The city was already lit when Babylon Squire arrived. The great lamp in the Knight’s Square blazed blue, and the hillside above him twinkled in the night. The boy looked around, immediately looking for his ancestor: this much light could only mean one thing. The old man had gotten started without him.

A light bobbing down the lane answered the squire’s question before he could even begin his search in earnest. Menachem’s hunched form strode out of the darkness. There was a look of distaste (wasn’t there always?) plastered across his craggy face. “You’ve been away a while,” he observed.

“There was a crisis on the Surrounding,” answered the squire, shrinking under his mentor’s disdain. The knight quirked an eyebrow upwards as he stalked past the boy, raising his lantern to hang it at the base of the great lamp.

After a long silence, he drawled, “Well, I hope you helped.”

“I did,” confirmed the squire, searching the older man’s face for any sign of approval. He found none.

“The knights of Babylon have a long history with Chronos’s court-

Inadvertently, the squire interrupted Menachem’s speech. “I know, I-“ And stopped himself, fearing retribution.

“You what?” asked the knight.

“I met Virgo.” The knight remained impassive. “Your Virgo.”

“Surely not,” the knight answered stiffly. “My Virgo, as you call her, has been dead for a millennium. You couldn’t have met her. Some other Virgo – it runs in families.” The squire thought he detected some barely-restrained emotion behind the words, sadness maybe. But he blinked, and it was gone.

“It was!” Babylon squire objected, taking a few hesitant steps towards the man. “Aria. She said she still had your light. Menachem – you’re name’s Menachem, isn’t it?”

That certainly got a response out of the knight, although Babylon wasn’t sure it was the one he’d been aiming for. Menachem yanked his lantern down from the hook on the great lamp and hurried across the square. The squire followed, struggling to keep up. Despite his apparent age, the knight could move spryly when he wanted to, and the squire kept tripping on the cobblestones.

Halfway to the doorway to the knight’s corridors, he turned back and snarled, “Just once, I’d like to see you figure things out for yourself!” Then he hurried forward, lantern-light cutting through the gloom ahead of him, and vanished through the doorway.

Babylon squire approached the arch hesitantly. He’d only ever gone through it with Menachem’s permission before, but then, he didn’t know where the ghost went when he wasn’t directly observed. (Schrodinger’s Knight, although that sort of thinking is tonally inappropriate.) Perhaps he was allowed through the door by virtue of the ring he wore: after all, the same symbol was echoed on the sleek metal knocker. The boy gave the door a nudge and found it opened easily. Raising his own modest lantern, he advanced down the dark hallway within.

The blue glow in the study seemed cold – tiny balls of light encased in the sconces on the walls, and the knight’s lantern was nowhere to be seen. Babylon Squire tread carefully, unsure of whether this too was lit by history and echoes, or if he was actually in the study as it appeared in the year 2011. The center table was littered with parchment: maps mostly, and of the mountain range surrounding the city from what he could gather. They were annotated in a neat scrawl, not the Latin alphabet but one he recognized from years of Hebrew School. Babylon Squire pulled out a chair and sat, hoping for a closer look.

“Can you read it?” came a voice from the corner. The boy looked up, and could barely make out the knight, hunched in a chair in the shadows.

“A bit, I don’t speak it fluently—

“It doesn’t matter if you can speak it,” objected the knight sharply. “No one here spoke it. But it was my native hand and I wrote in it. Phonetically.”

“Oh,” nodded the squire, who was still trying to piece together the genealogical implications. He was mostly drawing a blank. “Why do you keep lighting the lamps?” he asked. “There’s no one here.”

“So the ghosts can find their way home,” answered Menachem. The squire shook his head.

“But every single lamp?” he asked.

“Because as long as Babylon glows, no one will ever truly be lost,” replied the knight, which Babylon Squire thought was terribly sentimental but didn’t really answer the question. The knight seemed to sense his consternation, although the squire couldn’t be certain if he actually had or just thought of something else to say. “Mercury is the smallest planet. Our princess was powerful, but her magic was defensive. A planet like that must rail against the dark more than any other. And our nights are so long…”

The squire frowned. “What about Pluto?” he asked.

“I have reason to doubt Pluto was ever considered a planet, except perhaps in a treaty inked by the moon kingdom,” came the knight’s reply. “It was too powerful to be left alone. At least, that was how I saw it. The moon kingdom controlled the inner worlds as a matter of security, and the outer worlds because they were too strong to leave to their own devices. But I always thought that Jupiter could have put up a fight if it had wanted to.”

The squire nodded, rolling this information around on his tongue and wondering for a brief moment why a rich and powerful system like Jupiter hadn’t given Serenity a run for her money. Of course, none of these names meant anything of particular significance to him. He only knew how many moons Jupiter had because he’d been in the right place at the right time to be snapped up by Europa.

“Of course,” added the knight, “I am only an arm chair political analyst at best,” and the squire thought he detected a sense of humor in the statement. It was the first time he’d ever observed such a thing.

“Virgo seemed fond of you,” the squire said, after a while. (Having been uncertain of how to respond to the apparent joke.)

