Anpiel said very little to me, but she harassed me even less, only disputing my actions when they interfered with the duties of her handmaids. So I did less than I could have, as the handmaids already tended to the needs the supposed 'Lord of Eidolon' would have to take over to make a useful impression. So I stood in their midst, letting them handle all the distribution of baubles and trinkets, things to make existence more interesting. I suppose this worked in my favour, as in time the needs of the people changed in ways I was more prepared to account for.

"Where were these things found?" I asked the handmaids after the giving was done. It was only us in the audience hall, as the people had quietly shuffled out, going to wherever they went to eat and piss and sleep, and fondle these useless trinkets from lives long lost. Most of the curio looked antique, and I even recognized a few items from my dreams at Elvedon.

"Our Lady Anpiel will answer all questions," was their constant reply. In time I was alone, looking up at the high vaulted ceiling, and the stained glass windows that glowed in white lamplight shining behind them. The dust laden air was uncomfortable to breathe, but it looked beautiful. Tythus coughed, reminded me he was now ever by my side.

"Do you know where they get their loot?"

"Of course," he said, affronted that I even asked. "They go where there was plague. They're not clever enough to find the good stuff."

"And what's the good stuff?"

"The stuff out of time."

To that, I raised a brow, and crouched to look him in the eye. "Out of time?"

He was instantly nervous. I thought of Turk's rejuvenated appearance, but then I chalked that up to Elvedon's healing properties.

"That's a bad way to explain it. You saw one of those places. We walked through it. Didn't you sort of, feel like it was home?"

I shrugged, noting that never before had I seen or heard of a 'sideboard'. My homes, the Dolomite Sanctum and Haven, were made of metal, with cupboards, lockers and bulkheads.

"Why did you say it was out of time?"

"Well like, separate, not out of time as in it's at its end. I don't know if that's what it is. It could be something else. it just seems that way."

"Take me back."

"To where?"
"To where you found the ovaltine." I too was startled by the word.

"They have it outside? Where you're from?"

I tried to explain how fragments of memory would emerge, and all were from a past member of the Batch. But I think I did as well with him as he did with me when describing the strange preservation of those places where he found his rare loot. He took me there, and I did feel a strange sense of nostalgia, but it was not home.

"This place is weak," he explained, and so I followed the boy through a labyrinth of hallways, ruined lift shafts, catwalks, ladders and winding stairs, until we walked through a black hole in a crumbling wall and I felt my body warm as we passed into the room beyond. Astus waved to me from ahead. I had thought him gone.

"You can see in the dark, can't you?" Asked Tythus, my real young friend.

"Yes," I replied, watching Astus as he danced in the air, lighting the space before me. I heard a parsifal, and followed its echo, but Astus had faded to less than a blue ember by the time I caught up with Tythus.

"There you are," he said. We were in a bedroom larger than any I have seen outside of Clarion. It could have been a whole house, with its numerous walk in closets and sizeable latrine. I recognized many of the objects on the various dressers and mantles as items found in the mid-level of Clarion, a place that was out of time, as Tythus said, until I sacrificed the remains of innocents to the great bell that called upon the fury of the Sun. But in Clarion, even though it had for long years been spirited away, there were still signs of age.

"Could there be some preserving force at work?" I asked.

"I suppose. I really don't know anything about this place. I just see that it's different, and nothing is as old as it should be."

I handled a few objects, mostly a mechanical timepiece, and noted the remarkable preservation of the place. I pocketed one item, a putorino of fine rewarewa, glistening with a fresh polish. I blew into the center mouthpiece to summon the hidden whispers of Wheke, and Tythus gave me a wide-eyed look that worried me.

"I've seen enough."

Tythus nodded, and went to a flight of attic stairs in a boiler room adjoined to the water closet.

"Why don't we go the way we came?" I asked.

"Then we'll never have."

I shrugged, then gestured with my chin for him to lead on, and we were once again in a courtyard that opened to the laden sky.

"Can you take me to a window?"

"A what?"

My face spoke of disbelief, I am sure. But his spoke only of confusion.

"Do all open spaces face inward?"

Confusion.

I sighed. "Where shall we go next?"

"I'm getting tired."

"Have you a place to sleep?"

"Lots."

That would not do. "Where can we find accommodation? Permanent."

He nodded, looking into the distance beyond the city's endless ocean of walls.

"We'll have to kill someone."

"Could not Anpiel put us up somewhere? I am providing her people a service. Does not a Lord of Eidolon have a room of his own?"

He shrugged and made a face to that said I already answered your question. I shook my head. "Then we'll use one of your regular places."

He shrugged, then led me through a path I could not begin to recall, and we rested on a narrow ledge above a long hallways that likely once served as a concourse, but was now home to a gallery of twisted polymer effigies. All night I was distracted by a dim red light that seeped through cracks in the vaulted chambers above us. Now and then the light would brighten, illuminating the web of thick roped nets far above. Some held rusted crates, others had their bellies ripped open and held no loot save what old trinkets had been caught in their frayed entrails. I remembered the colored lights I took for windows when I saw Thirty-Third Day from a distance, and wondered if we were near one. I doubted it, having seen how well traveled my defacto companion was. I li the darkness with my inner fire, and saw as I had in the chamber of Gorgon's heart a lattice of atomic clarity, but there was no window, only lamps and torches and rush lights and gas lights and a pair of coals that simmered darkly. When all else faded to my fatigue, those coals remained, and no distance or bend of duct and wall could block them, and I felt that a pair of eyes had found me, and my sleep was troubled.

I searched for the coals in the morning. Tythus found me quickly. I described what I was searching for, but he either could not, or did not, offer me a satisfying explanation.

"I should perform my duties as Eidolon."

"Lord of Eidolon."

"Whatever."

So he took me back to Anpiel, and we, the unfed, undying, unwanted bastards of the world, watched as the handmaids gave useless artifacts to the cow-faced populace. I grew instantly weary of the farce, so I strode forward, removed my shroud, and let them look into my glowing blue eyes. Then I gave them what Anpiel, and even little Tythus could not. I told them a story, a story of a boy brought across the sea in a time where thoughts were governed for the greater good, and after showing that his flame would not be cupped or doused, was given to the source of his uniqueness, having been properly identified by those who sifted the masses for the twig that fluttered away when clipped. I told them a story of horrors inflicted on a child so that he might forget the self possession learned in his tender years of hiding, and how when he rose from the tomb he slept in the world had changed, and how he ran from painful truths by seeking the love of a woman, only to have her taken from him by the cruel world of which he was a symptom, and, having bowed his shoulders under the weight of purpose resigned himself to a soldier's life, and came to the palace of the pretender, so that his subjects might hear true tales of the wide and wasted world, and the shining light that burns brightly just beyond the veil.

Man, woman and child came close to me in tears, thanking me for having brought to them the desperately need relief of myth, and they begged for more tales, some asking me where I'd heard the one I'd just told. I found Anpiel behind the crowd and gave her a hard look, but the cold one she returned convinced me to save the truth for another day, so I ignored their questions and told them memories of the Fall that were dreamed to me in Elvedon.