The Mirror of Unreason

After the cramped, parchment-filled obscurity of the Curator's chamber, the pale, sallow light of the outside Warden's Grove seemed almost a blessing. As the powerful rush of adrenaline started to subside, Zen leaned heavily against one of the alabaster, columnar trees, his breath, ragged from the confrontation, slowly evening. The carved Icorian stone was still in his fingers, but it was now inert—just a cool, smooth pebble with its focused powers abruptly sapped.

The experience had been enlightening, but in the most terrible way. The Curator was more than just a protector; she was a living embodiment of the Grove's collective memories, its deep suffering, and its unyielding, warped customs. Nothing more momentous than a strategic withdrawal and a little reprieve, which his desperate gambit had gained him. It wasn't just empty rhetoric when she declared that his "record" was now active in her vaults. An active, unresolved record was a dangerous weakness in a field that was obsessed with order and the careful cataloging of every variation.

He had to obscure his recent trail, to purposefully obscure the crystal clarity of his incursion into the maze-like structures of the Grove. Icor had frequently discussed the "Art of Unmaking"—not actual erasure, which is frequently impossible in settings so strongly infused with lingering memory and focused intent, but rather a subtle kind of energetic redaction, a purposeful dispersion of one's signature that made a particular trace difficult to detect in a reactive environment.

Zen pulled a little, firmly sealed oilskin pouch from the inside of his well-maintained rucksack. There was a fine, silvery-grey powder inside—a prepared mixture of ground volcanic ash, some dried and powdered mosses that were said to have special energy-dampening properties, and a pinch of salt that had been harvested—per Icor's more fantastical instructions—from a location where fresh and saltwater met under a full moon. Additionally, he constructed a flat, delicate brush with a needle-fine tip that was made from owl feathers and one of his extra cartography styluses.

He began by carefully going over his clothing and knapsack, letting the silvery powder draw in and bind any remaining energetic remnants or tiny parchment threads from the inner sanctum of the Curator. The dust that resulted was then carefully collected into a small fold of pure parchment, which he carried especially for this reason. He planned to ceremoniously neutralize this fold of parchment once he was far enough away from this area of concentrated energies.

Then, focusing on the route he had taken from the dark corridor back to this similar refuge, he began a more complex process. He used the stylus to carefully inscribe a series of flowing, intersecting glyphs on the flagstones at key points. These were not Icor's symbols of deliberate focus, but rather older, more erratic "unbinding" runes that Icor had laboriously decoded from remnants that before the Great Lacuna. They were designed to interfere with coherent energy signatures and introduce some mental static into the local environment. He sprinkled a small amount of the silvery powder into the new lines as he wrote each glyph, then used the owl-plumage brush to spread it in a particular counterclockwise pattern, intonating, almost under his breath, certain phonetic elements that Icor had adamantly maintained were essential to "disquieting the elemental memory of the stone."

It was a particular kind of anomalous counter-cartography, a careful, even scientific application of esoteric principles rather than magic in the flashy sense. Instead of attempting to become truly invisible, he was trying to make his recent passage seem like just another inconspicuous eddy in the energetic currents of the Grove, which were already complicated and difficult to categorize.

As he worked, he kept thinking about the encounter: the Curator's deep grief, her unwavering, unrelenting belief in her responsibility, and the terrible elegance with which her paper form had become a weapon. "They spoke of harmony, then they brought chains." He felt the words, a burning denunciation of earlier encroachments. In hindsight, his own final statement, "This record is incomplete!" seems bold and possibly heartwarmingly naive. With the crushing, sorrowful weight of history, what could a single cartographer really contribute?

Beneath the Curator's dais, the signal from the data chip, which had been lost for the present, continued to be a persistent and frustrating counterpoint in his mind. It was obvious that the previous explorer, whose path he followed, thought something extremely significant was concealed there. Was the Curator desperately trying to hide a truth? Or was it a trap she was unknowingly guarding in her fervent guardianship?

As the faint light of the Grove started to diminish noticeably, he finished his painstaking job, the long, warped shadows of the alabaster pillars expanding. The place where he had worked now seemed to be undisturbed on the outside, but to his keen senses the unique energy "trace" of his passage was much softer, its boundaries artistically blurred. It may well prevent the Grove's automated sentience or its parchment sentinels from easily tracing his movements or identifying his previous journey as a site of continuing concern, but it would probably not resist extended, direct scrutiny from the Curator herself. It was a short-term solution, a way to buy more time.

Dusting the last of the silvery powder from his palms, Zen stood up. A certain amount of his usual poise started to return. He had faced the core of the Warden, been banished, but he had also learned important lessons. The Grove was a system, however tainted, with its own set of rules and, thus, predictable, albeit dangerous, behaviors; it was not just a collection of antagonistic beings. Despite her immense authority, the Curator was a prisoner of that very system.

Now, leaving the Warden's Grove completely was his most urgent requirement. With his'record' so obviously active, it would be quite risky to press further at this point. In order to properly examine Icor's notebook in light of what he had seen, carefully examine the scattered notes from the other explorer's recovered bag, and essentially rethink his entire strategy toward the Kuro-no-Mori, he needed to find a safe haven. Despite its seeming significance, the Warden's Grove was only one of the forest's many strata.

He glanced perceptively in the direction of the perimeter, the path leading back to the Whispering Verge's less explicitly hostile, but no less disturbing, lands. The trip outside would require just as much care and attention to detail as his entrance.