for u mama

DECAY I

When she rose there was nothing above her but the opaque indigo and the salt of words in her mouth. Unspoken, unshining, the sunrise was forbidden. Her sleep had been fitful and unsatisfying. Far in the horizon she saw land again. This was the end of the world; her exile was finally beginning. Inside it a heart did not beat.
	It had always been night. Never dawn, never twilight, only the black of night and the reign of stars. Even around her, the waters of separation had been nightfall-dark, depriving her of even a shadow.
	“To raze…”
	The waves lapped without tongues and she looked up, scanning. It was odd for there to only be darkness, a disturbing kind of odd that she should have noticed a long time ago. There was something behind those abyssal curtains in the heavens, she knew, but it had been so long since she saw the great light that she was beginning to think it did not exist. How long had it been? Had she gone far? Not here, this close to the end of the world. This close to death.
	I am reaching death. This is how it had to be, reminding herself, broken half-oar in hand. I sail. I decay. I rise again, and I toss ash. That is how my great fire will start.
	She. I. Death. What was the difference? The dull pulsating in her chest was the movement of blood but not the presence of life. What was death if not this empty alienation? Her eyes narrowed as her calloused hands mauled the water around her. How long had she been that dull inside? How long had she been oblivious to the endless black above?
	How long had she been – ?
	She had not spoken to anyone in days, perhaps weeks. She had not eaten. She had not drunk. She had only sailed. I won’t forget you. I won’t forget what I still live and die for. I won’t forget the Empire.
	The shore beckoned closer to her, and as she stripped towards it the fog started to subside. A deep exoskeleton of mist hung over all and reached up to the sky, hiding the past from her view. There was music in the way her small raft slowly drifted towards the beach, and for the next hour until she landed, she tried to piece together the words of the ocean’s song. It spoke in a foreign tongue, indistinct and far-off, but she could understand the louder words, only the shouted ones. “The Empire will fall,” the song said; “The heavens do not weep snow. The Princess is dead of madness.”
	When she stepped onto the shore she remembered it was almost winter – or at least, it had been, before she began to sail. Regardless, no matter what, there would not be snow. She had sailed east, always to the east, searching for the sunrise. But this was only the end, and now there was land in the breast of it. The sand was warm beneath her water-stained boots, and her cloak flew in the wind around her. The air was cold and tasted of the water she could not drink.
	She left behind her stolen raft and its time-eroded oar and started to walk up the silver beach to the city that stood ahead of her, leaving not a single moment of repose or personal recollection. I killed a blind man for that raft, she remembered, the memory as distant as the now-fading song of the seas. He bled peacefully and called himself El-mar.
	The seventh academy of Netzach rose ahead of her, endless. From here she could hear its bells. Spires of white and gray rose higher and higher into the air until their summits disappeared into the aggressive violet mist. The structure was large enough that it took up all the horizon. With every step she took toward the city-school, the higher it seemed to rise, and the more she could feel the boundless ocean behind her retreating. How odd it felt, to be walking on the earth again, to feel unyielding ground beneath her feet! She remembered leaving her home, amidst death and mourning, but could not remember why or when she had left. Everything before the endless black ocean felt a dream or a trick of the light, light that she would never see again, for still nothing twinkled or brightened above her.
	There were ten academies in the Empire that had been declining for centuries. “The Empire will fall.” She said that to herself, remembering that others had said it before her and would possibly be saying it after her, when she no longer lived.
	“But now I stand. Now I live.” The earth beneath her proved that; the end that she approached now, slowly, on her own two feet, proved that.
Netzach was the oldest of the nine academies and the largest. No one that ever had a prominent reputation in the history of the Empire had went to any other academy but Netzach; so it had been, and so it would be, for as long as the Empire stood.
	“The Empire will fall.”
	The sun would not rise. Something that had never fallen could never rise again, she knew, succinctly – but there was no word in the language she knew to describe something in such a damnable state between death and resurrection. More languages were hers, before, but now she knew only the one. The wind caressed her and her cloak to comfort her, and the fur on her collar tickled her neck.
