#arazlam

And so now he was returning to his boarding room one step at a time, like climbing one of the pyramids in Zelmonia's eastern deserts. And beside him, Mrs. Felix chattered on about what she found the most hilarious adventure that the neighborhood cat, Black Thomas, had gotten up to with someone's washbucket.

Arazlam did not explain to her that cats were fairly new to Ivalice in their domesticated form, having descended from kept coeurls in the time of Ivalice's “golden age” only to now find their future as weakened strays for the Wild Boys to bag and toss in a river for coins. Only four hundred years! That they had once been able to turn a man to stone with a gaze, and now mewled for cream at Mrs. Felix's kitchen door, was probably the makings of a great political analogy which he couldn't quite string together with so little sleep.

“And so then, little Black Thomas, well, he's a proud sort, as we all well know, so when his head emerged from that water, why...” Arazlam opened the door to his room, and was about to turn to offer his landlady whatever politeness he had remaining, when he saw that at his desk sat a young woman in undergarments, one that he did not know.

He shut the door quickly. “Mrs. Felix...” He offered, trying to push thoughts through several layers of gauze, “I must confess to feeling quite ill.” From whence had this woman come? Some fellow instructor's idea of a prank, or worse, a charity?

“Oh!” Mrs. Felix clutched her hand to her chest. “How dreadful you must think I am, that I didn't notice!”

“Not at all, Mrs. Felix, I suppose I am... not one to share so openly.” He tried to smile. “I think perhaps sleep will...”

“I will not hear of it! We simply must get some soup in you, Mister Durai, so that you can fight off... well, whatever it is!” She gave his arm a pat. “Now, you just go get yourself comfortable in your room, now, and I'll be right on back with a bowl of something hale and hearty.”

“I... thank you, Mrs. Felix.” He nodded her away, and then slipped into his room when she'd turned.

“Concerned for your reputation, Mister Durai?” The woman at his desk didn't turn. “I wouldn't have thought it of you.” She was not actually in undergarments; her style of dress, however, may as well have been. Her leather breeches hugged her legs like hose, and she wore a corset above and little else except a strange leather harness from her shoulders to between her... Arazlam blinked, trying to focus on the way her blonde hair moved as she turned over another sheet of parchment on his desk. “In truth, I would not have thought you had much standing left to lose.”

“Mrs. Felix is...” His fingers tugged at his long beard, tangling in it. “She would likely cast me on the street, to see you.” She would be back soon with the soup. He took a step back, so that he would block the door. “Who are you?”

She finished reading the page of his manuscript before she turned and fixed him with gray eyes. “I am a Riskbreaker, Mister Durai. Do you know what that term means?” He shook his head. “My name is Ophelia Goodfellow, and I am an agent of the Valendia Knights of the Peace.”

“Valendia is... a great distance away.” A continent's span plus an ocean, in fact. Arazlam had no skill in using it, but there was a dagger a few arm's lengths away, sleeved and resting on a night table. He couldn't imagine his chances in diving for it.

“I'd not try what you're thinking, Mister Durai.” Goodfellow looked bored. “You may not fear me by profession, but I grew up in the slums of the Greylands, and if I wanted you harmed you'd be so.”

“Knights for Peace,” he murmured bitterly. “Your national council answers to a coterie of corrupt noblemen and a dying church. Even here, we know this.” She raised an eyebrow and the corner of her mouth tilted up, inviting him further. “You count among your number Templars and Inquisitors. History repeats evermore.”

Agent Ophelia Goodfellow turned in his chair, crossing her legs. Her heels were the length of his hand. “You are quite the study of 'Templar' history.”

“I teach history, yes.” His mouth was dry. He knew she was right about her capacity for violence: the muscles in her bare arms were tense, despite her posture. He could see each one move, like thick ropes sliding across the deck of a ship. The “corset” was provocative, but Ivalician monks in the time of the War of the Lions often wore a similarly-revealing garment in order to provide the full range of arm movement. He wanted to sit on the bed—wanted to lie crying on the bed, in fact—but he could hear footsteps coming up the stairs outside the door already.

“I've been reading your work here.” She held up a page. “It's... florid, but with an admirable rigor.”

“What is a Riskbreaker?” He finally bit.

“Hm?” She tilted her head, as if she'd forgotten she brought it up. “Oh! Yes. Riskbreakers are of the Dangerous Criminal Task Force. We are charged with eliminating dangers to the state, wherever they might be found.”

Mrs. Felix knocked on the door.

As his hands fumbled with the lock, Arazlam knew that his robes were now sufficiently stained with sweat to convince her that he was ill, as perhaps he was. He cast a glance back at the woman in black, who just shrugged. He tugged the door open a crack and found Mrs. Felix's face pressed against the opening.

