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“Arindell has a very curious take on medicine. In fact you can find clinics on every corner and fully-modern hospitals located conveniently throughout the metropolitan area. But there is also magic; and far and away the most common type of mage is the healer. They ply their trade at stalls in supermarkets or working out of booths in strip malls. Come to them with any injury, large or small, and they’ll have you back on your feet in a matter of minutes. However, despite the size of the injury, the bill will usually be quite large.”
– Healer’s Guild Information Circular
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Chapter 17:
What Freedom Means
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#17.1 – Monday, the 23rd day of the 9th Month…
True to her mother’s commands, Scarlet came straight home from school. Then, since she’d ditched phys-ed and history, she made herself a quiet lunch and sifted through some mail-order research materials for two hours before calling her mom and telling her she’d just gotten home.
Though incredibly useful, the Great Library of Arindell did have limitations. While copies of more obscure texts definitely existed somewhere in its stygian depths, actually accessing them required a torch and a bullwhip. Scarlet found it easier simply to order some things from the archives of various universities.
Her process, though indecorous*, did work pretty well. She had figured out some years ago how criminally easily one could forge university letterhead. Scarlet Jusenkyou may be a thirteen-year-old school girl with a better than even chance of failing eighth grade. But Carmine Rose, a research fellow at the esteemed New Stormwind University, could get just about anything she needed.
Or, at least, a bad photo-copy of it.
It wasn’t really a book, just a sort of rough folio made from stapled-together pages of newspaper-sized paper. Printed from microfilm and then photocopied(probably more than once), the font could barely be read. Scarlet needed her shame-glasses and a magnifier, but she’d been poring over the papers all day.
“Here it is, I’ve found it,” Scarlet said to her cat. “In the chronicles of Saint Aberbock, on the one hundredth day in A.Y. six-six-sixty-six: ‘for Naomi hath stood before me her hand at the stone and spaketh thus ‘my sisteren hathe driven thine father’s sword here and sealed it with thy blood’ and I beheld the hilt of Echbalder upon the rock’.”
Jayce the cat looked unimpressed.
“Don’t you get it?” Scarlet said. “This is a first-hand account of the fate of the sword. The guy who wrote this saw it with his own eyes. Guy? Ok, the person of now indeterminate gender because this account is thirty-five-hundred-years old and they didn’t have great pronouns. Still, someone saw it, and wrote it down. Isn’t that great, Jayce?”
“Scarlet, laundry.”
Scarlet glanced up to see her dad standing in her open doorway.
“Yes, father,” she said.
“Is that ‘yes, father, I acknowledge that you spoke’, or ‘yes, father, I will do my laundry’?”
“…yes, father.”
“Go do your laundry,” Roy ordered. “Remember our last off-world family vacation? D’you want that to happen again?”
Scarlet glowered as she muttered Golden-Age profanities under her breath. She slid the book case forming her closet door back and tried to grab her hamper, finding it too heavy to lift.
“The only problem is the date,” Scarlet said to herself as not even the cat would listen. “And not just because it’s the demon-number.” Lacking better options, Scarlet stepped back and dragged the hammer out of her closet. “Ugh. Not unlike my laundry.” One more drag pulled the hamper out into the hallway, where Scarlet tipped it onto it’s side and began to role it like a barrel.
“A.Y. six-nine-ten marks the end of the Sixth Age, but many archivists writing in later periods didn’t recognize it that way, leading to dates listed later using the old convention—but the big triple-six puts it two-hundred-forty-four years earlier. Hunter wasn’t even born.”
Scarlet kicked the hamper to make it role, then turned and fast-marched back to her room. “That’s can’t possibly be right.”
“SCARLET! Are you rolling your clothes hamper down the hallway again?!”
“No, mom!” Scarlet shouted back. She grabbed the pages she’d been studding and squinted hard at the date. “Ok, that first one is definitely a ‘six’, what if the second is just a really jacked-up nine?”
Still cradling the folio, Scarlet returned to the hallway and continued kicking her wicker laundry hamper until it hit the edge of door into the laundry room.
“That would put the date at six-nine-six-six, sixteen years after the end of the Old Alliance Era.” With a final kick, the lid fell off the hamper and Scarlet’s rotten laundry spilled out all over the floor.
Scarlet stepped over the clothes and turned on the light above the dryer, spreading her papers out on the relatively flat surface. “A date which also does not jive, because… wait…”
Scarlet took several steps backwards and leaned against the far wall of the laundry room. “But what if he’s using the Lion Calendar†?” She slipped slowly to the floor and sat back for a moment, wracking her brain to remember the conversion equations. With one hand, Scarlet rooted around in the junk drawer and found a stack of sticky notes and a gel glitter pen.
