Touko enters the lecture hall, the rows of seats rising far above her and descending lower to the lectern, an indoor amphitheater. She glances at the watch she wears against the inside of her wrist. She isn’t late, but she isn’t particularly early either. There is quite a bit of difference in the span of ten minutes.
Her gaze fixes on a familiar and now somewhat repellent shade of magenta. At least he doesn’t wear his top-hat to class.
“Miss Aozaki!” Alba calls to her. He waves his arm a bit to gain her attention. She sighs and at least grants him her gaze, if only so he won’t yell her name anymore. She had never told him what to call her. Angry heat bristles at the back of her neck, wondering who might have told him, but there’s nothing to do about it now. She reaches up and plucks her glasses off her face, taking a handkerchief out of her coat pocket to pretend to clean them.
Before she turns her attention to her glasses, she sees that Alba has gone to the trouble of guarding a seat beside himself. For her, she presumes.
The hall isn’t full to bursting, even with all her classmates seated, so she sees no reason to take him up on it. She wonders if anyone had been accustomed to sitting next to him before. She can’t imagine that he draws that many close friends if he addresses everyone the way he addresses Araya and herself.
As Touko sets her glasses back on her nose, her eyes drift back to and past the nuisance to take in dark form sitting one row back from Alba. He also sits alone, one chair over from the wall. He is very still, hands apparently folded on the tabletop before him, though they are obscured by his sleeves from such a distance.
Making a decision, on a whim and a little out of spite, Touko squares her shoulders but keeps her gaze a bit demure.
In her peripheral vision, she sees how Alba’s eyes light up when she comes closer to him. He reaches down and there is a great shuffling of his coat and other things to free up the seat next to him. It isn’t particularly graceless, but he can’t seem to help making a bit more noise than is necessary with every move he makes.
Touko gives no fanfare as she takes a step up further to the next rung of seats. She glances at Alba, coolly through her glasses as she tugs the seat out next to Araya. She chooses the chair that is a bit closer to the aisle, rather than trapping herself between him and the wall. She settles her bag between her ankles and fishes out her notebook and pen. She draws herself closer to the tabletop.
Before she has the chance to scoot her chair more to the center of her space, she feels the warmth of Araya’s arm filter through the dark, heavy fabric he wears. She glances up, and it takes just a little too long to find his face above his shoulder. He is such a large man. It isn’t apparent if he is fully a man – a human – at all. There are stranger things in the whole fabric of the world.
Touko settles her chair so there is some space between Araya and herself.
His presence looms beside her. He has body heat, which she finds unexpected. Instinct suggested that part of him was more dead than alive.
Touko pushes her pen to a groove in the tabletop near its edge. She keeps her breathing steady.
Araya doesn’t smell like decay or neglect or any lack of hygiene.
The realization might have caused offense, but as far as she knows, he cannot hear thoughts.
She thinks she smells smoke in the air around him, but it is faint, distant, like a forest fire put out after rain. Her brow ticks down, trying to place any further scent without looking at him again. Prying when one’s own secrets should stay locked away isn’t the best idea. It also seems like a waste of energy.
“Ms. Aozaki,” Alba addresses her, resting his arm across the back of the chair he had saved for her. He peers up at her, trying to rescue his pride. She meets his eyes, showing that she is perfectly capable of it even when making no effort to do so. “I saved this seat for you...” he says, tapping the back of the chair.
His movement stirs up his cologne, which is far more discernible than Araya’s scent. It’s a strange, masculine but sweet liqueur with a steadying note of wood and the unnecessary complication of some musk that cannot quite find its place within what would otherwise be a pleasant odor. Touko feels as if she is trying to do sums in her head, wondering if perhaps there is a coherent cologne there. Maybe Alba has come to class still-drunk.
