Overview:

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Ser Cerulean Arlentis and his winged steed, Cielo, continue searching through the mounds of treasure and gold within the Griffin’s vault. Eventually, the pair stumble upon a seashell-shaped podium that reveals Aphrodite’s mirror—a relic that ties to Allison’s dream of beauty and stardom. Next, Cerulean discovers a tapestry embroidered with nothing more than the flame of a hearth. As Cielo watches, Cerulean runs his hands across the woven piece, causing the image to come alive. The tapestry reveals a Greek family from ancient times, conjuring visions of Roanne’s family and the small coastal community they once called home.

The_shell_remembers_her_face.sav 

Here’s a thing about the Griffin’s vault that nobody tells you in the brochure: it’s loud in the wrong way. Not loud like a concert. Loud like a cathedral. Every step Cerulean takes across that floor comes back at him three seconds later off a wall he can’t see, and every coin Cielo knocks loose starts a small avalanche that ticks and rattles and keeps ticking long after you’ve stopped caring. My sim reproduces all of it. Temperature too. The air in here sits at a steady cold that gold does to a room, and I have never once been able to put my hand on any of it.

They’re hunting object number two.

Cerulean walks, to the boy, tucked through his belt like a sword he’s decided not to draw. His armor is silver plate with gold accents running through the seams, scuffed now at the knee from climbing the coin hill, and his gold-laced silver gauntlets throw little wobbling reflections onto everything he passes. Cielo goes ahead of him at a trot, wings half-folded, hooves clicking. Every few meters the pony stops, sniffs a chest, decides it’s boring, and moves on. Honestly the most accurate treasure appraisal I’ve ever seen. 

Then Cielo’s ears swivel and he neighs.

“Yeah, I see it,” Cerulean says.

Set apart from the piles, on a low stone stand nobody bothered to gild, sits a seashell. It’s the size of a bathtub. Ridged, fan-shaped, the outside a chalky cream that’s gone brown in the grooves, the inside polished to a pearl sheen that catches the vault light and holds it. Water has gathered in the deep of it. Not much. Maybe a hand’s depth, absolutely still, so clear you’d walk straight into it.

Cerulean leans over the rim.

And a girl leans back.

He jerks upright fast enough that Cielo startles. “Whoa. Okay. Hi?”

Nothing in the water moves except the girl, who has not gotten the memo that reflections are supposed to copy you. She’s young, dark-haired, wearing a plain woven chiton with the shoulder pinned by a bronze clasp. She’s tilting her chin one way and then the other, checking herself from both angles, and she is completely absorbed in it. Not smug. Just busy. The way you’re busy when you’re deciding whether you like your own face yet.

“Who’s this girl?” Cerulean says. He crouches slowly and puts both hands on the shell’s rim.

I already know who she is. Not by name. By type.

So does he, apparently, because his eyes go somewhere else, and the vault light on his face changes to a color the vault does not contain.

I get the vision too. Perk of the job.

It’s a bedroom in Peregrine Lightyear, afternoon, the cold walls humming. Allison sits at a dresser with a mirror wide enough to fit three of her, elbows planted, chin in her palms. There’s a hairbrush she’s forgotten about. There’s a bow half-tied and abandoned in her loose waves. She’s looking at herself with total concentration, and she’s not posing, which is the part people always get wrong about her. She’s studying. Turning her head a few degrees, holding it, turning back. Some kids take apart radios. She takes apart the reflection. 

I want to be a lovely woman someday when I grow up.

That’s it. That’s the whole thought. It arrives plain and unarmored, and I sit there in my white cube with my hands on nothing and think about how nobody in that room ever heard it out loud.

The water shivers.

The Greek girl is older now. Not gradually. Between one blink and the next she’s a young woman in a meadow under a broad tree, barefoot in the grass, and someone has crowned her with a wreath of pink roses. She’s dancing. It’s not a performance, there’s no audience in the frame, and she’s doing it badly and joyfully, which are frequently the same thing. Sunlight comes down through the leaves in coins.

“Okay,” Cerulean breathes. “Okay, that’s nice.”

The water shivers again and the meadow is gone.

Now it’s a theater. Enormous, tiered, gold-lit, a sea of seats and a stage the size of a landing bay. There’s a podium and an envelope and one of those pauses that lasts a year. The name that comes out of it is Allison’s. She rises in a hot pink gown that’s been stitched with something that catches every light in the building, and the whole room stands up.

She walks the aisle. She takes the steps. Someone hands her a gold statuette and she holds it in both hands like it might be warm, and the sound in that theater is thousands of people being genuinely glad about something at the same time, which is rarer than any of the metal in this vault.

Cerulean has not moved. His mouth is open slightly.

