Chapter 023 - Shilling

  Mark stared at the apparition, filled with wonder, astonishment and confusion. Was this really a relative of his, her actual specter or just some projection of what she was in life, either way was this a connection? Is that what he needed?

  Dawn was by his side, she had rested her hand on his shoulder, probably attempting to offer some level of support, comfort or connection in what she was expecting to be a profoundly emotional moment. Was she expecting a repeat from the cafe?

  "This," Vincent said, his quiet voice filling the silence as he read from the glowing pages of the book, "is Magnolia Shilling." He looked from the book to the spectral image, his tone that of an archivist reciting a simple fact. "Administrator, First Class, for the Engineers' Guild. She passed peacefully in the city of Titan, one hundred and twenty years ago, at the age of one hundred and thirty-seven. She had no children."

  Mark continued to look at her, almost missing Vincent’s words, this woman apparently was related to him, but he could see no resemblance. He had to admit he wasn't close to his family, but he wasn’t estranged, he knew his brother and sister, his parents, aunts and uncles, and this Magnolia held no resemblance to any of them.

  Vincent paused, a final, definitive statement. "She was the last of her line. The last Shilling of your blood to be recorded in the annals of the Warden."

  Disappointment followed by confusion, he felt nothing with this person, apparently passing long before he was even born with no one between them. Vincent had said they were a blood relation, his last blood relation. The numbers did not match the facts, assuming the Warden’s records were accurate, there were over a hundred years missing.

  “Whats wrong?” Dawn's quiet and respectful voice broke his silent thoughts, “Is she not who you expected, apparently you belong with the big shots in Titan.” She had noticed his pause, and possibly even Vincent's creeping scowl, but she failed to hear what was said.

  Vincent was silent, but he didn't close the book. Instead, a deep frown creased his usually placid brow. He looked from the ghostly image of the stern-faced woman to Mark, and then back again. His gaze was sharp and analytical, his head tilting slightly as if trying to reconcile two pieces of conflicting data.

  "There is…" he began slowly, his voice laced with a genuine confusion that was more unsettling than his earlier serenity, "...who is she to you? I can’t see any connection."

  He was right. Mark looked at the sharp, angular features of Magnolia Shilling, her severe jawline and narrow eyes. There was nothing of his own rounder face, nothing of the features he saw in his own family photos. They could have been from different species, let alone the same family, and Vincent had noticed the problem.

  A long, heavy silence stretched out in the tomb. Vincent stared at the glowing records, his perfect, ordered world clearly thrown into disarray by this inexplicable anomaly.

  Finally, he looked up from the book, his eyes filled with a profound, professional apology. He gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head.

  "Forgive me," he said, his voice quiet but heavy with the admission of failure. "Something is obviously wrong here." He gestured from Mark to the unblinking ghost of Magnolia. "The records cannot be in error. And yet… the evidence is undeniable."

  Vincent’s placid demeanor was gone, replaced by the focused intensity of a scholar confronting an impossible paradox. He looked from Mark to the unmoving image of Magnolia, his brow deeply furrowed.

  “My authority, and the Warden’s record, is bound to the lands and citizens of the Titan Collective,” he stated, his voice tight with the strain of his confusion. “It is the nature of these things. I am only permitted to show you the records of those who have sworn allegiance to the Collective. The other nations… their dead are their own.”

  He paused, a flicker of internal conflict in his dark eyes. Mark could see the gears turning, the rigid adherence to protocol warring with the undeniable, maddening mystery standing right in front of him. The mystery won.

  “However,” Vincent continued, his voice dropping to a near whisper, a conspiratorial tone that felt utterly alien in this solemn place, “an error of this magnitude… a family known to the Warden, yet a face that does not match its bloodline… this cannot be left unconfirmed.” He fixed them both with a stare so intense it felt like a physical weight. “What I am about to do is outside of my mandate. I must have your word that what you learn here will never be repeated outside of this tomb.”

  Mark, caught up in the deepening mystery, nodded without hesitation. Beside him, he heard Dawn give her own quiet assent.

  “My Word, as A Hunter of the Silent Trees,” she murmured.