	“…the seventh world.”
	She walked alone and silent, and soon the beach beneath her languished to brittle sand and rock. The dimness was everywhere. Once or twice the exiled looked behind and saw an erotic sliver of the ocean, just exposed and obsidian enough to be taboo. It was almost conquered by the unending mist, and if she continued to walk, it seemed to plead, the conquest would be complete; irreversible. She kept going. The raft that had brought her looked like dust from this far off, and was starting to drift. Of course it would never return to her home kingdom, nor would it ever see its true owner again.
	 There were coffins embedded in the earth as she began to grow closer to the academy. All of the earth was burnt and brittle, as if a great heat had been bearing directly down for generations, but the chill of the ocean-bound air erased any such history, as did the thickness of the dark above. The sand had wasted away fully into moisture-choked wasteland, and ivory crows stared at her from atop every coffin. There was only one, at first, but more began to invade her vision with each set of nine steps she took. The crows simply stared; they did not fly, they did not peck, they made no noise; neither did she. The exiled stood and watched them.
She counted ninety-nine of them before continuing to walk.
	When the world was less than a mile away it started to bloom. Before she knew it the ground beneath her had become tar highway, the moon’s silhouette had appeared in the night mist, and the seventh academy grew three times in size. Its dominance of the horizon was tyrannical; buildings rose every which way, often in defiance of gravity and physical law, their reflections and distortions in the mist making it look as if they were rising down to the ground and originating from the heavens. She could see its innards even behind its great walls. Bridges and walkways connected massive rooms and towers, observatories with substantial telescopes pointed into the air and disappeared, and golden lights blinked everywhere there was not an opening. The crows began to sing once her back turned to them, and the coffins remained closed.
	The exile met the gates opened and unlocked, and in front of them a man in a black cloak three sizes too large stood. A sentinel. The exiled shook upon seeing him; as she advanced, heedlessly, she kept her eyes on his too-straight form. “Who are you?” she called, throat dry as bone, before they met. Beneath the fog and the darkness of his clothing he was unreadable.
	“Who are you?” he asked back, voice a chuckle and aviary squawk both.
	“I am an exile,” said, frowning, nearly sneezing. The man smelled; something was wrong. Her knuckles cracked like thunder.
	“Exiled from what, old friend?”
	“I am not your friend,” she called out, approaching. His stench forced her to scowl.
	“Exiled from what, old friend?”
	She bit her lip, and advanced. She had no answer for him because there was no answer in her. There had been only the journey; she advanced. The academy rose and blurred in the mist, everything indistinct, though she was close enough that she could hear it, groaning, more steel than wood or stone or brick. She advanced, biting, weathered black boots silent and groaning on earth.
	He stopped her. “Your name –” a hand seemed to rise, his body a mass of black and wind rising, rising, “You need a name.”
	“I don’t have one,” the exile whispered, frowning. Her hands curled into fists, and her face twisted in pain. “I don’t remember it. I… My name…”
	“So you’re dead.”
	“What? No! I… I just don’t…”
	“You need a name, child,” the man said. His hand lowered; his tone became gentle, only slightly mocking.
	“I need a name,” she repeated. The wind, ephemeral lover, rose as well. It sang as it died soon after. Exile, it whispered with its dying rattles, tingling the hairs on her spine. Lost. Dead. She remembered: the exile had been for herself, from herself. Exiled: to raze the seventh world. The great academy rose higher and higher above her, and she nodded towards it, obedient, captured.
	“I don’t remember my name,” she whispered to the hooded man, “I have been reduced to my exile alone. I… A word that comes to me is Murada. That is what I will be called, until…” She looked up, throat pained in its dryness. The man was gone; in his place, only a puddle of black on the ground, frozen over.