I have watched the entire run of this story from a room that no sound gets out of. I know exactly where Allison is standing right now, and what she’s standing in, and I am not going to think about it while this is playing.

The water goes flat.

Then it domes. Something rises through the surface without breaking it, the way a bubble comes up the wrong direction, and by the time it clears the shell it’s a mirror. Porcelain frame, oval, small enough to hold one-handed. Vines and shells and doves worked into the rim in relief. Water runs off it and doesn’t leave it wet.

“Allison’s ambition is the limelight,” Cerulean says quietly.

An image forms in the glass. Not his face. A woman, seated, turned three-quarters away, hair unbound, one hand resting on a dove. She looks out at him with the patience of somebody who has never once needed to hurry, and the mirror decides, right there, what it thinks of him. He isn’t in it. He can stand directly in front of the thing and he isn’t in it.

Aphrodite’s mirror shows the fairest of women. Her ruling. Her definition. No appeals process.

The porcelain flushes pink and holds the glow, steady as a pilot light.

Which is when I clock the pattern properly, and feel dumb for taking two objects to get there. The brush went yellow. This goes pink. The vault isn’t grading these things by what they’re made of. It’s grading them by who they belong to.

Cerulean lifts the mirror off the water. Cielo pushes his muzzle in to look and finds absolutely nothing looking back, huffs, and gives Cerulean an expression of deep personal betrayal.

“Not you either, Buddy,” Cerulean says. “Don’t take it personally. It’s a very specific mirror.”

They go back down the aisle.

The Griffin is where the Griffin has been the entire time, on the black altar step below the scales, front paws crossed, eagle head level. Up close the feathers of his neck are silver at the roots. The lion half of him has the loose, settled weight of an animal that stopped needing to prove anything a very long time ago. The scales rise behind him, two dishes on chains thicker than my arm, the west one groaning with gold, the east one carrying a single wooden brush and hanging one notch lower than it did this morning.

“I see you’ve returned with something more valuable this time,” the Griffin says. “Aphrodite’s mirror.”

“The value of this mirror lies not just in its porcelain,” Cerulean says, “or its link to Aphrodite.”

The Griffin’s head cocks a few degrees. He does not ask the follow-up question. I notice that. He asked plenty of them yesterday.

“If you’re ready, you may place the porcelain mirror on the eastern scale.”

Cerulean raises his arm. The mirror lifts off his palm and drifts up and out, unhurried, turning once, and settles onto the east dish beside the brush with a small china click that the vault takes and repeats and repeats.

The chain moves.

It’s not fast. It’s a heavy, grinding descent, link by link, and the west dish rises the same distance and the gold in it shifts and resettles with a hiss. Then it stops. Level two. The east side is still hanging well above the west, and the west is still winning, and two objects in a room this size look like exactly what they are.

Cielo’s ears flatten.

“You may need a third object,” the Griffin says. “Or perhaps even more.”

Somewhere else entirely, a snake woman is counting days at a window full of steam, and she’s got the arithmetic down to two. Nobody in this pyramid can hear her. I can hear everybody, all the time, which is not the flex it sounds like.

Cerulean rolls his shoulders. He looks up at the west dish, then at his hands, then at the pony.

“Yeah,” he says. “But Buddy and I won’t give up until we tip the balance to the east.”

Cielo neighs, loud, and the vault throws it back at them from every direction at once, so for a second it sounds like there are forty of him.

I’d cheer. Obviously I don’t.

Six_chairs_and_one_fire.sav

They go north this time, past the coin hills, into a stretch of the vault where the treasure thins out and the floor shows through. Cielo’s hooves stop clicking and start ringing. Different stone under here. Cerulean notices and doesn’t mention it, which is the kind of thing he does that nobody ever gives him credit for.

The tapestry hangs between two iron stands, and it’s the only object in this pyramid that isn’t shouting.

It’s wool. Old wool, the nap worn shiny along the lower edge where a few centuries of hands have touched it. The border is a plain key pattern in faded red. And the picture woven into it is a room. That’s all. An empty room, four bare walls, a floor, and set into the far wall a hearth with a fire going in it.

The fire moves. Not animated, exactly. It just doesn’t hold still when you look away.

“Huh,” Cerulean says. He steps close, tilts his head. “This feels more like a backdrop than a piece of art.”

He’s right, and I like that he got there in four seconds. It’s staged. Somebody wove a set and left the actors out.

“Okay. The brush painted. The shell had water.” He flexes his fingers inside his gauntlets. “So this one wants something too.”

Cielo backs up a step to give him room, then immediately fails to give him room, planting his chin on Cerulean’s shoulder pauldron to watch.

Cerulean raises both hands and holds them a few inches off the wool.

The gold-laced silver of his gauntlets warms up from underneath. Not white, not blue. Seafoam green, pale as the shallows off a beach at seven in the morning, and it spreads down the plates to his fingertips and stays there.

