Chapter 99

I was halfway through explaining why one of the larger medical suppliers around the western transit lattice was probably being overvalued when a small voice from somewhere above my right wing interrupted at the first natural pause.

"Apologies for the interruption, but I couldn't prevent myself from listening in. Can I ask how much of that projection assumes its present transportation costs remain stable?"

I stopped.

So did two of my fellow companions around the table.

The fourth continued eating.

I looked upward.

A tiny fairy hovered a short distance away, waiting rather than pushing herself into the conversation.

Young.

Very young.

Four transparent wings carrying enough iridescent coloration that distinguishing their actual pattern required attention.

Pale hair cut short and similarly iridescent, small crystalline ornaments keeping it arranged without overwhelming it.

Large rainbow eyes.

Clean skin.

Healthy wings.

Pretty, according to the broad standards that seemed to follow fairies across cultures far more consistently than whatever local fashions happened to be popular.

More importantly, well cared for.

Her white-and-gold skinweave had been fitted around her wings properly, the layers arranged well, the gold restrained rather than absurd.

Whoever had prepared her for social settings knew what they were doing.

Then I noticed the backpack.

Large.

Practical.

Not remotely part of the ensemble.

"Why?" I asked.

"Well, because the supplier's revenues have increased significantly faster than its operating margins," she answered.

"Its material acquisition costs, however, haven't changed enough to account for the difference. Its reported labor expenditure rose approximately in line with expansion, and nothing I found indicates an unusual increase in losses. Transportation appeared the most probable explanation."

That was considerably more of an answer than I expected.

"You found?"

"I was listening to your discussion, and my Origin Aspect retrieved the public data I remembered browsing that pertained to the organization."

One of my companions finally stopped chewing.

"And what does your Origin Aspect say?"

"Many things," the child answered. "Most aren't relevant."

That earned a first half-hearted laugh.

I waved toward an empty space beside the table.

"Come closer. This is not some top-secret meeting, or we wouldn't be having this discussion here. And it's obvious you're missing something if you think that."

She did.

Her flight was good.

Not extraordinarily good by the standards of a tower containing thousands of mature fairies, but far too polished for someone who looked six.

Her four wings adjusted independently as she descended into the occupied air around our table, taking to the existing currents rather than forcing everyone nearby to compensate for her arrival.

"Their transport expenses are up," I explained, "but a significant portion should be temporary. They're rerouting around a disputed corridor while two transport organizations renegotiate access. Current expectation puts resolution within four to six months. Which means..."

After I explained my reasoning, she evidently started asking questions.

Her first question was what could extend the dispute.

The second was what evidence supported the four-to-six-month estimate in the first place.

Better.

So I gave her the relevant pieces together.

The organizations involved.

The Court faction interested in reopening the route.

The commercial pressure accumulating on both sides.

The contractual circumstances.

The secondary losses making obstruction progressively less profitable to one of the parties.

She listened without trying to defend her original interpretation, asked about one uncertainty I had deliberately omitted because none of us possessed a good answer, then rebuilt her analysis with the missing information.

Nearly half her original conclusion disappeared.

That interested me more than if she had been right.

Most inexperienced analysts defended their mistakes.

Plenty of experienced ones did too.

This child seemed to regard correction as another form of profit.

"What's your name?" I asked once she'd finished.

"Solaena."

"And what exactly are you doing here, Solaena?"

"Learning who is here."

Reasonable enough.

"What do you do?"

That answer took slightly longer.

"I'm [Focus]ing on my [Cultivation]."

One of my companions, Edmundo, snorted at that answer.

"That's a word I haven't heard in a long time. Which class taught you about it? I hope they haven't misguided you, or I'll take it up with your teacher personally!"

The fairy who had continued eating with a peculiar look on her face finally looked up, then said with an adorable smirk,

"Learned it all by myself."

That was how Solaena entered our mercantile circle.

Not formally.

And certainly not because any of us immediately decided the six-year-old hovering beside our table was some economic prodigy.

She wasn't.

Her local [Knowledge] was full of holes.

She possessed almost no experience dealing with Everwell Prime's largest organizations.

Her capital was trivial beside ours.

When conversation moved into family-controlled ventures, old rivalries, reputation, or entities willingly accepting financial losses for reasons that had nothing to do with credits, her reasoning and investment models regularly became too clean for reality.

But she knew an irritating amount about everything adjacent.

Medicine.

Logistics.

Contracts.

Institutional organization.

Resource movement.

Infrastructure.

