The riddle of the Labyrinth7 A dedication for life

Daylight was waning, deepening the azure sky to indigo as the afternoon moved on into evening and the harsh Thulean winter wind blew flakes of crystalized snow towards the window, building up small and delicate heaps of glittering powder against the glass. The storm was departing now, vacating the empyrean for what promised to be a magnificent sunset. Curving from the right, then ahead and up high, before being attenuated to nothing by distance, the scintillating argent planetary ring seemed an artefact, having been shepherded into neat disks by the larger chunks remaining from whatever cataclysm had shattered the unfortunate satellite.

In the warmth indoors Cleanthia sat in her armchair, her forehead resting against the cold glass. It reflected her deep lapis-lazuli colored irises as she gazed with a disconnected yearning towards the city street several stories below. Down there people were passing by in their thick winter attire, clinging to one another against the bitter frost and slippery pavings as they entered and exited the warmth of the various shops and restaurants lining the street. The horse-drawn coaches and the few automobiles were making snaking tracks in the snow, their headlights turning flakes into fireflies. A group of youths about her own age darted between arm-linked couples and light posts, throwing snowballs at each other, laughing out loud and in their midst a large and furry white dog jumped around with the most joyous body language. The sight brought a small melancholic smile to Cleanthia's full, rosy lips and before she could stop herself, she let out a quiet laugh.

"Cleanthia?" A vexed voice conveyed her attention. "Have you even heard a single word of what I said?" In response Cleanthia caracoled her head to the source of the voice, seeing her father leaned against the door frame, arms crossed over his broad chest, biceps bulging and his short hair wet from a shower. She begun a dishonest retort but the look in his ice-green eyes made her rethink her decision.
"No, papá. I'm sorry for my disrespect." The rejoinder sounded unassuming enough, but there was a distance to her voice as if her mind was drifting absently.

Antolas let out a long exhale to cool his frustration as he stepped into his daughter's room to glance through the window at what had taken hold of her attention. The scene playing out down in the street made him take in another long breath and the toes of his bare feet curled against the soft rug as if to dig into it. His eyes refocused on the reflection of the two of them in the window glass and he recognized the sad and frustrated longing in her eyes. Seeing her like this, she resembled another woman closely in appearance, height and even age. To him, it was an unnerving deja-vu, Cleanthia and his memory could be seen as sisters, possibly even twins. Despite the appearance, Cleanthia was much younger. Perhaps still too young.

He had met Cynthia Saviterniou at the opening of an art gallery back in Lealia, and immediately been attracted to her. She had been eye-catching; tall, short blonde hair cut into an asymmetrical bob, sparkling cobalt eyes, small perky breast and dangerous hips. They had talked for hours about art, about Lealia and its people, the terrible war with Umakia which just had ended, about travel and many things in between. Antolas had been happy when Cynthia had accepted his invite to a play then to a concert then to a ballgame; he had taken her to places he felt were suited for her. She had gushed and loved every single outing, feeling at ease in the Celestian high society. He could tell it by the way she carried herself, the way she seemed to blossom in being around the cultured, the wealth and prestige. He on the other hand just knew how to play the part. He'd been doing this enough for a lifetime, the pretention; it was all part of the job, all part of being a Voidwalker.

"Perhaps it would be best if I didn't bring you with me on this mission."
"No, please! I'm sorry." Imploringly Cleanthia gazed up at her father.
"Better to be sorry now – than later for choosing the wrong path in life," Antolas went on as he rubbed his bearded cheek, feeling the rugged fabric of hair against his palm. He glanced back at the street below. "You still want to be part of their lives, and that's beginning to concern me. How can I be sure that you'll be able to cut the connections when it becomes necessary?"

"So we're having this conversation again," Cleanthia tucked a strand of her blonde hair behind her ear. "You've taught me well, papá. I'll be ready and I'll do as I've been taught when expected of me."
"Will you?" Antolas stared down into her eyes. It was almost like looking at a mirror image, but where his own eyes had grown cold in the face of two centuries of reality, her eyes still held that dangerous flicker of hope only seen in the young and the naive. That hope was something a Voidwalker could not afford. "I'm afraid you're still too young for this, my sugarplum. I'll contact my sister; she'll continue your training whilst I'm away."

