Iris

Dawn

Written July 31, 2020

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A dawn had finally come. Honey-pale sunlight filtered in through the surrounding mists—the morning was young yet, and the rising sun would soon burn the remaining vapor tendrils away. The stars overhead faded away, leaving the constellations mapped across her scales the only reminder for her that the night had been just that—only night.

It was a relief to Iris to see the sky grow pale and the night recede in the familiar cyclical order, and even more reassuring to see the beginning edge of a sun peeking out over that unfamiliar mountain range, way out in the distance. She sat upon her haunches atop the old cathedral steps, one set of claws holding onto the stone archway beside her as if to make sure it was still there while her eyes turned elsewhere.

Green forests rustled sleepily all around the ruined buildings that peeked out of the foliage, looking like the morning’s first birds caught in the moment of preparing to take flight and greet the day. A faint breeze wafted in, causing her nose to twitch—she could smell a faint trace of salt on the breeze. An oceanside breeze then.

Picturesque. That was the word for it Iris decided, if all was as it appeared to be. So far, the light was not too bright, and the dark was not too dark—no foreign heights or depths of being, only ordinary mystery.

That was enough. Enough for her to stay, at least for a while, and she turned to head back inside, settling her wings against her back as she did so with a sigh, leaving smudges of charcoal upon the side of the archway where her claws had rested. She made a mental note to clean the marks off later.

The early morning light drifted in alongside her like an old friend, passing through to the antechamber and nave, a dance partner trading mist for dust to twirl gently through the air in faded colors, flickering and gleaming across her scales and mane as she passed by the windows. Some of the frames retained the original glasswork between the mullions still, while others had needed repairs. There were more still that were missing entirely, holes in the architecture that were patched over carefully with oil cloth tarps and lashes to keep out the elements—she’d not had the time nor resources for more detailed repairs between travels.

There in the apse stood the old altar, built of polished wood, brass, and smoothed stone, worn with time and use, but well taken care of. Flora and fauna danced along the borders, some familiar to her eyes, others alien with indecipherable shapes or too many limbs. Atop of it all, set into the face of the altar was a series of clocks, astrolabs, and in the center of it all, a grand orrery, all still and unmoving...despite the faint hum that seemed to reverberate through the air surrounding them.

The shadows the grand orrery cast stretched long and thin from its spherical branches across the central aisle, the floor serving as a canvas made of an immense monolithic block of dull white stone worn smooth, the shadow lines criss crossing in an orderly chaos that intersected with the silhouetted framework of the stained glass window behind the altar. It was beautiful, and unquestionably methodical and intentional in its design, drawing the eye across it all like words on a page. What was far less methodical were the charcoal lines dark and messy that lay underneath the cast shadows, half faded from careless smears and attempted scrubbing to remove problematic sections. Iris was careful to step around the entire area as she made her way to the sunlit side of the altar, resting both sets of claws upon the edge as she regarded it all.

She couldn’t remember how to read what the instruments were saying.

She wasn’t sure if she had ever truly known what they said...or if she was simply tired, and her brain wanted nothing more to do with it for a good long while.

That was the thing about using the orrery: to move it, meant to move something else. Even with all the time she had spent familiarizing herself in its functions—how long had it been? Months? A year?—there was much about it that still remained enshrouded in mystery.

It had been a mystery she’d wanted to solve, once upon a time, she was sure.

But why?

She’d had a good reason, surely.

Or had that reason been shifted, with the use of the orrery? That felt right. Yes. She could recall the shape of that idea and memory, and she still knew herself well enough to know that she would’ve tried to find out what that reason had been. One did not play with forces beyond one’s comprehension for negligible reasons, not as a mortal with all too mortal failings, and she definitely was mortal—the altar could not change that.

She racked her brains, trying to dredge up the reason that she was...mostly certain that she knew, and judging by the open journal laid upon the corner, filled to the margins with notes, sketches, speculations and scribbled ramblings...she had tried for a very long time, and had only managed to delve further down the rabbit hole. Further into the space between stars. Further into the state of being lost.

It’d been for someone, once upon a time, she thought with a sudden inkling of insight. Flipping through the journal’s pages—her journal—she found...missing pages. Not ripped or torn, simply...filled with pieces of text written by the quills of strangers or printed in a typeset font she couldn’t place. The information they contained was haphazard and random, and looking between them all, she could not fathom a connection between them all. Certainly it escaped her what the rise time of bread in higher altitudes had to do with crystal formations in non-euclidean space-time-pocket dimensions, or the number of finch species recognized as breeds by an elite bird lovers’ club. While it would make for entertaining reading, Iris was certain these were not interests relevant to her in particular. Not pieces of information she would’ve placed in her journal...and not in so chaotic a manner.