The tapestry starts filling in.

Threads that were not there a second ago come through the weave and lie down and become things. A table first, round, standing on one carved central leg. Then a bowl on the table with steam stitched rising off it in three curls. Then people. A father with a short beard and a mended tunic. A mother reaching across to set down bread. Two sons, one grown and one not. Two daughters, the younger one kneeling on her stool because she’s too short otherwise.

Six of them around one table in a room with a fire in it. Nobody’s fighting a monster. Nobody’s a hero. It’s dinner.

The green light climbs Cerulean’s arms and goes into him, and his eyes unfocus, and I go with him.

Laiya. Afternoon, that specific coastal heat where the air stops moving entirely. Carlotta comes out of the kitchen with a glass bowl of fruit salad, condensation already beading on it, and sets it in the middle of the table with the small triumphant thump of a woman who has been chilling it since morning. There’s a fan oscillating in the corner. Somebody’s radio two houses down.

Cut. Under a sink. Roanne on the tile floor with her chin on her knees, watching her father Carding work a wrench around a P-trap, and Carding narrating every step whether she asked or not, because that’s what he does, and there’s a plastic basin under the pipe already catching the gray water. He hands her the wrench to hold. She holds it like it’s a ceremonial object.

Cut. A bedroom at night, one lamp. Roanne sitting cross-legged with a book across her lap, reading out loud, and Christine and Sarah pressed against either side of her arguing about whether she skipped a page. She did. And in the bed against the wall, Kate, who is supposed to be asleep and is not, listening with her eyes shut and her mouth doing the words a half second behind.

Cut. Full sun. A church emptying out. Roel in a barong with his collar already sticking to his neck, his new wife laughing at something off-frame, and the entire road turned out for it. Neighbors. Tricycle drivers. A tita with a video camera she does not know how to operate. Rice going up and coming down over everybody. Somebody’s cousin has already started a speaker system nobody asked for.

The visions let go.

Cerulean stands there with his hands still raised and the seafoam draining slowly out of his gauntlets, and he does not say anything for a while.

I don’t either.

I’ll tell you what I’ve got instead. I’ve got a white room. Sim’s running at full immersion, so I can smell the fruit salad, I can feel the heat coming off that Laiya road. That’s the spec sheet. Full sensory reproduction, real time, anywhere in the known universe. What it doesn’t do is set a seventh place at the table.

Anyway.

“It’s love,” Cerulean says finally. “That’s what holds them together. All of them, not just the family.” He lowers his hands. “The whole street, basically.”

Cielo makes a low sound in his throat and bumps him.

“This is Roanne’s treasure.” Cerulean says it with certainty, and reaches for the tapestry, and the iron stands release it without being asked. It folds itself. Wool, folding, unassisted, into a neat square the size of a book. Cerulean tucks it under his arm and rests his hand flat on it once, briefly, the way you’d settle a dog.

They walk back.

The Griffin is at the altar step. He rises as they come down the aisle. Not to greet them. He rises the way a teacher stands up when the answer sheet comes in, and he doesn’t say anything at all while Cerulean crosses the last twenty meters, and that silence has a weight to it that yesterday’s silences didn’t.

The scales loom behind him. West dish groaning with bullion. East dish carrying a wooden brush and a porcelain mirror and hanging two notches down.

“The third,” Cerulean says, and holds out the folded square.

The Griffin looks at it. Then he looks at Cerulean, longer than he needs to, silver-rooted feathers shifting at his throat.

“Place it.”

The tapestry lifts. It unfolds as it rises, opening out across the vault air with the fire still burning in its woven hearth and six people still sitting at their dinner, and it drifts over the rim of the east dish and settles down flat.

The chain takes it.

This time the descent is longer. Link grinding past link, the whole apparatus complaining, and across the vault the west dish comes up and the gold in it slides and rings and resettles. The east side keeps going. Down past where it stopped for the mirror. Down further.

It stops.

The two dishes hang almost even. Almost. There’s a hand’s breadth in it, maybe less, the west still riding lower, and the beam above them sits at a tilt so slight you’d need to sight along it to be sure.

Cielo’s whole body goes rigid. Ears up, wings half-lifted, tail out straight.

“We’re almost there,” Cerulean says, and there’s a crack in his voice he doesn’t catch. “That’s nothing. That’s a nudge. One more and we’re level.”

The Griffin regards the beam. He takes his time about it.

“We shall see,” he says.

Which is not agreement. It’s not disagreement either. It’s the sound an old thing makes when it knows something about the shape of the room, and I’ve been watching stories long enough to recognize that particular flavor of sure, buddy.

Cerulean doesn’t hear it. He’s already scanning the piles for number four.