hellonspectacles | Entries tagged with game: darrow

Though one might not initially expect it, Palamedes Sextus is fairly good with children, despite having no particular experience looking after them. Having grown up in a place that had no strict barrier between childhood and adulthood, he tends to treat children as short adults who haven’t had as much time to learn things yet. That can be a particular boon for the sort of child inclined to ask many, many questions, but even less inquisitive ones appreciate his instinct to take them as seriously as he would someone much older.

But babies? Humans who can’t communicate their needs and lack even the most basic reasoning skills? They might as well be aliens.

So when he shows up unannounced at Darlington’s door and immediately hears the sounds of a crying infant coming from inside, he hesitates and wonders if maybe he should come back another time, or even email Darlington his recent findings.

In the end, he knocks anyway. If need be, surely Darlington can let the baby sleep for an hour or so, or something like that. Can’t he?

Early in their time in Darrow, Pal and Gideon had gotten drinks on the regular, an easy warmth growing between them that the Warden hadn’t seen coming. Lately, though, thanks to one thing or another (trauma, universe-altering necromantic theorems, and strangest of all, actual romantic relationships), they hadn’t gotten around to it. So when Gideon texts Pal a little beer stein emoji, followed by a strong of question marks, he can’t bring himself to beg off, even if his plan for the evening had involved tea and some very important necromancer math. He texts back, suggesting the name of a bar, and a few hours later he’s out in the chilly winter air, heading towards it.

And yes, he’s still doing necromancer math in his head as he approaches the bar’s entrance, but when has that not been the case?

Palamedes keeps up a careful, steady pace as he walks across the city from the boardwalk to his apartment building. It takes every ounce of his not-insignificant self-control for him to do so, every instinct telling him to run until he is out of breath, or to stop where he is in the middle of the road and put pen to paper to make sense of what Gideon has told him.

Gideon didn’t die. The revelation is so great that Palamedes hasn’t even begun to consider what strange Darrow mechanism had caused the memories to enter her mind. What she had told him, as they shivered over their chipped mugs of tea, had been more strange, more wild, more world-changing than solving Darrow’s mysteries ever could be.

And there had been other things, too—stranger and more wild, that hinted at thousand-year conspiracies and a fundamental rottenness at the heart of all he has ever known.

Palamedes doesn’t even notice if Cam is home when he flies into the apartment and makes a beeline for his room. Technically, the Master Warden is incapable of forgetting an idea once it has taken root; in practice, like all good scholars, he believes in writing everything down.

He closes the door and leans against it with his eyes tightly shut, only to see familiar words emblazoned across his eyelids. He lied to us.

When Pal had asked Gideon if she knew what these revelations meant, really meant, she had said she did, but Palamedes doesn’t think that’s quite true. It isn’t her fault; Pal hasn’t expounded much on those last few minutes of his life, telling himself it is because he doesn’t have enough evidence to support his theories, but knowing, deep down, that his avoidance has a lot more to do with his own fears.

Still, they all understand pieces of it: Cam knows nearly as well as he does how they had picked at the lyctorhood theorem, trying to make it less awful in its conclusions, trying to make it right; Harrow, in her wild effort to keep some piece of Gideon whole, had, as usual, found a solution by awful instinct; Gideon, poor Gideon, now knows more intimately than all of them the sort of indifference their God is capable of.

Now, Palamedes Sextus has to put it all together and present his awful, terrifying, wonderful conclusion.

He sits down at the desk in the corner of the room and begins to write.

He doesn’t stop until morning.

After hours spent peering over blazers and scrutinizing the websites of wine bars in Darrow, after standing in front of the mirror ruffling his hair this way and that, after allowing Cam to first fuss over him, and then to grow tired of his fussing and telling him to get on with it already, Palamedes Sextus finally steps out of his apartment and walks the few blocks to a little cafe on the edge of Petros Park. Regardless of what anyone might tell him, he can’t contain his nerves, though they are overlaid with excitement that makes him walk more quickly towards his destination. It’s only a simple meal with Marianne, he tells himself, and they’ve shared plenty of meals before.

And yet it is more than that. He’s never done something like this before. He has never even thought much about doing something like this before. For Pal, whose heart might be even bigger than his intellect, and who has a bad habit of feeling everything a little more deeply than he should, it is something more.

He pauses about half a block from the restaurant, seeing a figure waiting outside who might very well be Marianne. Pal pauses and takes a breath, running his hand nervously through his hair one more time. And then he approaches her with a wave.