	She half-expected to hear a great bell to announce her arrival, but no such happening occurred. I have come in the dead of night, she reasoned; I will announce myself tomorrow. She walked inside the great open gates of the academy silently, one fist enclosed around a small ruby she had found on the ground. Absolutely no one was around; within the great academy there was only silence and the distant grinding of machinery, like something vast was moving slowly and far-off.
	It began to snow with a flash of lightning.
	The exiled looked around, bewildered, but the purity was gone as quickly as it appeared. She realized it was an illusion, or some sort of almost-invisible debris falling from above, like pebbles on the side of a cliff. Ahead of her was a staircase leading up, up, upward. It must have come from there, she reasoned. After arriving at the pure marble stairs, she looked upward, seeing nothing but the violet mist. Knowing nothing else; feeling drawn in somehow, she ascended.
	She could smell the rain before she could see it. No precipitation came near her nor the entrance of the academy, but a great din of water pelting stone and steel resounded from the south. When she came to a great height on the high spire of stairs, she was able to look off and see pillars of rain collapsing downwards in the horizon, but still within the boundaries of Netzach Academy. Beyond the walls, she noticed, the world beyond had been exiled beneath the oppressive mist, and slowly rising waves twinkled like stars. The exiled turned from them, hearing the far-off song of crows in her mind, and continued to rise.
	There was finally a single person at the top of the stairs, on a platform decorated only by stone and unyielding cracked fountains. The person stood at the edge of the platform, the very edge, directly opposite where the last stair and its banisters lead to the stable edge of the final destination. No birds sang.
	Murada took a single step onto the platform, her shoes as loud as bells, and the person turned around wildly at her presence. The wind returned with a kiss that blew away the stranger’s cloak, and it languished to gravity. Now bared, the woman standing opposite Murada paled. The great absent beast churning beneath the academy shifted, and a growl of gears danced up into the summit of the night where the two stood.
	The platform was not more than a few meters in diameter; the stranger stood transfixed, but Murada stepped forward. Now the person on the platform was within eyeshot, and her features were entirely unfamiliar to the exiled; but the closer Murada stepped, the more horrified the person became, until finally, within the thralls of a wicked fear and with visibly buckling knees, she spoke.
	“Stay back,” she moaned. “You shouldn’t be here. What are you doing here?”
	Murada paused, frowned, and held her cloak around her to keep it from flying away at the wind’s embrace. It was heavy and warm, comfortably so. “I came here to enroll in this academy,” she said, nervous. “I have come a long way, but I’ve finally arrived.”
	“Enroll? Here? Why?”
	That gave Murada pause. She had no reason to – but she hesitated, and kept her true purpose in her throat. “I… I need to be here.”
	“…You’re really new here? What? But… How did you get past…?”
	“The gatekeeper?” Murada probed. “I gave him my name, and he… Well, he let me in.” The girl had nothing to say to that but to shrink and step backwards, so Murada stepped forward and raised a hand. “Listen – I don’t know what you’re doing, but it doesn’t look safe. I need a guide to get around this place, I think, and a warm room and bed; can you help me?” The invisible beast groaned again, and Murada looked off in surprise at its surprisingly bold screams. “What is that horrid noise? This is no ordinary school, I know, but… Is this not the end of the world? I found crows here, and much more.”
	“The heavens will not weep snow,” the stranger finally said. The way she spoke was saturated with hopeless acceptance. For a moment Murada imagined the beast she could not see cried out in the form of human screams. The woman pulled over her chest: “You didn’t answer me –”
	“You didn’t ask me anything.”
	“Who are you?”
	“…An exile. I’m from a small nation, far off… Outside of the bounds of the Empire… I traveled often, and saw much. I studied often, as well. But I was exiled here. For a reason.”
	“What reason?”
	Murada said nothing. Her tongue burned.
	“Well… Why are you here, at the observatory? You shouldn’t be here. This is not the place for you.”
	The exile looked around. The platform had no equipment or instruments on its place; if anything, it looked stripped bare as if in preparation of the ceremonial dressing of a funeral. “This is an observatory? What do you observe from here…?”
