Esh suddenly jolted, as if she'd been stung by aether. Her head slipped from Ortahn's shoulder, and she thrust her arm out, pointing into the very thick of the canton.

  "Look, Ort... It's the excavator! In that district!"

  Ortahn lazily followed her pointing gaze. Between the distant towers, the edge of a huge, fleshy mountain was moving slowly, like an arthropod in resin. Its pinkish skin glistened with morning condensation, and its hand-head was scooping handfuls of earth from a pit in the pavement and neatly piling them into a mound nearby.

  Ortahn mused for a second on Esh's priorities of attention but generally agreed—the creature was interesting.

  "A very interesting crea—" Ortahn began, but cut himself off mid-phrase. All the hairs on his body decided to stand on end.

  A pale woman in a black dress was standing on the same street as the large homunculus, watching it with interest. But the moment Ortahn noticed her, she instantly, as if pulled by an invisible thread, turned her gaze to him.

  In that same microsecond, she leaped to their roof in a blurred jump, crossing several city blocks in a straight line. No running start, no inertia, no friction. It was a monstrous violation of the (as it just turned out, not so immutable) laws of motion. More likely an instantaneous teleportation with ideal air exchange, and her movement was just an optical illusion his brain had desperately drawn so as not to break. Otherwise, the shockwave from the compressed air, which would not have had time to get out of her way, would have easily swept them off the roof.

  Every detail of her appearance burned itself into Ortahn's mind against his will. Her face was not pale, but made of porcelain and tranquility. Her body was carved from white marble with thin joint lines in which a living darkness flowed. She was twice Ortahn's height and most resembled an animated statue of a forgotten deity that someone had dressed up for fun. Specifically, in a light black dress with wide pauldrons and a corset, a full skirt made of many thin strips, as was the fashion, with the same strips hanging from the sleeves, joining the skirt's. In one hand, she clutched a bouquet of already wilting white flowers. On her head was a long, though not record-breaking, hat, embroidered with gold symbols. The Ministeress of Supreme Joy moved to them.

  "Did you call me?" she asked in the voice of a benevolent woman in her fifties, whose life is firmly in order. Her porcelain face remained motionless, her lips did not move.

  Esh, who was still holding her finger out toward the excavator, yanked it back, jumped to her feet, and pulled Ortahn deeper onto the roof. It took the Ministeress one step to catch up with them.

  "I... I... was pointing at the excavator... Overlordess..." Esh mumbled.

  "Ah," the supreme-high-rank replied. "I see. It's my favorite form. What's yours?"

  "Ummm... The same one," for the first time in her life, Esh felt that words were slippery pebbles that refused to form a mosaic of meaning.

  "Are you sure?" the Ministeress asked, tilting her head. "You don't just want to flatter me by naming our shared favorites, do you? Your favorite color? Mine is white."

  "Yellow," Esh blurted out, lying for some reason. She liked green.

  "Well, now you have a different favorite from mine, after I expressed my suspicion of flattery," the Ministeress concluded.

  She suddenly crouched down, propping her chin on her fists. The flowers in her hand hung limply, shedding a few petals, but they immediately returned to their places. A marble knee with a distinct hinge poked out from under the rustling strips of her dress. This pose was so un-ministerial and absurd that Esh calmed down a bit.

  "Then I'll say my favorite dish first—Zazaran berry-meat pie," she ventured a small counter-attack.

  " I don't eat," the Overlordess replied simply, tapping her motionless lips. "Are you hiding? Be careful, you've chosen a hiding spot in plain sight. I noticed you right away. I just came when you called me."

  "We are just enjoying the rise of Solara, Overlordess," Esh confessed.

  "I also just fled a night-time meeting," the Ministeress ignored her words. "Endless rearrangements of endless resources... Nauseatingly boring. And what's wrong with your friend? Is he ill?"

  Ortahn, meanwhile, felt his steadiness crumbling. He froze, his breathing hitched, and the aether around him began to hum. Panic had sunk its venomous roots into all his systems, including his spiritual ones. His heart pounded in his temples, and a void was stuck in his chest. Even his anchor "Live" had turned into a crushing scream that didn't save, but only emphasized the hopelessness. The only thing keeping him grounded was Esh's tight grip.

