The transition is always distinct. You were moving; you have come to a stop. Bits of twinkling starlight fade away around you as you blink, your eyes adjusting to the difference in lighting. It’s polite to stand still to let the brief vertigo pass, especially so that you don’t bump into anyone else as they coalesce out of starlight and a sharp burst of the scent of evergreens. (Of course no one overlaps; it’s magic, after all.) But it passes quickly, and there’s a delightful feeling of solidity right after, as if you’re even more yourself, from the tips of your ears to the tip of your tail. Then you can snuff out the candle in your lantern and properly attend to where you’ve found yourself.
The Welcoming Plaza in Crevas is, like many, so solid that everything around it has to accommodate it. The ceiling, walls and floor of the cave that the Civils helped shape around the Crevas Stone are decorated exactly the way that you’d imagine the Nagi would do it: in a profusion of riotous colors, little chips of vividly bright glass forming the mosaics. Thick threads (of cloth, of roots, or of tails, depending on how you look at them) weave above and below and through each other, with ridiculous goblins peering through the gaps, or hands surfacing from the mass to guide or to plead, their edges made clear with little chips of obsidian. Think of one of your comic books, actually, the old four-color kind, except that all the panels have burst under the weight of four hundred different colors, and coil upon coil of undergirding structure threaten to lift right off the page, too.
After all, like most Nagi mosaic art, the art accounts for the shape (or, in this case, the other way around). Run your hand along the wall and you’ll feel the strands standing out in relief, the glass under your fingers indistinguishable from scales, until you touch the leering face of a mad-maned goblin hound or the knuckles of one of the hands emerging from that neon net. Go ahead. No standing behind a museum’s velvet rope here, my dears.
The cave’s got a yawning mouth at the west end, and when you emerge, you’ll find yourself standing in the bright crisp sunlight of Crevas, halfway up and halfway down. Elegant ramps wind their way up the walls of the valley on either side, and the lower city opens up below you, and looking down at those rooftops meant for basking and those rope bridges swaying in the wind and those pennants snapping in the breeze and those painted signs advertising glassworkers and dyemakers and illuminators and gemcutters and goldsmiths and weavers, to say something of the masseuses and the street vendors and the street performers and the coffee brewers and the venturers and the astrologers…
Well, then you might think the four hundred colors of that cave must have leaked out while you weren’t looking and flooded the city below, soaking into the streets and the houses and the silks and the laughter. It’s not Aestival, but no place can be Aestival, so don’t hold that against it. And there’s no better place in all of Thellamie to be during the Festival of Light.
Up and behind you the upper city rises, building up to the great Viperiat, previously the mirror-festooned fortress of a certain puffed-up glowbug. The Viperiat has never been taken in war, as it actively hides even its gates from its enemies; Yuki Edogawa pushed those gates open from the inside. (And she never would have gotten in if not for the cunning help of the Aestivali, let us note. Only they could have so perfectly pretended to betray the outlander heroine!) All the mirrors have been taken down now, despite the glowbug’s screaming tantrums from inside them.
So here we are. The scene is set. Cock your ear and listen to the celebrations reverberating throughout the city; Civelia has come to Crevas, and this may be the most special Festival of Light that anyone here has ever experienced, for—
Well. Read on, won’t you?
Hazel!
Ice cream on a hot day.
You’re already shivering and smiling, aren’t you?
It’s a spiced vanilla, creamy and rich and sharply cold. Delicate little flakes of ice press against your palate before melting back into the cream. The spices find the spaces under your tongue, at the back of your throat, almost tingling there. And you are, of course, careful with the purse that Yuki gave you, aren’t you? Still full of Crowns and Coronets, each one stamped with the Civil emblem on one face and the decorations of the minting Hub on the other, like all of those state quarters you have back home, the ones with exotic names like Texas and Ohio.