“Maths time, six-nine-six-six, minus one, times three-hundred-sixty-five, plus a hundred—probably carry a one somewhere in there for good measure…”
“Scarlet?” Ann’s head popped through the door. “What are you doing?”
“I’m doing my laundry,” Scarlet gestured at the mess on the floor. “That much should be abundantly clear. Let me see, that’s a bit past two and a half million days, divide by the number of days in a lunar year which is three-hundred-eighty-four…” Scarlet thought carefully for several moments while scribbling on the notes. “Lunar year six thousand, five-hundred-sixty-eight.”
“Child, you are clearly doing math, math is not laundry,” Ann said.
“My teacher says math is everything,” Scarlet replied. “Also, the Lion Calendar is an absolute count, not divided up into Ages, so my calculations are super off.”
“Scarlet, you’re terrible at math,” Ann told her.
“Gee, thanks, mom,” Scarlet pulled herself back to her feet and began arbitrarily shoveling clothes into the washing machine. “The lunar and solar calendars align once every three-hundred-eighty-four solar years, with the first alignment on the old Alliance calendar happening in A.Y. one-one-forty—”
“You have to separate out the lights and the darks,” Ann crossed her arms and tapped her foot. “And you had better not run your delicates through the dryer again! You know how expensive those things are!”
“You buy them off the discount rack, mom!” Scarlet retorted. “If you want to be helpful, remind me which Alliance Ages+ lasted exactly a thousand years and which ones were off by a bit.”
“Scarlet, I don’t know that,” Ann said. “No one should know that off the cuff. Do your laundry. Do it right. And then come to dinner.”
Scarlet finished stuffing clothes into the washer with complete disregard for color. She likened the task to a coal-stoker, with the emphasis on getting everything through the hole and not much else. Most of her whites were a light-ish grey by now anyway. Scarlet leaned her whole weight on the washing machine door until she heard it click, then started to measure out soap.
“Let’s start from one-forty,” she mumbled. “Shoot! Is it one-forty or one-one-forty? Gah! Stupid Lion Count!” Scarlet’s hand hovered near the on-switch for the washing machine. In five years of doing her own laundry not once yet did she manage to turn it on without shocking herself. Her mother insisted there was a trick.
Stealing herself, Scarlet tapped the button as fast as she could, then tapped it again when it didn’t register. Both times hurt. With a numb finger she returned to her bedroom, half her laundry still spilled across the utility room floor.
Flipping through the ‘Scarlet Edition’ of History, Scarlet found the section on the Old Alliance. “Great. ‘Many historians disagree as to exactly how dates were chronicled. Some sources indicate that the final year of every Age after the first was celebrated in parallel with the first year of the next. This would make each Age nine-hundred-ninety-nine years in length and not the oft-touted one thousand’.” Scarlet grabbed a red pen from her drawer and wrote a note in the margins to remind herself not to fall for that again.
“Scarlet,” Ann approached the doorway and leaned against it. “Do we need to get you a math tutor?”
“Huh?” Scarlet had been so absorbed in her own thoughts she didn’t have the slightest clue why her mother was talking to her.
“You don’t even have your book out. Where is the worksheet?”
“I’m doing fine in math,” Scarlet said reflexively, then added “I thinkP” under her breath. “Besides, I’m just trying to work out when this manuscript was written to ensure it’s accurate. I can barely make sense of these photocopied smudgecicles#—mom, if I give you really precise directions, could you go into the rare books annex at the Library and look something up for me?”
“They’re not going to let me in after last time,” Ann replied. “I had no idea you could get points on your driver’s license for that.”
“I’m just glad the Librarians can’t prove I was involved,” Scarlet said. “Ok, I’m finished doing mental-math. The Age of the Dragon ended in five-thousand-six-hundred-sixty-three according to the version of the Lion Count in use at the time. If that first digit is a really illegible five, and this event happened three years after the end, then this date works out.”
Her mother entered the room and placed a hand on Scarlet’s shoulder. “Come eat dinner and let’s talk about getting your math grade up. This is no time for you to be slipping down a Scarlet Hole.”
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#17.2 – Saturday, the 28th day of the 9th month…
Scarlet’s new ‘funeral dress’ looked stylish and dignified, a testament to Esperanza’s shopping prowess. For the first time, she didn’t feel silly or like a little girl while surrounded by other mourners. Cold air settled over the cemetery, and she pulled her shawl tighter over her shoulders. Her only stylish wrap, the velvet nightshade, complemented her new dress. But the last time she wore it Emmerich died, and his memory, and realizing he was now only a memory, made the day that much harder
At the service, several distinguished members of the Antiquarian Society spoke. Even Artur Hasdale attended, though he didn’t recognize Scarlet. A priest from Emmerich’s church led everyone in a hymn. And then they proceeded to the graveyard. Roy served as one of the pallbearers.