She was tired.

Tired of looking, tired of forgetting, tired of...of all of this madness.

She’d been trying to...find someone? Someone who had gone before her into this intangible maze, splintering outwards like the veins of a dragonfly’s wing into corridors upon corridors of possibilities, forever repeating down, down, down and up, up, up, both inwards and outwards in a fractaline monster, endlessly scaling in all directions into endless complexity.

She turned to the last page, and that...was gone. Not replaced, simply gone. It’d...it’d been there two worlds ago, hadn’t it? Had it been lost in one of the shifts?

That upset her more than she fully grasped. She knew it had been there, was sure of it because this she could remember the idea of, if not the contents of it. There’d been a letter there, she couldn’t remember the words, but she’d remembered it’d been important. It’d been for her. It’d been...from someone, most likely the person she’d been chasing, she felt that was a reasonable thing to assume. Flipping back through the pages, her motions became slightly more frantic as she searched the margins full of notes—surely she would’ve written down things about them, the other person’s name, once she discovered how the orrery affected memories…?

Some lines remained that seemed to be talking about someone, her someone, alongside notes about herself, but many had been replaced with words she didn’t understand the context, didn’t remember writing, and she wondered if they had been changed by the orrery, or if she herself had penned them in a moment of loneliness and madness, in the light world or elsewhere. The words “dark blood” and “the bells are singing” came up over and over the most, and a prickle of unease made her mane stand up along her spine just enough that her shoulders shifted to settle it back down. She couldn’t remember the context, but she recognized that they signified something. Out of reflex and a touch of superstition, she glanced up over her shoulder, in the direction of where the bell tower would be, beyond the confines of the main hall. She had heard those bells ring on occasion, when some of the bell tower windows had broken in one world-shift and a wild wind had wrought havoc inside the cathedral’s corridors and towers.

It had to be just her imagination that made her think she could hear the bells still resonating now, just barely at the edge of hearing.

She’d known the risk, had watched as her journal’s entries slowly disappeared or were replaced piece by piece as she kept looking, just as she felt the holes that came and went in her own memory now, patched up and filled in here and there the same way the ruins of this old cathedral were—whole enough to use, whole enough to operate in, still functional...but not what it had once been. Not where it once had been. Nor when.

But neither was she.

Was this even some version of home as she remembered it? Would she remember the ones she’d left behind before now? There had been others, she was sure, but their faces and their names, the little details of day-to-day life, the discussions and time spent together, were as hollow and separated as the panels of the empty arched windows that held no more glass within them. She knew there had been glass there once upon a time, and if they matched the grandeur and detail of some of the others in the church, they could have had scenes and fine details painted upon them. But they were gone, and so were many of her memories.

In their place…? She didn’t have nothing, no. She had...memories that weren’t hers. She could tell by the heft of them, the weight and set of them, like holding up a tangible object and exploring it with the pads of her talons, that they’d been made by someone else’s thoughts and eyes.

Mixed and matched from disparate sources, just like the contents of her journal. The outside cover was the same, but much of the contents inside were compromised now into another form of orderly chaos.

Such was the effect of the grand orrery. This, she knew all too well now.

She’d stopped trying to look for whoever she’d been looking for, about two worlds ago.

Stopped looking because that was...the first time she could remember not remembering anything about the person she was looking for.

How was she to know who she was searching for, if she couldn’t remember anything about them? She was skeptical at best about the idea of “knowing” them when she saw them. Deja vu would mean nothing if she could not understand what it entailed.

She wasn’t sure how much of her own original memories of everything else still remained. Enough to work with...but less than it had been. Different. Changed.

That made her throw her journal across the nave in anger, to realize she’d come so far and risked so much...for nothing. Only for more loss.

They had been important, she knew that, could deduce that by how much she had been willing to gamble on trying to find them, but with each turn of the orrery the pile of chips she could bet on each world-shift being the right one shrank, the right card she needed not coming up as the odds looked bleaker and bleaker. Or, rather, were made more apparent in their bleakness than she had reckoned, she admitted to herself now.

She had been nearly out of cards to play, and she couldn’t even see what endgoal she was in the game anymore for.