And you’re sitting there, on a bench set into a wall on one side of the plaza, surprisingly deep. Naturally, it’s that way so that Nagi can get their coils all up on there, on that nice perch (which is why it is also surprisingly low, your heels resting on the cobbles).
Nagi! You’re in the heart of their greatest city, you know. Not that they’re the only people there, not with the Festival of Light happening today, probably not even on ordinary days, there are plenty of Kel and Aestivali, Serigalamu and Avels, but the differences between all of them are as much cultural as it is in appearance. (Remember: center, south, west, formerly north.) But the Nagi are singularly unique, aren’t they? After all, everyone else has got legs, instead of a thick, well-muscled, sinuous, slightly cool to the touch tail.
(Well. Almost all of the Nagi have those. You’ve already accepted directions from a young man who had the glimmering golden eyes of the Nagi, a sibilant lilt to his voice, and diamond patterns on his legs when his skirt fluttered just so. You still haven’t figured out that he was flirting with you when he put his arms around your shoulders to orient you.)
Perhaps you’re watching that Nagi dancer by the fountain. She descends low enough that her palms brush the mosaic tiles, then rears up, showing off her pale red belly and her impressive abdominal strength, arms working above her ears (and let your eyes run down the hoops hanging from them, too). A small crowd’s gathering to watch, a lingering in the midst of a hundred other things to see. It’s okay to watch her pivot in place, to see her bare spine in the space between her top and her scales, to be engrossed.
Aren’t you?
Give us a moment to watch, or to have your eye caught by the fountain, or to enjoy the ice cream— a moment spent here, sitting on a Nagi bench in the middle of the Festival of Light.
Handmaidens!
That description of the Welcoming Plaza above? That’s here. That’s not quite now. Because you’re the reception party. Sulochana is supposed to be here, too, but from what Kalentia’s heard, it’s unsurprising that she hasn’t made it. The Princess of the Nagi Mercantile Consortium is infamous for overloading her plate and then overcorrecting based on a whim, for all that she’s led the Consortium to a strong year.
You are (or rather Heron is— Rurik, right?) the center of attention as you wait for Civelia’s arrival. She’s up to something big this year, that much is common rumor, but you’re definitely not supposed to tell anyone:
She’s prepared to make another Queen of Light.
Sayanastia knows, in her bones, in the shared essence of that devoured arm, just how big of a task that is. Civelia pours her spirit into everything she makes, like the Fallen Stars do, but she’s a second-tier divinity at best: a creation of the First Fallen, not one of His peers. The caretaker of the Stones and the world, the head administrator of the Civil Church, and an absolutely insufferable paragon of the stiff upper lip.
(At least one Heron has theorized that she literally can’t complain, at least around Heron, because then she wouldn’t be perfect. The First Fallen was inhuman, a sharp-edged ice-intellect that still dripped with cloying sentimentality. Or so Heron vaguely remembers, or felt comfortable claiming that she remembers.)
But she’s not here yet. It’s you, and it’s your job in aggregate to make sure she’s welcomed properly. (Stars forbid that Heron fail at being the honorary Festival Vizier.)
Onlookers pull out their tablets to take candid photos of Heron; giggling children weave underfoot, carrying toy pinwheels and toy prisms and brightly colored streamers; a Serigalamu merchant more brave than clever is trying to explain to Cair how timeshares work; the wind has a hint of Outside moss underneath the spice and the smell of crowds.
Yuki!
Where the mirrors used to be, there’s just tapestries hung over red sandstone. The Consortium came to the conclusion that even mosaics would be too reflective. Doorways that used to be hung with shining beads are now hung with bright but very opaque velvet. Last time you were in the Viperiat, you chalked up the disorienting maze to all the mirrors, but it’s time to admit that, no, this place is always like this. Where the sound of your own breath (or your noises of helpless outrage) used to splinter and come back to you from a dozen different directions, now the Viperiat swallows them up, and the shadows yawn between each lantern hung optimistically from the ceiling.