  "Yes," Esh looked at Ortahn with concern, her fingers squeezing his palm even tighter.

  "Do you have a permanent place to sleep?" The Ministeress tilted her head again in thought. It was her only way of expressing emotion with her head.

  "Yes," the girl again failed to find a better answer.

  "Good. I have statistics, you know. Zero homeless. I am the Ministeress of Supreme Joy, by the way," the supreme-high-rank informed them and switched to a conspiratorial whisper, even covering her mouth with her hand, as if hiding her words from someone. "But I think it's a useless position, invented only to keep me occupied."

  "Overlady, may I ask you a personal question?" Esh-the-researcher emerged victorious in a brutal struggle against Esh-common-sense and Esh-self-preservation.

  The Ministeress waved her hand, and the girl, holding her breath, asked, "How old are you?"

  "Oh, I stopped keeping track of that useless nonsense long ago. How long ago was the Scission?"

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  "About seven and a half thousand years ago," Esh answered without hesitation.

  "Well, I was already a hundred years old when Mother Vermina declared the Exodus, and I correctly called it the Scission. That's how everyone wrote it down."

  "Oh... You are very..." At the last second, Esh-self-preservation pounced on Esh-the-chatterbox, tackling her and covering her mouth. But the Ministeress was waiting with interest for her to continue, and Esh, left without the support of her inner Eshes, finished awkwardly, "...prestigious."

  " You should do something about your friend, otherwise he's going to throw up." The Overlordess rose to her full, gigantic height and planted her hands on her hips. "I have not the slightest desire to watch such an unaesthetic event."

  Esh nodded with frightened readiness and led Ortahn toward the edge of the roof, trying to give the supreme-high-rank a wide berth. But he, gathering the last drops of his will, weakly pointed a finger toward the external, emergency ladder coiling down the tower wall. Esh immediately changed direction.

  "My name is Isila, by the way," the Ministeress tossed after them.

  Ortahn instantly regained control of himself and snapped his head toward her. His own terror retreated for a moment in the face of deafening shock. The woman calling herself Isila was waving at them amicably.

  "No matronymic," she added as if in passing, crumbling the remnants of Ortahn's worldview into a fine powder. "They hadn't been invented yet. Times were simpler."

  Esh, though she had also heard the name, was already dragging him to the ladder. Esh-the-guardian was now in absolute control. But Ortahn couldn't take his eyes off the lonely figure of Isila, haloed by Solara. Her last words drifted to them:

  "If you have interesting dreams, we'll meet again. I love interesting dreams."

  The usual dim hustle and bustle filled The Scar, but it had chaoticly densified around Ortahn's room. They ran into the (two-thirds) noisy trio: Krel was swinging his fists wildly, Gartan was trying to calm him down, also with his fists, and Karbo was trying to use words for a change, which in this place looked like an eccentric quirk.

  "Ortahn! Esh!" the Great Kinetic called out to them. "The exam results are coming today. Gartan found out with his foresigh, or whatever his magic is called. The 'Roses' have good results, except for Krel."

  "That's if you believe the old man!" Krel barked, trying to physically convey his indignation to Gartan.

  Gartan grunted, and it was unclear whether he was protesting "old man," the doubt cast on his gift, or the fists flying at him.

  "Does that mean classes start tomorrow?" Esh reported in the form of a question, looking at Ortahn.

  "Yes," Karbo confirmed sadly, but his face immediately brightened. "You know, we have an idea: we can also learn during Tulila's lectures. Then we'll have more time in the archive for... something else."

  "Our free time has run out," said Ortahn's tired eyes.

  "It hasn't run out, it's just been compressed," Esh's eyes corrected him with a stubborn glint.

  Gartan finally broke free from the "argument" with Krel and, taking a step back, began to create trembling, glowing letters in the air—Ortahn had spent many hours of their shared time on this with him. The letters came out barely recognizable, as if written by a child fleeing a monster. Krel read with a furrowed brow at first, and then lunged at Gartan with a roar, but Karbo intercepted him in time.