  Vincent seemed satisfied. With a quiet, dismissive wave of his hand, the ghostly image of Magnolia Shilling dissolved into motes of silver light. He turned his attention back to the open book, his expression one of grim determination. Two new circles of runes flared to life on the floor, flanking the empty space where Magnolia had stood.

  “Let us broaden the search,” he echoed.

  From the circle on the left, a new image coalesced. A man this time, his face hard and sun-weathered, with the wary, suspicious eyes of a career soldier. He wore the high-collared, functional armor not unlike he had seen from the various armed forces back home.

  “Mark Shilling,” Vincent read from the book, his voice a flat recitation of fact. “Of the Sentinel State of California. Last of his line. Died at the age of fifty-seven during the Salt-Mist border skirmishes, three hundred and twelve years ago.”

  In a hushed tone, Mark had to ask Dawn, “Salt-Mist boarders?”

  “Old history, the last time the Collective worked with them on a joint mission, disaster, almost complete loss of everyone.” Came an equally hushed reply.

  From the circle on the right, another figure appeared. This one was gaunt and desperate-looking, his clothes little more than patched rags, his face half-hidden by a tangle of matted hair.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Cid Shilling,” Vincent announced, his voice holding a note of pity. “Of the abandoned Whisperfall settlement, near the border of the Screaming Sands. Died of thirst at the age of seventy-five, five hundred and three years ago.”

  The ghosts stood there, a chilling sight, but again Mark felt nothing. Vincent looked up from the book, his expression now one of complete and utter bewilderment.

  There was still no resemblance. Not even a passing one. Mark looked nothing like the hard-bitten soldier or the desperate, starved settler. Every path they followed, every record they consulted, only served to deepen the impossibility of his existence.

  Mark continued to look, before posing a question, “Why is he, Cid, like that? Wouldn’t an image of the dead be at their best?”

  “These are not images.” replied Vincent, his voice giving the dead the respect they deserve, “They are windows if they choose to interact, we see them as they see themselves from their life, a proud soldier until the end, and a man who died alone in a forgotten village.”

  And with that single explanation, the chill Mark felt was worse than anything he could imagine, there was more afterwards, the end was not the end, and at least for Cid his life had defined who he will be known as, perhaps forever.

  The silence in the tomb was absolute, broken only by the faint, silvery hum of the runes on the lectern. Vincent stared as the ghosts blinked from existence, then towards Mark, his face a mask of profound, academic bafflement. The mystery had deepened into a direct contradiction of the fundamental laws of his world.

  "I apologize," he said finally, his placid voice strained with the effort of admitting a total failure of his system. "The records are clear. The Shilling name has ended three times in the history of this world since arriving at First Landing. All three lines are extinguished." He looked directly at Mark, his dark eyes filled with a helpless confusion. "I cannot explain the discrepancy. I cannot explain a connection in blood to those who died centuries before you were born. It is… impossible."

  He closed the book on the lectern. The moment it shut, all the glowing circles of runes on the floor and the stone itself faded to nothing, plunging the vast chamber back into a deep, silver-lit gloom. The archives were closed. The official inquiry was over.

  “Wait… The Library, I was told the name was in Titan still.” Mark jumped in quickly, a desperate plea.

  With a sad smile, Vincent shook his head slowly, “The Library, Mistress Knowledge will have names. Those can be carried outside of the bloodline in many ways. I’m truly sorry.”

  The word was a final, definitive slam of a door he hadn’t even realized was open. Impossible. It wasn’t an insult or a dismissal, just a clinical diagnosis from the highest authority in the field, an assistant to Death themselves. The faint, desperate hope he’d been harboring without truly acknowledging, the hope they gave him for a name, a face, a single thread connecting him to something in this alien world, wasn’t just lost. It had been proven, with magical, irrefutable certainty, to have never existed at all.