"No way!" she let her anger show while standing and stalking away from the window. The last thing she wanted was to be passed back over to aunt Melandia. The high-borned Lady would be just as annoyed with the idea of having to stop what she was doing to instead dedicate her time to look after her failure of a younger relative. Alone, after the demise of uncle Varonth. No, Cleanthia didn't feel like putting up with Melandia telling her what a meagre Voidwalker she was turning out to be. The thought of having to listen to Melandia's arrogant tone only pushed her anger further.

"That's what discontents me, Clea." His voice turned almost mellow while detecting the potent empathic wave of anger emanating from her. "You still haven't learned to fully control your emotional aura. If I'd been a regular human, you might've affected me with your wrath."
"I'm sorry." Lowering her eyes she inhaled, trying to steady her anger and with a thought her aura calmed and dissipated. "I know I've still a lot to learn, but I'm nineteen years old. No longer a child who needs to be kept by her aunt. I'm ready for this."

Antolas knew his daughter did indeed have a great deal to learn, but it wasn't so much about controlling her empathy. At almost twenty years of age, Cleanthia was still considered young by their people's standards; therefore her lapse in emotional control from time to time was expected. However that wasn't the real reason Antolas was having second thoughts about taking her with him on this mission. The major concern was her young soul. So very much alike her late mother.

"Look at them!" He nodded towards the window, and they both stepped closer to gaze down in the street. "They live such fleeting lives. Even the longer lived races like the Sprits and the Djinni are still just a blink in the eyes of a Celestian. The humans could be happy to reach 90 – and then they are often in a very bad shape physically. They try so hard to fill those short lives with so much, and they are always striving for company, for companionship. I understand how these associations can be tempting for you. You want to feel it with them and to be a part of it. You want to be surrounded by the strength of their joy and profoundness of their sadness. You want to know them and you want to be known. You want to be seen. You want to exist."

"We do not exist, but allow existence to move around us," she whispered at her own reflection as the glass frosted over with the setting of the sun. The view of the street below became obscured and distorted.
"I know it's hard, sugarplum," he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed gently. "Our existence is a lonely one. We are so very few, and we're incapable to be a part of the ordinary world. Not even the world of the ordinary Celestians. We cannot be a part of their communities and movements. Yet, I too have stood at this very place where you stand now, hearing my father exhorting about our place in this universe. He told me we must stand apart, but reminded me also that the things we do are important. What we do helps those people out there to continue living their lives freely and secure. In a small way, we exist through each of them, even if they must never know it. Being a Voidwalker is a dedication of a life time, a honorable yet a lonely position."

Cleanthia thought over his words. She knew that part of what her father said was true. She was born a Celestian, and with the capacities to become a fine Voidwalker. Posterity to the gods of old, the real powerful ones who now were gone from the Cosmoses. What was left was this little handful of powerful guardians, who were supposed to look after the world until the gods returned. If they returned.

Still, she couldn't deny the part of her that longed to venture out in the open instead of staying hidden behind false identities and shallow relationships. Her father claimed that her mother's heart gave her this desire to make connections with others and be part of their existence. Cynthia had been a regular woman of Massertia, whose life-span had been just as fleeting as those in the street and there were times when Cleanthia wished to have been more like her mother in that respect. But she was Celestian, a Voidwalker, and it was perhaps time she began acting more like one.

"I understand," she turned her eyes back to him and nodded with a soft smile. "I'm ready to allow existence to move around me if it'll let us do what we are supposed to. To dedicate my life to it, the way I've sworn. Or I'd never taken the oath of a Voidwalker."
"I am so proud of you, dearest," he affirmed and kissed her forehead.

She let the soft, kindling warmth of his aura surround her, but she couldn't impede her eyes from wandering back to the street below, where the lantern men had begun moving from pole to pole, lighting up the lamps with a pale, orange light and where most of the people were vanishing now, only two or three horse-drawn coaches moving down the paved stones.

She may have said the words he wanted to hear yet her hidden yearning couldn't be silenced so easily. The way the Voidwalkers lived their lives, moving through the world without really existing in it, had been approximating a natural law for millennia. Ever since the Seven Pantheons vanished, to be true. The longevity of their race made them slow to change, but Cleanthia felt that things had to change or one day her people would cease to exist entirely, even in the eyes of one another. It was a secret fear that she kept for herself, tucked away in the back of her mind along with this surreptitious longing that she would one day be able to walk down the street outside, having people smile at her because they knew who she was. However her deepest secret was that she would one day love a man, make love to a man and bear a child the way her mother had born her.