Several industries she had apparently studied only because someone once mentioned something interesting about them near her.

And when she didn't know something, she asked.

When she did know something, she could usually connect it to something else.

Most importantly, she incorporated corrections quickly enough that repeating one became rare.

Over the following days, she joined us several more times.

Sometimes deliberately.

Sometimes because one of us spotted her elsewhere in Lylily Tower and invited her along.

We visited establishments where a single meal cost more than the monthly rent of some lower residential rooms.

Solaena never ordered food.

Apparently, she didn't need to eat thanks to her [Cultivation], which truly struck Edmundo speechless for the better part of an hour.

Instead, she spent the breaks consuming explanations.

She wanted to know why two suppliers were maintained when one was cheaper.

What justified investing despite an expected initial loss.

When reputation outweighed contractual protection.

Why a merchant had accepted less profit to strengthen a relationship.

Which assumptions in our analyses came from actual data rather than familiarity so old we no longer noticed ourselves relying upon it.

And occasionally, she simply thought we were wrong.

Those discussions were usually very entertaining.

More so if you were a spectator.

She eventually brought records of her previous economic activities after we asked in the wake of her modest bragging.

Not many.

Several small investments.

A handful of analyses.

One transport-related assessment that had apparently proven useful enough for her name to travel farther than she had expected.

Some arrangements giving her access to private commercial information.

Nothing impressive by Everwell Prime's standards.

But strange enough for someone her age that I stopped assuming an unseen family had simply given her credits to experiment with.

Especially after learning there was no such family.

By our fifth meeting, she had shifted categories in my mind.

Not a partner.

Not an apprentice.

Not anyone I would entrust with a serious quantity of my credits.

But a useful acquaintance whose questions were becoming more expensive to answer because she was progressively exhausting the easy ones.

In mercantile circles...

That was close enough to friendship for a beginning.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

One of the new residents visited my patrol post three times before I learned her name.

The first time, she wanted directions.

Perfectly ordinary.

The second time, she wanted to know how internal flight routes changed during maintenance, how the turbulence-control [Ether] systems behaved during failures, where emergency corridors intersected ordinary traffic, and what actually happened when two different priority classifications competed for the same airspace.

Less ordinary.

The third time, she arrived with a notebook.

"I'm mapping the tower," she explained after I asked why she wanted to know how patrol coverage was divided between fixed posts and mobile routes.

I looked at the notebook.

Then at the enormous tower surrounding us.

"You're going to need a bigger notebook."

"I have more."

My partner laughed.

We were six hours into a quiet patrol period.

Nothing had fallen.

Nobody had collided hard enough to require intervention.

No child had gotten trapped somewhere architecturally creative that no one had managed to get trapped in during the decades since this tower was built.

The last dispute we'd handled concerned whether a suspended planter projected too far into shared flight space.

We were bored.

The child had questions.

Innocuous and curious ones.

So we answered them.

Public patrol coverage.

Emergency stations.

Restricted routes.

Closure markings.

Common collision points.

Lost children.

Damaged traffic-control devices.

The things residents routinely reported unnecessarily.

And the things they routinely failed to report until they became problems.

She asked what happened when someone ignored a tower keeper's instruction.

Then what happened when the tower keeper was wrong.

That one entertained the entire post.

She wrote less than I expected.

The rare people who interrogated us this thoroughly were either of a mind to join us or simply had a school assignment to do so.

In both cases, they either recorded everything or forgot half of it immediately.

Solaena mostly listened.

Occasionally, she added a line.

Then she flew away.

Another post reported her less than an hour later.

Then another.

By the end of the period, she'd apparently visited eight.

Fine.

Children explored.

Some did it more methodically than others.

When I returned for my next duty period, she was still awake.

Different clothing this time.

The expensive skinweave had disappeared.

In its place was a fitness bodysuit patched enough times that I briefly wondered whether something catastrophic had happened to her finances since our last conversation.

Same clean hair.

Same carefully maintained wings.

Same backpack.

She was using an unoccupied public exercise platform near one of the major shafts.

Slow body rotations.

Controlled wing extensions.

Static positions maintained until small tremors appeared, followed by deliberate release before they became severe.

Nothing dangerous.

Nothing blocking traffic.

I continued my patrol.

Two hours later, she appeared at the post again and clarified something I'd told her during our previous conversation.

Not repeated.

Clarified.

She had asked whether traffic density altered response allocation.

Now she wanted to know whether the patrol routes themselves changed or merely the number of keepers assigned to them.

My partner answered before I could.

Fixed base routes.

