IC Date: 07/16/2025

More lanterns, more rope, more chalk.

At least Rowan was able to find a lot of this stuff cheap or free on online marketplace sites, her bank account couldn’t complain too much about that. They might not be the prettiest supplies, but they did the job and that’s what mattered. Over the past two weeks she’d gone over the rough contours of the palace maps she’d drawn, refining and smoothing each line, often under the supervision of the lavender wisp that had taken to following her home. Checking and rechecking her footage and photographs to ensure that they paralleled one another as exactly as she could manage. Hopefully her efforts here would be enough to ensure that subsequent trips would be a bit more efficient. It was always more work to start a garden than to maintain one, maybe that principle could apply here too. It was a nice thought, anyway. Assuming that the guardians hadn’t decided to make their way into the rest of the palace. That would be just a bit messy.

Rattling loudly as Tempesti passed through the streets of the ancient capital, the unlit lanterns strapped to her rucksack bore witness to the resurgent life among the stones. With each visit the roads held less debris, more color, a rainbow of glass singing with the morning’s first light. Unspoken stories emerging piecemeal from the city’s fractured soul. Each one warranted a stop, a few clicks of her phone’s camera doing nothing to disrupt the soft hum of insects that now punctuated the silence. It was difficult to imagine these streets as the capital of an empire, seething with the rhythms of human (or humanoid) life.

A dim recollection arose in the back of her mind, an article she’d read years earlier about the city of Cairo, about how even routine renovation or construction could peel back millennia. She wondered if Keraunos was similar, if knocking loose the right stone would reveal countless cities, each stacked one atop another. Whatever bits of Elysia’s history lessons filtered into her own consciousness didn’t say a thing about what came before. They tended to focus more on the sort of vicious absurdities that seemingly drove her previous self insane. An edge of bitterness lingered there, her own, never Elysia’s. She seemed to have gone to her grave unable to shake the belief in her own inherent defectiveness, whatever else she learned about the people who buried those ideas so deeply in her mind. Someone could have thrown open the doors to the Tower and told her she was free to go and it wouldn’t have mattered. Her fear would have bound her to the spot just as effectively as the magic they told her did so. Tempesti scowled slightly at the thought but quickly resolved to banish that frustration. Elysia was too dead to be helped, her planet wasn’t and there was too much work to do to let the lost potential of a dead woman weigh her down.

The soft sound of gently lapping water doused what embers remained of that anger. An unfamiliar stream rolled through what must once have been a canal servicing the palace complex, its reawakening current slow as it made its unsteady way from the river to the bay. Tiny as it was, she wondered if it would one day fill the limestone walls that loomed above what she might generously call a creek. A new creek. Well, a new-old creek. A creek that hadn’t been there just a few weeks earlier and now it was and it was working and she wasn’t sure how but she was helping. Ebullient with that knowledge, she all but floated into the dim palace entryway.