OtH 1.18 - The Lotus Blossom

I really like the design of the tower, so I hope you all enjoy it. 

Lurona’s personal tower was, as Aarick had expected, beautiful.

The stairs emerged into an entry room, and the density of the qi and ziu was so heavy that, even with his newfound capacity, he found it difficult to do much except concentrate and hold it at bay.

Lurona either noticed, or had expected it, because the energies withdrew from her in a wide sphere, soon passing outside his width of perception, allowing him to concentrate on other matters.

Like the room, which he had scarcely had any ability to even notice.

He suddenly found himself in the center of the closed bud of a flower. That wasn’t merely hyperbole, that was the actual design.

Golden stamens curled gently inward from the where the stair ended, each cradling inward and glittering with rough facets. The facets sent sparks of light out like flecks of pollen. And the floor around the stairs was a similar circle of burnished gold.

The overall room was roughly spherical, with smaller petals, white at the base then shaded into deep pink, curving in an upward arc as they reached toward the ceiling. Larger petals were hidden behind, reaching further up toward the middle of the ceiling. And then another layer was barely shown behind that, in a repeating pattern that created a spiral fractal made of deep pink petal tips.

Probably liked that fractal design, considering how much she likes geometry. Almost looks like a lotus, though I don’t see that weird honeycomb they have inside.

Honestly, he wouldn’t have even known that much if the sacred lotus wasn’t so important to certain Asian cultures.

Guess I’ll have to tell my parents that I actually did find a use for some of their etiquette training.

Directly ahead, Lurona moved one of the smaller petals, the nine foot petal still leaving more than sufficient room to exit as it slid on a curving track into the wall.

Whatever he had been expecting to find, the reality was sufficient to both distract and awe him.

There are, when looking at the design of buildings, certain unconscious expectations. In the modern buildings at home, Aarick would expect things like the usual walls, floors, ceilings, etc… He would also expect certain features put in by laws and cultural expectations.

These would be things like rectangular doors, gentle ramps for disability access, air conditioning, electric lighting, and so on.

He had already been dealing with some of the changed expectations here. The largest shock so far had been the invisible parts of the building, but the concept of hidden doors and rooms, or hiding functionality, was not really foreign to him.

This was the first time he had seen a building that needed flight to navigate.

When he first emerged, he failed to notice this fact immediately. The flat layered design of enormous petals covering the floor was the first thing that caught his eye. They started as comparatively modest petals stretching out from the center, at about twenty feet, and then expanded into slightly larger petals that lay beneath, the floor dipping a couple inches to the next layer of petals. This repeated out several hundred feet until the entire flower was encircled by a ring of gold on the floor.

The ring directly touched against where the white concave walls were closest, while each of the three corner sections was closed off with a door and wall.

Above, the walls started to curve inward, but even beyond their natural curvature, pale pink struts of stone curved inward to support a flat ceiling about sixty feet overhead. The ceiling had a fractal pattern done in silver and gold over white stone, the thick lines around a central circle thinning as they reached the edges until he could no longer see the details, only a glittering sufficient to show the pattern continued. The ceiling didn’t actually meet overhead, the central circle empty, and as he found his eyes drawn up and up following the supports, he peered into the gap in the middle of the room.

It was a hollow that penetrated all the way up through the tower, a single hollow cylinder that pushed up hundreds of feet, until it terminated at a web of glowing lines that hung in the air. It might have continued beyond that point, but the lines were so densely layered that he couldn’t actually see.

And, surrounding the interior of the cylinder, were archways. Some had closed doors, but most were open, lights spilling into the cylinder to cast additional glows within.

It was possible that there might be stairs in some of the corner rooms, but the obvious expectation was that the occupant would fly to get between the various rooms and layers.

“You can fly,” he breathed out in a whisper.

“I can,” Lurona replied calmly. “If you advance far enough, you will be able to as well.”

Perhaps flight shouldn’t have such a strong hold on him, but flight was one of the universal dreams. Whether it was possible through superpowers, magic, or science fiction, he had always wanted to fly. Even just flying in an airplane was powerful at times. Looking down at the clouds and the patchwork of city streets and the flat fields out in the country…

“How far do I need to cultivate before I can fly?” Aarick asked.

Lurona’s laugh filled the vast space like chimes, the echoes ringing through the space in waves of sound.

“Far enough,” she said. “You haven’t progressed into even having a dantian, yet. No one will tell you anything about the next step until you have finished the one you are on.”

She reached out one her hands. “Take my hand.”

He reached out his hand hesitantly and Lurona clasped it in a firm grip. It was a bit like being held by steel covered in memory foam. Yielding and pliable on the surface, but implacably strong beneath.

Without warning the two of them began to lift into the air.

Reflexively he tried to let go and flail his arms, but his one hand remained firmly clasped, even as his other arm pinwheeled to no effect.

He didn’t tip over or fall, despite what his brain was shouting at him. And, after a moment, he began to revel in the sensation.

It didn’t feel like he was standing on solid ground. It was more like the air had suddenly become like water. Not in its difficulty to move, but rather that his relative density had changed and he was floating upward to reach a new equilibrium.

Lurona pulled her presence inward until it barely covered the two of them until, outside, he could sense the push of qi once more.

And then, as they moved into the center of the room and started to move upward, he could sense something more. Streams of fiery qi and ziu were channeled together into woven bands of energy that were swirling upward into the column in a helix. The weaves were constantly changing as they moved upward, and it took him a little longer than he thought it should before he realized what it was.