	“I knew you,” the woman said, jerking forward suddenly, interrupting the exile. Her expression, already pained, now looked completely restrained – tortured.
	This came as a shock to the exiled, and she found herself silenced for a moment. There was much she did not know about herself; too much. The more she tried to remember, the less she was able to summon; only the songs were persistent, and the burned picture of the throne, and the blood. Blood on writhing, seizing concrete, and on her sword, and on her clothes.
	This woman knew her.
	The exiled felt a sudden surge of ambition – she wished to know, to see, and, startlingly, to destroy. Yet she did not know what to say… so when she spoke, it was to parrot something the song of the endless sea had impaled her with. “The Princess is dead of madness.”
	Another groan of the beast, and the woman dimmed. “You know not of what you speak,” she sighed as she shook her head. “You don’t remember at akk? Meeting me? My brother?”
	“No, I do not.” That elicited a memory, at least – a minor one. “I don’t have a sibling, myself. Only…”
	“Only… someone has passed? I never would have expected you to come here, unless something incredibly dire occurred. A funeral, was it? Everything you wear is drenched in black. Your father – he perished? No? Your mother, then? You came here to ask us for help? For sympathy?”
	That felt an insult, and Murada felt indignation build in her thighs. “No. I come from no funeral of family, and for no alliances. I came here… I had to come here. My exile was for a purpose. To raze the seventh world.”
	The woman stepped back, embraced her shadows once more, and turned away. Her face became hidden again, though Murada had not had a good glance at it in the first place. “You should not be here at all. What you speak of is impossible. What you have always spoken of is impossible.”
	“How do you know me, woman?”
	“We met a very, very long time ago. Almost ages. Do you really not remember?”
	I didn’t. “What is your name?”
	“…Vainia. I am…” She paused, pregnant with all the meaning of static. It almost felt to Murada that the woman was staring off into the abyss below not out of shame, but in search of something long ago lost to her. Mumbling, she continued: “That reminds you of nothing?”
	“No. Nothing.”
	“Well… what do you remember?”
	The exile took her eyes off the woman for the first time, and looked up to the resistant night air. The clouds were frozen beneath indigo ice; she discovered them again for the first time. “My worst memory was when I was a child. It happened twice; once, then, and again… not very long ago. Both times we had just come back from a tour of Kornelia, my family and I, and we returned to our own dump of a place. You wouldn’t know the name of it; no one does. People froze there, actually froze to death. Imagine – the year 1400, and people still freeze to death! There was a water shortage, so we could not power any of our water-generated heaters or public homes; because a scientist of ours, the first man of our nation to come to one of the Empire’s academies, returned home some fifty years ago claiming to have discovered the secret to endlessly renewable energy and heat. All we needed was water. We listened; the technology worked; the winter came; the snow did not. We waited and waited on snow after all our rivers froze to stone, but the heavens did not weep. I remember best two things: seeing bone protruding from the skin of dead homeless on every corner, and hearing my father blame the Empire. He said we should have known; he said it had not snowed once in all the world, since the Empire rose.” Her fists curled. “I had to watch so many die. So many…”
	The memory passed, and I felt empty again.
	Murada noticed how the woman covered by shadow looked tenuous; fearful. Before she could ask of it, the woman looked over to her warily, eyes trained on the worn soles of her boots, all meteoric in reverse. “You… you said 1400…?”
	“…I did. What is the problem?”
	How long?
	“Nothing,” the woman sighed, turning back to the edge. Her toes dangled off the slippery roughness of the boundary. “Do you hear it? The groaning of the great beast?”
	It sounded again, like a great dark horn from within her ribs. The cold shivered with her. She was too afraid to ask – so she didn’t.
	But the woman heard her question nonetheless, or perhaps she knew it all along. “It is the outside world clamoring for release. My graduation nears. They will be coming for me soon… to immortalize me.”