It was a secret hope that one day she'd know real friendship and real love, feel something to thaw the winter in her heart which was as relentlessly cold as the one holding Thule in its firm grip, and would do so long into April. Her father had broken that rule once, and if it hadn't been for his great power and high status among the Voidwalkers, he'd been punished severely for taking a mortal woman and impregnating her. Those dreams kept Cleanthia alert and eager and despite her desire to make her father proud, she refused to let them go.

****

Leaning back in her beanbag, Sarah closed her eyes. With the window of her den open, she could hear the sounds in the street. The splash of tyres through day-old puddles, the laughter of children, the rumble of an oncoming storm. She listened to of the neighbors returning, the building coming alive with the clicks of closing doors, the murmur of switched-on tellies and the aroma of different cuisines cooking in different kitchens. It was ordinary, pedestrian and so dismal that she felt herself turning a bit mad.

Fast, determined footsteps pounded up the small stairs, and she shifted her attention. Julianne opened the door only a second later and Sarah immediately understood something was wrong. She sat up, waiting for her mother's words.
"Well, I hope you're happy with all your daydreaming, because all your dreams are about to come true," her mother snapped without preliminaries. Sarah blinked in response.
"Say what?"

Without responding her mother turned to the round attic window and shut it closed with a slam that made the white curtains flutter in the draft. Her body language screamed of frustration, her shoulders cornered with tenseness.
"Mother, tell me what's going on!" Sarah acted very meek and treaded lightly around her mother's powerful temper, having learned the lesson well and often enough.

"This!" a letter was thrown onto Sarah's beanbag next to her lap. Sarah picked it up and unfolded it to admire the writing. The letters and the language was old-fashioned like a Shakespearian play, the handwriting ornate - lines turned, thickening and thinning at even intervals all straight across the page. She could make out a few basic words like the names of her and her mother and the Spanish word 'fiesta'. Excitement rose in her chest, yet she tried her outermost not to look too expectant.

"What does it say?" she asked in a small voice, handing the letter back to her mother. Her mother didn't take it, instead she returned to the stairs, glancing over her shoulder as she left.
"Just read it, will you!"
"But I..."

"Stop asking questions and get on with it! Clean your room, too!" Julianne's voice faded as her feet rattled down the stairs and Sarah looked around at her spotless room. She shook her head and reached behind her, towards the book shelf and brought out a small book in which she could look up all the old fashioned wordings and phrases in the letter. It took her a long time, the lion's share of an hour, but eventually she sounded out some of the words - and realized that her mother and she had been invited to a party at something called Whitehall Palace. The letterhead showed a large, Scottish-looking castle with four mighty towers with toppy roofs and a coat of arms with a dragon and two crossed swords. The invitation was signed by someone named King Angarian and the party was due three Fridays from now.

Sarah so wondered who this mystery King was, and why he had invited her and her mother to his castle. To an event called the Hallow Ewe Fiesta. She couldn't really grasp where this castle was and what kind of party they were to attend. What would she wear? Sarah owned no partywear at all, the best things she had was a sequin tank top and a pair of shiny, black jeans. Nothing to attend a party at the castle of a King, if Sarah's rudimentary knowledge of protocol was anything to go by. Most of all, she wondered why her mother was complying grudgingly, let alone at all.

It had now turned pitch dark outside, since the evening came earlier and earlier as the autumn rolled by, and she lit her floor lamp to be able to read a bit better. Still it wouldn't dispel the shadows in the corners and with them her discomfort. For even as Sarah felt excitement, she also felt tenseness. In her mind the very idea of going away somewhere, even if it was just for a night, felt overly exciting. But that exhilaration mingled with an unexpected fear of the unknown – of meeting people she had never encountered before. People clearly of higher state than anyone she had come across earlier. A King! Whatever he might be king of, one of the now defunct central European monarchies perhaps, he was probably all protocol and manners, and she knew next to nothing about that.

Standing up from her beanbag she walked over to her desk where her laptop sat. Switching it on, she was soon heading for Google and typing in the names Angarian and Whitehall. Turning up with nothing of consequence.

But if you weren't on Google, then you didn't exist, right?

So what was now this all about?