“Thank you, but I’m perfectly comfortable here,” she says. She glances up at Araya. He tolerates Alba’s nearness, but he does not make a sound to add to the conversation. His inky-dark eyes meet hers. She can barely make out the pupils. She blinks and looks back to Alba, his gaze less disconcerting, even if it looks at her with unwanted appetite.
There is tension in Alba’s jaw, a wince. He blinks his light eyes at her. She still sees Araya’s eyes in her mind. The expression strikes her as blank. Silent. She puts an elbow upon the table and cradles her jaw to one side, tilting her head away from both of them but keeping her eyes trained on the man below her.
“Ah, yes, of course,” he says. “I only thought that you might like to make acquaintance with someone who… knows more about the Clock Tower’s inner workings and even this country! You have come such a long way.”
Touko smiles faintly, but her eyes show no sign of being impressed. She speaks in a soft tone, peering at him through clean lenses.
“Is that why you have befriended Araya, too?” she asks.
“Well...” Alba says. He glances at the other man. Touko resists the temptation to turn her head to look for his reaction. “I would not say that I have befriended him so much as we have become… colleagues. Though, I would not blame anyone for wishing to befriend you.”
“It is my understanding that our kind – all over the world – are not particularly keen on intimate friendships,” Touko replies, still quite coy. She looks down to the head of the lecture hall. An older woman, festooned in purple and green, crosses the floor to the lectern and settles her notes onto it. Touko checks her watch again. Perfectly on-time.
“Of course, discretion of our craft is necessary, but—” Alba continues.
Touko smiles even more sweetly just before she lifts a finger to shush him.
“Class is about to start,” she says. She nods down toward the lectern. Hopefully, Alba will develop the ability to take a hint, at least for the next hour.
She hears him start to say something else, but then Lord Valualeta’s commanding voice silences him and quickly settles every other conversation in the room.
“Welcome, young pupils,” she says. It is neither warm nor pretentious. It is a matter-of-fact, honest welcome that imparts no value at all to the way she addresses them.
Touko peers down at her, her wrists resting upon the tabletop. She knows what will come next.
Lord Valualeta begins with an anecdote, its own kind of pleasantry, but a pleasantry with a purpose. Most of her lectures begin this way, and she has such a way of speaking that it calms the mind to focus only upon her words. Most days. Touko thinks she can be sure that Lord Valualeta has this effect on everyone. There is hardly a collective sound of breathing, rarely a murmur. Most of the Lords command some respect, some silence, when they speak, but Touko’s experience in her classes thus far places this woman’s ability at the highest level.
The sound is lulling, like a cat’s gentle purr in a silent room, punctuated by sharp crescendos which bring one back from the edge of thoughtlessness.
“And so this young magus believed that reaching out across such a divide would be beneficial to his craft.”
The vibrations of the woman’s voice carry through the acoustics of the room, and they have touched Touko’s mind and her skin. Every day since the beginning of the term, she has taken extensive notes on the content of these lectures. The sensation has driven her to. But she has not written a word so far today.
She draws a deep breath in and slowly, quietly lets it out. She relaxes herself from her shoulders down to her ankles. She blinks, almost sleepy for an instant, and clears her focus on Valualeta.
“… but while we share common knowledge and a common search for Truth, one important truth you must come not only to accept but to embrace on your journey toward deeper understanding is that the magus is alone. Truly alone before the infinitude or the emptiness of that perfect root of knowledge.
When you find it – if you ever do – you will not be able to take anyone with you.
Not brother nor sister nor parent nor child nor lover nor friend.
If you find a path, you will reach it alone, and none will follow you to that exact culmination. And this journey takes more than one lifetime, so you – all of you, new blood and old – must be prepared that you will fail. And if you fail, the only hope in any magecraft is to leave all that you have with an heir, never knowing the Truth, and leaving them only with the tools and skills with which you have prepared them.