	And before Murada could speak – the woman stepped backwards, heels tepid and fully off the edge, hanging on only by the tendrils of shadow in her tight fists. The danger of her movements shook the exile and ensured her silence. “It has led me to this! This is the only escape – both from here, and from a return. Listen! They will come for you, too. You must realize that. Time will pass here quicker than you think, but…” She looked used to the shadows. Murada almost forgot she was naked – in this chilling, unweeping cold! “I will not partake in their egocentricity. You are the same; I know it. They rise; they flourish; I wither. We wither.”
	“Listen,” Murada added, afraid to step forward. She raised her hands in open palms. “Please, don’t do this. There’s no reason for you to die – not like this! Calm down!” Even now, she felt no beating of a heart in her chest.
	“There is every reason for me to do this. You do not understand now, but you will. Death is all that awaits me!”
	“I…”
	“My brother,” the woman said, almost in tears. “They want me to rise… which means he has to die. You remember him, right? His smile? That is why…”
	Murada felt her heart seize.  How sad it is, the exiled woman found herself thinking, when I have no words in my mind for the sorrow the lost soul must be feeling.
	“This world is merciless, and this seventh of the ten worst of it all,” the woman continued. She turned away from Murada halfway, her sharp back and protruding shoulder blades cutting into the wind and diverting it. “Though the mast may stand tall, the ship will sink, nonetheless. I wish not to be the captain of this world when the sea swallows it up… but if I capsize it, they cannot kill my crew. I do the drowning.”
	“But… but, Vainia!” Murada stopped; gulped; the name was fire in her throat.
	The shadow woman turned and looked Murada in the eyes for the first time. She was withered, almost decaying, a root beaten down and trampled upon too many times. In the memory of what she once was, there was a dim image of what could be. Murada reached out, unconsciously, to grasp onto the fleeting person, but her hand was slapped away.
	“This is what it is to be ruined,” she said, tears starting to fall down her face. Even her tears were stained black, like the air. “Listen – no one should have to go through this. No one should have to watch the people they love die. No one should have to live in a world without stars, without water. We are dying here; there; everywhere! I do this… I do this for you. For my brother. For the Empire. You know this, don’t you? Because…”
	The wind blew, and the beast stirred, and Murada remembered why she came to the academy.
	“The Empire will fall,” both of them said, at once, “and I will cause its rot.”
	“You do not understand now, but you will,” Vainia continued, alone. The embrace of their hands broke; so, too, did the rain above them. “They will come for you next; you, or my brother. Listen to yourself; if you are still the same woman I once knew, you will choose the right option. I have made sure of that now. Until then, exile: find the immortal man. And protect my brother… please, if nothing else…”
	She paused and took a moment to compose herself. She had burst into confessional, mourning tears, and was overcome with emotion. The world held its breath for her. “Now I will go where he cannot,” she finally continued, “with my sorrow and clinging to life, and I will search for the sun to rise again, for the heavens are just as lonely as you; and though they may search for something, and cry out silently in failing, I will meet them. All my glory will be gathered in decay. It is yours now.”
	Murada stood where she was, her funeral cloak wrapped around her comfortably, and wished she could weep for the woman in front of her.
	The Royal Princess of the Empire leapt from the end of the world and disappeared in the gloom like the stars. The memory of the Imperial Princess began to decay within Murada’s mind as quickly as it burgeoned, but she fought back bitterly to hold the older woman in esteem and remembrance, even as she descended and regarded herself in the call of the crows. They sang to her on what she already knew.

DECAY II
Sorrow. I wish this were my name.
	The headmaster found her first.
	As soon as her boot touched the concrete earth again, Murada ceased to hear the sound of the beast within, and the rain stopped. She stood for a moment, mourning, but when she heard the footsteps a moment later she was completely dry. As soon as she looked into his eyes she knew that he had seen it all, somehow; from above, there was nothing to observe.
	All above is all below. Rend onto night what is night’s.
	His mouth, a frown; his hands, a composer’s; his mind, arace. The air looked lighter behind him, if magnitudes of darkness could creep towards lightness. He was many inches taller than her; but he was dry, too.
