Chapter Text
Sometimes, he wonders how he ends up in these situations. If the great triumphs and tragedies of his life are just a string of dominos pushed by a snap decision, coincidence, or the machinations of civilisations long gone. He traces them back in long chains, imagining what would have happened if one of those links broke. It’s fruitless rumination—which, he supposes, is something he’s quite good at.
So in the split second before he opens his mouth, he traces back the chain. How did he get here?
It probably began with the end. The day Bronev succeeded in unlocking the Azran legacy, the day all truths were revealed, the day when all three of him died on the stone floor. It had been a snap decision when he came to, not quite as dead as he had hoped, to crawl into the shadows. To disappear. After all, Bronev had been arrested, Aurora was gone, his brother was… well. He’d fulfilled the goal that had kept the fire burning in his chest for thirty years. It was time, surely, for him to vanish into this empty, Targent-less world, and find a new fire to tide him over.
Which he’d been keen to find as soon as possible, given the way Raymond was fretting over him. It had been another coincidence this time, as while Raymond helped him replace the dressings on the burns the Azran hadn’t been kind enough to heal, the suggestion of visiting his in-laws came up. It was safe now, Raymond reasoned, which was true but he felt vomit rise up in his throat and on instinct he pointed to the newspaper, which happened to be open on the story of a Baron’s rather unusual inheritance settlement, and wouldn’t a Baron’s inheritance help them give the Bostonius some much needed repairs?
He felt Raymond wasn’t entirely convinced, which only increased his enthusiasm, so when they landed outside this curious little village with such a haphazardly built tower over its otherwise idyllic streets, he decided he absolutely had to know what was at the top of it and hopped into the barely repaired plane. And when the top of the tower had a patch of grass just large enough to land on, well, it seems obvious from there.
And that is how Jean Descole, or Desmond Sycamore, or maybe even Hershel Bronev now that name was safe to say aloud, ended up standing outside the door of this house at the top of St Mystere’s dilapidated tower, facing a young girl who despite her demure appearance was trembling with outrage as she raised a gloved hand and said in a wobbly voice, “What are you doing on my lawn?”
…What is he doing here?
All this ruminating leads him to stand there with his mouth open saying nothing at all.
This only outrages the girl further, and she draws up her spindly shoulders with both hands clasped to her chest and says in a slightly less wobbly voice, “You can’t just fly up here. It’s not allowed.”
“Not allowed?” he echoes, a tiny smirk playing on his lips. “Am I to believe there was a hidden clause in the Baron’s will that stated the use of planes was forbidden in the search for the Golden Apple?”
A little too late he remembers that his misadventures are no longer life or death, and there’s no longer much justification for being an ass. The girl however, is unaware of his instant regret. Outrage turns to plain, simple rage as blood rises up in her cheeks. “It’s cheating and you know it!”
He takes a moment to size her up, to really examine her. She can’t be much older than fifteen, and though she’s dressed impeccably for company, her pale face along with clothes that don’t seem to show signs of wear give the sense of a shell, protecting something inside. It’s too perfect—all a mask. Only the boiling anger in her eyes comes from somewhere real.
Well, a girl in a mask will receive the man in a mask in return. “I’m not above a little cheating,” he sneers in true Descole fashion, and cranes his neck to see past her into the house she emerged from. He doesn’t see anything striking. “Curious that a house should be at the top of a tower like this, isn’t it? Almost as if something might be hidden here.”
She clenches both her fists until her knuckles turn white. “You won’t find it if you cheat.”
“Oh?” He smirks again. “I think you’ll find I’m rather good at finding things that don’t want to be found, so if you’ll excuse me, I have a house to search.”
“That’s my house!” He pauses as her voice rises in volume for the first time, almost to a shriek. “You can’t just—” She reins herself in, pursing both lips together in a tight line, and he leans towards her with a mocking smile.
“It sounds like there’s something in there that you don’t want me to find.”
“Hah!” It’s like a laugh, but the contempt in it reminds him of himself. She takes a deep breath and composes herself, relaxing her fists and letting a slow smile spread over her face. “You’ll never find it,” she repeats, clasping her hands back over her chest. “Because I won’t tell you where it is.”
He examines her face again, and determines that she is deadly serious. “Is that your role in this?” he asks in exasperation. “To decide if whoever seeks the treasure deserves it?” It reminds him of another treasure hunt, and a girl who didn’t get what she deserved in the slightest.
The girl in front of him now is older than Aurora, likely human, and seems more cognisant of her role in this treasure hunt. But he watches her push her shoulders back to seem bigger and the arch of her neck as she holds her head up straight, and he can’t help but see Aurora doing the same as she prepared to take on a destiny she never asked for.
