Chapter 105

I still remembered the first time Solaena "coincidentally" overheard one of our conversations.

Back then, I had actually believed it was a coincidence.

A pretty little fairy had hovered close enough to listen while several merchants discussed a supplier whose revenues had risen considerably faster than its operating margins.

She listened.

Thought.

Then interrupted with a question about transportation costs.

Nothing particularly extraordinary.

Children listened to adults.

Curious children interrupted them.

Exceptionally curious children occasionally even said something relevant.

Then she started recalling public information about the supplier from memory.

We corrected several assumptions she had made.

She discarded them almost immediately.

I asked what she actually did with herself.

She answered that she was [Focus]ing on her [Cultivation].

I joked about whichever teacher had inflicted such a bewildering obsession upon her.

And she looked up with that pretty little face of hers, smiled as if she had already found something amusing about me, and told me she had learned it all by herself.

That was how Solaena entered our mercantile circle.

Coincidentally.

I had long since stopped believing that part.

Not because I thought she had known who we were beforehand.

She probably hadn't.

Her [Knowledge] of Everwell Prime had contained enough gaping holes back then to make that unlikely.

What I no longer believed was that the distinction mattered.

Solaena didn't need to know beforehand that someone was useful.

She only needed to notice once.

Then she stayed close enough to learn why.

That was one of the first things I should have understood about her.

She rarely wandered socially.

She positioned herself.

Near conversations likely to contain something useful.

Near people who knew something she didn't.

Near gatherings where one introduction could lead to another.

Then she listened until something caught.

One question.

One answer.

One name.

One relationship.

From there, she pulled.

Not hard.

That was important.

People called individuals like her puppeteers.

Usually derogatorily.

The sort of person who strung threads through everyone around them and made people move where they wanted.

I had known actual examples.

Most were nowhere near as impressive as the name suggested.

They lied too much.

Pushed too hard.

Mistook manipulation for influence.

Eventually, someone noticed the strings and cut them.

Solaena was different.

She rarely needed to make anyone do anything.

She learned what they already wanted.

Then connected things.

A merchant wanted access to a supplier.

A supplier needed financing.

An archivist possessed records someone else needed.

A Court acquaintance knew a relative.

A teacher knew an Academy.

An investor remembered a failed venture whose failure answered somebody else's present problem.

Solaena asked.

Listened.

Remembered.

Then, sometimes weeks later, placed one piece beside another.

Nobody needed to be forced.

Everyone involved usually possessed perfectly good reasons of their own to act.

They merely happened to meet the correct person.

Receive the correct information.

Be reminded of the correct old event.

Or hear one annoyingly precise question from a beautiful little fairy who looked far too harmless to be reorganizing the relationships around her.

That was the fearsome part.

Not the strings themselves.

How difficult they were to see.

If I hadn't watched her build the first few from right beside her as a mentor of sorts...

I doubted I would have noticed the hundreds that followed.

At first, Solaena had simply been a curiosity.

Six years old.

Intense iridescent eyes striking enough that people remembered them before they remembered her name.

Expensive clothing implying backing she didn't actually possess.

And questions.

Endless questions.

Economically, she had been useful mostly because her ignorance was interesting.

Her [Knowledge] was broad enough to make conversations worthwhile and uneven enough to make some of her conclusions ridiculous.

Medicine.

Logistics.

Infrastructure.

Contracts.

Institutional organization.

Resource movement.

Then someone mentioned an old family rivalry, and her model collapsed because she had assumed everyone involved cared about credits more than they cared about hating one another.

We corrected her.

The next time something similar happened...

She accounted for it.

That became the [Cycle].

Solaena made mistakes.

Once.

Perhaps twice if reality disguised the same mistake well enough.

Then her Origin Aspect swallowed the experience and made repeating it progressively less likely.

[Guided].

I never acquired a complete explanation of what this Origin Aspect of hers actually did.

Eventually, I stopped asking.

Whatever distinction mattered to Aspect scholars wasn't especially relevant to me.

I cared about results.

And the result was that Solaena remembered.

Everything that mattered.

Documents.

Conversations.

Circumstances.

Assumptions she had made.

Who corrected them.

Why they had been right.

Then, months later, some new situation would resemble the old one just enough for that entire experience to reappear behind those fakely lively eyes of hers.

