Prologue: Wylbrige

The Cultivation and Exploitation of Venomous Flowers

There is a spiralway down the swallowing neck of fate. Many are the ways to the mouth, though all seem to convene at the bottom, wherever that may be. Moment-spinning moments dissolve into the finger fabrics of memory, though I do my best to recount it all the same for you in this volume.

We were twenty years and some months prior today, one billowy morning inside the atrium, when my instructor had told me just such. Above a reeking brew, steeped honeyblossoms in a pale milk, her face carved itself as a shadow in dim firelight.

To me, she was Thorne, and that was how I had always known her. I'd taken it for her family name at times, though I'd seen conflicting information.

In those years we spent together, I came to realise she preferred a more formal address, though my failure to commit it to memory was spurred by her insistence that I speak with her just as I always had. As she'd told me, no further considerations but the natural could be tolerated, not for myself, certainly not for her.

As I tidied the dust from the window frame, she sat unmoving, save for times where she'd clear her throat and adjust the leaflets on her desk. Just as I settled into a rhythm in polishing the old iron grate, she rose up, as if driven to interrupt it.

“And what do you make of it all?”

“Of what, precisely?” I asked, perhaps in less polite form.

Thorne spun the quill in her fingers as I looked back to better hear her. The nib grazed paper, tip stalling with her thought.

“Broadly speaking, the state of the Art,” she said. “The Art, the procedure, the structure and the institutes which allow it all. I set myself to ask an open question, and one which I do not expect of you a perfectly concise answer.”

The Art was a simple matter at the hand of an endlessly complicated one. It was a wonderful and pure thing, in culmination of all the efforts of those who came before and after, an incarnation of that precious human spirit towards discovery, past survival and into ascension.

We did not agree on this. Stubbornly, we could not.

Each time we had spoken of it before, an argument had broken out, and I'd found myself given servant's chores, just as now, just as three days prior.

Fresh humiliation burning in my chest, I turned to what of it I could answer with utmost diplomacy. “I think so little at all of the academy, if that's what you mean to ask.”

Thorne closed her eyes, rolling over my words, then chuckled, settling back into a slouched seat. “Then,” she said, “it's not for nothing that I have taken you as my student.”

I lowered my rag from the window, but she raised a hand to stop me. “The servants are at rest today. A rest you earned for them, as I am certain you recall. Do not betray their trust just because I have forgiven your slight, Lúka.”

I folded my ears to my head, working at the tougher dust caked to the corners of the window. Every now and again, I took an oiled brush to a grate, and in this quiet, when the squeaking glass hushed, all I could hear was the crackling of the furnace.

Nothing but the furnace and the wind.

To a certain extent, I put my best efforts towards ignoring the wind. Most did, and this was an unspoken norm, at least among the castle scholasticate.

So long as it was not storming, and one did not find themself situated in one of the higher towers, this was a trivial matter. In the tallest points, the wind seemed loudest in a storm, but a deep sound resonated into the lower chambers, and I had always found that one more offensive by nature. Thorne once told me that the privilege of choosing one's own office was to pick one as high as possible, a sentiment I failed to grasp until arriving at the Wylbrige proper and experiencing the thrum firsthand.

The other apprentices called it The Bellowing, spoken of in the same casual voice one would use to discuss a creaking rafter. Nothing could have prepared me for my first experience with it, though I did hold some resentment for their complete failure to try.

Some weeks of good lectures I'd missed, vomiting up thick oils of an empty stomach from sheer anxiety during the stormy seasons. In avoiding this, with what I recognise in hindsight as undue familiarity, I'd demanded a bunk in the tower nearest Thorne, and by her petition, I'd been granted it.

But it wasn't storming today, and it wasn't yet the time where I expected much of it. Outside the glass, the wind glittered only as much as it always did. A gentle poison, and one which I blessedly exempted myself from the dealings around.

I lost myself in the work at last, and after some uncountable mass of moments, turned back around with my work well finished.

I stood alone in the office, and just as unceremoniously as she'd summoned me here, Thorne had quietly left.

Taking her cue, I did as well.