“I know where the Golden Apple is,” the girl says defiantly, with all the confidence of an Azran emissary. “And if I don’t want you to find it, then you won’t. So either solve the puzzles properly, or leave.”
Half of him laments coming here; the other half feels almost at home playing a ridiculous game for a treasure he doesn’t even want. “Alright, little girl,” he sneers. “I’ll solve your silly puzzles in no time. Watch me.”
“I will!” she replies, and slams her front door in his face.
How rude.
Left alone in this strange rooftop garden, he wanders over to the railing to look at the sprawling collection of streets, houses and gardens beautifully arranged like an estate of Versailles. It seems like the kind of place he doesn’t belong in, and he’s supposed to search it for puzzles. Well, that, or return to the Bostonius empty-handed and hope that Raymond doesn’t ask what’s next.
After only a moment to think, he gets back in his plane and flies down to the village.
᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃
The village itself is rather pretty, he has to admit. The houses are a charming mismatch of warm-coloured stucco, delicately bordered in white, and well-maintained sandstone brick. Uneven cobblestone paves the roads, but there isn’t a car in sight, likely thanks to that moat around the edges. It’s peaceful. A far cry from London.
He finds himself musing that it’s the kind of place he’d have liked to settle down in, but never for long, because his musing is always interrupted by one of the bloody residents. “You’re not from around here, are you?” says a woman in a dirty apron, who he stoically ignores. The paper said St Mystere was an isolated town that didn’t like strangers, but that clearly wasn’t true, was it? “Don’t think I’ve seen you around here before,” says another man, and he deliberately turns a corner to avoid him. Honestly, they are absolutely incessant. “Why not try your hand at this puzzle I thought up?”
The last one gives him pause. After all, the girl in the tower said something about puzzles, didn’t she? It occurs to him that she might have accomplices in town, and perhaps they’ll be more forthcoming. So he solves the puzzle—child’s play, really—given to him by a short man outside the village hall and considers the best way to get him to crack.
“So, how long—”
“Impressive!” the man interrupts. “I thought I’d set out quite the puzzle, but you made short work of it.”
Des… mond, he supposes, blinks back in surprise. “Thank you, but—”
“As a reward, let me tell you a little fact about St Mystere,” the man continues, utterly ignoring him. “The Reinholds own all the land this village is built upon. I hear they own all the buildings too.”
“Right, the family of the Baron who died,” says Desmond, keen to get back on track. “Can you tell me a little more about them?”
The man acknowledges him this time, but only by throwing his head back and barking out a laugh. “Oh, I didn’t know the man at all! You’d be better off asking at the manor. Not that they let riffraff like us in, ha ha!”
Unamused, Desmond moves on as the man continues to laugh at his own joke. This square seems like a central route through the village—he needs to find some seedier, quieter spots.
He only has to take a few steps before he’s at the foot of a large clocktower, with a towering set of wooden doors. This seems promising. But no sooner has he laid a hand on the ornate metal handle, than a broad-shouldered man materialises out of seemingly nowhere to block his path. “Oh, nuh-uh,” he says, folding his arms and leaning over Desmond as if he can block out the sun. “If you wanna pass through here, you need to have solved at least 12 puzzles first.”
Desmond swallows, takes a moment to think, and lies. “I have solved twelve puzzles.”
The broad-shouldered man narrows his eyes. “Nuh-uh you haven’t,” he replies as if it’s a plain simple fact, and resumes his position leaning against the door.
Is everyone in this village out to vex him personally? He steps back into the square and glares at the man, who seems unperturbed. What is everyone’s obsession with puzzles? Before he can stop it, the thought crosses his mind: his brother would love it here. He pushes that down. The fact is that his brother is not here. He is, and he’s sick of puzzles.
But he acknowledges that attitude is unlikely to gain him access at this point in time, so he turns his attention elsewhere and heads out of the opposite side of the square, down a smaller street that seems to lead to the drawbridge he saw from the sky. What kind of village has a moat and drawbridge these days anyway? What are they keeping out, or keeping in?
As he stomps towards the gate, another voice carries over to him. “Oh, you’re not from around here, are you.”
He hesitates. Then he looks to the source of the voice. It’s a short man skulking in the corner, with his hat pulled over his eyes and a grin that reminds him of the Cheshire cat from the books his mother read to him as a child. In several years of investigating mysterious locations, interrogating every shopkeeper or tourist or loitering teen, Descole likes to think he’s developed a good sense of who knows what. And this man… Descole suspects that he knows everything.
“I’m passing through,” he replies rather deliberately. “Are you local?”