For a merchant, it was horrifyingly useful.

For anyone hoping to compete with what she might become...

Probably just horrifying.

Still, [Guided] wasn't her most dangerous quality.

Neither was the way she learned to present herself, though that came close.

The fairy who first hovered beside our table had already possessed most of what Civilization generously called beauty.

Months later, she learned how to use it.

Not ostentatiously.

That would have been easier.

She learned how much gold looked wealthy rather than desperate to look wealthy.

How much ornamentation made a child appear charming rather than overdressed.

How to smile without looking like she had consciously assembled the expression from remembered instructions.

How to let someone underestimate her for just long enough that correcting them became entertaining instead of insulting.

How to look curious when curiosity served her.

Innocent when innocence opened a door.

Serious when competence needed to show through.

She could enter one gathering as a prodigious child.

Another as a Pulse Aspirant.

Another as a promising economic amateur.

Another as a young fairy making something of a social debut.

And increasingly...

She could simply enter as Solaena.

People had started knowing what that meant.

That change happened faster than I liked.

I brought her to her first serious gathering outside Lylily Tower as my plus-one.

She prepared for it like someone preparing for an examination.

Who would attend.

Who I knew.

Who I only recognized.

Which introductions mattered.

What subjects were appropriate.

How long one remained with a group before leaving became natural.

When interrupting counted as participation rather than rudeness.

She still made mistakes.

Of course she did.

I distinctly remembered having to explain that people generally preferred not being visibly informed that she had just calculated another conversation as possessing greater expected value.

She listened.

Stored the correction.

Then repeated the gathering with fewer mistakes next time.

Soon, I no longer needed to remain beside her.

Soon after that, invitations began reaching her directly.

That was the social side.

The financial side rose with it.

Initially, Solaena brought us analyses and let us tear them apart.

Then came small investments.

Then private records.

Then actual organizations began giving her actual problems.

Struggling ones first.

Naturally.

Large institutions already possessed armies of analysts, advisers, accountants, negotiators, and every other expensive person whose job was preventing outsiders from becoming necessary.

Small companies possessed problems.

Problems were considerably less selective about who solved them.

That "conveniently" suited Solaena.

Give her one financial statement, and she remained inexperienced.

Give her the statement, several months of procurement records, transport changes, an eleven-year-old newspaper article, half a hundred records of similar cases, and the memory of an argument she overheard at a gathering...

Then things became irritating.

She connected them.

Not always correctly.

That mattered.

Solaena's rise wasn't some ridiculous sequence of flawless predictions.

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She misjudged loyalty.

Underestimated how long someone would willingly endure losses.

Overestimated economic rationality.

Underestimated [Pride].

Failed to account for decisions made on horizons longer than her entire lifetime—which was still shorter than the conception age she so loved to use for bizarre reasons.

Occasionally reached the correct answer for the wrong reason.

Reality corrected her.

Then her Origin Aspect helped her make the correction permanent.

So the failures didn't stop her ascent.

They accelerated the next attempt.

One company survived because of something she noticed.

Another didn't.

Both still gave her experience.

Someone showed her private records.

Those records became [Knowledge].

That [Knowledge] made another conversation possible.

The conversation produced an introduction.

The introduction opened another set of records.

Her financial competence bought social access.

Her social access bought better financial information.

Better information improved her competence.

Then the improved competence bought access to people she couldn't have approached before.

Eventually, trying to decide where one rise ended and the other began became pointless.

Which, knowing Solaena...

Was probably intentional.

That was what made her a puppeteer worth fearing.

She wasn't merely collecting people.

She was building a structure in which every new thread made several old ones more useful.

And she did it without looking like she was building anything at all.

Ask most of the people involved, and they would probably say they had simply met an unusually interesting fairy.

Perhaps helped her.

Perhaps received help in return.

Perhaps introduced her to someone.

Nothing more.

I had watched the web being woven from near the beginning.

That made me harder to fool.

It also made watching its growth considerably more alarming.

A teacher.

A Court liaison.

Archivists.

Tower keepers.

Merchants.

Investors.

Administrators.

Researchers.

Families.

People who knew people.

Then people who knew the people everyone else wanted to know.

By the time Solaena organized that conception-birthday celebration of hers, I recognized guests around her whom I could not have introduced her to myself.

