Chapter 1: Fifteen, for the rest of eternity

Nes was a region to the northeast of the second largest continent on Tiaea, known mostly for abundant natural beauty and a rather antiquated local culture. Over the past one hundred and fifty-four years, Isa Greenwald had grown exhausted of both. The Greenwalds, a family name much older than her, had lived in the same house upon the hill since the region's founding - a strange and towering thing almost as tall as the Goddess Shrine in the center of the capital. People complained about it, called it heretical, but no one would ever get rid of it, just as no one would ever get rid of the Greenwalds, as much as they really wanted to.

Isa lived alone in the impressive tower-house since her father had died. Since her fifteenth birthday, she had not grown an inch taller - she'd checked. Every day for the past thirty-five thousand, seven hundred, and ninety-three days, she'd gone and stood at the same spot next to the rounded doorway, and marked the spot next to the top of her head with a pencil. She'd been carving notches with a knife, at first, but she worried about cutting right through the wall after too long. The pencil marks blended and faded into each other, like her permanent footprints stained into the old board flooring, all at the same height as they had been for over a century.

It had been exciting at first, eternal youth: the dream of so many across space and time. But once people started to forget her - quite literally, people seemed to forget she existed if she wasn't standing right in front of them - the splendor wore off. Isa just wanted to move on with her life. One hundred and fifty-four years in the same place would do that to a person.

On that night, though, the beauty of Nes was on full display with a lunar eclipse. Due to the orbit of Tiaea's moon, and the region's approximate location on the planet's surface, it was a guarantee that viewing the moon from the capital, also called Nes, would result in a perfect, total eclipse. Not only that, but that night would be a supermoon, too, meaning each curve of the lunar surface would be visible to the naked eye, resulting in a once in a lifetime experience of celestial grandeur.

This would be Isa's second time viewing it. The overlap happened about every seventy-five years or so, and Isa had notes from her last two observations to compare against that night. She'd gathered everything on one of the desks in the study, pages fluttering in the breeze coming from the open window. It was about a three foot drop to the section of roof beneath the window, and once Isa had everything gathered, she tucked her notebooks under her arm and clambered out. The tower-house had an observatory at the top, even with a telescope, but Isa had found over the years that this particular patch of roof, flat enough to sit on without fear of sliding off, was the best place to stargaze. Not only did it face away from the capital, so there was never light pollution, but the trees also thinned out so the giant firs didn't block any of the viewable sky. Isa sat here now in the cool night air, with her notebooks in her lap and a telescope in hand. The moon, of course, was plenty visible without it, but she wanted to check the positions of the surrounding stars with the sketch she'd made of the last eclipse.

Another fifty years had already gone by. To her, it still felt like yesterday when she'd shared the house with her father, but he had been dead for quite a while at this point. He'd passed at 100 - on the younger side for Thae such as them. Most of the people Isa had grown up with had passed, or were in the process of passing, but she struggled to feel more than a vague, distant melancholy over it.

Isa's closest childhood friend, a girl named Aya, met with her once, when they were both fifty. Her face was regal, as if chiseled from stone, and she wore strands of silver hair at each temple. Aya was beautiful in ways Isa never remembered her being. She barely seemed like the same person at all.

"You're still fifteen?" Aya had asked with the mild surprise of learning an acquaintance had picked up a new hobby. Isa nodded.

"It's a curse. That's how it works."

Aya hemmed and hawed over this. "That's an awfully negative mindset," she replied, with so much pity it bordered on contempt. "Haven't you just tried getting older, dear?"

This was the last time Isa spoke to her.

By the time she'd heard of Aya's death, thirteen years ago now, she realized that conversation had been more than twenty five years ago, and she could not find it within herself to be moved. She was sad, of course, in that nebulous sort of way one feels sad when a celebrity or distant relative dies, but not in any way that stuck. She felt no grief. What she seemed to grieve instead was the grief itself - why had she let herself grow so far from others that death no longer held the weight it ought to?