  The silver light of the tomb seemed to dim, the profound silence pressing in on him. He felt Dawn’s hand on his shoulder, a small, warm weight in the crushing emptiness. He registered the gesture, cataloged it as an attempt at comfort, but the feeling itself never reached him. It was data from a distant point. He was a project manager staring at a final, failed Gantt chart where every critical path led to a dead end. There were no more contingencies. The project was over, perhaps it had never started. He didn’t exist… He never existed here…

  He turned, his movements stiff and economical. The next logical step was to exit the facility, it could offer him no more than it already had. He began walking toward the great stone archway, his mind running on the quiet hum of automatic necessity. One foot in front of the other. Breathe. Choose the destination… Where?... Why?...

  Dawn’s quiet voice cut through the fog, not directed at him, but at the robed figure they were leaving behind. “Wait,” she said, her tone a mixture of frustration and disbelief. Mark paused, practicality dictating he should wait for his escort. “That can’t be it. People don’t just fall out of the sky, Vincent. He’s standing right here.”

  He could hear the sharp edge in her voice, the hunter’s refusal to accept a trail that simply vanished into thin air. “With the greatest of respect. Are you telling us the Warden’s records are flawed? That there’s more you’re not seeing?”

  Mark heard the soft, gliding footsteps of the Warden’s Assistant approaching from behind. He didn’t turn.

  “The records of the Warden are absolute, Huntress.” Vincent replied, his voice regaining a fraction of its placid authority, though it was now colored by a deep, academic frustration. “They are a perfect and complete history of every soul that has been laid to rest within the lands of the Titan Collective, and those of the other nations I was permitted to view.” He paused, and Mark could feel the man’s analytical gaze on his back. “There is no flaw in the data. The anomily… is in the subject.”

  He heard the words. They were a label, a categorization: Anomaly, Subject. It was no different from being called 'Displaced' or 'Stranger'. Just another box for a problem that had no apparent solution.

  “My deepest apologies,” Vincent said, his voice strained. The apology wasn’t for Mark, but for the failure of his own perfect, ordered system. “I have served the Warden for more than thirty years. The word of the Oracle is a fundamental law. The records of the Warden are a physical manifestation of that law.”

  He gestured to the empty space where the book of souls had been. “Mistress Knowledge has acknowledged your existence. The Warden's records prove it is impossible. I have never, in all my years, witnessed a reality where two absolute truths are in direct, irreconcilable conflict.”

  “So what does that mean?” Dawn’s voice was sharp, cutting through the philosophical crisis. “He’s a ghost? A lie?”

  “Dawn, please stop.” It was just a whisper, a whisper they apparently didn't hear.

  The question, the argument on his existence, a past or present, he couldn’t risk another chance at hope, not yet, not here. It had taken everything to put himself back together in the cafe, to accept on some level there was more, only to have it stolen away definitively.

  Vincent turned his gaze back to Mark, but he was seeing something else now. Not a person, but an equation that didn't balance.

  “Perhaps,” he murmured, more to himself than to them, “we are all asking the wrong questions.” He looked at Dawn. “You are correct, Huntress. People do not simply fall from the sky.”

  Then, his dark, analytical eyes fixed on Mark, and he posed a theory so contrary to everything Mark had been told, so fundamentally reality-bending, that it barely registered.

  “We assume you exist, as you stand physically before us,” Vincent said slowly, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “But what if you are simply out of your time?”

  A terrifying thought, first an alien world, now time travel. Science fiction likes to make things tidy, even with that mote of interest, Mark knew in his heart it wasn't so simple.

  “What if you are not a visitor, Mark Shilling?” Vincent’s voice was quiet, but it seemed to echo in the vast, empty space. “What if you are a native of The Ark… one who, by some unknown magic or forgotten cataclysm, fell out of time?”

  He let the theory settle, a new and terrible weight in the profound silence.

  “Before the founding of the Collective. Before the Sentinel State. Perhaps even before the exodus from First Landing. Could you be one of the first perhaps? A pioneer from the gateway, lost to us?”

  Mark stared into the gloom, the logic of it a cold, sharp blade twisting in his gut. A thousand years of history he didn’t belong to. A dead world suggested that might not be his. He wasn’t just a stranger in a strange land. Now they propose he was a man out of time, a project so far beyond its original scope that it had ceased to have any meaning at all.

  A new box for someone to fill. ‘Historical error.’