	“ – ”
	He said something, but she did not hear. The rain had stopped falling but she still felt it deep in her ears; Murada frowned, lowered her head, raised her hood, and tried to walk. I hate the rain, she remembered, again. The air was viscous, like wading through birthwater. A faint smell of roses wafted on her nose and taunted her. I hate the roses, too.
	The headmaster stopped her with a hand, and this time she heard him speak. “What were you doing up there in the observatory?!”
	“I… That is the observatory?” She turned – saw nothing. No stairs, no platform, no corpse, no rain; only the mist, suffocation, and vague blurs of memory. Her head was starting to hurt. “I’m sorry… Who are you?”
	“You know who I am,” he grunted. “Come. This way. We have much to discuss.”
	The walk had been decorated by shadow, and she had lost track of where they were more than once. This close to the odd architecture of the academy, she felt engrossed in a maze; rooms and buildings were arranged in all three dimensions, windows became doors when her peripherals groped them, lights flickered on and off and shadows moved where people did not. When she looked up, she felt the vertigo of falling a great distance; when glancing down long stretches of empty corridors and platforms, heat waves made the world tenuous and untrustworthy. More than once they passed a building she thought to be near the gates, but the entrance itself eluded her vision. She knew not how they came to where they were without losing their way; or, perhaps, they did. She shook the moistness from her cloak and hung it up to dry when they arrived in his office.
	A strange, distant threnody dared to play as they rose up the stairs of his office building. No one sat behind the desks meant for secretarial work; but the chairs were moving, slowly, like the people in them had only recently left them. The exile narrowed her eyes at the music, tripping over her feet once or twice thanks to her sheer intense focus. Who could have been playing it, if everyone in the office had absconded? It was nothing like the song of the wind and empty world outside the academy; that one, she remembered still, deep in her heart and ears like the echoes of falling rain. This song, though – the academy’s song – it felt forbidden, and in another language, perhaps one she had forgotten long ago. It haunted her.
	Before she knew it she had been standing for a long stretch of time, staring off at a large clock that did not tick. No windows illuminated the expansive office room, but it still managed to be brighter than the academy’s grounds.
	“So,” the man said, tall, in gray, nose long and distinctly Imperial. He took up residence behind his desk with his hands clasped in chains of flesh. He stood and she sat. “You have seen the observatory. What secrets did you learn? Were you looking for it? Them?”
	“No. Nothing like that. Only… I found it.”
	“What were you looking for, then?”
	No answer – again, because there wasn’t one. Not inside. The distant song stole most of her attention away. She still kept her head tilted and her eyes trained on the clock. Frowning, she realized that it had three seconds hands and no way to measure the hours.
	“The cemetery, then?” He glanced back and frowned at her. She gave no answer. He sighed and rubbed at his temples. “Why do you disrespect your headmaster so, my lady?”
	“What?” Her eyebrow shivered. “I… I am not nobility. Why do you call me so?”
	It was his brow’s turn to dance, and jerk about it did. The squareness of his stubborn jaw did not seem to follow. “What nonsense are you speaking of, my lady? Have you forgotten your name?”
	“Of course not. My name is Murada Taoris. Have you forgotten?”
	He faltered – of course not, thin lips said, unsure of the lie.
	“I wish to enroll here, sir.”
	“But… you are already enrolled…? I… What did you see up there, to imbue you with such idiocy? Did you…?”
	The exile let an honest response twist around in her throat before swallowing it and sighing softly. If he had not grasped that she did not do the apparent crime she was being accused of, what was the point in repeating herself? A man who did not learn the first time would not learn the second, or the third. “There is a vacancy within the school now – no?” In speaking, the number 99 rushed to her consciousness and retreated just as quickly as the song she could not understand.
	Eyebrows met, fused, fermented. “Excuse me?”
	The Princess, I said, is dead of madness. And didn’t you see? The ice was born on her body, or not from weeping sores or asphyxiated birds. Though a million and one men have died since the stoicism of the heavens, and though I have seen them all, it is only the one that I have met. This one. I am here on exile.
