Fangira picked up the gilded receiver from the bracket. It was a fairly expensive looking thing, as if some goldsmith had gotten a little too adventurous with the treasury of a small bank. The shaft was gilded, if not golden in itself, and the dial glittered in the late morning light entirely made of gold. But of course, the telephone dangled from a circle of fading grey mist, somehow in prominent contrast against the whitewashed ceiling of the Kitchen. So, there was that.

“Mrs. Earnshaw speaking,” Fangira said.

There was a brief mismatched hum of a thin voice, that I would assume to be of a female. But, then again, assumptions are a step on the stairwell of prejudice.

“Yes, yes,” Fangira said. “But madam, I didn’t know what else to do!”

Oh. Well, then.

“But the evening shopping went a little astray,” Fangira looked at me and continued. “As I wrote in my dispatch, a man with the brain of a nine-year old made me drop the goods.”

Hey! They were talking about me!

I am of course the cynosure of all eyes and the hot topic of the Milan fashion week. I am the showstopper, and the maestro bowing down to receive all the red roses thrown at his feet.

They are all about me.

“He’s an absolute idiot,” Fangira said.

And they mostly say that about me as well.

“Yes,” she continued. “Yes?”

There was a long period of silence. Fangira twirled her short hair falling beside her ear, and looked at me, Alice, and the green grass outside the window. Alice, on her part, kept staring at the ceiling, in fits and bursts, along with deep stares into her cup.

“I’m glad it’s so,” she said finally, without sounding glad at all.

A brief period of silence followed. This time she focused on the outside.

There was a bit more of “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am”. And some more silence.

“I’ll be waiting,” she said, finally. The little muffled chimes of the mysterious caller stopped with a final defining hum of the static of the phone line.

She put the receiver back on the phone, and it went up, yanked by the wire, and vanished in the ceiling, as if it were not made of gold but of morning mist in the valley of the ceiling.

Fangira turned towards me, smiling. Although she looked like a wolf standing on its hind legs on her best behaviour, she maintained the outward calm of voice. She turned to the both of us.

“Shall we take a walk? Berenice, can you possibly bring us some tea?”

It was a question with only one answer. So, I followed her, with Alice and a tray of silver carrying a porcelain kettle following my steps, calmly floating in the air behind us. We wandered around the green lawn, growing with a certain assumed carelessness of wild abandon, along with a neatly maintained length of grass. I walked without shoes, feeling the ground with my naked sole. The sun was shining bright, probably even warm (of course, I couldn’t tell), and the tall conifers with pine like pointed leaves (not really sure if they were indeed pines) still holding on to the early morning’s snow.

The wind blew, and I saw Alice shivering a bit, as the trees grew thicker around the clear grassy path we moved on, eventually engulfing the view of the Manor and the wide lawn with the girl sleeping on it. Shadows of trees started upon us, hiding the sun even though it had risen as high as it would perhaps go that day. As we walked, the trees held the cold here, with some even having snow thick against the shaded side of their trunks, scattered about their roots.

The path was leading up to a wide glade with one clear centrepiece. Four trees stood there, with few leaves and an ink black bark. And, a large black stone, square at the top, dropping down to meet a hefty block of black granite, cut again to a square. And this ‘column’ was about ten feet high, raised above the grass on a circle of moss. The circle touched the vertices of the square in an elegant way of packed earth raised like a dome, kind of like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man — perhaps even with the man in question at the centre.

A grave.

“All things come and go, like the Mist Blossoms, but oh what an autumn bloom!” Fangira said. Was that poetry?

She came to a stop at the edge of the dome of the moss-covered earth. “Echolocus would have loved it,” she said. “He always used to say that life was like the front of a storm. It is made in special circumstances, and for a brief moment it gathers power and rains down. Perhaps its winds will die briefly, but then it meets another front of air to gather back its forgotten chemistry to become another storm.”

She paused, looking over at the very faint blossoms growing on the black bark of the four trees that stood guard over the grave. I knew not then what they were called, but they looked like ephemeral flowers that grew by mistake on the tree. Nay, just attached to it as if they were floating on the wind. Just then a gentle breeze would pick one up, and guide it up in swirls – translucent white blossoms floating in the spirals of the breeze among the high branches.

But then, the breeze would die, and the blossom fall through the swaying of the air, in fits and rushes, down to the black granite block, where it stood like a sentinel in a stark white-upon-black contrast.

We all stood and watched.

None spoke till Fangira began again.

“I don’t know why the man chose weather as his metaphors,” she said. “He was mad. And, I’m not saying that lightly. He … didn’t even remember those that were close to him at the end. His memory faded; he couldn’t even remember the door to his rooms. And yet, every day, we’d find him in the middle of his papers, scratching, scribbling. Every day, he’d descend down to the room of the gears to make something new. He wouldn’t even know the way to it — I was there that day when he roamed the whole of Castle Agathwx declaring that somebody had gone and stolen the room of the gears from him. We had to guide him to it, and of course he had merely forgotten where it was.