What of that conversation I thought, it didn't matter in the end. The days would stretch forever, and again we would argue on some meaningless matter of philosophy or other. In memory's faded tapestry, it all barely amounted to a switch of shade.

But for no particular reason, I couldn't shake it. Not in the weeks to follow, not in the moments after. As brief as it had been, as nowhere as it had gone, like a thorn in my collar, it proved a terrible ordeal to think of much else.

That afternoon, I went for tea, having my servant fetch what papers needed seeing-to in my own time. It wasn't honeyblossoms, a truly expensive and wretched flower, though it did have milk to slick the swill. As for the papers, I saw to them as I always did. When the worst of the work was finished, I sent the articles back to the porters, most rightly earning my sleep.

And there was that strange thought, which so cruelly robbed my night away. By morning, it lingered still, and for many mornings more.

One day, far beyond the point where it could matter in the slightest, I came to my answer.

For all Thorne could prove insufferably disagreeable, she had been fishing for a disagreement that day. When I failed to give her one, or rather, found a point she could not argue, I left her in silence.

Like a child, she was disappointed to be denied her play, and so she took up her toys in her arms and left.

I couldn't muster any guilt over it, least of which not because a week rarely passed before or after without just such a heated bout of punished debate, most of which because it never happened again. By the time I'd noticed, it was something I could take no action in regards to, after all.

And so five or so years later, as my gift of parting to the academy, I climbed the stairs to her study for the last time, a good flasquette of gourdwine under the crook of my arm and draped under my cloak. The door felt heavier to open alone, and I drained the wine in one good go of it, leaned up against a bookshelf. On her desk, I set nothing, I said nothing to her, and then I stared for some time, and then I left.

And that was it.

Maybe I had planned to say something more. I felt disappointed in myself, so I must have had some ideas. As I saddled myself with my books -- and all the other things that go in a big unwieldy pack, to avoid a waste of breath -- I thought back on that look in her eyes, cold and distant. I remembered shaking her hand, and wishing her the best.

For all I might have come to regret, I'd come twice as much to resent. There that feeling was again, terrible temper and all. I couldn't help it. How terrible had she been, as a master of procedure, as a student of the Art, to produce just one apprentice, and such a poor one at that. What a miserable shame on me it had been, faced with saying goodbye to such a long chapter of my murky memory, to find no words and only just barely a fond glance for the one who taught me such.

The memorial fell the day before I was to depart. I stayed in my bunk, doing little of anything at all. I'd been to the burial, and that was enough.

At the first break of dawn, I made my way with those few servants I hadn't yet released from contract to the foot of Wylbrige, a cobbled mess below the smoothworn spires. A small crowd had gathered, some scholasticate, others of the vulgar mass. Gifts came into our hands, though few were kept, and many bottles were reduced to their finer glass before it came time to depart.

Ahead of us spanned the easterly road, and we'd walk it in company of a mixed caravan of goods and travellers, to Vedrony, to the far castles, where I would spend the next ten years becoming the woman I'd never once understood.

That was it. This was the kindness I extended to my master, as a fellow first and a teacher second.

I write this to elicit no sympathy, but to get across one finer point: I provide no instruction in this recounting. If you are to draw up a conclusion from it all, it is that I expect only the kindness I have earned as an instructor who will one day join your peerage.

My field is oneirics, oneiropyricants in speciality, with a secondary study dedicated to the specifics of traditional curses, treatment and infliction alike. What of this you may make into an informal lecture, I use only as a diary to chart my step. Respect these pages as though an extension of myself, with all severity or restraint that would imply.

Before all else, I must acknowledge that the subject of this expedition lies outside of my field. Even so, it is well within what the Praxics -- that is to say the association of Mergielka -- would issue a grant of cooperation towards.

I disclose this motivation freely, to preempt any sort of investigation into it. I do not believe the Praxics would show such dignity, but I invite them to consider this factor in their future dealings. As it stands, this ethical deficiency cannot help but reflect in the quality of work produced by their students.

With that being said, the subject of this diary -- as well as any other assorted writings you may find relevant to the topic of this expedition -- is the cultivation and exploitation of venomous flowers.