Just a Bystander

Piercing the Veil

Under normal circumstances, I might have been able to give an orderly recount of the events of the past two weeks. Despite – or maybe because of – my manias, I can be highly rational and objective after I've laid things out neatly in my head. But it was hard to tell my father everything when I hadn't even had the time or opportunity to sort through everything by myself, and it was especially difficult to focus since I kept thinking about what he had revealed to me about the orbs.

It took the better part of an hour, with my father patiently redirecting me with probing questions to get the full story out. And although I normally preferred to be alone to process my thoughts, I was actually very grateful for my father's presence on this occasion. Trying to talk about the Prophecy and about Ambrose brought out a dark tangle of anger and indignation, but his methodical and incisive questions helped me unravel the knot and settle into a state of mental and emotional equilibrium.

Of course, that was the kind of thing I could only fully appreciate after it was over. The hour itself was fraught with emotional outbursts on my part, and a lot of mental stress as I was forced to confront the fact that I had been intentionally not thinking about some things, like whether or not my father had helped Reeves perform the mass memory wipe of the Chosen One and the Prophecy. As it turned out, he did have a part to play, which was what helped him develop his orbs. I extracted a promise that he would tell me everything he could.

After he had gotten everything, my father made me another cup of hot chocolate and retreated into his own version of mania as he paced around the study. It was clear where I had gotten that from, but in his case, it was characterised less by an almost-violent need to be alone, and more by a sense of intense preoccupation. My mother had long since learned not to try to talk to him if he was in this state. He could hold a full conversation with you and still not have any recollection of it, so if you told him to do something for you later while he was like this, you were setting yourself up for disappointment. I had actually learned to take advantage of this to extract promises from him to get things I wanted, but Triss was the one who mastered the technique and ended up with more toys than any child had the right to have.

I smiled a little at that thought as I took a bracing sip of the hot chocolate. Everett Dundale was on the case, so I didn't have to worry. There was a surge of gratefulness and affection in my heart as I reflected on how fortunate I was to have a brilliant artificer and a good man for a father.

If he held to his usual pattern, my father would be pacing for about half an hour more. Now that I was a lot calmer, I was reasonably confident that the others were alright. Jerric and Ambrose were the most proficient in the principles of arcanophany, but the other three combined would surely have figured out how to undo the arcanic net. I felt a little bad for leaving them like that, but it was something I could make up for later.

That meant I had time to just sit here and relax for what felt like the first time in two weeks. I hadn't realised until this moment how much tension I had been carrying around in my mind.

A glint of silver beneath the remaining pile of books on the sitting room table caught my attention. I set my cup aside and carefully extracted what was obviously a prototype orb from beneath the mess. A quarter of the outer shell had been removed, revealing the mind-boggling complexity of the construct's interior.

It wasn't a solid sphere. The outer shell was simply the outermost layer. The layers beneath that had been similarly peeled back to allow a peek at the innermost parts of the orb. It looked like my father had somehow managed to fit five layers into one orb. There wasn't any mechanism that bound the layers together, and it seemed as though they were just meant to enclose ever-smaller orbs. Even more amazing was the fact that on every single layer, a fine lattice of glyphs spiderwebbed across the surface. The glyphs on the core were so small that they were barely visible to the naked eye and appeared as little more than flecks on the smooth silver.