That was when I finally accepted something I had been resisting for several weeks.

I was approaching irrelevancy.

Not complete irrelevancy.

Solaena didn't treat relationships like ladders to be kicked away once she climbed them.

If anything, she understood the value of preserving useful old relationships too well for that.

She would still visit.

Still ask questions when I possessed answers.

Still occasionally bring something interesting enough to make me remember why teaching her had been entertaining in the first place.

That wasn't what bothered me.

I was no longer one of the doors ahead of her.

I was becoming one of the doors behind.

Her upcoming visit to Esme Academy, which the Entity named Orris had arranged, made that painfully obvious.

The place wasn't inaccessible in the literal sense.

That would have been crude.

It simply belonged to the class of institutions where wealth alone wasn't enough.

Nor political connections.

Nor academic competence.

To genuinely belong inside, one usually needed enough of all three that nobody questioned why they were there.

It trained future financial analysts.

Economic advisers.

Capital managers.

Experts who would eventually advise organizations moving quantities of credits beyond anything Solaena presently controlled.

More importantly, it gathered the people who would later employ them.

Professors with their own networks.

Alumni already embedded in major institutions.

Recruiters.

Families capable of placing children there.

Organizations willing to sponsor promising talent.

Solaena wasn't even enrolling.

She had acquired an invitation to demonstrate what she could do.

Potential honorary association.

Possible library access.

Possible exchanges with professors.

Introductions if the correct people found her sufficiently interesting.

The sort of opportunity older families spent years arranging for their children.

Solaena acquired it because one of the commercial relationships she had cultivated decided she was worth recommending.

That was her entire rise in miniature.

One relationship.

Used well.

Leading somewhere larger.

And looking at the invitations she had been accepting lately...

She was already preparing for the next stage.

She had begun refusing more gatherings.

Not because she had become less social.

Because her time was becoming more expensive.

The circles I could comfortably access no longer represented the highest circles available to her.

My companions noticed.

Mostly, they were pleased.

We had met Solaena early.

That was valuable.

A few already possessed arrangements with her.

Others expected simply knowing her to prove useful later.

Some joked about someday telling people they had known Solaena when she was still the tiny fairy interrogating merchants during meals she didn't eat.

They were satisfied with that.

Reasonably so.

I wasn't.

Perhaps that was my Origin Aspect's fault.

[Finality].

An unimpressive name if one expected every Origin Aspect to sound like something carved into a monument.

Mine had never been glamorous.

It was useful.

[Finality] helped me recognize endings.

The last favorable moment before a negotiation hardened.

The point beyond which an investment stopped being salvageable.

When an opportunity had begun escaping even while everyone else insisted there was still time.

When another week of patience no longer meant patience and simply meant accepting the loss later.

Not prophecy.

Not [Fate].

Just a peculiar intimacy with the moment when possibilities stopped remaining possibilities.

For weeks, [Finality] had been bothering me about Solaena.

Or perhaps I had been bothering myself and using my Origin Aspect as an excuse.

Hard to tell.

I went to sleep after another gathering thinking about her.

Woke convinced I was exaggerating.

Then heard she had met another person I didn't know.

Entered another arrangement.

Been invited somewhere I couldn't casually follow—if at all.

And the feeling returned.

Something was ending.

I couldn't determine what.

Our relationship?

No.

My usefulness to her?

Partially.

An opportunity?

Almost certainly.

But which one?

I turned the problem around until even I became sick of myself.

Then Solaena celebrated her birthday.

Her conception birthday.

Of course.

Even her birthday had to be strange.

I attended.

Enjoyed myself.

And watched the little fairy host a gathering with an ease that would have been impossible for the child I first met.

She smiled.

Accepted gifts.

Introduced people.

Redirected conversations before they became awkward.

Kept incompatible personalities sufficiently separated.

Made people feel that they had been invited because she wanted them there rather than because their presence served some carefully considered [Purpose].

Perhaps she really did want some of them there.

With Solaena, though, both could be true at once.

Eventually, the gathering ended.

I left.

Then, halfway along one of the adjoining routes, I remembered something I had meant to tell her.

Nothing dramatic.

A commercial rumor that might save her ten minutes of investigation later.

Normally, I would have sent it to her.