Isa thought about death more and more frequently the older she got. She would stand on the balcony railing, her toes dangling off the edge, and look all the way down. The height had long since stopped giving her vertigo. Never did she feel the urge to jump - as impermanent as any injury would be, it would still hurt - but she still stared down to the leaf-covered forest floor, the overgrown garden that overtaken the back of the house, and she think about the finality such a drop ought to have. Terminus. The end.

She would stand there for hours, sometimes, wondering if a strong enough wind would make her lose balance. She never found out.

Life kept moving. The town expanded farther every year. Isa stayed in place, even as the distance between her and them closed in. The more ambient noise she could hear from the town, the more alone she felt. But she did not move.

Even when facing away from it, Isa could still hear faint snippets of the sounds of the festival. The Thae of Nes seemed to have a festival for just about everything. It was a wonder nobody got bored of them with how constant they were. Eclipse festivals were usually grander than others, drawing in tourists from offworld, even. Isa herself had never been. She avoided going into town if she could help it. People who knew avoided her, gawking when they thought she couldn't see, and those who didn't treated her like a lost child, which honestly felt worse sometimes. So she made do in the tower-house, as best she could.

Before she'd hoisted herself through the window, she checked the time on the old clock above the door - nearly midnight. The moon rose bright and full on her right, the red tint of the eclipse just starting to cover it. By twelve, it would be bathed in a dim, crimson light sitting at the apex of the sky. People in town would cheer and celebrate as the eye of the Goddess looked upon their revelry.

Isa snapped her telescope shut, and jotted down the positions of the constellations on a blank page. She had one of her father's old astronomy books in her other hand, and she flipped to a page so dog-eared the corner had almost fallen off. The picture in the book was quite faded now, but still decipherable. Tiaea wasn't on an elliptical orbit like some planets. The photograph and the sky looked exactly the same. This brought a smile to her face. It was small, and quite obvious, but satisfying nonetheless. She kept her eyes on the stars, waiting for midnight.

Isa wandered back into her memories. When she was much younger, before she knew she had no future, her father would sit on this same patch of roof with her in his lap and point out the different constellations to her. He'd take her hand and use her finger to draw the shapes of mythical beasts and heroes in the sky, telling each story as she did so. All these years later, and she could remember each one as clearly as she had the night he first showed them to her. Just left of the moon, which was almost in position, was a constellation said to represent the nose and lips of the Goddess looking down from the heavens. Below, she saw the fountain - a cluster of stars that looked to be spilling from a faucet. Even though she'd seen the eclipse before, she swore the night sky shone brighter as the moon's face rose to the center of the sky.

It was a soft shade of peach, or perhaps a little more orange than that, the same sunset color as her and her father's eyes. Isa craned her neck to look at it, and she heard the distant sound of cheering from the town. It meant nothing, though, compared to the beauty of the sky. The whole world seemed to bask in its glow.

Not the whole world, she realized - but the papers in front of her. She snapped her attention downward. Rather than a trick of the light, the pages of notes seemed to actually be glowing. They were not hot to the touch, nor were they changing in any way. They simply glowed. Isa traced the edge of the paper with her index finger, muttering hushed exclamations. Before her eyes, the glow began to subside, and new words appeared on the pages.

-Miriam's labor. I expect the book is somewhere within the house, gifted to the next generation of our family. It's hidden using the same method I've used on these notes, but I think I've developed a method to locate it without the light of the eclipse.

Isa recognized her father's handwriting, and her mother's name. She flipped through the papers - each page of astronomical notes held a second, secret layer, as if they were written with the moonlight itself. When she moved them out of the light, though, the writing disappeared again. She marveled at this for a moment, then jumped up, tucking the papers under her arm and crawling back through the window. She rolled over the ledge and landed on the floor of the study with a thump.

