Chapter 28: Back into the city

Some goodwill that was, thought Kira, but he still obeyed and made his way back. When he arrived, there was some curiosity about where he had been because he had managed to miss his lunch, but the curiosity died down quickly enough and his story of it taking longer than expected to find Jake held. Fortunately, his fellow scribes had set aside a lunch for him, and it sat waiting on his desk.

Tucking into it with a degree of ferocity, the food served to calm Kira after the events of the day as everything somehow managed to feel a bit better when he had a bit of food in him, but he still would not forget what he had seen. He wondered if he could tell anyone about it, but then who would listen? The only two people who might take him seriously and who weren't within the palace were Cat and Gretyl, but it was unlikely they could do anything about it.

For the rest of that day, with no solution presenting itself to him, he continued working on sorting the various scrolls handed to him. Among them, he was certain were the scrolls that he had given over to Jake earlier in the day, now bound with a wax seal to prevent any meddling that hadn't been altered at all. With just a couple of parchments remaining and the day nearing its end, he hurried to finish his tasks before following the other scribes out of the office.

That night he lay awake whilst Aura slept, thinking more about the day and reliving what had happened. He still couldn't reconcile how he had fallen through the painting when he had entered the passage to how he had moved it aside when he had left. This confusion and the confusion caused by his dreams seemed to have a common cause in the Progenitors. Who exactly they had been, who they could be at this time and what they wanted with him was difficult to understand. All that was clear was that they were intent on showing him things, but for what purpose?

As their intent was impossible for him to discern, he turned to what he had heard Jake call the zombie-like people puppets. The term fit them well, and it implied some kind of control as puppets had to have masters to move them and direct their actions. Krinestadt had always held demi-humans with a degree of distrust, and such an attitude was supported by its dear old church. As such, their use in these experiments in place of humans made only too much sense.

The reason why their aura had felt so strange was because it had been altered and that they had been stripped of free will or desires, speculated Kira with growing confidence, allowing what remained to work as the most obedient and mindless slaves available.

This conclusion made the most sense to him as he lay there and wondered when these puppets would become public knowledge. Their public unveiling would be a great risk as it would be liable to create an uproar and this combined with how they had not felt complete, as though the manipulator was still busy studying how they might be better produced, meant that they were unlikely to be released any time soon.

The next couple of days passed Kira like a blur whilst he wrestled with ideas such as moving up his plan to leave the palace. This was because whilst living in the palace, seemingly at every turn, he found new things that would be able to cause him trouble or even get him killed or, as something worse, potentially make him end up like the poor demi-humans below the palace. He had been certain of a need to leave at some point before he had even entered the building but now would not be a good time to leave because it was winter, and without any accommodation or supplies, he would end up in another sort of trouble. This meant that he would likely have to wait until at least after the New Year celebrations, which now would be in less than two months and would signal the coming of the spring.

When he left, he would go west, back into the old lands of Arkadia, to be free from Krinestadt and then try to start using his manipulations to help people and combat the problems that those lands were having with banditry. He even supposed that he could create a group of manipulators to work for this goal, but this was him getting ahead of himself as he first had to find a way to leave.

Such an escape would certainly not be coming on this particular day that he now found himself on because, whilst it was the perfect day to escape as it was his day off, he had things that he wanted to get done. If he could just go and find Cat again, perhaps he would be able to get some better information, or so he thought but, as he left the palace, he ended up walking alongside Aura out, into the city. This meant that trying to find Cat was out of the question and instead he turned himself over to trying to enjoy the day as best as he could.

First, they headed back to the colosseum, taking a route that saw them walking together through the park that held his ancestor's mausoleum. Despite the somewhat grim surroundings, Kira maintained a conversation for the whole walk about his work in the palace and other minor things. He never mentioned what he had discovered below the palace and, regardless of how it had weighed on him for the past few days, it entirely slipped from his mind as they talked and laughed with their trivial happenings seemingly as important as anything in the world. Aura seemed a lot easier to talk to than she had the first time that they had been out together, and he surprised even himself with how open he was with her - trusting that she wouldn't tell anyone else about his true feelings about some of his colleagues whose work he deemed was passable at best.

Everything seemed to be a better version of the previous week's Saturday with the fighters in the pit this time being worth the watch. Kira still fancied his chances against a couple of them with a sword, but against one of them, who had deftly defeated his opponent with a faint to their left, he knew that he would have had to resort to attacking them with help from his aura. This would have been a very costly exercise but, as he still did not fully trust his own strength with his manipulations, fighting like that would have to do until he was confident that his punch would be enough. It would certainly have helped to have had something that he could hit to test his strength, but no such object had presented itself and damaging a palace wall was liable to get him in trouble. With avoiding trouble as his only definite objective, it definitely didn't seem worth it.

If he had been able to lose Aura in the crowds, he could have gone into the park, where fewer people were around, and tried hitting something there but abandoning her didn't present itself kindly as he could imagine it ruining their recently formed friendship. This was odd in itself because he hadn't expected to make one whilst living as a slave, and it gave him a possible reason to stay that now contributed to telling him to wait until the weather warmed to leave. He assumed that she was a friend because of how easy it seemed to be to talk to her, even as they pushed their way out from the arena and mingled with the crowds, but he couldn't be certain as the closest that he had come to a friendship before had been with the various scholars in Illyria.

However, even as he thought he was second-guessing himself because he supposed that Cat was a friend too and the ease with which they had become friends, despite how they had met, was confusing. It seemed that making friends wasn't some mystical ability limited to serving only those that had lived out on the streets for their whole lives and instead that it lived on within everyone. Breaking these friendships, the first that he had sincerely achieved, was not appealing to him, but he knew that he would have to at some point. It did not matter what happened. Someday he would have to leave and go west and for what exact reason this was, beyond helping people, was unknown to him.