No doubt the gathering of energy served some purpose above, but the individual weaves and helix were more art. Art that could only be seen and appreciated if you could sense the qi that it was made of.

Aarick could only see a tiny portion of it at a time, and some of the qi was hazy, but he wondered what the overall structure of qi would look like.

His thoughts were cut short by them entering an archway on the side. A door that had been closed opened as they approached, and he caught only the barest flicker of qi at the motion. Whatever Lurona had done to open it was far beyond his capabilities to even sense.

The room beyond was not particularly welcoming, but it wasn’t exactly foreboding either.

The room was large, though the ceiling was only a dozen feet, and a large circle was in the floor. Runes and geometric shapes sprawled across the surface and etched between them, delineating various spaces inside the larger circle into smaller circles. The glowing lines were supplemented by various stones embedded into the framework.

The usual ceiling framework that shed light was conspicuously present but only surrounded the edges of the circle, none of it going directly above it. Instead, the pattern on the floor was directly copied so the two lined up perfectly.

A few functional chairs sat around the edges of the room, as did some bookshelves filled with various books.

Two chairs started to float into the air as they entered, slowly drifting inwards and crossing into the circle. He and Lurona continued to drift forward in the air, heading into one of the larger delineated circles. They arrived roughly the same time as the chairs, and even though the chairs were fully within his senses, he couldn’t sense how they were being moved at all.

I’d be worried by the whole ritual setup, but it isn’t like I could do anything if she wanted to hurt me. Besides, it doesn’t look like it was something set up just for me.

It was, in fact, obvious that this setup had been in place for a long time. Very faint grooves were worn into the stone, and it occurred to him that these might have been caused by nothing more than Lurona walking on them for a thousand years.

This whole room, actually, felt a little bit different than the rest of the building he had seen so far. He couldn’t recall seeing any wear and tear, at all, so far.

That would mean… what?

Probably that whoever does the maintenance isn’t allowed into this room. Or maybe they just can’t fly, and Lurona doesn’t want to bother with bringing them inside.

Regardless if any other rooms in the tower were accessible via some hidden stairs, this room was only accessible via flight.

No… wait. It could just have an invisible entrance. Stupid hidden doors stopping me from making conclusions.

Well, no… I can still come to some conclusions. Either the room is too important, secure, whatever, to let in someone else, or, Lurona doesn’t feel like flying someone in to repair it.

Aarick promptly hated his mind as it suggested another possibility.

Or, the rune thing is to delicate to allow repairs around it.

Sometimes, Aarick felt being intelligent and analytical was a ripoff. It tended to lead to lots of second guessing oneself.

His feed hit the ground and his knees buckled in surprise, causing him to flail backwards for a moment as he fell… only to land in the chair that was directly behind him.

Lurona’s stifled cough hid her amusement poorly, and while her hand might have hidden her smile, the glint in her eyes, combined with the crinkling lines of suppressed laughter were plain to see.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said as he rolled his eyes. “I know. I really should pay better attention.”

He stood bolt upright as he remembered his manners.

“Sorry, wasn’t supposed to sit without permission.” He said in a rush, before finishing wryly. “Not that it was intentional.”

“Go ahead and sit,” she said with a smile, her hand dropping to reveal it as she took her own seat.

“I honestly wasn’t expecting to talk with you again today.” She said.

“Ah, yeah, sorry about that.” He said with a wince.

“No need to be sorry, Aarick. I am the one who agreed to see you again, after all.”

Lurona looked off to the side for a moment; one the fingers of her right hand tapped gently against the armrest.

She sighed, and looked at him again.

“When I talked to you before,” she said, “it was of no great consequence to shield you. It appealed to my sense of… righteousness, I suppose. Though that term seems too grandiose. Justice is probably the better term. You had been wronged, so it was just to correct the scales. And,” she smiled mischievously, “I will admit to taking a certain pleasure in concealing your nature. Tweaking the pride of various nobles by denying them a prize, or by making you a far more expensive to obtain in the long run.”

She paused for a moment.

“If you go far enough, you will start to think differently too. It becomes natural to think on longer time scales. To see this come to fruition in only a decade… It would have been too delightful to resist.

“However, I felt compelled to do right by you. Though… I wish to be forthright, as well. Many would not have bothered to help you, but the help I have given you costs me essentially nothing.

“Plenty of tutors for wealthy families live here in the creche. For even a chance that I might offer them, or the families they serve, a tiny bit of favor they would happily leap to educate you. With a minor implication of your own noble status, they would have hoped for the same from your family, or possibly you in the future.”

She paused for a moment, and he took the moment to ask a question.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. “Why not just let me be appreciative of your generosity? What do you gain by diminishing it?”

Instead of answering him, she asked him a question in turn.

“You connected to fire, and think you can probably connect to the concepts of motion, earth, and metal, correct?”

He thought for a moment… that did sound like what he had said to Reodan. For a moment, he debated how honest to be, but ultimately, even with her admission she was the only one he could talk to.

“Yes,” he said. “However… that really only scratches the surface. As far as we knew, we didn’t have qi or ziu at all. So we had to figure out how to do everything without them. And, at its core, that meant understanding things so deeply that we make the laws of the world work for us.”

What forces and concepts might I actually be able to unlock?

“I… might be able to undergo more than a dozen enlightenments.”

Lurona blinked at him, her face blank.

“It appears…” she said slowly, “that my decision to have this talk here was more appropriate than I realized.”

Her expression turned wry, and her tone dry.

“It also seems that the heavens have decided to try to tempt my resolve with greed.”