“Well, don't you look a fright, you poor duck!” She cooed. “I've got just the thing right here.”

“Ah, yes...” He nodded perhaps too vigorously. “Thank you, Mrs. Felix.”

“Well, I can't fit it through this passage, now can I?” She pushed the door open with one kitchen-strong arm—in that moment leaving Arazlam wondering if she herself wasn't a combat-trained Riskbreaker—and thrust a tray into his hands with another. He cast a glance back, but the blonde woman was nowhere to be seen in his tiny room. “There you are. Do make sure you eat it all, Mister Durai, you're nothing but skin and bones.”

“I... I shall, madam, you have my word.” He closed the door with the landlady blessedly on the other side of it, and he heard the secret agent chuckle before he turned to see her leaning against the desk. “How?”

“If I told you, I'd probably have license to kill you.” She stepped forward and dipped the tip of her pinky in the soup, bringing it to her lips. “Mm. Needs a touch of peppergrass. I'd dice a stalk and mix it in while it's on a low flame.”

He placed the tray on the bed. “You say, if. You aren't here to kill me?”

She rolled her eyes. “You've simply no respect for practicalities, have you?” She leaned in. “Why, were I charged with murdering a bookish old man with no sense of self-preservation, would I converse with him first?”

“Sadism?” He offered back.

“Let me ask you a question, Mister Durai.” She turned back towards his work. “Why pursue this? Is it a sop for a bleeding heart? You have lost your family. Or is it perhaps a belated apology to your late father, who supported you to no end?”

Arazlam's fist clenched. “Perhaps you, Agent Goodfellow, have no respect for the abstract. From whatever source this wellsprung, it is now a river in motion. Truth has value in and of itself, and all dams fall before it.”

“You presuppose your actions are of the abstract.” Goodfellow shook her head. “You said it yourself, history repeats. Some are committed to keeping it so. Some are content to let the waters break what they may.” She slid open his single window, as though it were new. “I am of the latter. And thus I am a friend.”

“A peculiar friend, who appears in a man's room unannounced.”

The seller emerged from a cloud of dust, a man who could well be six times Arazlam's own advanced age based on the look of him, and Arazlam offered him a distracted nod in hopes of appearing the fool. It had been Goug that had finally perfected the movable type printing press; the likely-apocryphal story is that it was King Delita himself who had commissioned the development, as a way to bring education further to the lowborn like himself. If that had been the goal, it hadn't really succeeded – broadsheets and the picaresque were more the mode of the day – but usage had still blossomed regardless, and you could often find collectors combing places like this for the first books ever printed, hoping to enshrine them behind glass or auction them to each other. To Arazlam, this felt rather beside the point. An author, even the stuffiest one, hoped to be read.

He made a show of browsing a few other shelves before working his way to the one that Jellion had directed him towards; many books were, unsurprisingly, on various engineering principles and collections of natural philosophy that even Arazlam would barely understand without a translator guiding him through page by page. But true to her word, there was a sizable, if eclectic, collection of tomes on various periods in Ivalician history. He actually found one or two accounts of the Lion War that were not readily accessible in his library or the Akademy's that might prove marginally useful as tertiary sources, and decided making additional purchases would serve to waylay suspicion. Then he knelt down to inspect the shelf where his quarry supposedly lay.

As the story went, in the years following the coronation, King Delita ordered some of the rooms in Lionel Castle completely redecorated, and that the old furnishings were to be destroyed. A sort of traditionally “regal” action, to be sure, and Arazlam doubted anyone put much thought into the decree. But somewhere in the axe-chopping of a bed, a laborer found something exciting and dangerous. Arazlam had a guess as to whose bed it had been, that had secreted within a hollow post a series of missives that, when found, swiftly passed hands in whispers.

And then Arazlam's eyes alighted upon the text in question, and his shaking hands wrapped around it.

It's not clear how many people held the sheaf of letters before they were published. It's also not clear if they were published out of a morbid curiosity or in an early, failed attempt to disseminate the truth. It might even have been an early gambit of his ancestor, performing the latter under the guise of the former. What was clear is that most of the copies in its very small print run were lost to Templar flames within a year of its publication.

He brought the book, along with the others he'd selected, to where the shopkeep stood. “How much for this one?” He asked idly, holding out his prize.

“Eighteen gil-coppers,” the man shrugged. In Arazlam's home town, perhaps the cost of two loaves of bread.

My post at the Akademy of History in Zaland came about fortuitously; love led me to it. I was shelving a catalog volume of missionary expeditions to Jylland when a radiance in overbundled furs hurled a text at me unprompted.

