Tomiris had been a Blossom for long enough that she had come to forget what it felt like to be an outsider, to witness the Tower of Rebirth and its wonders for the first time, after a life of it being a mysterious spire safeguarding secrets and history, magic beyond human understanding… Though the path towards the ritual chamber arranged by Narges did not delve deeply beneath the earth, it still passed by armories and reliquaries; columbaria guarding the hallowed cremains of bloom-sisters who, though long dead, still had something to offer to their Order; the alabaster Ágalmathic Garden where vast and complex statuaries were sculpted over millennia in marble and ivory, jade and liedwurzel, terracotta and gold. There was more history here than Tomiris would have possibly been able to explain, so she was fortunate that the sisters were too awed by the most blatant splendors to actually question anything. Even the most hardened skeptic could never deny that there were no wonders such as those sheltered in this tower of a thousand names. Stonetree, Welkinbearer, First-and-Last-Light, Kholaerie, Byn-Mur-Met… It must have taken a great deal of restraint for the Rose to start using the most prosaic of names. Or maybe it was done for the sake of outsiders, a rare concession that would have been given with bitterness.
“This is all so wondrous,” said Krisolde. “Splendid, beautiful, marvellous… Ryscrux, help me with another word.”
“Magnificent. Refulgent. Flamboyant. Garish. Meretricious,” she rolled her eyes in a manner most adolescent. “Sister, it is not the gildings and filigree that ought to awe you. We have no lack of hideous jewelry and stupid-looking crowns in the palace.”
“But this is different!” Krisolde insisted. “These works are of Blossom make. That makes them magical, miraculous, luminous, er…”
“The works themselves are but substance,” said Sayuri. “In Tawarasato my family boasts of a throne of pearl and silver, but those alone only make it a chunk of rock shaped to be fit for a royal arse. These statues, these paintings, all our ornamentations… I think their greatest value is not as vaults full of treasure but as history memorialized. There is a tale behind each relic you will find within the Tower. Every object once meant something to someone, and that meaning lingers as long as we preserve it. None remember the hands that sculpted the white and silver of my family’s throne, but we know they were not the fingers of kings and queens, emperors and shogun.”
“I’m sure you can find many treasures shaped by princesses,” Tomiris remarked, “but they were not made by another in their stead. They were princesses before they became Blossoms, but in truth they were never mere princesses again after that. They stained their hands and bloodied their fingers and cracked their nails.”
“This memory is the treasure, not the gold,” Sayuri said. “That is what we wished to show you. You’ve seen and tasted enough riches that these gildings would only be more of the same. Much more, yes, enough to lull you to sleep, but only ever the same you’ve lived. So we offer you more.”
Ryscrux attempted an unpleasant smile. It was clear she was not used to the gesture.
“Sayuri Hiramatsu,” she said, “you are smarter than I gave you credit for.”
“Thank you?” She replied with a minimum of discomfort.
“I must admit I had several misgivings,” she said. “I still do, I suppose, but less than before.”
“Don’t be this way, Rysie,” said Krisolde. “You promised you would come with an open mind, the same as I.”
“And you promised you would not make up your mind the instant you saw the grandeur and the dresses and the beauty and the dresses, the history and splendor, and, of course, the dresses. Sayuri, Tomiris, the truth is we still have the right to refuse to join your Order. There are costs to it, to relinquishing some of our imperial privileges. Krisolde and I have no chance to ascend the throne, we’ve no illusions on the matter, but we are still Fürstinnen, for every Prince and Princess of Rosavor is granted this ceremonial title… And the sway in the imperial election, which is very much not ceremonial. We would give up that right as part of your Order, for it was considered improper for the Rose herself to have a vote alongside any little princesses she might have tangled herself around.”
“Does the position not bring with it dangers?” Sayuri questioned. “It makes you direct participants in imperial electoralism, so if you renounce the title and vote, you will be free of politics. I know well enough that it is perilous to be part of those games, even when you have little to gain, so it is best to leave those behind.”
