couch in quiet deliberation. Absentmindedly stroking his beard. Circular glasses over the slanted vulpine eyes like a real wise fox would have had.

He hummed and dragged his stick through the sand covering the entire office floor, turning my three into an eight.

“It is much more susceptible to forgery.” His words calm, a mere statement of the fact.

“It most likely is. But that is not its main strength.”

“Yes, speed was it? But how a written system would affect your thoughts.”

“Well, just as mathematics itself does, it breaks a large problem into smaller parts, with each number being able to be solved separately and then added together as a whole.” My stick moved fast drawing multiple examples as I spoke, showing all four basic operations. “What separates it from the other counting methods that while position matters it also makes it simple. Just as there ten ones in ten there are ten hundreds in a thousand, within their position, they all act the same, you just have to remember the position of the answer.”

He watched me quietly, clearly engrossed in the drawings on the floor, fascinated by division especially.

I made yet another, bigger example as I continued “And with that as long as you can count to ten you can count forever. You can count numbers large and small this way. Each number after ones is but a sum of fractions, a tenth, a hundredth and so on.”

“And yet it still fails to do what geometry can do with ease.” He smirked at me

I raised my eyes and looked at him smiling slyly. His eyes so narrow they looked like slits.

“Which is?”

“Diagonals of squares, for example”

“A square root?” I arched my eyebrow. Alright, old fox, you wanna play, let's play. My stick drew yet another symbol. A square root of two. “You mean this?” and then I started drawing digits. One, dot, four, one, four…

“Bah! That's just an approximation, and you simply made up a squiggle!”

“Perhaps, but what is math if not a choice” I kept writing numbers, making him frown. Human brains were bad as such calculations, I would have had to memorize this beforehand if I was normal. Unfortunately for him, my brain had additional hardware installed, perfectly capable of doing something so simple. I moved on “Whenever we are stuck, we simply move on, inventing new things, assigning something simple to something complex, once the pattern is understood. Besides what about cubes?”

“What about them?”

I drew a cubic root. “They also have a diagonal right?”

“Yes, and it is still more precise than that squiggle.” He definitely lost some steam there although he was smiling still, engaged in the discussion.

“And then?” I smiled back.

“And then what?”

I drew the fourth root. “What shape I need to get diagonal of that?”

He stroked his chin in contemplation. “Well you can probably do it with a bunch of squares in succession”

I smiled and drew an n-th root in silence. And got a stick thrown between my eyes.

“And why would I need something so abstract.” He huffed.

I handed him his stick back, rubbing my nose. “What are numbers if not abstracts themselves. They have no sense of smell, nor taste, nor colour. We can’t grasp them with our senses but our minds.”

“Hmpf.” He yanked his stick back. Unwilling to concede. “And what makes you believe that same cannot be done with shapes instead? New forms?”

“Oh, I know that it’s possible. But the mathematics is more than just numbers and shapes. There is calculus: the mathematics of change and motion.” I rubbed my fingers together as if rubbing coins. “Compound interest too.”

He sighed at looked at me. “Who do you think I am?”

I frowned, did I say something offensive? “Virnan Kiymetl Shah”

“Exactly. I study math to understand the world! I study geometry to understand magic!”

Truly?

He went on, “If you want to entice someone with something like that go talk to Aikerim Adal, she still only has gold in her eyes. This is the place of knowledge, not profit!”

I let him vent standing quietly. So her name was Aikerim Kiymetl Adal, huh. Eventually, he sighed and picked up a cup of water as I went on, taking it as my cue, “My apologies for using a wrong example. But then this branch also tells you how a curve curves, or how much area a certain shape takes. The reason I chose interest was that it is very easy to visualize the basic premise using cuts or any other money. A heuristic of sorts.”

A spray of water met my face. What an ungrateful audience. “Are you alright?” He was choking a bit.

He waved me off with a stick, violently. “Don’t step on that!”

I looked at my feet, I almost stepped on the square root sequence that I’ve written. Okay, I took that back, I had a grateful audience, it just wasn’t grateful to me.

“So, out with it.” He continued in a no-nonsense tone as if nothing happened.

“Er?”

“Your interest thing. Show it.”

“Well, imagine if an interest of a full cost per year…”

And so I went, explaining the origin of Euler’s number to a renowned mathematician who had been known for his knowledge more than I’ve been alive. I broke in a cold sweat at the implication, a mere slave trying to explain something so basic to someone like that. Luckily for me, he was in extremely serious mode, absorbing my words like a sponge, not even thinking about something silly like pride. I felt myself closer to his greatness in doing so. Like a child with a time machine shakily explaining things to Archimedes, reading from a cheat sheet. And simply basking in his brilliance.

Although I wasn’t planning on introducing calculus with e, he was as stubborn as he was willing to learn. And more. Besides, he liked geometry, so I decided to give him a taste of yet another transcendental number, different from pi.

Albin Shebet Chasya

He walked briskly through the city, ignoring the crowd that spread apart in front of him. His tail twitching with excitement. A card gripped tightly in his hand.

All his relatives had different ways of staving boredom off. All boring and mundane. And yet they dared to scoff at his. Braggarts. As if standing in front of a paper covering it in smudges, or sweating at the stone chipping pieces off somehow put you at the forefront of the intellectual elite.

Him?

He liked to murkwatch.

It was so fascinating to find interesting stories among the average. He felt as if he was digging for treasure each time he went down onto the lower city, observing their lives. Some called his findings worthless trinkets and baubles, but he felt they made the history alive.

Sparkies? They were obvious, their actions so predictable that it barely took him any real effort. He actively avoided doing so in fact, no point in making his life more boring. Wermurks were different, their minds clouded from scrying. Each one a puzzle to solve.

He had gotten good at reading them by now. For most, he barely needed to even draw a card. For some, he did only to confirm his guess. Precious few surprised him.

Until today.

He glanced at the card in hand. The same one that he pulled last, just before they have spoken for the first time.

The crossed swords.

The male hand holding the blue blade. Arkshi, The Sky Father, The Protector drawing his blade to strike his wife.

The female hand raising the yellow. Mreea, The Earth Mother, The Provider meeting her husband in battle.

The Divine Divorce. The End of Times. Chaos. The card had many meanings each more intimidating than the other.

He chuckled to himself and spoke, to no one, “How interesting.”

He turned around and stared at the silhouette of the tower he just left behind. Glowing runes flared up and, with a snap of fingers, dissolved to dust. The street fell silent.

“Well then, the child of chaos. A murk who speaks the language of magic. Walk your life and show me what the chaos really is. Yours might be the most interesting murk story I would ever write!” He proclaimed and then frowned. “Although going around his Domina might prove tricky. Well, no matter!”

He turned around and resumed his walk, whistling a tune. Avoiding the still figures slowly coming back to life.