“Aria was an exceedingly bright child,” the knight replied, placing special emphasis on her name. “The Virgo line has always run strong in Babylon. Her family… had a tendency to produce senshi.” This was followed by a long silence – perhaps a moment of pensiveness on Menachem’s behalf. Eventually, he said, “Even when she was small and following me on my rounds… I suspected she might follow her aunts to the Surrounding.”

Babylon Squire nodded, taking this in. He had a plan slowly forming, one that would hopefully earn him points with his ancestor and with Virgo. Maybe he could even construe this as a good deed, reuniting two long lost friends…?

“When she met me,” said the squire, “Just for a second, she thought I was you.”

There was another long silence.

“Would you rather I was you?” the boy inquired to the dark. He could swear he heard a single, hoarse laugh.

“No,” replied the knight, “Because then I’d be a freckly, rambunctious brat with bad hair.” It stung. The squire looked down at the table, concentrating on the neatly-lettered alephs and bets of the map.

“Would you rather I was someone else?” he asked. The dark seemed to hesitate.

“You need to go find some things out for yourself,” came Menachem’s reply. It wasn’t an answer. The map on the table swam in front of the squire’s eyes and then crumpled before his eyes, becoming a dried husk of its former self. Babylon picked up his lantern and got to his feet: the vision was over.

The journey out of the study seemed longer without the faint lamps to guide him. All radiance had vanished with the knight, and when Babylon emerged into the square he found the whole mountain had gone dark in the meantime. It was funny like that. He twisted the sigil ring on his hand, studying the insignia engraved upon it.

He needed to go find some things out for himself? The order rang in the squire’s ears. What did the knight think he’d been doing – slacking? Babylon thought he’d done a lot of work already moving towards becoming a better superhero. Being told to find things out for himself almost implied that he hadn’t done any groundwork so far, something the squire vehemently disagreed with. It wasn’t cheating that Kurma had clued him in about the rings, or that Virgo had told him his ancestor’s name… was it?

It wasn’t like he’d woken up one day knowing all the rules about how to be a knight of Mercury or something. Gee whiz.

Babylon gripped his lantern tightly. Without any other lamps lit, the ancient city seemed impossibly immense and dark; like some slumbering giant, settling on its foundation. He almost swore he could hear the mountain groaning against the wind.

Babylon squire did not have the Wick. He could not light the lamps and he could not show the ghosts their way home and he could not push back the dark, and the night on mercury was long and cold.

He held his lantern high, trying to bounce light into as many corners of the square as he could. It seemed a feeble effort: the shadows here had a texture, thick and velvety. Menachem probably expected his squire to go home (if Menachem expected anything of him at all, being Schrodinger’s Knight and all), but the boy was undeterred. He had a tiny circle of light, and he could wait out whatever hissy fit the knight was throwing.

Babylon hooked his lantern onto the great lamp and crouched at its base. The blue light never flickered, never wavered. He could not say how long he’d been sitting there when a familiar figure emerged once more from the darkness. One by one, the lights on the mountain blinked back on.

“You are going to get frostbite,” pronounced Menachem. Babylon squire gave him a stubborn look. The knight offered him a gloved hand, which the boy ignored as he got to his feet unassisted.

They stared up at the mountainside for a long moment, not speaking.

Finally, unable to stand the silence any longer, the boy asked, “You’d rather it be anyone but me, wouldn’t you?” It took him a long time to get a response.

“You’re what I have to work with,” said the elder knight, ambiguously.

“Why’d you come back?”

“Because you’re going to get frostbite if you fall asleep here.” He shot the boy a withering glance. “You ought to go home.” It honestly hadn’t even occurred to him to leave.

“I want to light the lamps,” Babylon squire told him. “Where have you hidden the Wick?” Except, he was already anticipating the answer.

So of course, “You should figure it out for yourself,” came as no surprise. The boy mulled this over for a while, adding it to the baker’s dozen of other questions he’d been messing with.

He turned to the knight. “You’re on my mother’s side, aren’t you?” he asked, finally beginning to untangle the bizarre genealogy. The knight gave him a sidelong look.

“Keep looking. You’ll find it,” he said, cryptic as ever and apparently two trains of thought distant.

“Mom’s side of the family,” pressed the boy. “If I go far enough back.” Not that there was any way to trace back further than the eighteen-hundreds that he knew of. It was a forcibly pruned family tree on that side. “My grandfather,” realized the squire, “He’s one of seven, but he’s the only one— I don’t know what you want me to look for.”

“The only one to what?” asked the knight.

It seemed that Menachem was not versed on recent Earth history. “To survive,” said the squire quietly. “To escape- there was a war.” That seemed to be enough of an explanation to satisfy the knight, and describing genocide to a thousand-year-old ghost was a daunting proposition.

“So that’s what became of us,” he said sadly. “Surely…”

The man was lost in thought. The squire turned around and unhooked his lantern from the lamppost behind him.

The knight spoke again. “Something must have survived. People carry things with them. It’s only natural. All of mankind clings to their history.”

Well, at the very least, it was another question to answer. “I could ask,” said the squire, flexing his numb fingers.

“You should go home,” answered Menachem. “And find the answers for me. Consider it an order.” He sounded weary and sad. Unwilling to upset him further, the squire did as he was told.