Instead...

[Finality] stirred.

Barely.

A weak impulse.

The sort I had learned not to ignore.

So I turned around.

Solaena had already left the room.

I caught sight of her identifiable iridescent crystalline wings disappearing along a distant route.

I followed.

From a distance.

Not because she would have objected to seeing me.

Something about the moment simply felt like announcing myself would destroy whatever opportunity [Finality] had noticed.

Keeping up with her proved humiliating.

I had always known Solaena flew well.

Knowing it and trying to follow her through Lylily Tower were different experiences.

She moved like someone who had memorized every useful current, shortcut, traffic rhythm, shaft, and obscure route large enough to admit four wings.

Twice, I nearly lost her.

Once, I only found her again because I guessed she had climbed instead of following heavier traffic downward.

Eventually, the populated routes thinned.

Then the ordinary routes disappeared almost entirely.

She headed toward one of the secluded exterior regions of the tower.

I stopped several platforms away.

Far enough that I hoped she hadn't noticed me.

Whether I actually escaped her [Awareness]...

I preferred not to investigate.

Solaena settled alone.

Everwell Prime stretched beneath us.

Millions of lights.

Millions of lives.

More wealth, influence, ambition, desperation, opportunity, and sheer Civilization than any circle I had ever considered important could hope to contain.

Above all of it, overlooking it with indifference, sat a fairy young enough that she should have only just begun developing her first properly intelligent thoughts and memories that would truly remain with her for the rest of her life.

A silhouette delicate enough that someone seeing her without context might have wondered why a child had been allowed somewhere so isolated.

Then Solaena began her [Cultivation].

And I finally saw what I had spent months deliberately not looking at.

I had long since learned what her [Cultivation] was about.

Everyone did.

It was practically the first thing she told people.

I knew she stayed awake for absurd periods because of it.

Knew she possessed an Aspirant rank within the Pulse Of Eternity.

Knew her Path contained far too many Aspects for someone her age.

Knew the entire economic and social life I had watched her construct was something she mostly pursued while her Essence couldn't endure more of whatever her real routine involved.

I knew all of that.

But I had never watched.

Why would I?

I was a merchant.

Her Path was her concern.

What she could do with financial records was mine.

Then her [Will] became tangible.

I stopped moving.

Some developed Aspects didn't require expertise to recognize.

Understanding them was another matter.

But recognition?

That came easily.

Her [Will] pressed outward with an intensity utterly disproportionate to the tiny body containing it.

Not uncontrolled.

That might have been less disturbing.

It was directed.

Then her [Ambition] answered.

Blaze was the only word that fit.

Nothing actually caught fire.

There was no heat on my skin.

Yet every instinct I possessed interpreted what I witnessed in exactly the same way.

Do not touch.

Do not stand in front of this.

Do not mistake something small for something safe merely because it could fit inside your hand.

I had spent decades dealing with wealthy Entities.

Influential Entities.

Ambitious Entities.

People capable of collapsing a small company with one decision.

People who handled sums Solaena couldn't presently dream of personally controlling.

People whose names opened rooms mine didn't.

None of that prepared me for seeing what the little fairy directed at herself.

She turned that [Will] inward.

Toward her own Path.

Then demanded more.

Her [Ambition] surged in answer.

From several platforms away, I found myself thinking that if even a sliver of whatever pressure she imposed upon herself were turned toward me...

I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

That was when [Finality] finally stopped whispering.

Ah.

There it was.

The thing I had missed.

Or, more accurately...

The thing I had avoided looking at because everything around Solaena was already interesting enough without it.

Her economic rise wasn't the important part.

Neither was the social one.

They were consequences.

Tools.

Solaena wasn't spending month after month building wealth because she particularly cared about becoming wealthy.

She wasn't entering increasingly influential circles because high society fascinated her.

She was doing both because whatever afflicted her Essence forced periods of "idleness" upon her...

And she had apparently decided that idle time itself was unacceptable.

So she accumulated something else while she couldn't continue developing her Essence.

Credits.

People.

[Knowledge].

Access.

Influence.

Everything I had watched her accomplish...

Everything that already made some people whisper about her...

Was what Solaena did when she couldn't work on the thing she actually cared about.

Her Path.

And she was still overtaking us.