“Our family is troubled, yes,” said Ryscrux, pausing behind the others, thoughtful. “It is trouble, too, of course. Princess Hiramatsu, it is very unworldly of you to think that you can turn your back on the many tolls your birth extracts from you. You renounced your claim to your throne, but should Prince Sayonji earn the ire of his supporters, somehow, you would naturally be a candidate to ascension. It would matter little if that is your desire or not. And you would be a candidate pitted against cousins, against uncles, against kin you’ve never even heard of. We were born in a whirlpool, you see. We may try to swim away from its heart, but it may always drag us back and pull us under. All I have to say for the nonce is that, for my sister and I, our votes have value, even with the dangers brought by remaining on the board of this dynastic game. If our two votes could have been enough to sway a future election, who’s to say a defeated Prince shan’t seek retribution against us, who could have earned him his victory…?”
“You will have the strength of the Red Rose at your side,” said Tomiris. But Ryscrux was clever enough to see the lack of confidence in her words.
“Your Rose so savaged and wilted?”
“Less so with two more Blossoms in our midst,” said Sayuri. “Still, your caution is commendable. I was reluctant, too, and will admit that in trying to leave the past behind, there was a price to pay. But I have never once regretted paying it.”
“Very well,” at last Princess Ryscrux relented. “I have come with an open mind, I swear. Let us move on, then. What is this… This demonstration you expect to so awe us?”
“We are almost there,” Tomiris said, concealing her own ignorance of the details. Lady Narges did not until now strike me as the sort of dramatic woman to prize secrets and surprises. “Come and see.”
Wordlessly they went, until at last they reached the chamber prepared for them, its doors shut, foreboding. Though Tomiris knew this to be a complex mechanism, it appeared astoundingly simple, a single slab of polished granite marked only by concentric rings of runic patterns chiseled onto the stone. In the midst of the innermost ring, a circular hollow awaited its key; this, too, appeared smooth and plain, but both it and the key were intricately carved with precision only magic could provide. In spite of the smoothness in its appearance, Tomiris needed only brush a fingertip against the keystone to feel a dizzying array of near-imperceptible depressions and ridges. Tomiris gently placed the key into the opening, pressing slowly, cautiously, as if she could somehow break or distort it. The key sunk, followed by a succession of clicks so satisfying it made Tomiris shiver as the rings took on lights and colors, then rotated and folded onto themselves one by one. Effortless, was the only word she could use to describe it. It was not stone grinding in heavy shrieks, but as natural as the closing and opening of eyelids. Only far, far more beautiful…
What awaited inside was a plain, sterile chamber, lights coming to life as Tomiris stepped in. Lines glowed as though greeting them, their colors brightening as each of the four approached the center of the room. Elaborate patterns of runes spiraled outward from the thin pillar at the heart of the chamber, each glyphic shifting before Tomiris’s eyes. Narges and Professor Almicar had clearly worked too hard on this for it to be merely an amusing demonstration of magic.
“Pretty,” said Krisolde, staring at the pillar as its colors whirled, alive, never in stillness, shifting so quickly and constantly that Tomiris could never say for certain if it was red which she saw, or blue, purple, gold, some color yet unnamed… “What does it do…?”
There was no need to answer, and no time. A bell tolled softly, a sound too distant to trace and yet it did not feel as thought it came from somewhere but from within, a ringing gentle yet persistent, unceasing, lengthening its call with each passing second, beyond what seemed possible, and though Tomiris believed she felt it change in pitch, in volume, in distance, when she actually focused it remained the same, always the same, tolling on and on and on and on forever in the same note, its tone both anodyne and haunting, both familiar and not of this world, both a bell and not a bell, something which was and something which was not. It made her head hurt, then soothed that very same pain in the same breath, in the time it took Tomiris to blink, until she felt compelled to sleep, to close her eyes, and when she did so at once she felt compelled to wake.