It was small, made even smaller by the sheer amount of stuff within it. Each wall had shelves upon shelves pushed against it, and posters of all sorts tacked above them - periodic tables, star charts, anatomical diagrams and more. Being one of the rooms in the tower-house Isa used the most, it was also one of the messiest. Many of the encyclopedias and journals were just stacked on each other and left on the floor or desk where she'd been reading them last. No dust gathered, as nothing stayed put long enough for it to settle. Her father's astronomical notes were strewn about the room. A few open books lay on one desk near the door, while most of the loose pages were pushed to the side on the drafting table she used to reach the window. Isa's eyes were wide, searching in the low light.

As she suspected, more scattered pages glowed with hidden text.

Isa dropped her bundle where she stood and scrambled across the study to grab a heavy stack of blank paper from the desk by the door, the one she used to use when she was little. She crouched in the moonbeam that passed through the open window and placed one sheet over the glowing notes. They shone through the translucent sheet, dulled only a little. Isa didn't register the words as she began to copy them onto the blank page. Once the moon passed out of the range of the eclipse, the text would disappear again, and she had a better chance of copying the words in that time than she did of reading them. She started off by trying to be neat, replicating each flick of her father's handwriting, but doing that took almost fifteen seconds to get through a single line. Soon, it devolved into a messy, shorthand scrawl, and some letters she didn't even bother to finish before moving onto the next one. When her pen ran out of ink, she simply tossed it aside and grabbed a dull pencil from the floor.

For what felt like hours, though she knew it couldn't be, Isa sat hunched over the floorboards scribbling onto the paper like a woman possessed. With each page she finished, the glow of the hidden letters seemed to fade just a little more, and soon became so dim that she had to blow out the overhead lamp in order to see them. Once they could no longer show through the paper, she sat the pages side by side to copy - and then, like a candle running out its wick, the lettering faded out. She couldn't read it even if she squinted.

A stack of notes about as thick as her thumb still remained. Compared to the amount she was able to get through, it seemed gargantuan. Isa let out a defeated sigh before slumping over on the desk, resting her head in the crook of her arms. She gazed out the window.

The eclipse had come and passed, and she'd spent almost all two hours and thirty-five minutes of it looking at papers on the floor. She blinked. Her eyes felt heavy from strain. She'd be better off going to bed, but if she was just resting her eyes, it'd be fine just to lie down right there on the floor. She pushed the stack of copied notes aside and laid down, resting her head on her forearms.

Of course, she fell asleep.

Isa awoke again to the sunrise shining right in her eyes through the open window. At first she just moved her arm over her eyes, but the persistent ache in her back forced her to sit up. Falling asleep sitting down always left her feeling stiff.

After stretching herself out, she turned to the clock above the door again to check the time - just after sunrise. She felt like she'd been asleep for longer than just a few hours, though. It took her a moment to realize that she'd slept for over a day. Pages scattered by the breeze from the window were strewn about the floor, and a cadre of bugs had gathered by her hair. She shooed them away, then went about reorganizing the study.

It was easy to lose track of time when every day felt so similar, and this wasn't the first time she'd fallen asleep for so long. Sometimes it felt like every time she went to bed she'd wake up later. One day, she wondered if she would go to sleep and never bother to wake back up at all.

Isa stacked the papers together without bothering to put them in order, tapping the edges against the drafting table to straighten them out. She flipped through with her thumb. It was impressive she'd managed to get as many copies as she did, counting around thirty-one pages in total, with a final page of half a line she'd managed to make out before the hidden writing had disappeared again. The last few pages were barely-legible chicken scratch she had to squint to see the letters in. It'd take more time to decipher than it had to copy down. She huffed, and tucked the pages under her arm.

She left the study. She wandered down the short hall that led to the spiraling staircase that wrapped around the circumference of the tower-house, which was about ten stories in total. Each floor only had one or two rooms, though, and whoever had built it had more of a mind for aesthetics than accessibility. Still, Isa marched down the three floors to the kitchen, where she dropped her stack of papers on the table and then poured herself a glass of water. She sat down, sorted them all out, and then began to read.

