Ethos & Amity

Chapter 1: Meet the Idealist

            "Craft, Code and Continuum are not merely part of existence. They are existence."

                                                                                                   -Archivist Geome Harvest

Marvus Blackenwhite realized, as he looked up at the teal sky, a remarkable occurrence.

The atmosphere perfectly matches my look today.

While that may or may not have been true, he nonetheless took his opinion as such and used it to power his day. The Sun brought magnificent illumination to his ruddy brown skin and a polished sheen to crow feather, ducktail hair. It almost, almost, made Marvus forget the biting cold wind the burghal of Masara was infamous for.

The emerald green caftan jacket, loose short sleeves, an irregular, scarf-like collar, hugged his narrow body as it trailed down to split coattail blowing in said wind. Passersby could make out Marvus' majestic six pack, visible through the tight, ribbed, canary yellow silk shirt, tucked into a pair of loose fitting scarlet trousers. On any day of the week, this budding historian and fledgling watercolor artist chose a monotone dress arrangement. Every single day, all red, all yellow, or all green. But today, promotion day, well, that called for all three.

Marvus buttoned his jacket and picked up the pace, flat white cotton shoes, the type preferred by those who did martial exercises in The Mounds, scraped the intricately laid out cobblestones of Premiere Walkway. This proved a good decision, for, unbeknownst to him, his preoccupation with the sky and its supposed analogous alignment with his apparel kept him in the doorway of the newly minted Museum of the Unison. The best museum in the Tetrarchy Coalition. The best in the Aubade Kinship even. A second home. His home. The new job.

"Secondary Archivist!"

He yelled it as he tucked chin into uneven scarf collar, for the ill wind increased its glacial acrimony coming down from the Gelica Ice Shelf. Yes, his ankles were cold, despite the thick woolen gold socks, but the air cut right through the cotton shoes. Marvus passed by others with a bit more seasonal sensibilities than he, but it did not deter him. The job was his. He would work directly with Archivist Geome Harvest, the greatest historian, much less archaeologist, in the last century, who was there when the final signatures were put to paper to form five once hostile nations into the Kinship. He would get to hear those tales on lunch breaks between wholesome bites of stir fry noodles and spicy mushrooms, ask what it was like to visit First Dance, the sole burghal in the Synchim Tribal States. Marvus had been attached at the hip to Masara from birth, a city boy, and the idea of the countryside was, to him, a fearful exercise as much as a phenomenal possibility.

The wind snapped him back to reality. Cold. Unabiding cold. The sole positive of this arctic gale was the trees along the Walkway. These olive green, bronze and autumnal red sculptures were fake, of course, with broad leaves turning solar might into electrical indulgence, the spinning vertical upper trunks converting the wind's fury into stored power below the burghal streets. Absorb, store, moderate, share. Aubade Kinship Law of Usage Article One. The Walkway contained so many of the trees that it doubled along its five kilometer stretch as its own public park, loaded with ornate iron benches hosting power recharge stations shaped into seashells or shining steel modern art pieces. Marvus passed between the trees, the shortcut his daily mode of travel, and the usual dull hum of the pseudo flora had accentuated into vibrant cicada sibilations.

The young historian cast beryl eyes ahead to the long, convex windows of the seven-story Verdure Charter Grounds, central courthouse for the four burghals of the Tetrarchy. All of the walls were glass, clean, with thin steel support beams for structural strength. Up above, thick timbers jutted out and up from the slanted roof not unlike a crown of the old days when this land was known as the Neerian Tetrarchy and monarchies fought for control. At the tip of each timber, a weighty sculpture, gunmetal flower petals held rounded light pods for illuminating the Walkway come evening. As it was now the depths of fall, those lights would come on soon. Marvus briefly imagined the backyard of the Grounds, where he once sat debating legal nuances with elders, a spacious oval of greenery, a hedge maze even, for legalists needed a soft place of recluse in between feisty court dramas. Between the timbers and the glass, a stone strip held the carved words in the ancient Neerian alphabet: