Chapter LI (51)

  Coleo not arriving for his audition at the circus didn’t outright mean he was part of Mitsuko’s opposition. There were a lot of other changes in this loop versus the loop she’d been in the circus with him. Perhaps her stunt at Fairy’s Grotto caused a cascading effect that resulted in Coleo applying for the circus. A guard distracted by her antics might not have been involved in a different event happening in the town that involved Coleo in some way. Or maybe Holly booking that inn room caused someone else to go elsewhere. Every action Mitsuko did caused a ripple effect across the entire archipelago. The smallest choice could potentially change everything.

  But that also didn’t make Coleo’s absence not suspicious.

  After waiting until the circus’s allotted time for auditions completed, Mitsuko decided to return to the inn.

  As she passed through the streets, she stepped back as children ran past her. A gnome girl was laughing while being chased by a human boy with a muddy handprint on his cheek. A mousy Kemon boy followed after them. They bumped into some people up ahead as they weaved through the crowds.

  As per usual, people were returning to their normal lives now, the dome’s oppressive nature fading into the background with the passage of time.

  And yet, it would all be back to the way it was before at the end of the week. Another 46 resets until time continued beyond this one week. Unless Mitsuko failed…in which case everything would be frozen forever. Every life on the archipelago snuffed out. It all rested on her shoulders. The responsibility of so many lives.

  Best not to linger on that fact. Take everything step by step. First, she needed to kill the guardian and restore Mauve’s sage. From there, she could work to help other islands free their sages. One at a time.

  Back at the inn, Mitsuko found the atlas Holly had ordered at the foot of their room’s door. She grunted as she lifted it. The tome had some heft to it. Then she stepped into the room.

  Holly was still sleeping so Mitsuko found herself back on the balcony, leafing through the atlas’ maps.

  “She is snuggling that crustacean,” Sterling complained, tail swishing back and forth. “Abnormal behavior. I fear your friend might be under the influence of an innate mental ability by that creature. Manipulating her through a dark branch of magic.”

  “You’re probably right,” Mitsuko said.

  Sterling’s glowing green eyes flashed with surprise at her agreement. “Then you’ll dispose of the foul thing?”

  “It’s a mental ability I’ve seen many times before. Often deployed by young creatures. It’s called…being cute.” Mitsuko turned a page of the atlas. “Stop being jealous of the crab.”

  “Bah!” Sterling hopped back up to the railing and then proceeded to furiously groom himself.

  Mitsuko was not a cartographer. She lacked the skill and eye for detail of someone like Holly, but even she could tell the maps of the city in the atlas were disastrously disproportionate. It didn’t help that canals appeared randomly throughout the years, easily dug up by elementalists restructuring the town’s foundations. Even the coastline moved from map to map. Though if it was a result of bad mapmaking or elementalist interference was up in the air.

  It took a long time before Mitsuko finally noticed one building which kept reappearing on each map. A stagnant location in the middle of the chaotic changes all around it. She frowned and flipped between pages. Then she stood up and stared out at the city.

  “Is this…the clock tower?”

  “That would certainly be a thematically appropriate location,” Sterling said.

  Mitsuko let out a sigh. At least she didn’t need to worry about getting lost as she navigated her way over to it. That one landmark stood out in the city.

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  Once again, she jumped from her balcony, though this time she took more care in her fall so as not to accidentally squash a pedestrian below. Not everyone was sleeping in late like Holly. Now a normal hour, people were out and about.

  “I am quite pleased you have discovered the location without my assistance,” Sterling commented as they walked. Mitsuko suspected that part of the reason he was quite a bit happier now was that they’d left the crab behind. But she kept that suspicion to herself and let him continue to ramble. “Resourcefulness will be key in completing the Prismatic Spiral. A keen mind with unique approaches to problems will serve you well. Especially as you reach higher level thresholds of our spells. I am relieved to say I have complete faith in you as our Champion.”

  “Thanks, Sterling,” Mitsuko said. She wished she shared his trust in her. In her mind she still knew hundreds of other mages who would have made better Champions.