	“You know not of what you speak,” the headmaster and his shadow said, voice doubly deep and doubly dark. He turned in full; the crow’s feet around his eyes narrowed as he tried to reconcile what he could not understand. “No one ever leaves this world.”
	The song stopped.
	“But I have entered, and I wish to enroll.” To raze. The clock stopped its movement.
	He crossed his arms over his wanwood chest and became a different man. A vengeful man. You are not who I thought you were, his eyes burned, and I hate you for my misconception.
Murada would have spoken, but her intended words became a fist behind her teeth. All at once she remembered saying she had a last name, and knowing it; where had that knowledge come from? Whose name was that? It felt too familiar, unpredicted, like the memory of the snow that would not come.
	“The sun has set and passed us,” the headmaster declared, “and no impostor candle can take its place. Not without a price.”
	“I have nothing I can give you. No name, no service, no lands, no power…” Yet as she spoke, the exile’s hands reached up to her chest. Involuntarily, almost groping herself, her thin fingers reached into a pocket sewn into the innards of her shirt and pulled forth viscera drenched in wealth. Golden coins shone in her hand, sung like songbirds; she held them forward at the same time she said “power”.
	The headmaster visibly shook. He kept his eyes on the coins and his lips pursed tightly. “Millionmarks,” he whispered, naming the newborn silence. “You are either a fool or a corpse.” He exhaled, puffing up his chest, and forced his eyes to rise. “I could grab those from your hand and still refuse your enrollment. I could steal the money and order you exiled. Where is your sense?”
	Murada smiled. “Where could you exile me to, when I am already without a home?”
	“You would be left to die somewhere on the wastelands.”
	“You said no one may leave this place.”
	“I could have lied.”
	“Would a headmaster lie to his student? A true one?”
	“Would a true student carry millionmarks?”
	“Apparently, they are necessary. I only seek education. My purpose is simple.”
	“Too simple.” He frowned and probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “Do you want me to cater to you, now? You think this wealth gives you power over me? You are still forbidden from ever reaching the observatory. You are still forbidden from ever finding the cemetery. You will always be forbidden from leaving campus again, until the time of your graduation.”
	“Enough, please,” Murada said, sighing and looking away in disgust. She dropped the coins onto his desk like they were searing hot coals. “You speak in worthless nothings. If that is what you wish, sir, so be it.” She was starting to get used to the destiny of decay. “My business here is finished. Have your faculty member show me to my dorm, and let us never meet again, sir.”
	“As you wish, Lady Taoris,” the respectful title a hairball of spit. “Never let me see you near the observatory again.”
	The exile flinched. “Never again. Never again say that to me. It is just Murada. To everyone, I am just Murada.”
	“…If that is what you wish, Lady Murada. But you will not go to the observatory. Never again.”
“I go where I please. What will you do, sir? Expel me?”
He picked up the last coin, frowned, and exhaled from his nose. The seconds hands on the huge clock audibly ticked. The headmaster turned; his shadow remained where it was. He had wanted to say something, but hadn’t; she imagined he had lost his nerve, or his conductor, or his thoughts.
	His words go missing so often, she observed. I have memories of names and the taste of blood in my mouth, but everything that is missing is within me, too. There was a reason I came here. It was in search of something. This is where I will find it. All I find in my heart is love, so deep that it twists up inside and becomes hate. It is dead. I have loved so much my heart has shriveled and become dust inside me.
	Murada Taoris narrowed her eyes and turned fully away from the headmaster of Netzach Academy. A descent. Weeping. Madness. Death.
	“Hold!” he called out, when she was only a step from leaving. She was in the middle of wreathing herself in her black rags and scarf once more, and as she froze in place, her dark black waves fell onto her shoulders, tideless as well. She looked up to the headmaster, who still had his back to her. “Who wept?” he asked. “Who wept?”