That had been the moment she had decided to cut her losses.

She could remember that, at least. Retrieving her notebook gently, she swept off the dust and smoothed out the wrinkled pages, regretting her moment of anger. Regretting her decision to jump into the unknown...for a moment. Her anger she did regret expressing it so, but feeling the anger, trying, those she didn’t.

She was only sorry that it hadn’t panned out.

Life was like that, sometimes. Sometimes, you simply didn’t get what you wanted.

A carefully folded, loose page had slipped out of the front, and she picked it up, turning it over to inspect it.

A letter...in a delicate, spidery font with a familiar, erratic slant—not hers. Parts of it were smudged out, or replaced, but she could make out most of it, and her name at the beginning. Was this the letter she remembered having?

Iris,

I know you still have questions but please for your own sake, forget about me. I made this choice and I’ll face the consequences. There’s nothing left for me here anyway, you know that. I know you would have come with me if I’d asked...but that’s why I didn’t ask.

This world has so much more to offer you. Go live your life and be happy. I’ve taken up enough of your time as it is. Don’t worry about me, just worry about yourself, go find people to get into normal fun and trouble with, not trouble that involves warping the fabric of time and space and the gods know what else.

Thank you, for everything, for all your help on my research, for the times we’ve had together, for being there when…

The words trailed off, the sentence unfinished, and Iris felt a pang of guilt inside at not being able to remember what had happened. Someone...someone else had been lost, hadn’t they. She wasn’t sure how, though. Perhaps not in the way she and the someone she had been chasing were. She couldn’t remember. She read on.

...but don’t come after me. There’s so much out here, there doesn’t need to be two lost souls wandering alone out in the uncharted. I’ve taken the ethereal charts we found, and Mir. We’ll be alright, I know you’ll miss the little guy, and I was planning on leaving him with you, but...I just couldn’t see my way to giving them up. Not when they’re all I have left to remember Rodel by.

More was missing, replaced with what looked like song lyrics about unicorns in some absurdly overly-cursive script. A last legible fragment in the sender’s penmanship followed.

Take care, and live well.

Sincerely,

...she couldn’t read the smudge where the sender’s name should have been.

She’d read this before, she felt. More than once. Prior to attempting to use the orrery for the first time, disregarding the request, because...because?

Why?

She’d done it because they...there was something she could almost remember, but the memory didn’t come. The mentioned names felt familiar, but only in the way of having seen it once or twice before a long time ago. Not familiar in the way they should’ve been she knew with a certainty rooted in her bones, names she’d used often and had known well.

Whatever her original reason had been...it was gone then. At that point she had chosen to listen to the unknown sender’s last wish, at long last.

She had then went about looking for a way home...wherever home was, a single point in whatever the orrery defined as a map of space and time and...whatever else it measured.

What would happen if she couldn’t find home again, before all her memories were all a jumble of mismatched pieces, like a hoard of nicknacks gathered from abroad by someone else? She wouldn’t know the stories of each one, the rhyme or reason, it would simply...be. And who would she be, then?

She had needed to take another gamble then, to try to get home, referring to the drawings and notes of the original settings of the grand orrery when she’d first seen it. Before...before someone had changed the settings. That someone.

They had studied it together, she realized.

How had she forgotten that?

...how much else had she forgotten, that she had not yet realized?

She had needed to go home. There was another round to play, and then it would be over—except.

Except...that the last world-shift and ruined her sketch of the initial layout of the altar’s mechanisms. There was a different drawing there now, blurred and smudged beyond recognition other than it had been of...another dragon? An imperial, it looked like. Words were written beneath the image, but she couldn’t make them out with how the marks had been smeared.

So she had needed to improvise. Improvise off of what she thought looked right, looked familiar, even as uncertainty gnawed at her gut. Iris had hesitated as she put in the last coordinates, wondering if she was right, questioning herself in this as she rarely did. Here, though, there were no notes she could double check to ensure accuracy. Memories were questionable at best now. Everything was uncertain, in a way she couldn’t process. That had unnerved her almost as much as the effects of the orrery. Steeling herself, she had stepped out of the line of the light streaming in from the window down upon the altar, and watched as the cogs, wheels, and parts slowly began to move of their own accord, spinning and circling for a long few moments as the air hummed—and she had watched through the windows as the sky shifted outside.

She remembered.