The cut on the side of Scarlet’s head had closed up by now, and she took a great deal of time to straighten and set her hair, holding it back with a headband so that it stayed nice.
Scarlet only had a specific ‘funeral dress’ because her dad knew so many old people. She got dragged to two or three a year. But never for anyone she cared about before. She cried, but softly, and found herself comforted by strangers. Emmerich wasn’t just highly respected; he had many, many friends.
The final stage of the funeral involved everyone walking past the open grave, throwing in a handful of dirt or a rock. Scarlet, meanwhile, waited until no one could see, and tossed in a lit match. “By the light of this fire, and into the light,” she whispered. “Safe journey to the spirit world*.”
Only Emmerich would know to think of the funeral chant from when they burned bodies in the Sixth Age. No one else would get it, or understand why Scarlet needed to do it.
People were starting to leave now, and Scarlet didn’t care to linger. Moving past the grave, she found her parents.
Overhead, the sun blacked out briefly.
Looking up, the serpentine forms of three dragons were clearly visible, flying in a tight formation. They formed a circle almost exactly overhead, nose to tail and rotating fast.
“Why do they have to fly here today?” Scarlet’s mother scowled. “Don’t they have any respect?”
“Yes,” Scarlet wiped her wet nose on the back of her hand and felt her eyes tear up again. “That’s an honor-guard formation†.”
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* #17.3 *
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Scarlet sat atop her giant book while Esperanza made herself comfortable on the yard, draping her graceful neck over the house and settling her head in front of Scarlet.
“Are you still coming up to the Mountain?” Esperanza asked.
“Tuesday after school, soon as I get out of child-prison,” Scarlet nodded. “…do dragons have school?”
“We’re born with all the knowledge we’ll ever really need,” Esperanza shrugged, making the eaves of the house creek. “Closest we get is warkyte training when we’re sixteen or so.”
“I thought High Mountain had Tyrants?” Scarlet blinked.
“They have one Tyrant,” Esperanza snorted. “And they think that makes them so cool. Oh, sure, Irinu was the hero of the Battle for Bident, and I was too young to fight, but I’m not at allll jealous.”
Scarlet blinked at her. “…is that a reference I should get?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Esperanza raised her head up and stared down her snout at Scarlet. “The Uprising? The Great Betrayal? You’re a crazy history nut, how do you not know about war with the ConFeds?”
“Recent history really isn’t my jam,” Scarlet admitted, then decided to change the subject. “Why were you at the funeral?”
“The name of Emmerich Thompson was known to High Mountain Flight,” Esperanza explained. “Not me, personally, but since I knew the formation, they asked me to participate.”
“Too bad nobody on the ground knew what you were doing,” Scarlet sniffled.
“I’m a little surprised you did,” Esperanza said.
“Most dragon ceremonial formations aren’t known,” Scarlet exhaled. “But the honor guard is one. To this day, dragons fly the same formation over Lelerough’s monument in the Dragonlands.”
“Yep, that’s where all my cute dragon boys are,” Esperanza nodded sadly.
“Well, all the cute human boys are jerk-wads,” Scarlet snuffed. “My therapist told me I have to go to the school dance, with a date. Can you believe that?”
“Ohhh, fun!” Esperanza giggled.
Scarlet frowned at her.
She liked boys just fine. Not any specific, flesh and blood, living boys. But the concept of the male gender, in an appropriately athletic and nice-smelling edition, did intrigue her. Her school mates delighted in reminding her that any boy would have to be blind, armless, and deaf in order to show any interest in her. To that point, none ever had. She didn’t like any living boys, anyway. Through her studies she found a whole world of love letters and courtship records from that far distant Golden Age of Lieber(Eieber?) and the Slayer Dragons. One stuck in her mind, and she wished more than anything to have a boy like the one in the letter express an interest in her. A now long-dead girl a little older than Scarlet, known today only as “A. Hilde” wrote a beautiful letter to a friend about the affections of one “D. Roan”. Reading the girl’s words, Scarlet wondered when she would ever get to feel that way about a member of the opposite sex.
“No one’s ever gonna ask me, and I sure as heck ain’t askin’ anyone!” Scarlet forced herself to speak around the tightness in her chest. “Here’s literally all the boys I know: jerk-wads from school, and the celibate necromancer who’s way too old for me.”