  "Stop wasting your magic on insults! You're the gray-haired baresteether! Gurtozm (a malevolent creator of negative self-fulfilling prophecies)! Write something useful, old man!" Krel returned to his indignation.

  "Just because you did worse than all of us doesn't mean you failed," the Great Kinetic tried to insert some reasonable words.

  "That's if you believe the old man!" Krel declared with a stubbornness worthy of a better cause.

  "Just wait a day, Krel," Ortahn stepped into the situation. "If Gartan is right, he's right. If not, then be glad he was wrong."

  Gartan, hearing his teacher's voice, turned his gaze on him and for some reason began to look miserable, as if a celestial eclipse had fallen over him. His eyes even glistened with tears. He walked over to Ortahn, took his hand in his own rough palm, and beat his other hand against his chest. The words "Holdn, Ortam" were tearfully scrawled in the air.

  "I'm sure I did fine," Ortahn tried to comfort him, his only desire to finally fall into bed and sink into his usual nightmares.

  Ortahn and Esh knew: tonight was their last trip to the library. The final assault before the study cycle began and everything dissipated back into the familiar corridors of life. To stay up all night, knowing that lectures and grueling practice awaited Ortahn during the day, would be the height of irrationality.

  Onyx greeted them in silence, not knowing how to react to their grim faces. They settled into their familiar corner, also without dropping a word.

  "We shouldn't have climbed onto that roof," Ortahn began to drop his words. "Too open. And closer to the orbital eyes."

  "I thought you liked it," Esh tried to joke weakly. "Solara, the wind, the company..."

  "We got too relaxed," Ortahn ignored her attempt, his voice flat and colorless. "And if anyone other than the strange Isila had been in her place, we wouldn't be talking right now. We wouldn't be doing anything at all."

  "Do you think she's the Isila?" Esh decided to try a distraction.

  "Yes. I don't think anyone else would dare to be so flippant in her position."

  "But you said that Matriarch Isila burned libraries and destroyed history. I pictured her differently: more sinister laughter, less talk about favorite colors."

  "Over thousands of years, she could have gone mad and pulled herself back together thousands of times. That means her current personality is an accident," Ortahn suggested. Then, reluctantly, because it didn't simplify things but complicated them, he offered another version. "Or... the opposite of propaganda isn't always the truth. Sometimes the truth turns out to be a third side, a little bit like all the others."

  "By the way, what magic was she using?" Esh, sensing a weakness, pressed her advantage to distract him and took out her notebook. "I can't even find a definition. There were no gestures, no words, no aetheric indication..."

  "I don't know either," Ortahn admitted. "It's some kind of pure magic. Without a hint of the beauty of female magic or the simplicity of male magic. Just absolute efficiency. A spatial shift and direct manipulation of the aether, I would guess."

  "Exactly!" Esh moved closer. Her eyes were burning with the fire of logic. "Isila is an anomaly. And all great scientific breakthroughs happen through anomalies! If something doesn't fit the formula, it means it's part of another formula we haven't found yet! We need to look at the picture as a whole and, preferably, from a different angle."

  She made a dramatic pause, letting the silence hang in the air, broken only by the rustle of parchment as Onyx rearranged it somewhere nearby, and the movement of the walls.

  "The picture as a whole?" Ortahn repeated mentally. "What even are male and female magic? Where does one branch of the tree transition into another? For the tree itself, this question is meaningless. Isila lived before the Scission. And she uses everything. Simply because she doesn't think about the division. For her, it simply doesn't exist. Why do we even believe that magic is divided?" The tectonic plates of understanding in his head slammed into their correct place with a roar. "Because it's not a natural law. It's a political act."

  "Live," sounded in his head.

  "And think," was added.

  Ortahn looked up at Esh. His breathing and heartbeat became steady. Esh stared at him and held her breath. Even Onyx stopped his pointless rustling and raised his head, his huge amber eyes fixed on Ortahn, as if he realized what his lips were about to pronounce.

  "There is no male magic. There is no female magic. There is only human magic," Ortahn said.

  Reality, which for millennia had rested on this division, could not bear the weight of this truth: the library walls exploded, causing the shelves to collapse and the library's architecture to freeze in shocked paralysis.