The Chimera

Chapter Nine: What Comes Down the Mountain

While neither Jasper, Tai, nor the clockmaker Skander are having the best of days, Giada's isn't going much better.

While opening the drapes in the rooms throughout the Taymon cottage that morning, she had had to keep herself from mistakenly ripping them right off of their fixtures. No matter how gentle she thought she was being, the drapes were tugged more aggressively than she intended, leaving her tense and irritable as she moved through the house.

Upon arrival for her work at the archives, she had been soothed by the familiarity of her surroundings, but this tranquility was disturbed in the late afternoon, when she caught the young student she was meant to be training flipping through one of the most fragile copies in the entire archival system. Giada had snatched the book back and scolded her abashed student, demanding to know how she had even managed to take it out of the locked case it had been in.

The altercation ended with her trainee subdued for the remainder of their time together, but still offering no satisfying explanation as to how the book was accessed in the first place.

Giada is frustrated: with her student, with her own overreaction, with the newfound strength that seems to trickle through her limbs. If opening the drapes was difficult, her usual tasks of handling rare books are near-painful in the amount of concentration it requires for her to not accidentally crush them into dusty scraps of paper. When she had snatched the book back from her trainee, she had been elated to find that it remained in one piece in her grip.

Her work finished for the day, the late afternoon sun muted for the moment by overhanging clouds, Giada goes to the place where she knows her mood will improve.

The archives, like the university, are located in Beledon's city center. The Taymon cottage lies much farther to the west, where congestion gives way to more scattered dwellings before ending at the western forest.

Instead of hailing a carriage to take her to the western end of the city walls, where she will make the rest of the way by foot, Giada heads east.

It's not a challenging walk, in and of itself, less than an hour's brisk pace from the archives. Still, its location will mean a later return to the cottage, and the possibility of her siblings waiting in futile frustration for her to show up to the evening meal on time.

Worth it, though. Always worth it.

She knocks on the door of a three-story townhouse with faded paintings of daisies along the border. Not a minute passes before the door is opened by Zahara's father, waving her in. He explains that her brother Dalmar is not at home, out attending to a patient, but Zahara is in her room.

Giada thanks him, then eagerly climbs the stairs to the attic, passing similar embellishments as the daisies on the door: on the furniture, walls, stretching down to the floor, an artist has clearly left her paint-stained touch throughout the home with images of vines, flowers, patterns of leaves.

Giada climbs the final steps to the attic, pleased to find Zahara in her usual sketching pose: lying down on the ground, paper spread before her and lead stylus in hand.

The attic isn't vast, but it is beautiful in the way that any space Zahara occupies would be, once she decides to call it her own. The light green walls are covered with images of bright pink flowers on vines that spiral to the ceiling, birds with beaks open as if mid-song. There is a quilted bed, a small chest of drawers, a table with a wooden chair (presumably for her to work on, but used more as a surface area of storage space) and little else.