Nighttime Furies

Squares of moonlight spill from the windows into Raum’s bedroom. He scrunches up his blankets, turns away, stares instead at the wall. Hours have passed since he got into bed, and though he assures himself that he just needs to sleep, he cannot.

He turns back to the window, thinking. Would Reyl really do something like that? Are these contingencies going to work, if she does? How desperate would she have to be?

Is Raum really, really worth that? Caught in this loop of rumination and anxiety, able only to find more fears whenever he reaches for answers, Raum finally surrenders and casts off his covers.

He’d like to settle down with a cup of cocoa and listen brainlessly to some radio drama, but none air at this hour. So instead he stalks through the manor’s lonely halls, reaches the kitchen, descends to the cold cellar, and returns with a bottle of sherry.

That he bothers to pour anything into a wine glass exemplifies Reyl’s contemptuous idea of shallow ‘propriety’.

Liquid comfort. It really is. But already the fuzzy warmth congealing in his stomach is dulling the edge off his thoughts successfully, and what were once blades whirling through his mind soon degenerate into a soppy, churning sludge. Give him a pillow and he would sink into it. But what’s just one more sip… to hold onto this nice feeling just a bit longer.

He sighs, hiccups. Slumps into the back of the chair. As he stares at the ceiling, the tide shifts, and the cozy heat in his gut tightens like a knot around his innards. Tears leak from his his eyes, his nose, heavy in the pits of each.

God, god, god, god. What the hell has he got himself into? Raum plants his elbows on the table, forehead in his palms.

Though a haze garbles the worst of it, churning thoughts bludgeon him like furies. It’s so dumb. Everything he’s doing. It’s so so so so so so so so so so so dumb. Look at it… cozying to Aquila now Aquila’s not cozy but let’s be real who didn’t predict that? Raum predicted that. So why, why why why why why why bother, investing so much to this shady person, why latch yourself onto him, why act like there’s anything good to keep here… you just like being the cute harmless one beside him… you just like pretending you can turn him around… you just like feeling he’d get rid of you if he didn’t care… but you don’t really care… not really... you just need these diversions because it’s too much, too much, it’s too much…

Leading on everyone’s time you are. Hey, still have those painkillers?

Yeah…

Well hurry up and get them! Have a buffet!

—Wwwoah oh no okay there. Bad idea bad. Because… uh…

Someone would have to find him and that’s a horrible, horrible thought. Imagine Reyl finding out. Or Aquila. All those people glad that a Whitewood survived… you’ll hurt them. Cause problems. That’s horrible. So horrible…

Raum pinches his nose. Ooooo he’s drunk. Or needs to get more drunk. He sloshes his glass about in contemplation, but ultimately pours the sherry down the sink. Can’t be hungover for Aquila tomorrow, he thinks dimly, then washes the glass, sobbing while singing Chiquitita.

He sniffs. Thinking to sober up, he retrieves a loaf of bread from the pantry to graze on as he returns to his bedroom. God that moonlight is bright. Which dad grandpa of his hated curtains so much he had to throw them all out. Stricken with a brilliant idea, Raum goes to heave a bookcase over to block out the window, but, heavy with books, it barely budges an inch. Though he blearily tries to fix this issue, he soon tires, gives up, forgets about it, and conks into bed with his loaf.

Not even seconds later, sleep does consume him, finally.

When Raum wakes up, the sun still has not risen.

His head pounds. His thoughts, though somewhat more cogent, only reach his brain after trudging through murk. He groans, sits up, squeezes his throbbing temples. Some tiny gritty pimply things itch at his back. Oh god wha—Raum checks under his covers—it’s breadcrumbs. What. There’s a whole loaf of bread on his pillow. What.

Raum massages his forehead with the butt of his palm. Gifts from drunk Raum. Thanks man.

He lets his arm slump back down to the pillow. Nausea pulses through his temples.

Okay he’s a little hungover. So you know what screw everything right now he’ll just sleep this off. ‘Night.

But however he tries to get comfortable, the crumbs itch at him relentlessly. He’s not getting to sleep before he cleans this mess up… and that means waking up. Goddamn it.

Still reluctant to commit himself to being awake, he lies there and thinks for a minute. Shit, he got pretty buzzed last night. Earlier this night? Not enough to black him out, but remembering how that glug of sherry spiralled down the sink, certainly more than his prescribed three-to-four glasses. (Also goddamn it ugh, he wasted good alcohol).

Man. It’s been ages since he slipped this bad with his liquor. Usually Reyl would stop him before… well.

Slip-up explained.

Raum scooches to the edge of the bed, squints to check his clock, and only now notices the hole gaping open in the wall where the bookcase once was. The bookcase itself has shifted out of position, like an opened door, and messy piles of books litter the ground.

Raum wheezes a single thin laugh, then checks the hole.