“Did you check to see if Hezikah has a younger brother who also doesn’t wear a shirt?” Esperanza suggested.
Scarlet scowled. “I don’t think it would be quite the same.” She let out a long sigh and deflated. “I GUESS I could ask around at the temple, they are a helpful sort. Also, I bet my dad has a friend who has a kid who’s about my age…”
“Oh, don’t let your dad set you up on a date,” Esperanza dismissed. “I’ll find you a boy!”
“It’s not a date!” Scarlet protested. “It’s a prescription.”
“No, I’m upgrading it to a date,” Esperanza winked. “On the night of the dance, you just put on that minky little red dress we picked up at the mall, maybe do something with your hair. I’ll take care of the rest!”
Scarlet felt her throat begin to close. “I can’t wear that in public!”
“Trust me, with a hot enough guy on your arm, you won’t have annnny troubles,” Esperanza told her.
Scarlet paused a moment and glanced at her friend. “Are… are you going to set me up with a dragon? I mean, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just… need to know.”
Esperanza blinked at her. “Well of course! What did you think I meant by a ‘hot’ guy?”
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#17.4 – Monday, the 30th day of the 9th Month, the Last Day of Summer…
Emboldened by the confidence Emmerich placed in her, Scarlet set out to find the Blood Stele.
Her search would go about as well as most of her endeavors*.
With Phys-Ed and history after lunch, she figured it would be easiest to leave school a little early and buy herself some much-needed research time. It worked, too! Both her parents were at work and none the wiser, and Scarlet got to spend six solid hours working on the problem.
In that time, she found the real name of the amulet: the Blood Chrism, for its connection to the Blood Stele.
And it was far older than Conri’s lifetime.
And aside from that historic curiosity, Scarlet had made exactly no progress.
Gritting her teeth, she looked around her small bedroom. The bed, desk, and floor were all covered in two reams of paper “borrowed”† from her father’s office. On these, Scarlet spent the previous afternoon, following morning, and current evening analyzing the runes of the amulet.
No one would ever describe Scarlet as a cunning linguist. Common, the chief dialect of Aren+, was a living language transcribed in multiple alphabets going back fifteen thousand years. And Scarlet, with her guile, could easily read any known dialect of it(with varying degrees of comprehension, she did not have magical language-wizard powers after all). But she had repeatedly proved hopeless at literally any other language. There were five or six major ones spoken on Aren, dozens more smaller or dead. Thusfar, Scarlet only ever had to deal with Common, or, in some very rare cases, Standard.
Scarlet glared down at the piece of copper on her desk. “But this stupid amulet…”
Many hours of work were enough to rule out that the runes were an alphabet(maybe?), but so far she hadn’t achieved any more.
“They’re not decorative,” Scarlet announced. “Of that much, I am positive—Friar! Friar, no!”
Throwing herself from her chair, Scarlet lunged for the duck. He had just gotten that ‘look’ in his eyes, raised himself up on his little legs, coiled, and pounced on the sleeping cat.
Jayce, startled, leapt up and began tearing around the room.
In short order, pages fell out of the air like snow.
“You guys are lucky only one of you tastes good,” Scarlet glowered.
“Scarlet! Dinner!”
And now her mother was home.
Scarlet rubbed her eyes and then her cheeks, then did a quick sweep to assess the damage. The pages weren’t in any order and not intended for a destiny other than the recycling bin, so other than knocking the amulet off of her desk, the pets hadn’t caused any harm.
Kneeling, Scarlet found the amulet, and the late afternoon sun caught the gem.
“Scarlet!”
Scarlet hadn’t yet exposed the amulet to sunlight. She’d put it under her desk lamp and played around with a flashlight, looking for anything at all unusual, but she hadn’t put it in the sun before.
The red stone inside the setting caught the light and arrayed it on the floor in a shimmering pattern, projecting a single, strange dark spot. As Scarlet rotated the amulet in her hands, the spot didn’t move like a normal refraction through a faceted stone should.
“SCARLET!”
Trembling, Scarlet looked up. High Mountain was above her. The top of the amulet, near where the chain passed through a little loop, had a sort of crest on it Scarlet could tell didn’t belong to a decoration. Exactly where the black spot projected onto the floor changed depending on how she oriented it, but with the crest aimed at High Mountain, it appeared to be pointing to a specific place.
“Scarlet Amiko Jusenkyou, I know you’re in here. You had better not be ignoring me!”
Scarlet jumped and dropped the amulet. “S-sorry, mom!”
“What is all this?” Ann demanded, looking around at the mess of papers. “Some sort of art project?”
“Research?” Scarlet offered.