She opened her eyes to an oddly large world. The wooden walls were not unfamiliar, but she could not immediately recognize where she’d first seen them, or the table, counters, oven, all too tall for her to reach their tops. The scents, too, were familiar, though it took her a moment before she recalled the smell of kumis, amidst the scent of sausages that sizzled on a seasoned iron pan. All were recognizable, but she found herself forgetting the names of some. She was and was not herself, her mind awhirl with the memories and knowledge of two girls at once, both of them herself, the same person, but entirely separate…
Mother, she thought, and then she saw her. Was this always what she looked like? She looked up at her setting the table, and the thought drifted away, to be replaced by the certainty that this was Mother, this was the way she always had been, why would she think otherwise? Tomiris struggled in the space between the memory of what she lived and the recollections built years later. She felt herself as a child, again, still small and unlearned, but she retained enough of her adult self to chafe at the separation between her mind and her body.
She focused, emptying her thoughts as best she could and letting the world around wash over her. Only then could she make sense of the past she witnessed and the past her present built. Did Mother always have such angry eyes? Now it was hard to tell if her gaze was indeed so cruel or if Tomiris had just decided it was so. The image before her brought her no final answer. This was the woman that she remembered, but she had remembered Mother a hundred times and a hundred ways.
A third chair had been set for Uncle Neral, her mother’s eldest brother, and sole sibling that still drew breath, such as it was. He lingered abed, no doubt, indisposed by inebriety and by his crippled leg. There was a fourth chair, before Father left. When she ate silently with Mother, Tomiris at times wished she had left with Father, though she knew he wouldn’t have her. Did I know that? Or do I know it now…? If the child knew, she dreamed nonetheless, wishing to believe instead that her determination would impress Father into loving her.
In a moment she found herself outside. The skies were brighter than she thought she recalled, the grass a shade greener and the village ever slightly more lively. This is truth, not memory, Tomiris concluded, because in her memory this was a nameless village of old men and cripples, of crones withering away and sons watching them turn to dust. Now it was different, now there were men and women at market, some chatter, and the homes that concealed the horizon from sight were not dusty and crumbling straw huts but sturdy enough wood, if unadorned. The smells of grass and fruit, of smoke and straw came to her slowly, each one taking an instant to recognize. With each one came passing images, recollections so brief they could be barely said to exist. And none of this exists.
A memory of tending to oxen. A memory of drawing water with Niini. A memory of climbing aboard a cart headed south – no, it was east, not south. A memory of thinking this is a day I will never forget, but she could not recall what it was, and the scent did not linger long enough for her to tell. In trying to recall a memory, another memory was born, and the first grew ever more distant; more distant still the day itself.
Somewhere along the way from then to now her mind had turned Noiongat of her childhood into the Noiongat that she was always asked about. She pictured squalor and lost pride, a whole nation of fading memories and glories turned to fog. It was that fog, of course. And though it was other things, to her it was all that remained. Even when she peered through the fog she remained within it, and soon the mist buried her eyes again. The colors washed out in front of her.
Dirt roads gave way to worn stone and then to the road to the new capital of Gurvalan, wider and more sightly, almost inviting, and not far from them, laborers toiled to lay down train tracks coming from the south, from Heiginzhua. To her child tongue, it was impossible to pronounce. A land so distant that it might as well have been imaginary, so distant that the child had believed all myths and legends… But then again, as soon as the village was out of sight, that was too distant. Until it wasn’t. Gurvalan was so grand and magical when Mother spoke of it, a city so splendid and populated Tomiris could scarcely believe it. It was sprawling, yes, and it awed her, but there was no magic. I thought cities were towering spires with life all over, with a hundred hundred hundred people. Gurvalan was better than the nameless village of her birth in as many ways as it was worse. Mother was rarely home, her work demanding more of her time than caring for grazing cattle ever had. It fell on Tomiris to tend to her crippled uncle, to wash his vomit clean and to hear him cry and mumble. And all her friends were gone, too, and the children of the city were cold and cruel. Soon she came to understand that the privation she knew in Gurvalan was different from that of the village, somehow more unkind, not fostering bonds but spite and hate, jealousy and wrath. Mother was always angry now. We will live in the capital for a better life, she had told Tomiris, who never had the courage to ask what exactly was better about this life, where after two weeks in a dosshouse Mother spent half of her wages renting a pair of rooms in a chawl that was always too wet, even on the driest of days.