“You men!” Her face was flushed, and the cold that had seeped into the library cast a veil below her eyes. “Your imprudence! Language is not a salad!”

“I beg your pardon, milady?” I offered weakly, and She stomped one heel, her fists curling outward from her down-stretched arms in a way that was infantalizing in a way I'd rarely see her again, but also endearing in its suddenness and, I note long in retrospect and with some embarrassment, in the way her cheeks softly pulsed.

“You pick and choose! As though all of you were kings! You flick out a word like a... a radish, that you like not the taste of, or drown them in oils, you...”

I was taken quite instantly, of course.

As she calmed, she explained that she had failed an examination given by a Professor Cypress, whose view of her translations from the Old Valendian did not take into account that certain suffixes had changed in that era following the annexation of the Republic of Landis into what was then the Archadian Empire, and their accent incorporated into the language. She argued that it was less a question of “accent,” and more one of the suffix falling out of favor with the ruling class of the period, as they took on a young emperor in wartime who disapproved of a nickname he'd received from the commonfolk.

As the hour passed, I found myself bringing up the recent advances in the study of psychology, in which “a salad of words” was actually being used quite colloquially, and she transitioned from there into the legend of the Lucavi named Chaos, whose winds deafened the people to each others' tongues, and its possible basis in early Ivalician linguistic theory. I could not remember a conversation that I had enjoyed more. I offered to tutor her, and she accepted. And by a year's time, Helenor and I were wed.

Soon enough, however, scarcely before our courtship had even taken wing, I found myself with more pupils. Friends of Helenor's, first, and then those with more and more tenuous connection. It is not that I was an especially adept tutor—indeed, Helenor herself gained naught but a suitor from our arrangement—but I had some degree of conviction in my lessons, and so momentum carried me. I began aiding one of my own teachers, and from there parlayed my role into one more official. Though teaching larger groups suited me far less, and in my lectures I became instead something of a bore.

My earliest memories, viewed with eyes not yet hip-high, were of the massive casks that lined one wall of the barn that he'd converted to a shop before any of we children were born; each held sand gathered by tradesmen for his craft, sand from what seemed every beach in all of Ivalice. I can still remember the plates affixed to each barrel, “Zeltennia,” “Giza,” “Sandseas,” “Romanda,” “Jylland,” even “West Valendia.” I would run my hands through each, feeling their varied coarseness and density, even as I watched my father float glass upon tin; made from the sand pulled from outside Leá Monde (it was, then, before the quake), or even right beneath our own home. He would laugh at the sight of my awe, and remark with a warmth he only held when at the workshop that he'd seen all the lands of Ivalice without having left his barn.

No small share of my father's funds came from his particular gift in stained glass, for he was in his day the contractor that provided the transcendent windows that adorn so many churches and temples dedicated to the worship of St. Ajora. But my father's other career and his true, hidden passion was that of natural philosophy, and his workshop was as often producing lenses as it was tableaux for the Church of Glabados. He and his closest comrades were often affixing those lenses to our skies, taking arcane calculations like the arithmeticians of old, learning more and more of our natural world. One night my father, when in the cups, chuckled and said that with one hand he gave the church their eyes, and with the other poked them out.

My earliest days not spent in that workshop were oft spent in the company of a young lad named Mathye, red-headed son of the local apothecary and possessing no small skill in matters athletic and martial. Like many boys of our day, we often entertained fancies of serving in the wars of time past, the Valendian Civil War, or the Fifty Years' War. We'd stomp through the woods wielding sticks, imagining battles against figures of legend. Males of the Hume race like as not hear as much of military conquest from boyhood games as they do history texts. Come the schooling age, however, I took to letters regularly, and found the fantasists could do the tedious work for me of shaping worlds in which to play.

My brother and I would ride by cart with my father into Warjilis, where there was a larger schoolhouse and more learned teachers – we were not of noble stock, but Warjilis is not a town of nobles but of merchantry, and coin was as good as noble blood in securing us our educations. My brother Oswyn took to figures quickly, as though a possible fate outside continuing our father's work never existed for him. But despite an all-consuming appetite for stories and histories, I was indolent in my studies. It was little surprise, then, when I fashioned myself a philosopher and a poet, though my brother took it poor when my father only encouraged my dreaming. He would find me up in a tree, reading a weathered copy of Oeilvert: The Veil of Wiyu or some such and decry my state to my father, who would only shake his head.

Oswyn looked to the heavens. “He'll not find a wife if he acts the child, forget even providing for her.”

My father smiled at me and did remark, “There is time enough in all things, and Ivalice has spare few left that could see the winged ones were they to return right before us.”