Arc of Forgotten Fragments (Floor 2)
Elia—in Ho Siyu's body—knew she couldn't waste a single moment. The tower had been unequivocal, an relentless echo in her new flesh: the events had already begun. And in that borrowed body, every second passed like an alien, stolen ticking, a countdown she couldn't decipher.
She chose to start with the garden. Logic had nothing to do with it; it was pure visceral instinct. Ho Siyu's memory of that place wasn't just an image; it was a pang. It was tinged with childlike nostalgia, with a tenderness that mingled with echoes of incomprehensible, veiled losses. If anything could lead her to Yiran's emotional heart, to the buried truth, it would be there.
She covered herself with a light cloak, the fabric feeling strange against her skin. She walked in a silence that felt too loud through the corridors of the old Ho compound. The mansion walls seemed to whisper secrets more zealously than the elders of the Castellan Family, their shadows dancing under the flicker of paper lanterns, still lit at that early hour, casting undulating figures on the worn tatami mats. Every step was an intrusion, an echo of a life that wasn't hers.
Upon reaching the secret garden, a sense of estrangement washed over her, a chill that didn't come from the cool air. It wasn't strange because of its rarity, but because of its perfection, a perfection that bordered on the unreal. The pond in the center was crystal clear, but its surface reflected nothing. Neither the leaden sky, nor her own face, blurred in the water. The lunar lotus flowers floated motionless, their petals white and ethereal, as if time had forgotten to touch them. Every leaf, every stem, seemed suspended in an artificial, unnatural stillness. The air itself felt dense, as if the narratives of the Tower had solidified here, containing every breath.
"Is this also trapped in the Tower's narrative?" she wondered, Ho Siyu's voice sounding strange in her own mind. The question disturbed her more than she wanted to admit.
She didn't have time to delve deeper into that unsettling stillness. A faint crunch on the gravel behind her, barely audible, announced another presence. Elia felt a jolt of adrenaline.
"I thought you didn't like gardens when they weren't blooming," a husky but strangely familiar voice said.
It was a woman, older than Ho Siyu, but not old enough to be an elder. Elia turned slowly, her muscles tense, and saw a figure enveloped in red and gold robes, heavy fabric that fell with dignity. Her bearing was proud, almost defiant, and her gaze, inquisitive, penetrating. One of the Family's aunts, perhaps. Her mind, still adapting to Siyu's borrowed memories, desperately searched and found a name: Aunt Lanyue. Rigid, intelligent, a key player in the lineage's internal affairs. A dangerous piece.
"I suppose I'm starting to see them with different eyes," Elia said, the ambiguity of her new condition a shield, a double-edged sword. The phrase felt forced on Siyu's lips.
Lanyue watched her in a long silence, a silence heavy with unsaid expectations. She approached slowly, her steps measured, until she stood beside her, facing the inert pond. Her gaze settled on the water, then returned to Ho Siyu, analyzing every fiber of her being, looking for a crack.
"Your sister was here last night," Lanyue began, her voice dropping a tone, almost a whisper. "She stood silently for over an hour. Then she left with her eyes lit up, as if she'd solved something. I don't like that." The last sentence was spoken with a coldness that chilled Elia's blood.
"Why?" Elia asked, her own voice sounding firmer than she expected.
Aunt Lanyue turned, her gaze fixed on Ho Siyu with an intensity that made her hesitate. "Because the Ho don't solve things in gardens. They bury them."
And with that, she left without another word, leaving Elia with the weight of those words, with the image of the pond that reflected nothing, and with the echo of buried secrets.
What had Yiran "buried"? And what had she "solved" that so disturbed Aunt Lanyue? The answer, or at least the path to it, pushed her toward a single destination.
The next step was inevitable: the ancestral library. There, secrets weren't buried... they were encoded. They were jealously guarded, waiting to be unearthed by the right hands, or the wrong ones.
Elia entered unimpeded, an advantage of the body she inhabited. The doors opened with a slight tremor, a groan of recognition that resonated in the deep silence of the place: Ho Siyu's body had permission.
Inside, the air was denser, laden with the smell of old paper and accumulated wisdom. The shelves weren't organized by subject or author, but by silences. Every corner of the library had a distinct acoustic, its own resonance, as if certain stories could only be read when the air was quiet enough, when the outside world stopped roaring. It was a labyrinth of contained whispers.
She headed toward the corner where Ho Siyu's memories indicated Ho Yiran often lingered longer. A secluded spot, among texts on fire rituals and treatises on forgotten lineages, where light barely dared to enter. There, among rolled scrolls and worn leather-bound volumes, she found a book without a title. It was covered by a gray cloth, so intact it seemed to have avoided the passage of years, as if a time bubble had protected it.
Upon opening it, there were no words on the initial pages, only a single vibrant red ideogram on the first page. The same one Meyun had unwittingly mentioned, with that lightness that sometimes hides the truth: Fragment.
But below the ideogram, barely visible, as if someone had tried to erase it unsuccessfully, was a handwritten line, in ink darker than the original. A line that seemed like a whisper torn from time:
"The truth is not found on the pages, but between them..."
The handwritten line, almost a ink ghost, resonated in Elia's mind, stronger than the library's silence. Was it a riddle? A mockery? Did it mean the key was in the absence of text, in what was unsaid, or in a reading between the lines that transcended literal meaning?