“Get washed up for dinner,” Ann’s voice got a bit calmer and gentler. “You can get back to… whatever this is… after you eat.”
Scarlet glanced up at the rapidly setting sun, then down at her growling belly, and set about for her bathroom.
“I got a call from your school today.”
Scarlet froze.
“I know you’re still grieving, so we will let it slide. If you need to be excused from school you have them call me.”
Scarlet forced herself to swallow, then ducked into her bathroom.
The only food Scarlet had bothered to eat all day were a few hastily devoured slices of dry toast at breakfast. Sustenance never rated high on her priorities list and most times she ignored her hunger. But right now her belly felt like the gaping maw of a bottomless chasm. With her face and hands passably scrubbed, she trod back through her room over the scattered papers. Two overlapping sketches caught her eye, and she grabbed them and a pencil to take with her to the dinner table along with the amulet.
“I did three internal audits today,” Roy announced proudly as the family sat down.
“That’s nice, dear. Scarlet has done… something… with all of your printer paper,” Ann said. “Again.”
“Mired in an antique mystery?” Roy shifted his attention to Scarlet.
“It’s just a lousy souvenir, honest!” Scarlet replied automatically. When both her parents blinked at her, she timidly raised up the amulet. “I… thought… I could solve the mystery of the Blood Chrism?”
Roy squinted at the amulet a moment as if trying to remember what it was, then eyed the papers. “I see we’re putting our drawing classes to good use.”
Smiling if nervous, Scarlet tucked the amulet next to her plate and began to eat. Two years earlier in perhaps his finest moment of parenting, Roy took Scarlet to a semester-long university course on archeological illustrating. The techniques were quite fascinating, and since then she had been enamored with what you could learn by “drawing” an object. This wasn’t traditional sketching(which, as with many things, Scarlet was rubbish at), but concentrated on what human hands had done. Dropping the patina and other natural markings, she exposed details invisible in a photograph or even to the naked eye.
Her many inexpert sketches of the amulet had done exactly this, revealing the odd glyph in a way only such a precise study could achieve.
Roy surprised Scarlet by reaching over her and taking one of the pages, holding it up to the light to examine it. “Looks like you’ve almost solved the puzzle. Is this one of those send-away adventure kits?”
“Uhm… ya know what? Sure,” Scarlet forced herself to smile.
“Ohh—I used to love these visual riddles as a kid, this is the Hexen-cipher,” Roy clapped excitedly. “The finished shape is actually very easy if you know the clues.”
“The what, now?” Scarlet blinked.
“Oh, it’s older than dirt,” Roy waved. “May I?” Scarlet handed him her pencil and he flipped the paper over. The original glyph consisted of three parallel lines, and a fourth line intersecting all of them at an angle.
Beginning with a smaller copy of the original glyph, Roy made a quick series of lines, pausing only once to check himself, then erasing several guides he’d done and handing the page back with a six-pointed star now drawn on it. “Fancy that!” Roy announced. “I still know the tricks!”
Scarlet gaped at the shape. “How did you do that?”
“See the lines on the original shape?” Roy pointed. “The middle line here is slightly shorter than the other two. In Hexen, that means it’s a mirror-point. When its asymmetrical like that, it means you always fold the shape out left to right, then the finished shape top to bottom, but move it up part-way. I’m sorry, dear, were you wanting to solve it on your own?”
“No. Nope,” Scarlet found the simplicity of her father’s logic stunning. “Nope. This is great. This is good.” No question whatsoever: the hidden shape her father revealed lay encoded across the face of the amulet. Scarlet would never have figured it out in a hundred years of trying, yet the way her father explained it fit perfectly with all the pieces she’d unearthed.
“The Hexen-cipher was really popular when I was a lad,” Roy continued. “All the decoder rings from every serial box had them, every comic book had puzzles in the back. We used to memorize glyphs for insulting gestures and draw them on each other’s homework. Ah, the memories. Of course, it’s even older than that. Something fun for you to dig into your books over.”
In fact, it was older than that. About four thousand years older at least. References to the Hexen-cipher and its connections to the Blood Chrism were more common than fake copies of the amulet.
For Scarlet, knowing the cipher existed and its history proved not to be very difficult. Learning what the cipher was and how to use it seemed damn-near impossible. Not a single one of the dozen references she’d checked had any actual details; every passage just said “and then, using the Hexen-cipher” as if the reader already knew exactly what to do.
And, of course, as she listened to her father talk, obviously she, too, would have known if she’d just paid a little more attention.
Conri Jusenkyou, for all his foibles, absolutely loved comic books.
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End:
Chapter Seventeen
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