Chapter 12

Avant-garde

"Beneath my feet is the soil that spreads independently of the Doctrine; it is the same here as it is beyond the Allowed. Why, then, are we prevented from traversing it?"

Mind of the Heretic, Vol. X

Noah looked at himself in the mirror, his expression faintly pensive. He had finally been given a different set of clothing, though he couldn’t exactly claim to be pleased with it. A long-running robe, loose enough to make him seem skinnier than a stick, dyed in ashen-gray with the surplus of golden lines forming swirly patterns across the surface. Top to bottom, it looked remarkably strange, unlike anything he’d ever worn before. The image was completed once he pulled over the hood and draped it over his head, concealing half his face with the backward-pointing hat of sorts.

“… I have to wear this?” he glanced at Olivia who stood by his side, clad in far more respectable, if simpler, fashion.

“Yes,” she nodded. “As you’ll be my ‘Dacent’ from now on, you have to be wearing traditional clothes. If you don’t like them, you can stay in the room permanently, though.”

“… you make it sound like a bad alternative.”

“You look rather fashionable,” Olivia said, smiling somewhat cheekily. “I bet a lot of the Ladies will greet you.”

“… aye,” Noah nodded. “And ask me to perform hymns and odes for them.”

“Ha ha…” Olivia burst out into a short bout of laughter, shaking her head. The more she’d gotten to know the strange Outlander, the more she realized he was more than what meets the eye.

“Ah, so it be,” Noah shrugged; he was never one to get hung up for too long on fashion. But it’s truly ugly—no, no, doesn’t matter. Better this than the stuffy room. “I’m just glad to be leaving the stuffy room at last.”

“I can imagine,” Olivia said, calming down, somewhat ashamed of her outburst. She’d come to realize that she let her guard down around him too often and too quickly. In the end, she was still a Princess. “Follow me, then.”

“Oh? Her Highness herself will be giving me a tour?” Noah asked, pulling back the hood. Right after, however, Olivia pulled it back over, much to his dismay. “Really?”

“Fabricate a sense of mystique around yourself,” Olivia said, though her smirk betrayed her intentions. “I hear it does wonders for the womankind.”

“… aah, just lead the way…” Noah sighed, relenting.

The two stepped out of the stuffy room at last, out into a narrow, damp corridor. He could hardly see along the curve of the path, lit only faintly by a few candles and torches. Olivia led the charge up front while he followed behind, keeping his arms behind his back, in a true, scholarly fashion.

Following the corridor's end, they climbed up a short-lived staircase before winding up inside a much wider and better-lit hallway that flattened on the crossroad, curving into a circle on both his sides. She led him toward the left, quickly stepping out of the curving hallway carpeted in red, its walls decorated by paintings of various kinds, by taking an arched exit that led into an open hall of sorts.

Noah found himself faintly stunned; the ceiling was remarkably high, well over a hundred feet, the roof domed and fashioned out of ribbed vaults. Pillars extended in the patterns of two, holding up the upper floors, the gateway to which could be found in the central stairway, the width of which was approximately thirty feet. The floor beneath was tiled in clear cyan, the walls fashioned out of marble-like stone, decorated with either hand-carved mosaics, or paintings once again.

Above the stairway was a massive, stained-glass window, radial in shape, cleaved like the petals of a flower, through which the star’s radiant colors pierced, bending and morphing as they fell upon the surface gently. It was the scene the likes of which many historians imagined when describing the medieval castles and palaces – grand, grand, and grand some more. And this was only her individual house rather than a truly important place.

“Impressed?” she asked, noticing he’d stopped.

“Hm,” he nodded honestly. “It’s rather… remarkable.”

"After each Holy War," she explained. "The Royal Houses are razed in lieu of granting enough space for the winner's future children. I'll find it hard to depart from this place if I'm being honest."

“…” Noah remained silent as she resumed walking following a brief pause and a pensive sigh. He walked behind her, matching her pace, as they made their way over to the mansion’s entrance – a set of iron gates that led out into the open world, situated on an elevated platform, a set of stairs connecting it to the ground down below.

The cityscape spread in front of Noah’s eyes as he stepped out into the light; what stunned him far more than the interior behind him was the city’s architecture itself – it was eerily avant-garde in make, with shapes bound together seemingly illogically, creating products that appeared to defy the laws of gravity. While the towering spires still extended here and there, breaching toward the sky, most of the buildings were like squares and rectangles stacked together in strange ways, occasionally bending in and out, producing visually breathtaking buildings.