The sun had rolled across the sky, growing brighter and brighter and as the windows filled with light bright enough to make Iris wince and look away, shielding her eyes, the fear that it might be something more flitting across her awareness. The fear that it might be something dangerous, like a mana bolt straight to the face. But it was light.

It was all light.

Through her eyelids, she could see nothing but light. Not even the capillaries of blood that should’ve tinted it all in familiar comforting darkness. Opening her eyes she squinted, and wondered if she’d gone blind—there had been only light. Light, and nothing else. No shades or gradients to discern and see by, only the blinding of too much.

The grand orrery had not worked there, despite her efforts. Without both shadows to define the contours and paths of its maps, without the right angle and amount of light to fill the canvas of the spaces and dimensions that it charted...it had been little more than a curio set out for display.

In the endless light she’d stumbled about blind and without rest, like a ghost exhumed from its grave, trying to find her way through touch alone. She had tried to coax a response from the altar with coordinates she could remember, but to no avail, and careful adjustments gave way to frustrated guesses and random input out of desperation. Nothing had worked.

She’d tapped her way around the altar then, tired and exhausted with how there was no respite from all this light, not even behind her own eyelids, and her claws had bumped into her journal. Her journal, and the little pencil box strapped to its back, full of charcoal and graphite pencils. She’d held it as she’d sat upon the stone dais, claw tips clicking lightly and slowly as she’d sat and breathed, tired and in need of rest that too much light denied. An idea had come to her then, feeling the shape of her pencil box in her claws, and she’d rifled through its contents until she’d found a large enough lump of charcoal for her purposes and had carefully closed the box—no need to lose the other pieces and go scrabbling about blind for them across the floor.

She sketched a pattern by feel, knowing the lines would be horrendously out of place but hoping and praying it would work. When her claw tips scraped along the mosaic tiles along the edge of the center isle earlier than she’d expected, Iris had cursed. She was way off from where she thought she was, relative to the altar.

The lack of sight was making her appreciate just how much she relied on being able to coordinate herself visually, and she worried for a fleeting moment that she wouldn’t be able to correct her mistakes.

She pushed on though, trying to squash in something approximating the curves she knew the orrery cast upon the floor along the edge of the isle, listening for the telltale hum of the apparatus coming to life.

Nothing happened as she stood still, holding her breath.

Cursing to herself, she fumbled her way to her supply cache and managed to wrangle both water and a bundle of rags. She tried to clean off the area where she thought the smooshed lines were, and ended up cleaning the whole area, hoping she got enough of the charcoal markings off.

She had to sit and consider, and rest in as much as one could here, for a moment, nibbling on a few morsels she’d also grabbed along the way—they turned out to be some of the sun-dried fruit she’d packed, dried cherries and apple slices, from back before she’d made the first jump. It made her homesick in a way she couldn’t define.

She could make temporary landmarks to orientate herself. The idea came upon her as she had sat, remembering home and wondering how far away it was, recalling how the trees had looked as they turned from summer to autumn—remembering the feel of bark and stone beneath the pads of her talons.

With that idea in mind, she stuffed the rest of her snack into her jaws and hurried about gathering items—she wasn’t entirely sure what all of them were by touch alone—that she could use. Stones and other small, dense objects she used to measure and mark the intersections of her makeshift grid, along with rope and thead to mark the guidelines for both the rulers and the intended curves.

Then, she carefully, gingerly redrew the pattern as best she could from memory along her set guides, wishing all the while for references, hoping it would work.

Her ears were ringing—or. Was that the altar humming? She pricked her ears, straining as she paused in her drawing. Yes! The altar was working! ...but the drawing wasn’t finished—

Blinding light swerved abruptly into nightfall, and Iris’s eyes were grateful for the respite. For a moment she could see outside the cathedral’s windows to where cirrus cloud wisps floated over thin, watery blue skies before those too receded swiftly into a solid, looming shade of void-dark black eclipsing everything. The stars had been strange, distant and cold in that dark world, none venturing close enough to do more than suggest the lay of the land she had found herself moored upon. She had struggled to get the altar to work there as well, in a world where the dark ate the light. Neither her breath nor magic had lasted for more than a moment, expanding and then contracting like bubbles of air forced up and away as if through water, breaking up and dissolving from the pressure of the unseen. Flint and steel born sparks snapped and popped as shadows swarmed to engulf them, and the beginnings of flame had been immediately snuffed out when she’d tried to light them.

It was a world where light had no place, just as in the world before that, darkness hadn’t had a place.