Elia ran her thumb over the red "Fragment" ideogram, its surface surprisingly rough. The book's pages weren't blank; they felt strange, dense, as if made of something more than paper. She lifted the volume, weighing it. It was unusually heavy for its size. Carefully, she tilted it toward the faint light filtering through the high windows. Nothing. Not a watermark, not invisible writing.
But then, a flicker. On the edge of one of the pages, almost imperceptible, was a small notch. It wasn't damage, but a deliberate incision, barely a line that Elia's fingernail could just feel. Her heart racing, she checked the rest of the pages. There were countless, or so it seemed, and on about every tenth page, she found an identical notch. They weren't random; they formed an irregular pattern, a kind of Braille code for an initiate's eyes.
"Between them..." she whispered. It wasn't about what was written, but how the silence itself was structured. Each notch, a clue.
Suddenly, a shadow fell over her. Elia looked up, the book still in her hands. In the threshold of the corner, standing like a statue carved from obsidian, was the Elder of the Dream Weavers, the matriarch of the Castellan Family, a figure feared even by the boldest. Her face, furrowed by a thousand wrinkles, was a mask of neutrality, but her eyes, small and dark, seemed to pierce the soul. She wore the traditional Ho silk kimono, embroidered with intricate patterns of cranes flying towards the rising sun, and her hands, gnarled with age, held a polished ebony wood staff.
"Ho Siyu," the Elder said, her voice like the rustling of dry leaves underfoot, a sound that evoked the memory of past winters. "You take too many liberties in this place. The library is not for the curious, but for the guardians."
Elia felt a chill. The Tower had warned her about the dangers of being discovered. The Elder of the Dream Weavers was the personification of the Ho Family's memory, a living archive of their darkest secrets.
"I was just... looking for a scroll on heraldry, Elder," Elia lied, Ho Siyu's voice sounding strangely hollow in her ears. She clutched the untitled book to her chest, hoping the Elder wouldn't notice the slight tremor in her hands.
The Elder's dark eyes fixed on the book. Elia felt a pang of panic. "Ah, yes?" The Elder took a slow step towards her, her staff gently tapping the wooden floor. "What a coincidence. Your sister, Yiran, also seemed to be looking for something in this very corner last night. Both with a sudden fondness for ancient wisdom." She drew a little closer, her breath, with a faint scent of medicinal herbs, reached Elia. "Tell me, Ho Siyu, what do you think is hidden in the deepest corners of our Family?"
Elia swallowed. The question was not innocent. It was a test, a trap. Any wrong answer could betray her. She had to maintain the Ho Siyu facade at all costs.
"Secrets, Elder," Elia said, recalling Lanyue's comment about the Ho burying things. "The secrets the Family chooses to protect from oblivion." She tried to make her voice sound respectful, but with a subtle inflection of youthful curiosity, typical of Ho Siyu.
The Elder nodded slowly, her eyes still fixed on the book. "And sometimes, Ho Siyu, oblivion is a blessing. Some truths are too heavy to be carried by all. Some, even, can destroy what they touch." Her gaze hardened. "Put that book down. It is not for your eyes. It is a volume that holds a story best left in the darkness."
The order was clear, but the Elder's tone, that mix of warning and veiled threat, made Elia resist. The prohibition pushed her beyond reason. She couldn't let go. "I'm sorry, Elder," Elia said, her grip on the book firm. "But I feel there's something in this volume that... that the Castellan Family needs to remember now more than ever."
There was a risk in that statement, a glimmer of insubordination that the original Ho Siyu would never show.
The Elder of the Dream Weavers smiled, a joyless smile that chilled Elia's blood. "Oh, Siyu. Always so... impetuous. Curiosity is a slow poison for those who don't know the antidotes. I hope you don't face the consequences of your own audacity."
Without another word, the Elder turned on her heels and walked away with the same slowness with which she had appeared, her figure vanishing among the tall shelves. Her departure was as unsettling as her presence.
Elia was left alone, her heart pounding. The Elder had yielded, but her warning echoed in the air. She knew she had aroused dangerous suspicion. However, she couldn't stop. "The truth is not found on the pages, but between them..." The notches. The pattern. There was something more.
With the book firmly held, Elia went to a more secluded corner, where the light was even fainter, and sat on the floor, ignoring the dust. She turned the pages again, stopping at each notch. They weren't just marks; each seemed to have a slight variation in depth, in the way the edge had been pressed.
And then, she saw it. Or rather, she felt it. When her finger brushed one of the notches, she felt a barely perceptible vibration, like a distant pulse. Not in the book, but in the air around her. It was the library itself.
"The distinct acoustics... the silences...", she remembered. Each corner had a resonance. The "truth between the pages" wasn't just in the notches, but in how those notches interacted with the specific acoustics of the library.
Elia closed her eyes, concentrating. She held the book in a certain way, tilting it, rotating it. The notches. The silences. Could it be that each notch corresponded to a way of positioning the book at a specific point in the library, activating a resonance that would reveal something?
Elia stood up, the book in her hands, and observed the labyrinth of shelves. The library was no longer a place of inert secrets, but a vast resonance chamber. The truth wasn't just between the pages; it was in how the book interacted with the space itself. It was a map, an instrument. And she, Ho Siyu, had just found her first real clue.