Paimon
The circle shattered...AGAIN!!
Paimon stood in the wreckage of his fifth attempt -- copper shards of light settling through the flagstone like snow -- and the grin splitting his face was entirely inappropriate for a man surrounded by the debris of a catastrophic magical failure.
"Extraordinary," he breathed.
The score was long gone. Still face-down on the cold stone where he'd swept it days ago, four hundred pages, their annotated margins staring at the floor in a way he chose to interpret as humility.
Seventeen fresh sheets since, every one of them a circle that should have worked!! The fifth had been his most elegant construction yet -- concentric rings of probability-space, each keyed to a different temporal anchor going back to the first act of creation, the whole structure designed to trace any being's origin the way a river traced itself back to rain.
Four seconds, then it had found something in the data it wasn't built to hold and shattered inward with the structural conviction of a measuring cup meeting the ocean.
He crouched over the largest fragment, turning it. The light inside was still moving -- the calculation still running, still trying, the spell's intelligence doing exactly what he'd designed it to do against something his design hadn't apparently calculated. The dedication of it was honestly moving, he quietly pocketed the fragment.
He started writing again.
The sixth circle would need a different architecture. The temporal anchors were the problem -- they assumed an existence that had a beginning, a before-which-the-subject-was-not.
Remove the anchors entirely, go purely structural. Map the negative space around the origin rather than the origin itself.
He stopped. Wrote four lines and crossed them out.
The second attempt had been spatial, that had been the one that levitated the desk.
He sat on the flagstone among the light-debris and looked at the ceiling -- copper hair vivid in the lamplight, eyes cycling amber-to-green-to-amber at the speed of a mind running three problems simultaneously and making advances on not a single problem.
The third problem was the one on the page, and the page was not yielding, his right hand had moved ahead of his eyes to the next sheet and was already sketching the outer ring of attempt six.
The being in the garden had no origin point.
He had confirmed this five times. Each confirmation more spectacular than the last -- the first circle had returned null, the magical equivalent of a shrug. The second had run for eleven minutes, mapped the entire known timeline of creation in both directions, produced a figure, and then the figure had been wrong by a margin so large the circle had caught fire from the sheer embarrassment of it.
The fourth had found something, which was new, which was extraordinary: the calculation had brushed the edge of something that predated the word predation, sent back one data point before the whole structure came apart.
One number, written in a register he had never used in all his existence because the register described states prior to the framework everything else was measured within.
He looked at the number on his page.
His eyes went fully amber.
"...You were there," he said.
To the number, to the ceiling, to a garden across a sea and a continent, forty-three metres below a desert.
"You were there before there was a there to be in."
He stood.
The sixth circle needed more room than the workroom had. Also the eighth and ninth circles, which he was already planning, which would require a space where the floor's opinions about what happened to it were less consequential.
The flagstone had been opinionated enough already, he swept the seventeen pages into his bag after the pen.
He left the score though -- it could find its own way back to the stand eventually, it was stubborn enough.
He looked at the number one more time.
"Right," he said, to no one.
With the complete conviction of a man whose decision had been made three circles ago and whose conscious mind was only now receiving the memo. "Right, I'm going."
. . .
Lucifer
The garden was interesting from London.
He'd been looking in for twelve minutes -- a passive thing, the way certain frequencies bled through barriers if you knew the right angle.
Not looking at, exactly. More the way radio moved through walls without asking the walls. The scotch was the same glass as three days ago. He'd developed a comfortable arrangement with it.
The sourceless light, the six trees in their circle.
The Wall at the northern end holding its silence like a man who'd been told a secret and was genuinely pleased with himself about it.
The figure in the grass, sitting with the dark-haired one -- the note-taker, the one whose hand never seemed to stop moving even now, pen across the page with the specific velocity of a person for whom the alternative to writing was overflow.
The old woman with the scrolls, settled against the documentation table with the lamp she'd brought from Accra and sixty years of being right stored in the way she held her shoulders.
Restful, In a way he hadn't been in a very long time. The garden didn't ask anything. It simply held what it held.
Then the figure in the grass looked up.
Directly at him, the forty-five degrees, turned toward London with the specific quality of something that had classified a frequency and was now addressing its source without requiring the source to announce itself first.
Lucifer went still.
He'd been very quiet about this, He was always very quiet about this kind of peeping.
The figure across four hours of flight time and forty-three metres of stone held the frequency for a moment -- long enough to confirm the identification, long enough for the pause between them to carry whatever it needed to carry.
Not a challenge. More like... attention acknowledged.
Then: a nod. The considered, deliberate downward motion... The one that meant acknowledgment without ceremony.
Lucifer laughed.
Out loud. Short and genuine -- the specific bark of it, the same one that arrived unbidden when the name was spoken.
He raised the glass, the instinct arrived before the theatrics could: a salute, sincerely meant, across the improbable distance.
Something that had clocked him from a Negev sub-chamber and responded with the equanimity of a man handed a business card from across a very large room.
The figure looked at the glass, then at the angle it was held.
At Lucifer's face.
The forty-five degrees deepened. The working-out quality arrived -- processing the gesture, the raised glass, the social register of the whole arrangement.
Encountering the human custom of the toast for the first time and trying to map it against whatever it already had for the concept of acknowledgment.
Sincere and completely at a loss. The expression was so thoroughly unperformed that something in his chest did something uncomplicated, which was the most unusual thing that had happened to him since the name.
He watched understanding fail to arrive in real time.
"Little girl," he said quietly, to the window, to the nobody in the sitting room. "You have your work cut out."
He brought the glass to his lips. Set it down precisely, the reflex so old it had stopped being a choice.
Outside, the city conducted its usual grey parliament -- the bus, the pigeons, the woman walking the small dog that was currently winning a formal grievance against a lamppost.
London's perpetual, magnificent indifference to anything happening at depth.
The garden's frequency stayed open in his peripheral awareness. Warm. Unhurried.
He left it there, a small indulgence. He could afford one methinks at this point after aeons.
. . .
Vothanael was staring at the ceiling.
Just that -- sitting in the grass, the forty-five degrees tilted upward, directed at forty-three metres of Negev stone with the specific quality of attention he normally reserved for things that warranted it.
Which was everything, the ceiling had no business warranting it, in Yosef's professional estimation.
He crossed the garden.
"What are you looking at..."
Flat and direct. Not quite a question.
The voice he used for structural findings -- the report voice, the one that expected a response and would file whatever arrived.
Vothanael looked at him, then back up again.
He followed the gaze, Stone...
Forty-three metres of compressed Negev above it, the surface team somewhere up there making their peace with the heat and the barren desert. He opened his mouth --
[Careful, mortal...]
It arrived in the space between his thoughts and his next word, taking up residence without apology.
Amused, Languid.
The tone of something with an extraordinarily long history of being entertained by small things, the amusement refined into something that was almost, almost affectionate.
[Some distances exist for reasons older than reasons. Things that are very far apart...]
A pause. The smile in it was audible.
[...tend to stay that way.]
Yosef swallowed audibly as the amused presence let out a tinkling laugh before fading away.
His spine let out an involuntary shudder as he quietly sat down beside Vothanael....
To be continued...
(Author's Notes: Here we are Folks with 2 big wigs blatantly present with a small trollish gift by lucifer for our dear Yosef)