The air was thick with petrichor and with steam. He could taste it, moist ozone heavy on his tongue, an acrid, burnt note underneath the rain. Babylon swallowed, his throat dry despite the humidity, and all the small hairs on the back of his neck stood on-end.
The light at the center of the square looked strange to him. It flickered differently from the others. It was too solid. The color was off. He stepped closer to the lamppost, looked up at it--
--Called it by its name.
“Code,” said Babylon.
“Babylon,” said the Code.
Babylon turned his back on the lamppost, surveying the city as best he could through the rain. Nothing else looked out of place. He could see the distant lights of Mistral down in the valley, shining through the lake. But the code had never come to him at Babylon…
Strange that it would come now, when something had his teeth on edge. He scanned the buildings on the hillside - was there something moving out there, a shadow sulking around in the rain? It was probably just his imagination. This is my domain, thought Babylon. I am the master of it. Nothing can harm me here.
He turned back towards the Code.
“Why did you wait so long to reveal yourself to the knights?” Babylon asked, trying to keep his tone from becoming too accusatory. He thought he’d asked the same question a few years ago, but… the answer was never quite satisfactory. “I was a knight for years before we ever saw you. We needed your help.”
"My power is tethered to the Knights. We are a unit,” answered the Code, after a moment’s pause. “Your Code piece, and all Code pieces, are tied together. Each and every piece a part of a whole. I did not wait to reveal myself, I couldn't. Perhaps if the Knights were working harder, I would have been with you sooner. But I cannot control the shortcomings of others."
Which seemed bitchier than usual. Babylon shivered for reasons he couldn’t quite pick out. Despite the rain, he wasn’t cold.
“"I would have helped if I could,” continued the Code. “There is much yet to be done. You should have tried harder. Perhaps I could have helped sooner."
You should have tried harder. Yeah. As if he hadn’t told himself that enough times, worrying over Lina or Avalon, over Arkady who wore Tate’s face but whose features never quite resolved right, whose memories would never come back, who would never quite match Tate’s potential. And oh, he loved her, but… she was different than how she should have been, and that was his fault. Maybe - maybe she didn’t know how much she’d been robbed of… but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been taken. Babylon could have prevented all that in the first place.
He could have--
He stopped himself. It was a vicious circle of thinking and he wasn’t going to fall into that trap right now.
Instead, he gestured to the courtyard they were standing in, and then to the Code itself and its position inside the lamp post.
"You've been here all this time?” he asked. “I've been past this lamppost a million times. How come I've never seen you? And why are you showing yourself to me now?"
The code’s answer came harsher, and more swiftly than he was expecting.
"You've never seen me because you weren't looking. You are blind, Babylon,” declared the Code.
Babylon cringed, teeth set on edge, but the Code continued. “For all the light of your wonder, you still wander in darkness. Perhaps it is only now that you were ready to see me. But, perhaps, I was wrong. Perhaps you wander too close to darkness. Is the light your way of hiding from it? …But you can't hide for long. It will catch up to you, soon. You can't stop it. You can't stop anything."
It wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear, but then, Babylon was used to magical constructs telling him things he didn’t want to hear. His ancestor had been especially harsh, but that had helped him to grow. “Maybe,” he said, studying the way the Code’s light flickered and danced. It was probably a warning. He’d been having strange dreams lately, and that was usually a sign.
“I can try,” he said, looking up towards the lights of Babylon, bright through the rain.
As if it had heard the Code, one of the lights on the hill winked out.
The Space Cauldron