“And he did that right till the end. Right until he disbanded the Castle, cursed everyone, and swore everyone to secrecy. Then, he died. In his sleep. Just never woke up one morning. By that time, everybody had left. He had been living alone, with only us, his servants, for about twenty years by then. Only Nathania Upstorm and Zasshwein Metamin came back to bury their old teacher. And we were shut down, buried as a relic of the past in the Castle as well. Just like old Echolocus, buried.

“And this is where he is buried.” Fangira knelt down to touch the black stone.

The silence began to dwell on the glade; Alice walked over to the black column, gazing in its solemn gravity, also in utter silence.

“Wait,” I said, something clicking in my head. “Twenty years? You must have been a kid!”

Fangira turned to look towards me. “I’m Eighty-eight years old, Crow.”

Damn.

“What skin-care product do you use?”

She turned towards me and furrowed her forehead. “What?”

“You have far fewer wrinkles than someone who’s eighty-eight—”

“I AM NOT A HUMAN, YOU BUFFOON!”

“I mean, still. Have you ever seen a non-wrinkly long living animal? Never. Amazing. Flawless. By your sprightliness, I think you’re far from a tortoise.”

She got up in an unhurried motion, and pulled herself to her tallest. She lightly bent down her head, and stared uncomfortably into my eyes.

“I was made through the cadavers of dead magicians and extinct ferocious animals, Crow. I am a Necrominion,” she whispered, with a puff of steam coming from her hissing voice. “Are you afraid?”

“No. Since, I think I am dead as well.”

“Quite possible. We keep finding old projects of his everywhere in the castle.”

“Well, there goes my origin story. Not as charming as Iron Man. Tch.”

“Iron — what?”

“Just a man, with the greatest superpower of all — money. Never mind that, tell me about why we are visiting your old man’s grave?”

Fangira let out a sigh. “For a reminder. A reminder of what it is that we are doing. Perhaps, I’ve been too harsh with you, and too dismissive. I apologize. But now that you are here – and it does seem like you’re staying – I’ll only ask for your loyalty to this side. Our side.”

I was supposed to answer but I couldn’t come up with one. I looked around to see Alice on the verge of a question and on the edge of the moss-covered mound. So, I let her take precedence.

“Yes, Alice?” Fangira asked her.

“It is written here, ‘We will know. We must know.’  Just that. No name, no dates. Just that. Mrs. Earnshaw, what does his epitaph mean?”

“A quest for knowledge. The desire of all that live — to know! Truths must be unearthed. Facts must be organized. Mysteries must be unravelled. That was his life’s work. The work for which he was branded a high criminal. For which the Kingdom of Glecia collapsed. And thus, we stand at Castle Agathwx: holding no weapons other than knowledge, no armies other than books. We stand at the edge of the forest, trying to find the last Chasm of Darkness, and the lost knowledge of the Lost City. And Castle Agathwx will continue — for the heir of Agathwx is back!

“So! What say you?”

Alice dropped down to one knee, her left arm folded on her left knee, and her right arm clenched in a fist beside her waist.

“I pledge my sword, and my life, in your service. I swear it on my life, with the spirits of the dead as my witness.”

I was quite taken aback. Didn’t know that I was receiving my knighthood.

“Crow?”

“Yeah. A’right. Didn’t understand many words. But, a’right.”

Fangira twitched one of her eyebrows towards me. “I hope you stay true to your words. Now, would you all like some tea? Since we are out here. The cold is very nice to have tea in. Berenice? Norah? Beside the Mist Blossom please?”

Suddenly, from beside the shadows at the farthest end of glade, came out Finora, appearing like a spectre, but carrying a clean red chequered sheet. She lay it down on the grass with a flourish. Fangira motioned for us to sit down, and the floating tray of ingredients poured out a cup of deep reddish-brown tea on a floating saucer in front of me.

Everyone had a cup, and Finora had a large slice of cake, and Berenice had … well, lots of air. And, we all sat down on a brightening glade beside the four Mist Blossoms, and sipped tea from cups with softly rising vapours.

And, that was how most the day went. A solemn day — which, I must admit, was mostly caused by my own actions of inanity — that drew to a close with tea and warm fire. Not bad for a man who did definitely die. And came back to life — or did I?

There were certainly a lot of questions that I had no answer to. Where the heck were we? I remember… other things. Beaches, statues, Colonel Sanders, and Ronald McDonald. But it hardly seemed like this was the world where I came to. Darjeeling Tea, Assamese Tea, and deep roasted Javan coffee. That wasn’t here either.

But whatever it was, I think I was very eager to find out. After all, we must know. We will know.