The next page was just a drawing, copied in her uneven hand. A circle, with another circle inside, and within that, intricate patterns weaving between each other. There were ink smudges all over the inner circle, but not so much that the detail within became illegible. Some of it looked like text, but Isa had never seen such a script before, for Thae languages, offworld ones, or otherwise. She squinted.

As she stared, head tilted to follow the curve of her writing, she realized she could understand it. Not because she'd seen it before or studied the language, but because it just… made sense. She knew it as certainly as she knew the lines on her palm or the curls on her head. If what I want to find is hidden here, then please, reveal it to me.

There was more writing underneath. I've found chalk works best as a conduit. Graphite or charcoal can work in a pinch, but chalk is so easy to come by that you should never find yourself without it. The circles are rather inconvenient, however, and I suspect there are other methods for channeling magic. H wrote as if he expected you to know these already. I assume he elaborates elsewhere. Would it have killed him to keep his notes in order?

Really, she felt like she ought to have been more surprised to see the word magic written down like this - skeptical, even. But Isa was not the sort to doubt her own eyes, and the fact that these notes even existed felt like more than enough proof of such a thing. She traced the magic circle with her index finger, feeling the dip of the page under the ink's weight, and muttered the mysterious words under her breath.

It felt at once new and unfamiliar. The way her mouth wrapped around the vowels, the position of her tongue and teeth for each word, all of it was distinctly not her mother tongue, yet at the same time speaking it felt as natural as the now-antiquated dialect of her childhood. Nothing happened when the words left her lips, but at the same time, there was a sort of buzz to it, like a burst of energy released off-target.

For the purposes of finding something, however, the apparent incantation seemed rather vague. She flipped back to the first page to scan over again. Briefly she wondered what the cut-off text was supposed to say, before she spotted mention of a book. It seemed like the obvious thing to look for - and if she were trying to hide a book, then plain sight seemed like the way to go.

Isa couldn't be bothered to find a tape measure or a drawing compass among all her things. A few decades ago, she'd picked up sewing, and knew she probably had one lying around, but she bolted right to the library the moment she'd found the chalk in the basement.

Taking up the entire third floor, the library had walls that curved with the circumference of the tower-house, which made it impractical for its intended purpose. Each year that passed, Isa felt more scorn towards whichever of her ancestors had built this place. To account for the shape of the room, all of the shelves were placed in rows in the middle of the room. They almost reached up to the ceiling. It took Isa several hours and more strength than she had to move them out of the way - by the time she was finished, she was panting like she'd run a marathon, and the sun was already setting again. She cursed under her breath.

The center of the room, at least, was easy to locate by a particular knot in the hardwood floor, and she had to wonder if it was on purpose. She popped a squat and set her materials out in front of her.

She redrew the circle fifteen times, taking extra when writing the words in the center. Just like the other night, she copied them from the page on pure instinct, unsure of how or why her hand just knew how to write this script. The more she thought about it, the less sense it made. By the time she finished the stick of chalk she'd used was nothing more than a stub, and she tossed it away. It left residue all over her hands, and her thumbprints dusted the floor as she touched the outer rim of the circle.

"If what I want to find is hidden here, then please, reveal it to me."

She knew these were her own words, coming from her own mouth, but they sounded so impossibly different from anything she'd ever heard. It did not help that her voice felt unfamiliar - she had not spoken aloud at full volume like that in recent memory, and there were cracks at the edge of each word. But as they left her lips, the circle started to glow.

It was like someone had set off a flashbang. Isa stumbled where she stood, vision consumed by a sudden burst of light. She fell backwards and covered her eyes. Then, she peeked out from behind her hands, spots dancing in the corners of her eyes.

Something was still glowing - brighter than the overhead light, but not as strong as the burst that'd just happened. The effect left her vision dimmed and blurry, the afterimage falling down her field of view like snow. She rubbed her eyes. This didn't really help things, but she proceeded towards the shelf the new light emanated from.