“Not nearly as local as most,” the man says with a shrug. Cryptic. As if he senses the hunger for information dripping off his long cloak, the man widens his grin into a half-moon. “Want a tip?”
Descole makes a ‘hrrmph!’ noise that resembles a haughty laugh. “Well, that depends on what you can tell me.”
If it’s possible, the man’s grin gets wider, and he points a finger. “Give that ol’ barrel a tap.”
He turns around to see an unassuming wooden barrel sitting by the closest building. The man’s grin doesn’t flicker for a second. This… might be a trick to make him look like a fool, but he already looks enough like a fool traipsing about this ridiculous place. Why not commit to it? He leans over and knocks firmly on the top.
There’s a soft ‘clink!’ as something hits the floor. He looks behind the barrel, and something did—a tiny gleaming coin. He picks it up and rounds on the grinning man, who licks his lips like a cat thoroughly pleased with themself. “What is this?”
“That’s a hint coin,” replies the man with a smirk. “For when you’re stuck on a real stinker of a puzzle.”
Descole scoffs. “I assure you, I need no assistance solving any puzzles—”
“You say that now,” replies the man in a smug tone. “Just wait.”
“For what?” snaps Descole.
“Oh,” he says gravely. “I couldn’t tell you. Now that’d be cheating.”
If you listen very carefully, it’s possible to hear the crack as Descole loses the last shard of his patience. “What does that mean?” he demands.
The man leans back against the wall, plainly disinterested in elaborating. “You’ll see.”
He likes this village less and less by the second.
Turning away from the strange man at the corner, he starts walking towards the gate again, and turns the hint coin over in his palm. Its shape and design are entirely unfamiliar, but the concept of using an object to simplify puzzles is something he’s run into before, in his research on the Azran—
He stops. Isn’t he meant to be done with the Azran? Isn’t the point of this little excursion to help them start again, build a new life without sparing a thought for the way in which the Azran could hurt them?
He stands in the middle of the street and it hits him all at once. What is he doing here?
The answer is something he’s known for a long time. He cannot build a new life without picking up the pieces of his old one, and the Azran have already rendered him too broken to do it. Over twenty years since she died and he has never visited his mother’s grave. His wife’s family were always kind to him, but he was never able to face them once she was gone. Just hearing his brother’s name hurts like an open wound.
He has always had a threat to fall back on—it’s too dangerous, I’ll do it when Targent is gone—but now Targent is gone, he’s forced to conclude that something else has him by the throat. A great dam that has held back the tides of Hershel Bronev for the last thirty years, and he’s not sure what will happen when it breaks.
And it will break. No matter how he delays, he knows he’s on borrowed time.
He turns around, and starts taking slow steps in the direction he came from. If he’s on borrowed time, then why should he spend it letting these villagers irritate him into oblivion? There has to be something more worthwhile left in this empty, Targent-less world than getting angry with strangers…
…is what he thinks, but when the same old woman asks him “You’re not from around here, are you?” he turns around to look at her, somewhere between perplexed and annoyed.
“Didn’t you ask me that already?”
The woman sniffs, fixing him with a similar expression. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
He’s about to dispute that statement, but a man twice his size crashes right into him, knocking the air right out of his mouth. “Oi!” yells the man, his face turning beet-purple in a split-second. “Watch where you’re going!”
This time anger doesn’t even occur to him. He stands motionless, barely even hearing the man, as realisation slams into him with all the force of an explosion that sends him flying back a month or so into what feels like a distant memory.
There was a night on the Bostonius, towards the end of their journey, where Desmond was in the cabin. Perhaps that’s misleading—in the last month or so on the Bostonius he spent almost every night in the cabin working on whatever was available. He couldn’t sleep, and even when he did the thoughts followed him into his dreams. It’s been too easy. Targent should have caught up to us. What are they planning?
Most of those nights he spent alone, but on that night, Aurora appeared, haunted by nightmares of her own, and he gave in to a moment of weakness by letting the emissary of the civilisation that ruined his life fall asleep in his lap. That was when he noticed it—Aurora made a noise when she breathed. Not something you’d notice if she sat next to you normally, but with her body curled up against his, he heard it in his bones. A mechanical clicking sound, like the ticking of a clock.
Perhaps he knew of her true nature even then. But as he’s so gifted at doing, he ignored the inconvenient truth until its bitter, bitter end.
“Oh, I have just had it this time!” yells the man, storming off, and he blinks, as the mist of memory clears. Right. Why did he remember that now?
Because, when he crashed into that man, for only a moment he heard an eerily similar noise.
He looks around at the well-constructed picture of a quaint village, at the residents who repeat themselves and throw out puzzles like broken records, and changes his mind yet again. He is not going anywhere. Not until he finds out why this village is full of golems.