The sudden crash— no need to be ashamed, dear, anyone might have jumped right out of their skin. (Or, to use the present idiom, their molt.) A Nagi forces her way out of a room just ahead, teeth bared, glancing back over her shoulder, and proceeds to barrel into you. That’s not actually something that happens often, given how aware the Nagi are of their bodies and the smaller people around them. But not this one.
An apology dies on her lips as she looks down at you. “…the outlander,” she sneers. Her pigtails are hung with ostentatious gold charms, lying heavy on her shoulders. “You come and go as you please, don’t you? No need for you to live with the consequences of your political meddling—”
“Out!!!!” Sulochana has her upper body through the velvet of the doorway now, gripping either side furiously. “You go back to your mother right now and whine about how you don’t get to treat the Consortium like a set of child’s hoops—“
“—not even a member of the Consortium—“
“—your face is red and breathless—“
“—nepotism which every bylaw of the Consortium stands against—“
“—crushing my friend—“
From underneath the very heavy body of this Nagi, you are still clever enough to recognize two things: there’s probably a bodyguard or two behind Sulochana, but she’s filling the entire doorway and not letting them past, and from the way both their fingers are twitching, the two of them are another set of screamed fragments away from pulling out their Heartblades and dueling right on top of you.
Just another day in the life of a former heroine, right?
Eclair!
Sand thunders down into the vats, roaring, deafening, thunderous. The polewomen working the vats all have fluffy earplugs and communicate through sign language and Nagi tail thumping. Their job is to stir the solvent into the sand. Below the vats are barrels, already bearing the proud logo of Vessenmer Dyes and Paints. As the sand melts away, what is left behind is dye, as close to raw color as is possible.
In other parts of this workshop, dyes are blended in carefully measured quantities to make new hues; in other parts of the workshop across the courtyard, barrels are painted and orders are organized. Under your feet, in the rock itself, barrels sit and age, the color of the dye subtly richening and darkening as it waits in the dark. Rumor has it that some businesses have long, spiraling passages down beneath the city, to the places where even the darkness is wet, there to achieve impossible transformations— but that is a matter of public safety, and thus a banned practice, save for the Alamek family (who hold the monopoly on Outside-soaked colors).
Anesh Vessenmer turns the swatch of wallpaper over and over. Her short-nailed fingers are daubed in dried colors, including a sort of purple-grey that might be useful for painting old thistles. The color on the swatch has not faded since it was carefully peeled from the wall; you’ve seen to that personally. Anesh considers the swatch, and she considers you, and she considers the length of her own consideration, and she considers the sword hanging at your hip.
“We make many sales,” she says. A statement of fact. “Assuming this is one of ours— I’d have to consult the books— it might have been purchased through a reseller, or through the Church. We do a lot of business with them.” Hidden in her words is the glint of her fangs: if you interfere with our production the Church will ask you why, and the Civils won’t pull Heartblades on you but they will pull paperwork on you, and you’re an Aurora, aren’t you? They can find reasons to make polite requests of you, and if not you, then they can make polite requests of people who would pull Heartblades on you if necessary, because they make sure that the world stays nailed down and as pristine as possible for the Queen’s return, and part of that is painting new construction and tastefully adorning their chapels. At least, that’s what I think she’s saying. Maybe you disagree. Her face is flat and does an admirable job of hiding her thoughts.
There is no sign, on the swatch, that it was part of the letter A, before you peeled it from the wall; that the letter was part of the word THAT; that the word was part of the sentence CURSED BE THEY THAT OPEN DEAD INSIDE. Or DEED INSIDE. Timtam’s calligraphy needs work. She has an unfortunate propensity for unnecessary loops and swirls. She also got paint spattered on the carpet. These facts are likely connected.
Out in the courtyard, which has variegated sand between each tile of glass, a small child plays with her rabbit. It hops one way, she slithers to that side. It hops another way, she slithers to the other side. She claps her hands in delight as Mister Hoppy bounces into the circle she’s made of her tail.
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