The dark was easier to work with in ways though. Far less taxing on the eyes, if more unsettling in its own way. She’d had to work with only brief gouts of light from her breath, barely enough time for her eyes to begin adjusting to sigh only to leave her in a stifling darkness again, but for the feeble pinprick glow of the starry constellations of her hide. The glow ordinarily extended a little farther, but it had barely extended beyond her own person—certainly not enough to see by properly, beyond a suggestion of where the stone flooring was perhaps darker with her scribbled map lines. Her previous charcoal marks had not been of use there, nor had further adjustments to the orrery produced any results in that lightless world.

The grand orrery needed more time in the light than she could maintain with her breath, or with fire frustratingly despite having plenty of dry tinder and breathable air—the flames simply did not stay.

She had given up in frustration after a time, hungry and tired, and had slept. The darkness at least had allowed that, as a blessed relief. Waking up had left her groggy and cold, missing...missing her lair and her…?

She couldn’t remember who she missed, there in the dark, tired still from so long a marathon of wakefulness and effort. Delicate dried fish fillets wrapped in baked seaweed sheets served as her breakfast—the last of the wraps she’d made in the world before the bright one, where fishing had been plentiful on grey, pebbly beaches.

But how much light was enough? She’d assumed that the instruments needed enough light to cast a shadow upon the floor, but...did it have to connect the two? Was the orrery able to function separated from the floor map, if there was both a map upon the floor and light upon the altar’s mechanisms?

She cleared away the grid markings, leaving them all piled off to one side of the room as she considered another attempt at cleaning off the charcoal marks.

The exhaustion lingered bone-deep though, even after resting—she just wanted to go home, now. Home where things were familiar, normal. Or as normal as normal got. As wondrous as the cosmos was...she wanted her feet back on solid ground that didn’t shift beneath her claws at turn of a wheel.

Because of that, she elected to skip attempting to clean off the dark marks from the floor—what good would they do after all, in absolute darkness? She needed light, here.

Looking down at the faint pinpricks of light upon her scales, she considered a possibility. Grooming her mane absently in a self-soothing gesture, she carefully, blindly curved her tail around the far side of the altar, hovering the brightest stars just shy of touching the orrery, listening close.

She heard a sound. A hum.

Iris pulled back quickly, heart beating rapidly at the confirmation of an inkling and hope. The altar could work with the dim starlight that emanated from her scales. It was enough. She was enough.

But the floor map...her head turned, looking down at the floor where the orrery’s shadows would normally be cast.

She needed a different map cast upon the floor. Activating the altar now wouldn’t move her anywhere different, and she didn’t want to keep having to draw random lines and hoping the next world would be more hospitable than the last. That seemed like a good way to die, if the next one was missing something more crucial such as air.

And if she didn’t have a map of how to get home...where was she to go?

Her eyes lingered upon her side, mapping out the old familiar constellations that reminded her of familiar night skies. Of home. They’d resembled some of the ones her family had taught her, she could recall that much. Not quite the same, but...that gave her another idea.

Perhaps...perhaps it would be close enough to serve as a map. She didn’t know if it would work, trailing a knuckle along the veins of her wings, remembering the lines of the stained glass window that overlooked the choir space behind the altar. The one that shone down upon the stone canvas that the orrery mapped its shadows and metal-cut shafts of light upon.

Perhaps...she would be enough.

Curling herself into a full circle around the altar now, she curved her far wing close to her side, between her ribs and the floor, crouching as low as she could until she felt her wing bump the stone beneath her. Then she encircled the orrery with her tail, accidentally brushing the plume across it before drawing back just enough to avoid contact, and to keep her tail plume from getting caught once the orrery started to move.

The humming began, slower than before, but building up as it should.

She could hear the sound of the altar’s mechanisms beginning to whirl, and then—she saw the sky change.

The sky was lightening in that familiar fast rotation as the world shifted around her, and she could see.

Predawn light had filtered in, and she slumped down, just...looking. Taking it all in for a moment of relief, and awe. It felt like she had never seen the dawn before, in a way.

That was how she had ended up walking out to sit upon the steps outside, earlier.

It had looked like Sornieth. Where, exactly, she was not quite sure, but...perhaps this was home.

Or, perhaps, it was close enough.

She didn’t know. She would have to find out, eventually. Later, though.

Later, and after that...what to do with the altar.

The soft distant scrape of claws on stone had her ears pricking to swivel behind her, and she turned to look towards the entrance.

She had visitors.

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