As she drew closer, she could make out the spine of a book that hadn't been there before. It sat between two volumes of text that had once been side by side, as if someone had collapsed a little hole in space just to hide it. It still seemed to glow, but she didn't need to squint to look at it anymore.

Isa reached out her hand, stopping just before she grabbed it. She felt no heat.

She wrapped her fingers around the spine and pulled it from the shelf. Like that, the two books bordering it were right against each other again. The space where the old book had been may as well have never existed, but Isa held the proof right in her hands.

The tome was old, looking almost ancient. Its brown leather cover was cracked around the corners, the gold leaf detailing all but rubbed away. A little clasp held on by threadbare stitches held it shut, which Isa then undid. She slouched against the shelf, sitting cross-legged and bent over the book. It seemed as fragile as micah when she opened the cover to examine the first of many yellowed pages.

Property of H.G. Not one of her ancestors had ever been named something starting with an H - she'd studied the old family tree more than enough times to know that. And yet as she hovered a hand over the page, she knew with a deep and unwavering certainty that this book had belonged to one of them, and had now been passed into her care. Was this the H her father's notes had mentioned? It felt so old, so fragile, like breathing on it would cause the whole thing to crumble to dust.

Isa scanned through the pages. Each one was written in the same unusual script she had seen on her father's notes. Like before, it seemed alien at first, but the meaning became clear almost instantly. She just had to look properly at the words, instead of just the page.

It is an unruly and forceful thing, they wrote, with a certain mind of its own and a purpose similar to that of the physical sciences. It spreads itself unevenly throughout the universe, which greatly diminishes possible potential for use. If you can use magic for something in one spot, it is unlikely you could use it the exact same way in another. Isa furrowed her brow and turned the page.

The most important thing to understand about magic is that once something is sufficiently explainable, it is no longer magic. So, nothing will be explained - but that which is unexplainable does not make it unable to be understood. This happens on a level beyond that of conscious thought, that of the describable, the part of the self that is, in essence, magical. Magic exists in every body where there is something that can never be explained, but always understood. All beings are mutable.

Isa frowned. This seemed entirely unhelpful, especially considering the work she'd gone through to find it. The hope that had lit inside her mind flickered, and she leaned back against the shelf with a short huff. She looked at the ceiling.

The most interesting thing that had happened to her in almost a century led to nothing but a dusty book of riddles. When the eclipse revealed those notes, it had seemed like an omen - a faint promise of change. Now she sat in the middle of her own disarray, running down the power in the middle of the night for no good reason. Isa fell back against the floor with a mighty thump, which shook the shelves, and knocked a book right onto her head. She swore.

"Mother of - " Isa stood up, knocking the journal off of her lap. She rubbed her scalp; the bruise was already forming and disappearing. A small perk of never aging or dying was that injuries healed much faster than they used to. Perhaps, then, she could just live with it. What was another one hundred and fifty-four years of the same routine, anyway?

The journal laid on the floor, somehow unbothered by the tumble despite its age. She looked down at it. Even if it held no answers to her condition, it must have had some value if its owner went through such great lengths to hide it. Isa picked it up again and flipped through the pages, only stopping to look at a star chart about halfway through.

It looked more like a map, but stars and planets dotted it where one would expect land and sea. A curious thing, it was - no spacefaring vessel would use something as archaic as a paper map. And with how old it was, it couldn't have possibly been used for navigation. Faster-than-light travel was only a bit longer than Isa herself, but the names of the planets were those used by their own peoples. It made no sense.

Just as quickly as she had given up, the journal had sucked her back in. Isa moved over to one of the chairs by the window, weaving through the messed up shelves. She threw herself back into the cushions and curled up, setting the book on her knees.

"Damara," she muttered to herself, pointing at one of the planets. "Tiaea, Vanon, Attacus, Lillum, Flekke - " She stopped. Had she read that right?