( SOTP Ahoy! )

It’s not that Palamedes means to ignore the messages from Marianne. The day following Harrow’s arrival, his head feels fit to split open, and when he glances at his phone periodically to make sure that Gideon hasn’t sent him a frantic messages, he notes the usual texts from Marianne with a smile, and vows, quite sensibly, to write her back when he can see straight. But he ends up spending most of the next day with the Ninth, arguing with Harrow over this theory and that, only realizing when it has gotten quite late that he has again forgotten.

And then Camilla appears in Darrow, an event that had seemed so astronomically unlikely that he had tried with every fiber of his being not to hope for it, and he is swept up in the miracle of it. The pair talk into the night until their throats are hoarse, they spend days poring over all the evidence Pal has collected about Darrow, sometimes with Harrow and Gideon, sometimes on their own. His promise to return Marianne’s missives becomes more and more distant.

It’s Thursday, and Palamedes is alone while Cam goes for a run—still half-terrified to let her out of his sight, he’d offered to go with her, and she had just looked at him—when his phone buzzes. It’s only a reminder that he has books due at the library, but it makes him realize, to his horror, that he had never replied to Marianne. Without quite knowing why, his stomach twists at the thought that she might be angry at him.

He opens their text chain and writes,

Marianne,

I hope you will accept my most sincere apology. I fear that, in my unconscionable silence, I have revealed something that I have attempted to keep from you: necromantic powers alone are not enough to keep me from being a complete jackass from time to time. My week has been unexpectedly eventful—please understand that this is an explanation, not an excuse.

In answer to your earlier messages: I like the first sunglasses best, I wasn’t free for coffee on Friday (explanation forthcoming), and Orlando was really quite remarkable.

Are you free for lunch this weekend? I would like to apologize in person.

Palamedes Sextus, Master Warden of Dunces, etc.

Palamedes has been in Darrow for two weeks, and the days have begun to blend together. Some days, he stays up so late that it’s nearly early, other times he rises before the sun. Most days he works on theorems that have begun to wallpaper his apartment, or sips tea in Gideon’s kitchen, or surrounds himself with a citadel of books in some corner of the public library. Darrow has yet to give up its secrets, but Palamedes is still determined, and he often pontificates at Gideon about his latest theories. Sometimes he talks to the kitchen table instead, since it’s less likely to talk back.

“Warden, you need to get out more,” says the voice in his head—the one he thinks of as Camilla’s—as he paces his apartment restlessly. She’s right, of course. Camilla usually is. On impulse, he picks up his phone and texts one of the few people he actually knows in this strange city.

Mr. Darlington,

Do you like tea? I would be very interested in meeting up to learn more about these portal magicians of yours.

I promise, I’m slightly less of a raving lunatic these days, though my furniture may believe otherwise.

I look forward to your response,

Palamedes Sextus.

Palamedes has always thought of himself as a solitary person. The Sixth are, as a rule. If one isn’t born with the ability to enjoy long stretches of time with reading and writing as one’s main form of entertainment, one grows into it quickly enough. Palamedes Sextus has spent hours pouring over a single phrase and days by himself in the deep recesses of the Library. The quiet is perfectly normal.

What has never occurred to him, not until now, is that while he has often been solitary, he has never been alone. Camilla has officially been his cavalier for almost eight years, but they’d been living out of each others’ pockets for longer than that; she is his right arm, his sounding board, his other half.

And alone in his apartment, larger even than the quarters allowed to him as Warden, he has never been so distant from her.

He has avoided leaving for most of that time—the loneliness inside makes him feel hollowed out, but the hustle and bustle of Darrow overwhelms his senses and leaves him dazed. In the forty-eight hours since appearing here, he has barely eaten. He has begun talking to the furniture. He needs to get out. Eventually, he finds himself on the long stretch of Darrow shoreline, where the sky is frightfully open, but the people few and far between, and the sea tantalizingly mysterious.

As he approaches the water, he toes off his shoes and socks and leaves them in the sand. He sinks onto his haunches at the edge of the water, his grey scholars robes pooling around him in the wet sand, and lets his fingers trail in the foamy edge of the water as a wave comes up to greet him.

"Temperature: Ten degrees celsius. Salinity: 35 parts per thousand. At least fifty distinct species of microscopic organisms,” he murmurs. It doesn’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know, but its a comforting sort of exercise, for all its simplicity.