This is but a memory, Tomiris reminded herself as the world continued to change around her, a haze that grew gradually until all of a sudden all was different. This is not real. I have somewhere to return to. That made it more bearable, remembering that this was all illusion, recollection. Vivid as it was, it was nowhere near vivid enough to be mistaken for life, not truly. But it was enough to make her remember not simply what happened and the way she felt, but why she felt that way as a child. Gurvalan was too large, yet her home was claustrophobic, cluttered, smothering. She wanted to return to the nameless village, but life was now entangled in the web of this swollen, misshapen spider.
And yet… And yet there was something in Gurvalan that changed her. In the drab brown and grey the colors that she found were all the brighter. This place that years ago had been a vague myth, no more than an idea, was real, had always been real, both lesser and greater than all her mother’s promises, and real, too, must be all the rest. There were places in the world that had names, other names, and other colors, other people, and now that she had tasted that, Tomiris could not abide dull greens of summer grass, the pale yellows of wheat fields, the blacks and browns of filth and mud and fouler things. She could not remain here. She could not wither into her own mother, who harbored no dreams but to rot in a slightly larger room. Where Mother was lulled into emptiness by what she deemed the small luxuries of the capital, Tomiris was enchanted by the promise of all the colors she had yet to know and the world she had yet to see and how boundless it was, and suddenly Gurvalan seemed smaller than the village where oxen outnumbered men.
Mother hated her for it. Resented her. She envied me my dreams, Tomiris thought. Years later she began to understand that Mother had never loved her, or at least she decided to believe in that. An accident, a squirt of seed, fatherless and meaningless. The first in her family to read, that meant little to Mother and to her increasingly insensate uncle. I had hopes once, when I was a child, Mother said, though Tomiris couldn’t believe it. If she did, she would have to admit that she could – would – become as hollow as the woman before her. Perhaps some part of her always had that understanding. Perhaps that was why the day she saw a Blossom mantled in a color more splendid than all of nature, merely passing by to inspect the Rose’s embassy in the city, Tomiris knew she could not stay here. There was no meaning here for her. There were no ties here for her. There was no future here for her.
She remembered her past but never spoke of it aloud. She invented a tale of a different life, a dull life but different in small ways, a life she didn’t have. A child with a father, with several brothers, who lived in a village that, though small, had a name, who had boldly stolen a coin to buy passage west, just a small hint of daring and childish rebellion, as well as dedication. Tomiris wondered if she meant to become a magical girl, even then. She wasn’t certain. It was the world that so enthralled her, the idea of elsewhere, of everywhere. That was what Blossoms were, she thought. That feeling so fleeting, given life and named, that promise of a life that could be more, that could mean more…
All that came after was but a meaningless gust. She recalled glimpses of the path that brought her from Noiongat to Graufor to Altengrie to Tesmaria and Cartasinde. But that was merely the how, not the why. Now she saw it. Now she remembered all that she had felt, all at once. The bell hummed and the sound became a color, all colors, and then Tomiris was once again in the midst of the chamber, indistinct save for the veins aglow on the floors and walls and ceilings and pillar, the lifeblood of the Stonetree.
The others opened their eyes at the same time. Sayuri was calm, restrained, but Krisolde and Ryscrux both wept in sorrow, ugly, loud crying, Krisolde almost hysterical. Sayuri moved to comfort them, but Ryscrux wrapped her arms around her, pulling her as close as she could.
“What did you see?” Tomiris asked the princess, though she could already guess the answer. “Ryscrux… What was it that you saw…?”
Her eyes welled with tears. She didn’t try to hide them, not in all their redness and pain and rage. She held her sister close and let her bury her face on her chest, clutching her tight, squeezing with urgency, close to ferocity.
“The same thing you saw,” she said. “The reason I was brought here. The reason there was no path I could have taken but the one that brought me here,” she caressed Krisolde’s hair as her sister wept a muffled dirge. “The reason we will take your hand and become Blossoms.”
The Rose's Torn Petals 