Flekke. The name was unfamiliar. Her finger hovered over the dot on the page. She traced the ink with her finger, feeling its indentation in the page. The little blip of a planet was all the way across the page, as far from home as it could possibly be.

She set the book down on the armrest and turned towards the pile on the floor of things she'd moved off the shelves - books, trinkets, tokens of lives before hers. Family photos of faces she didn't know. Shoving all that aside, she found the little black cube she was looking for: a star atlas. They were all 3-D projections nowadays, accounting for the vastness of space. A flat mat could show two planets right next to each other, but in reality, they could be millions of light-years apart on an invisible Z-axis. She fumbled with the cube, turned it on, and the projection appeared, glowing faint in the overhead light. Flicking the lightswitch off turned the library into a little facsimile of the cosmos, little glowing stars and planets hanging in the air like lanterns. Isa sat down in the middle of the floor again, fiddling with the controls until she had pushed the coordinates towards the numbers scrawled beneath the unfamiliar planet.

Nothing. It wasn't there.

But that's impossible, she thought. Planets didn't just blink out of existence like that. She switched off the atlas and grabbed another, then another, all to discover the same thing. The longer she studied the empty space, the more apparent and unusual the absence became. Stars, other planets, celestial bodies orbited around its silhouette, acting as if it was still there.

So was it?

Isa turned again to the journal. Flekke was the final stop of the travelers, those from the stars from whom we all first came. The last of those who searched for homes, they were the first to collapse. The planet is sealed like a tomb, a place of rot decaying now for more years than any mind could comprehend. This is above all things ironic. H.G. apparently did not find it ironic enough to share why. Here I have laid to rest the last of my notes - mostly on the correct usage of the key and the unlocking method but I have also included curse dispellation, since the method is tricky and I do not want to risk some inexperienced fool like M getting his hands on it and making a mess of things.

Quickly, Isa flipped back to the chart. Flekke was far, far from Tiaea, a distance that only seemed larger the longer she looked at it. But nearby it was Vanon, a planet she recognized - tidally locked, and one of the first adopters of FTL travel. Getting there would be no more difficult than buying a ticket and packing a bag. And Flekke was there - even if she couldn't see it, its shadow remained.

She could just leave. She didn't have to stay locked up in this stupid impractical house when the door was right there. And if all of this turned out to be a bust, so what? Wouldn't it be nice just to be somewhere that wasn't here, in this life that had left her behind?

It was a long shot, but Isa had nothing if not time on her side. She snapped the journal shut and stood up, making a beeline for the door - she struggled to keep herself from running so she wouldn't trip on any of the displaced books. Then she raced up the stairs towards her own room.

It was dusty. Her childhood bedroom had served as little more than another storage space for over a decade now. All the hobbies she'd collected over the years had been gathered up and left in here, stacked in boxes or, more often, just tossed in whatever corner had the most room. Isa paid little attention to these, only stopping to push aside what she had to in order to get to her closet. She slid the door open and started digging around for a bag.

When she couldn't find one, she turned to leave, but instead stopped. Her gaze lingered on the room. At night, the whole thing seemed like one big shadow. With all the stuff cluttered inside, she couldn't quite tell which corner her hammock used to be set up in, or what spot on the wall her mirror once hung from. The boxes held old stuffed toys, calligraphy sets, and keepsakes - at that moment, it was no wonder to Isa that she felt so stuck in a house full of so much junk.

Isa left, being careful not to slam the door. There was much planning left to do still, and in her excitement, she'd forgotten the most important steps. She needed to find a ship, and then buy a ticket - and she'd need to dig all the money out from the chest in the basement so she could pay. Then, of course, there was the matter of getting out of Nes, as the region had no cosmodromes of its own. Vargus was closer, but Alunin was more populous, and had much bigger ports with more variety. Tickets for the trip out of Nes would be extra money. This would take much more effort on her part than she'd first anticipated.

Isa worked on through the night, powered by the hope burning in her chest. She was leaving.