That was what finally made my discomfort comprehensible.

Solaena's social ascent was a side project.

Her financial rise was productive idleness.

And both were already carrying her toward circles where I would require favors merely to follow.

What happened when she eventually decided one of those things truly mattered?

What happened when that [Will] turned toward acquiring influence because her Path required it?

What happened when that [Ambition] decided some fortune, organization, political position, or social structure had become necessary?

I knew enough to recognize the answer.

[Finality] did too.

One way or another...

Solaena was going to leave our current circle behind.

Soon.

Not because she disliked us.

Not because she intended to abandon anyone.

Simply because her trajectory didn't end here.

Anyone who waited until her rise became obvious before trying to hitch themselves to it would discover the problem too late.

There would be no comfortable wake to ride.

No convenient coattail to grasp.

By the time everyone agreed she was soaring upward, she would already be beyond their reach.

And anyone trying to seize her then...

Would burn their fingers before catching so much as a wisp of what followed behind her.

My opportunity was approaching its [Finality].

Not my relationship with Solaena.

Something more specific.

The chance to become more than Edmundo.

Useful merchant.

Occasional teacher.

One familiar face among the hundreds she would eventually know.

That realization should have annoyed me.

Instead...

I smiled.

An ugly smile.

The sort I was grateful nobody stood close enough to see.

Because once I finally recognized which opportunity was ending...

Another became embarrassingly obvious.

Solaena had mentioned it far too many times for me to have forgotten.

Her [Faith].

For months, I had filed that particular [Ambition] alongside the stranger pieces of an already strange fairy.

She intended to establish her own [Faith].

Gather [Faith]ful.

Chosen ones.

Eventually build whatever institution naturally followed.

I knew she wasn't joking.

I also knew something she was still far too young to have witnessed herself.

At the true peaks...

[Faith] followed.

Not always temples.

Not always worship.

Not always people kneeling before an altar.

But when an Entity climbed high enough, others inevitably placed [Faith] in them.

Their judgment.

Their Path.

Their strength.

Their ability to succeed where others failed.

Their ability to keep going when everyone else stopped.

The sort of Entities whose names outlived companies, families, organizations, sometimes even political orders...

Rarely stood alone.

People gathered beneath them.

Around them.

Behind them.

Believed in them.

I had never been particularly interested in doing that.

Why would I?

I possessed twenty-three Aspects, amongst which were no fewer than eight First Order and three Second Order ones.

A respectable Path.

A successful life.

Enough credits to remain comfortable.

Enough influence that nobody important to my business could casually ignore me.

And enough [Finality] to know I would never become one of those beings standing at the highest peaks.

That had never bothered me.

A merchant didn't need to become the greatest existence alive.

Sometimes the better opportunity was recognizing one before everyone else did.

I looked back toward Solaena.

Seven years since conception.

Already climbing social circles most children didn't know existed.

Already becoming a financial partner useful enough that organizations gave her private records.

Already turning failures into permanent corrections.

Already weaving hundreds of relationships together so subtly that most of the people involved probably believed the web had grown by itself.

Already treating accomplishments I would have proudly called serious progress as something to pursue when she couldn't work on her actual priority.

Already possessing a [Will] I wanted absolutely nothing directed toward me.

Already burning with an [Ambition] whose limit I couldn't see.

And she wanted [Faith]ful.

My [Finality] settled.

For the first time in weeks...

Everything felt obvious.

I hadn't been about to lose Solaena.

I had been about to lose the cheapest possible entry point.

There was still time to become more than one useful merchant among hundreds she might eventually know.

Still time to establish a relationship with whatever she intended her [Faith] to become before joining it looked less like an eccentric choice...

And more like begging for admission.

Still time to make the sort of investment every merchant dreamed of discovering early enough.

All it required...

Was forming another Aspect.

I already possessed twenty-three.

Forming a twenty-fourth probably wouldn't kill me.

And if I was wrong?

Then I would have formed a largely useless [Faith] Aspect toward an excessively ambitious fairy child.

I had made worse and much more painful investments.

But if I was right...

I watched that tiny figure continue her [Cultivation] above Everwell Prime.

Still pushing with [Will] that could probably crush my defenseless self.

Still demanding more.

Still burning with [Ambition].

My ugly smile widened.

What a damn opportunity.