	“Do you mean…” The exile finished putting on her layers of dark and looked down. “You saw her fall, then? The princess?” The headmaster did not respond, but the drooping of his shoulders were not silent. She could not remember the woman’s name. “I tried to stop her,” Murada lied, “but it was out of my hands. She said she couldn’t bear to graduate. So…”
	“Leave,” he said waving a hand behind her. “There will be another. You are to take her chamber for your dormitory. You know where it is.”
	She did not notice she was being guided around the campus until her guide, in the midst of a yawn, started to talk to her.
	“Let us walk, and introduce ourselves,” her guide said. She smiled too brightly, with the skin of an Imperial. “My name is Yula Rhond. How nice to meet you, Lady Murada Taoris! The headmaster told me all about you. Come, come, let us leave behind the dreadful administration building. How early it is; your journey must have been long and arduous, I’m sure! No, no, come this way; away from the gates. Why would we need to go near the gates? Oh, the observatory? Even in the morning, the mist is so heavy, we cannot see it… Hm? How can we tell when is morning and when is night, if the heavensfog never shifts? The moon, silly! When we can see the shadow of the moon, we know it to be night, so we rest; when we wake, it has faded, so day has come. This here, as you can see, is the beginning of the scientific department; yes, you can tell, because all of the buildings are wider, with plenty of space for underground labs! I promise, you will grow used to the architecture of Netzach… It really is quite the gorgeous academy… What year are you? … Oh, a first year? As am I, though I have been here for a bit before you already! Oh, my lady, I am sure we will become the best of friends. Look now, those far-off there are the writing and contemplating buildings, where most of the classes for composition and writing theory are held… No, no, the classes for actual writing and genres occur down that way, about a mile up as well. Oh, have you not attended an academy with verticality, as well? Sometimes our classes take us so far up that it feels we are descending. Truly, I promise, you will grow used to it! Oh, and there is the beginning of the dorms… No, we will not be living in those, they are far too luxurious… Those are for the fourth-years. We will be over in this direction, and on the ground floor… Come, come, it is a walk, but we will arrive, I promise… Hm? Do I know any fifth-years? No, I cannot say that I do… They always seem to frown when walking across the grounds, as if they have been here for simply too long… I suppose I will be like that, after five years of constant education, but my family depends on me… What, do I know the princess? Heaven’s no! The Empire is vast, and though this academy houses her, she and I have never crossed paths… And if we had, what would I do? What could I ever say to her? The legends say she is the heir to the world, my lady! They say she will take the place of the Emperor’s father as Lord of the Empire, and find her seat amongst the Imperial Royals in the halls of eternity. What would she have in common with I, the daughter of a simple petty lord? What memories could we share? Ah, feast, over in that direction is the old ballroom, and feasting hall… No, they no longer stand, they say the building burned down in a devastating fire and was ruined forever… It is a bit of a legend, honestly, but I think it exciting… Why has it not been repaired yet? I’m not sure… Hm, now that you mention it… I’ve never seen another single damaged building on campus. Interesting… but I haven’t seen it all, have I? No… Oh, that poster? The Revolution Council, no? Burn it, toss it, discard it! Everyone knows the Council is a farce. Oh, my lady, no! It just isn’t real. It’s shrouded in so much secrecy, yet it announces its meetings and claims to have secret talks with the royals, but no one who goes to their meeting places ever sees anyone else… Without fail, everyone knows the Council is just a joke, something unique to Netzach, I suppose… Come, come, this way, we grow closer to your dorm… Wait, what? Have I ever been to a Council meeting? Of course not, of course not! I may be a petty lady, but I do have standards for my dignity, my lady. Why do you seem so interested in them? Come, come, perish such thoughts; you are much too pretty and wealthy to worry about such trivial things… I admit, I have never come this deep into the school’s heart… What dorm hall are you staying in? My lady? You will not tell me? But… Why change the subject? I told you I have never met the princess, or the prince either… What? … No… No… Whatever do you mean, the princess is dead?”