He couldn’t discern the materials they used, and couldn’t even begin to grasp the methods of construction as he was hardly familiar with any of it – but he could still stand in silence for a moment and appreciate the sight. Silver, gray, yellowish, coral… those were the main colors as far as he could see, mostly morphing into a sand-dye uniformly, with a few standouts, such as an eerily crimson-red, screw-shaped spire extending in the distance, as well as the massive tower, tall but slim, inwardly arching at the top, one of the opposing ends winding up higher, a rotating sphere of light imposed between the two points. It was somewhat reminiscent of the alien-imagined architecture back on Earth, thin, lean, and tall, though clearly not made out of glass.

“Welcome to Lumina’s heart and soul,” Olivia said, glancing at him. “Elucido, the capital city.”

“… it looks… remarkably different than from the outside.” Noah frowned all of a sudden. However tall the walls are, there was no way he wouldn’t have noticed the strange architecture from the outside.

“It ought to be,” Olivia chuckled. “The entire city is submerged inside the Illusion of Light, set up by the current Lightbearer herself. Unlike most, she had been gifted with the direct Augmentation of Light – bending it to her will, creating distortions and illusions as she wishes. From the outside, the city looks no different than most others spread throughout the Kingdom as to give the illusion of stalled progress.”

“… ah, is that so.” Noah remarked dismissively, yet was spitting flames inwardly. His first task, it seemed, would have to be understanding what the hell Light even was. Those kids in the forests sure haven’t been doing anything that can be connected to light – they were shooting fire. Yet, now a figure popped out that did do things with light – nothing really magical about it, as it can be viewed as the penultimate form of refraction or even gravitational lensing to a certain point. Naturally, it was magic, as she’d done without thousands of mirrors and prisms stacked around to reflect light at just the right angle.

The Light was what worried him the most, as it was the sole variable he could not account for. Power, wealth, influence, status… those things were universal, applicable effectively everywhere, even to another world. So long as the species is hierarchical in social nature, especially if cognitive, those concepts will reign supreme. Light, however, was an outliner; how could he account for what is essentially magic? No less without knowing how it even works, or why it works.

The problem was that science was not his field of expertise. The only reason he knows anything about the properties of light is that creating illusions with it came in handy several times during the assassinations he’d carried out. Even if there was a way to rationalize the Light so that it agrees with the laws of physics, he was not the guy who can rationalize it.

“… you can really do it?” she asked all of a sudden.

“Hm?”

“Make it all mine.”

“Yes,” he nodded confidently. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“… you’ve done it before?” she asked something that was bothering her, looking at him expectedly.

“Quite a few times,” Noah replied with a smile. “With far less and in far harder situations. Creating worlds as I wish them… was my life,” he added, looking up toward the sky, in a random direction, helplessly hoping his eyes were pointed toward the distant Earth. “It’s the only thing I knew since I was perhaps ten or eleven.”

“… that’s… awfully young.” Olivia said, noting that at ten, she was still playing with dolls, innocently running among the Palace’s halls.

“… hardly,” Noah said, looking sideways, meeting her gaze. “I’ve known men and women who became soldiers in an army by the time they were six. They were pointed at an ‘enemy’, and told their parents would be freed from prisons if they won. Or they would be given food, or wealth, or power. Or, mostly, just… toys.”

“W-what… what kind of a world did you live in?!” Olivia asked, her expression turning ghastly pale.

“… the one full of wasted potential,” Noah chuckled bitterly. “But, enough about that; what I’m more concerned is your world. Give me the rundown of the most important buildings in the city, their function, their backers, their purpose, the most important communities…” while Noah continued on listing the things he’d like to know, Olivia stood stunned in silence, her eyes glued to the tall figure by her side. He was well over a head and a half taller than her, towering, yet appeared incredibly small for just a moment as he reminisced.

She was certain he downplayed his life more than she could even imagine. What exactly did he live through, she pondered inwardly, her fingers inadvertently clutching into fists. For the first time, she stopped seeing him as an Outlander – a strange, abstract figure, one larger than life – and looked beyond the veneer, seeing just another person. Different, yes, unique in his own way in which he observed things, but a person just like her nonetheless. He may be larger than life in his own, small ways… but he was a part of it just as much as everyone else. He was human.