Rania reached out with both hands. The fruits settled into them one by one -- weightless, each one carrying a warmth that corresponded to its tree with the feel of something that somehow knew where it came from.
The amber one warm from the inside, the indigo one cool at the skin and warmer under the flesh.
The fourth one distorting the colour of her sleeve which she noticed and immediately stopped analysing cause she was getting a headache.
She looked at them in her palms.
Seven colours, Seven blossoms. The garden in her hands, now just the size she could carry with her.
She turned and started walking -- quickly, with the pace of someone containing something that would overflow if she slowed down -- toward Amara at the ember-copper tree.
"Amara?" Her voice not quite steady.
"Amara, you need to --"
"What did he give you?" Amara asked, without looking up from the notebook.
"He made them. I asked him to show me the shape of it and he -- look!!" She held out both hands. Seven colours, the blossoms perfect, the warmth of each one distinct. "Look."
Amara looked at the fruits. At Rania's face -- the expression she wore when something had arrived faster than her processing could handle, the brightness behind the eyes, a controlled panic.
Something moved through Amara's chest that had no clean name yet but was warm in a way of watching someone receive a thing they hadn't known they needed.
"Did you say thank you?" she asked again.
Rania stopped.
"...I walked away quite fast," she said.
"Rania."
"I know. I know, I know." Already turning, already crossing back.
Amara watched her go. Looking at the spot across the garden where Vothanael had returned to the grass, the forty-five degrees tilted toward the seventh tree, the corner of his mouth holding the motion -- not a smile, closer than yesterday, the thing the almost had been building toward since the dark of the sub-chamber.
She opened her notebook. Wrote four words. Closed it.
. . .
Bael
The western reach of the lower territories smelled of sulfer and brimstone.
Bael stood at the edge of the contested ground and looked at the army. Three thousand soldiers of infernal classification, ranging minor-grade through mid-tier, all pressing east toward the boundary line with the collective hivemind of things that had tested the line, found it soft, and told each other about it.
The word had travelled the way these words always travelled through the grapevine -- becoming distorted in the being told, becoming something so different than the actual situation that it had forgotten the original report and was now running on a facsimile of it.
He had opinions about that.
The petition on his desk could wait, Petition sixty-seven.
A boundary dispute -- as it happened, a different reach, same underlying philosophy. Someone always tested his patience somewhere.
The line always told them something. The something they told each other was never quite the same as what the line actually said.
He rolled up his sleeve, The three silver rings caught the light the lower territories offered -- dim, red at its source, the quality of something that had burned for an extraordinarily long time and became embers without enthusiasm.
The first ring old. The second older. The third so old it had stopped being an object and had become a standing arrangement between the metal and the air around it. An artifact that others would kill to get their hands on.
He opened his hand.
The shadows moved... The Bael domain ran through perception, through the structure of what was and was not visible, through the negative space every living thing moved through without understanding that the space had a governor.
He redirected it -- the darkness of the western reach pulling away from the army the way water found a drain, leaving a quality of exposure that wasn't light. It was considerably worse than light. The bright nakedness of being seen completely, wholly, by something that had decided to look.
Three thousand soldiers stood in it.
The front rank halted and the middle rank pressed. The front rank held its ground against the middle rank's momentum and somehow achieved success by the method of all things that had just encountered the Bael domain: it was scared in moving forward as if a beast made its lair past the border.
He smiled... He was the beast.
The edge of the domain touched the first of them.
One moment of contact -- the full content of what stood at the boundary line projected cleanly, without preamble, without negotiation.
The army's assessment of the line updated in real time in front of his eyes.
The mass retreated, Fast. The speed of retreat was as if it found a bigger predator waiting for them to blunder with open jaws.
He rolled his sleeve back down, squared the rings on his fingers -- an old reflex, a small precise adjustment, the habit of a man for whom imprecision in small things was an early indicator of inconsistencies in large ones.
His communications piece activated.
Copper hair through the projection was seen even over distance -- the specific quality of a mind running three problems simultaneously and winning by the time it made contact. The voice arrived bright, and giddy.
"Bael?!... Bael, listen!!!"
"Paimon." He flatly answered.
The voice he used for petitions and for Paimon, which had a significant overlap. "What?"
"The anomaly! The Negev garden -- the Name, the being, all of it. I've run diagnostic circles!!" The sound of pages was heard fluttering in the background.
"Five, Six. The sixth one caught something! The seventh caught more!!"
"How many circles."
"...Eleven. The point is I have a data point. A single data point -- a number in a register that technically shouldn't exist because the register describes states prior to the framework that gave numbers a meaning to exist within. And the number corresponds to --"
"Paimon. Calm down."
"I need to go to the mortal plane!!"
The lower territories offered their usual ambience -- the distant sound of something large moving through stone somewhere to the north, the air at a pressure humans didn't go looking for voluntarily for survival reasons ofcourse.
The cleared ground where the army had been. The petition on his desk, sixty leagues up, waiting with the patience of paper that had always been waiting.
He looked at where the mass had retreated. At the boundary line, intact with a full host. At the sky of the lower territories, which had never been a sky in any meaningful sense. He had long since made its peace with the fact that it'll only be a replica of the real world.
"On what grounds?" he asked.
"On the grounds that he exists prior to any framework I've ever worked within. On the grounds that every circle has confirmed the anomaly is unclassifiable!! On the grounds that I have a number --" A page turning.
"-- written in a register that predates creation, and the number is him, and I need to know what the rest of the equation looks like!!"
There was a moment of silence...
"You want to go to Eden," Bael said finally.
"I want to go to the garden where something is being taught by a woman... to conjugate verbs... Who also ended the Primordial Chaos, yes?"
He stood in the lower territories and thought about a wall inscribed with layers going back into stone without number.
About a name spoken in a register predating the Word. About a figure in the grass who had looked up from forty-three metres below a desert and through multiple planes of existence detected a simple probe. Paimon has gone crazy... Doesn't he know that the slightest mistake would have something even those fledgling Gods would run from coming after all our collective behinds?!
He thought about the boundary line. About the mass that had tested it and found it was not an easy prey.
He thought about eleven circles, each one more extraordinary than the last, each one shattering against something that predated the instruments used to measure it.
The three rings lay still on his fingers.
"I'll think about it," he answered Paimon after a long pause.
"That means no."
"It means I'll think about it."
He closed the connection before the next number arrived and turned from the cleared ground.
He began the return -- a long unhurried walk of a man who had already made the decision and was giving himself time to finish thinking about it, which was a distinction he maintained because control in small things mattered, and the gap between deciding and having decided was, in his experience, where all the most important thinking happened.
To be continued...
(Author's Notes: And here we are with the next installment of BTFW folks. If you are enjoying the story so far, please tell me how you feel about the book in reviews, comments or even by adding the book to your collections.
Bael's powers: Dominion over invisibility and visibility; that is the big bad King Bael can create a 3D simulation of real time war going around with his demonic energy.
Paimon's powers: Dominion over Knowledge and Magic; he is a researcher and a scatterbrained magical scientist of the Underworld)