This is why you must find your own specialty, your own passion, your own nuance to impart upon what you were given before you arrived here, and to share that with another in its purest form is folly. To do such a thing dilutes its meaning until it means nothing and becomes an ordinary part of this world, making any exploration of those things which are beyond it impossible. It is like speaking the same word over and over until it loses its form and definition in your mind. And so you must hold some words, some great deal of the knowledge you will gain here, close in your heart and never let it go until it is torn from your flesh…
And that, young pupils, is the principle that we will discuss today.”
‘… young pupils.’
While it is the least important phrase Valualeta has uttered so far, Touko picks up her pen and flips to the clean page she has marked with a pink, transparent tab. She writes it down at the top. She takes a few more, substantive notes before pausing. She peers at the two words again. She underlines them and makes a few stray dots on the paper and their end.
She looks surreptitiously over at Araya. There are lines etched into his forehead toward the center of his brow as if he has spent a lifetime frowning. Something about him strikes her as a man in his 40s. There is something much older in those wizened lines and the dark fog in his eyes, though.
Touko takes off her glasses and sets them aside for a moment. Her focus on the lectern and the woman behind it is a little hazy without her glasses, but she can see the man beside her just fine.
Perhaps it is not death that seems to follow him but age. How old is he?
Older than their teacher?
Touko remembers to listen.
“… Learn it well, for it is the foundation of your success not only before me but in seeing that everything you do here does not turn out to be for naught, or worse, your extermination,” Lord Valualeta says, a full stop at last.
Touko is still looking at Araya when she hears the rattle of a hard bracelet on Valualeta’s wrist hitting the lectern, more casual but not unlike a gavel. The muscles in stomach and legs tighten together, her body anticipating the already-instilled ritual.
“Please rise,” Valualeta commands. The hall is the noisiest it has been since she began speaking. There are a handful of murmurs, but most of it is the sound of dozens of students rising to their feet at once, some chairs scraping as they do.
Araya towers at Touko’s side. She looks up at him without trying to hide it. With all the movement around them, it doesn’t seem conspicuous to look. He is so much taller than she is, and she feels the urge to ask him if he is ancient or if he only seems so.
Valualeta clears her throat and sidesteps her lectern, her hands folded before her expectantly.
The hush over the class returns.
“Now, you know I must ask you in order to remind you...” she says with an easy smile that imparts warmth for the subject more than her students into her voice. “What do you seek?”
“True wisdom,” dozens of voices say in unison.
Touko hears only one with any clarity.
His voice is so deep that it seems almost seismic in quality, and yet it is low and subdued. Restrained, even.
Araya hasn’t spoken a word since she had chosen the seat beside him.
Even as she fixes her eyes forward, she does not look at their teacher nor anything in particular.
Could she have given herself an opportunity to ask him by seeking permission to sit by him?
Her lips curve into a dismissive curve at the thought. She had sat by him out of spite, hadn’t she?
They are far enough apart from him that their arms cannot brush incidentally. She can still feel his voice at her side.
“Where do you seek it?” Valualeta recites with a faint flourish. She enjoys this part, and who wouldn’t? She gets to hear the results of her work, all around her, and see it in motion.
“Only within myself,” they all answer her, in unison but in the singular. Together but profoundly, intentionally alone.
Touko had not thought it to be a problem, but now she wonders at how alone and singular one of them might be. It is an itch she knows she will want to scratch.
With barely a dismissive wave of Valualeta’s hand, they all sit down and slide their chairs back into place. For a moment, Touko remembers being in a chapel, somewhere very far away from London. She remembers the unison, remembers the sound of the words she used to say but only some of their substance. For a moment, the memory tingles.
The feeling is familiar. It’s ‘foreboding.’ She has heard the sound of a mountain speaking. Her lips curve upward. Her breath forms a scoff, a chuckle at herself, before she reaches out and takes up her glasses and her pen.
- - - - - - - -
This isn't necro because late 2016-2020 are a myth. They are lost to the sands of time and creativity. We shall not speak of them.
Originally Posted by Snow
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