  The clock tower’s old wooden doors were locked of course. But Mitsuko simply pressed a hand and cast Mend. The lock clicked as she found the last time it had been unlocked. Which happened to be only a few minutes earlier.

  That rang a few silent alarms in her head. She readied herself for a fight as she pushed the door.

  It creaked open, spreading light into the dark room.

  Overhead, gears ticked loudly. To the side was a stairway that wrapped clockwise around the room’s perimeter.

  Mitsuko stepped inside and let the door shut behind her. With it closing and cutting her off from the sunlight on the street, the shadows spread and the room dimmed, there was still enough ambient light from far above to make out the bigger objects in the room.

  First, she decided to check to see if the sage’s prison was in a similar hiding spot to that of Sterling’s. His had been hidden underground beneath an altar. So she sought out any sort of discrepancy in the floor, looking for a secret passageway. This time she didn’t have a voice in her head to guide her forward. She flicked her wrist to create a sword of ice and placed the tip on the stone floor. She let it drag across the ground as she moved, searching by both eye and touch simultaneously for any sort of discrepancy.

  The sword scraped the stone, creating a soft screech, joining the cacophony of gears clicking overhead. She remained alert. If the noise drew out anyone from within the clock tower, she would be ready for them.

  Nobody arrived.

  And she found nothing of note on the dusty floor.

  But this also still felt like the right place. Sterling had implied as much as well. The best call was to continue her investigation.

  “Okay, time to go upstairs.”

  Sword still in hand, Mitsuko took her first step on the staircase. And then another. The click of the gears intensified as she drew closer to the complex mechanism. Soon, the noise overwhelmed all others. She could no longer even hear her own breathing or heartbeat.

  The winding stars had no barrier between her and the clockwork. A precarious set up likely to grant workers and enchanters easier access to the mechanics of the massive structure. There were a few rickety boardwalks leading down to the center of some of the bigger gears but Mitsuko ignored them for now, focusing on her journey to the top.

  “Mind your hair,” Sterling said. Despite the noise, his voice sounded clear. Likely a result of her connection to him through their souls. “Thankfully you’re short. The last thing we need is for you to be scalped. They certainly haven’t added any safety measures in the last thousand years. And several of these gears look to be entirely unnecessary, serving useless purposes. As if an attempt to create an even more precarious environment. Sometimes it seems as if your entire civilization has been built upon what we created and you’re simply patching up things you don’t comprehend and praying that it doesn’t all come tumbling down in a catastrophic collapse.”

  Mitsuko said nothing, though she was now even more mindful of the gears clicking together overhead and the fall to her side. Sterling was right that it would suck to get her hair caught in one of those. She imagined many workers over the years must have lost limbs to the reliable gearwork surrounding her.

  A pendulum swung back and forth, swooping through the space between gears. Mitsuko paused to watch its approach. Its swing held enough force to knock over a hydra.

  She continued on up the stairs until she came to a door. Not anything elaborate or unique. Just an old slab of wood with a dented knob.

  Like the door below, it was locked. Which once again proved a very minor obstacle for Mitsuko. A second later, it swung open.

  In front of her was a large wooden loft, with a few of the gears from below piercing through the floor. It was quieter up here than on the stairs next to the bulk of the clockwork. The massive hands of the clock ticked by on the glass wall to the side. There were likely a hundred different enchantments helping keep this building active after all of these years, but that hardly seemed important at the moment.

  A small bitelas boy looked up at her from his pile of blankets in the center of the room. A child. His emerald back shell glittered in the beams of light coming from the window. His eyes were wide as they went from her ice sword, to her face. He reached over to the flute, sheathed at his belt like a dagger.

  Mitsuko put her guard up, recalling Theo acting as the acolyte back on Ashen and the children disappearing on Verdant. This child could very well be under the control of Mauve’s guardian.

  A buzz from above made her look up just in time to see the shadow of a bitelas man falling on her. Then a string instrument slammed into her head and she crumpled to the ground.

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