It’s indeed a secret a passage, aborting soon into a ladder that descends into darkness. Raum stares out the window.

Come on.

Unwilling to presently face the passage, Raum throws himself into his usual morning routine. He showers, stretches, cleans his sheets, makes his bed, has a light breakfast, checks the time properly (a couple hours to sunrise), and all wrapped snug in his robe and blankets, settles in to the big leather armchair in the living room, curious to what radio dramas play at this hour.

After his program ends, and the commercial break comes, a PSA airs. Please stay alert for changes to our scheduled programming…

With the hangover marginally tamed, Raum heaves himself out of the chair and rubs the heavy pits of his eyes. He’d still rather just sleep. But it’s far too late for that now.

He returns to the secret passage, armed with a neon torchlamp. Though queasy, clumsy, and hesitant, he does scramble down that ladder, until all that surrounds him is black.

Raum’s feet touch solid ground. Before him, at the end of the ladder, is the neon-lit door to a bunker. It has been left unlocked, as if Raum’s visit had been predestined, and Raum himself, acknowledged long ago.

The bunker is built on the principles of an Ordish vault, but furnished with Asphodelean baroque. After finding the switch for the diesel lamps, Raum unearths lounges, bedrooms, bathrooms, storerooms, a kitchen stocked with non-perishables, and a small library. Inside that library is a door whose face bears the onlooking crow of Whitewood, laurelled with its motto E.C.Q.O.I.

Raum kneads his temple with his thumb while massaging his forehead with his third finger. He shuffles through papers left upon the library desk, as though he will find some better pursuit in this mound of half-finished letters, but they offer nothing so conveniently relevant.

Defeated, Raum turns to the crow door.

Inside is a records room. Though narrow, it is structured like a block of the larger Ecqoi, with five distinct gridded rows of bookshelves and cabinets. But these shelves are only half-filled or empty. Plainly, they were meant to store more generations’ worth of information than they ultimately did.

Carved upon the head of each row is a sigil.
One: A flower twined over a bloody sword.
Two: A crow with a key in its beak.
Three: A weeping mask.
Four: Pearls in a skeleton’s fist.
Five: Liquid spilling from a taut rope.

The first two are the symbols of house Asphodel and house Whitewood. The last three are completely unknown, and match no houses that Raum knows, nor do they follow the conventions of house crests.

Well those first two rows must hold the sensitive records of the Asphodels and Whitewoods. The image of these bookshelves side-by-side reinforces every allusion Raum has caught to the families’ closeness, but, satisfied he has already grasped the most important implication of these two shelves (that they were collaborating, as the Whitewoods would not blackmail the Asphodels), he feels content to leave them be.

The other three, though…

Raum cannot explain his reluctance to investigate these archives.

He needs to know. If not to fill out the tapestry of his personal family history, then to comprehend the dealings and relations his family had, the ripples of which still may linger, that could follow him or that he inadvertently casts as its remaining head. So until he understands these symbols, he cannot leave this room. Though, it’s not that he feels obligated to it. It’s just that turning away now means running away, as if his foundations in Asphodel were a blank slate irrelevant to whatever future he wanted, into another stupid cowardly fantasy.

Already he must sense these archives do not hold great things. He just wishes he had a little more prep time before he was invited down to them.

Kneading his hands, Raum steps forward and inches a book out of one of the shelves. Though he has braced himself for it, and though his mind has warily distanced his body by lightyears, with every flip of the page, the knot in his stomach only balls tighter, and tighter, and tighter.

These are assassination contracts. Rather, this is a record book logging the distribution of assassination contracts. Who took what hit on who, for how much money, completed or incompleted, commission details, expiry date, so on and so on. It does not take a genius to realise that house Whitewood was mediating these hits — not conducting them, but forwarding the commissions and money to the parties that would.

The next row holds little better. These are archives of brutal repossession contracts, ordering the return of loaned gold, jewels, artworks, clothes, swords, horses — and whatever extras the commission-takers could find to meet that initial loan’s interest. Though more complicated than murder at ruining a life, Raum is familiar with how such a gig can scalp unwary men, over time, to nothing.

The last row is for narcotics and kidnappings. Shockingly, these do not simply organise the sale distribution of Asphodel’s existing drug scene, but are massive bulk orders of product, and proactive buyings-up of whatever is left, all to be sold off instead in Ordish markets. The kidnappings are not just kidnappings either. They are meticulously vetoed, but assuredly extant, trafficking gigs of certain undesirables into the Ordish slave trade.

Raum’s arms slump to his sides. He doesn’t want to read any more of this. And besides, he’s seen what he has to.

The Whitewoods weren’t just Asphodel’s intelligence service and spy network. They were, in effect, the kingpins of its whole underworld.

Your mom’s side, your dad’s side, it’s all the same shit, see? All that changes is the coat of paint. He can feel Reyl grinning, victoriously.

Raum wants to rebut, No, look, the tenor here’s different…, but the phantom in his mind snaps back: Denial! Semantics! Fantasy! Delusion! Look at you walking backwards straight into hell.

Raum rubs the bridge of his nose. If he’s going to argue his point, he’d rather do it with the real thing, not a banshee. Sighing, he winches the most recent logbook back into its shelf, pauses halfway, winches it out again, and stares down at the thing.

Shelving it now feels like some weird concession he doesn’t need to be making. Like he’s been begging for a sword, only to be given a gun, then disregarded its use because it’s unfamiliar and unexpected. A strangely calm feeling of confidence, unlike anything he’s felt before in his life, settles upon him. Were he to once again pit himself against Reyl’s cynical worldview, the things he’s seen in this room would be final silver bullet to annihilate her utterly. He can’t explain it, but it’s true.

Raum returns to the manor, taking this logbook with him as a focus for this odd state of mind. Pressing his palm against its cover, he tells the servants, who have awoken now before dawn to prepare Raum’s breakfast, that he’s going for a walk.

For once, he wants the time in the peace and silence, to think.

The sun still has not risen yet.

But the very first hints of twilight have come over the sky, and people have begun awakening for their everyday rituals. As he traverses the city streets, Raum observes: This prosperity isn’t rooted in the underworld. It’s the underworld that’s subject to the judgements of this society.

Aquila, through his intimate association with the Whitewoods, commands — or commanded — how money flowed into those criminal syndicates. And though he can be mercurial, he is not dumb to the dynamics of control. Groups obedient to him would become powerful, while those that defied his edicts would drown. That is Raum’s confident read of what he has found.

Sort of like recognising you had a rat problem, but domesticated them to run into a cage and do tricks.

Raum trudges up a hill of debris to his destination, the burnt-out remains of the cathedral. The skeleton of this formerly magnificent building has cracked, blackened, and fallen completely, but still behind the altar there stands an untouched marble statue of the world’s creator, grinning over the splintered pews proudly.

Its immaculate perseverance, among the destruction, chokes Raum with inexplicable fear. He clenches his book tightly, and with the cautiousness of a mouse sneaking behind a cat, circuitously navigates to the base of the statue, so he can sit in its shadow.

He checks with his fingertips first, but no thunderbolts strike him for leaning his back against its base.

Following the statue’s gaze, Raum sees the palace below and the city surrounding. Raum understands immediately that building this statue in this cathedral precisely opposite the palace was purposeful, and that no other structure would ever be allowed to stand taller than Aquila’s home. Simultaneously, only now does apprehension strike Raum about the gravity of Aquila’s long, vengeful, nascent crusade to annihilate Phoenix, who this entity marked.

Give the guy a bone. Hey? Raum thinks at the statue. Else don’t let him corner himself so much lower and lower, just sweep in to conquer him now.

It’s impossible to tell whether Raum’s request reached anything’s ears. But the grin of the statue unnerves him, such that if anything did hear him, it was surely something far more great and far more devious than Raum could outsmart or Aquila could outplan.

But that’s all a higher battle than the one Raum came here to contemplate. He flicks open his book simply to open it, and gazes again over the brilliant, purposeful, artful, symbolic architecture of the city.

So Reyl, what is power? Is it simply the liberty to destroy others so they cannot kill or rob you?

Power is knowing all the ways you may achieve your aims, paired with the means to actualise them certainly, that you are left having compromised nothing. Understanding of one’s own desires is an intrinsic requirement of power. Though Reyl intuits these dynamics, Aquila understands them far better.

Because Aquila did not build this kingdom on rats. They would have naturally betrayed him and undermined this society’s faithful culture, the true locus of his power. So Raum suspects he did not enable these criminal syndicates to toy with weaklings, who would compromise themselves for an ounce of status, or because he values their services more than a healthy society, as Reyl would argue.

Rather, it is a net. Or a filter. Something to catch and repurpose the nation’s useless dregs, and if such garbage fails to cooperate and serve Aquila even at this filthy level, that is not just a green light but a warning bell to destroy that garbage outright. Though an unnatural train of thought for Raum, and not one he particularly likes, it makes sense filtered through his half-built understanding of Aquila.

The methods by which Reyl soared in Ordanz are the same ones by which she’d hit bedrock in Asphodel. To get what she wants here — that is, to become powerful — means at some point accepting her ‘strengths’ only work when others are hedonistic, stupid, or fearful, and this place breeds for none of those traits. Whether Aquila’s in the picture or not, Reyl would not survive here.

Is that being idealistic, or just being mercenary, from the top’s perspective?

Raum flips through a couple pages of his book, snaps it shut. He heaves himself to his feet, done with his meditations, and takes his first step back to the manor, through the blackened debris, under the pink light of dawn.

But mirroring him at that first step, a figure emerges over the crest of the hill, making him pause.

It is Aquila.