Flexible deviations.

Additional staffing during high-traffic periods.

Solaena thanked her and left.

I began paying more attention after that.

Not because she did anything suspicious.

Quite the opposite.

She obeyed traffic markers.

Stayed out of restricted areas.

Asked permission before entering patrol spaces that weren't openly accessible.

When told something was prohibited, she usually wanted the reason, but once she understood it, she followed the restriction instead of testing how strictly it was enforced.

Her flying was similarly difficult to complain about.

Fast when space allowed.

Conservative around children—even if she was also one.

Precise when merging into controlled corridors.

She didn't cross opposing traffic merely because being tiny made the consequences less dangerous for her.

She understood wake turbulence.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Used the maintained air [Flow] instead of fighting it.

Corrected early enough that other flyers rarely needed to compensate.

What became strange was how often I saw her.

One duty period.

Then another.

A colleague mentioned speaking with her between mine.

Another had seen her several hours before that.

By the time I mentioned it, the fairy beside me already knew what I was asking.

"Apparently she sleeps about once every eight days."

I looked across the shaft.

Solaena had just emerged from a lateral corridor and accelerated upward.

No unstable wingbeats.

No obvious exhaustion.

"She's six."

"Six and a Pulse Aspirant."

That was new.

I checked.

Not because I suspected anything criminal.

At that point, curiosity had won.

What little resident information relevant to tower safety was available contained nothing alarming.

No missing-child notice.

No guardian dispute.

No Court restriction.

No health warning.

Her Pulse affiliation checked out.

So did the rest of what we were actually entitled to know.

Odd.

But odd wasn't a tower keeper matter.

Soon enough, most posts in my region recognized her.

And before long, some of the keepers had started saving unusual pieces of tower information for when she inevitably appeared.

None of us noticed exactly when the basic questions stopped.

They simply did.

Then she started asking about exceptions.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

Solaena never asked to join my class.

She came for the books.

Our tower "academy" had acquired the name mainly because children needed somewhere to learn, do things, meet other children, and spend time under supervision without leaving Lylily Tower.

It was not an Academy in any serious institutional sense.

We taught reading.

Mathematics.

Basic Essence theory.

Fairy history.

Flight safety.

Court structures.

General subjects considered useful before children moved into more specialized educational institutions.

Over centuries, that function had also produced one of the larger juvenile-accessible book collections in the tower.

The first time Solaena walked in, she asked for advanced material on institutional history, interspecies economics, political structures, and Aspect development.

I asked for her resident identification.

Then took in her patched bodysuit.

"How advanced?"

"As advanced as I'm allowed to access."

That answer caused the problem.

Juvenile-access rules assumed a child asking for advanced material might not understand why some books carried restrictions.

Solaena understood perfectly.

She merely wanted the exact boundary.

So I did what procedure recommended whenever someone's stated educational level obviously failed to match their age.

I tested her.

Not her Essence.

Her education.

Reading first.

Then mathematics.

General history.

Essence fundamentals.

Basic Civilization studies.

Then the portion used to determine whether a child might benefit from accelerated instruction.

I stopped halfway through the ordinary progression.

Not because she knew everything.

She absolutely did not.

Her education was bizarre.

She could explain contractual incentive structures better than two of my assistants.

Her anatomy [Knowledge] forced me to check whether several terms I remembered had changed in newer instructional material.

She understood the conceptual distinction between a formed Aspect and the broader concept it embodied without needing the simplified explanations we normally used for children.

Her mathematical ability was comfortably beyond what I expected at her age.

Then I asked about a famous children's story used throughout local Court education.

Nothing.

She'd never read it.

Two nearby fairy communities whose founding histories were normally taught early?

She knew they existed.

Barely.

A common flight game?

Never played it.

One of the simplest ceremonial songs used at Court gatherings?

She recognized the title.

That was all.

Advanced wasn't the correct description.

Uneven was.

Broad in directions six-year-olds ordinarily never approached.

Deep enough in a handful of subjects that our ordinary material would contribute little.

Almost empty in others.

The pattern became perfectly understandable once I stopped evaluating her as the product of an education and started viewing her as someone who had learned according to necessity.

I asked how she'd been taught.

"Many books," she answered, before giving her Origin Aspect as the closest thing to a primary instructor she ever had.

That explained more than it answered.

I summarized what the tower academy actually offered instead of dragging the conversation through dozens of tiny questions.

Classes.

Supervised activities.

Age-cohort socialization.

Group projects.

Fairy history and culture she had clearly missed.

Ordinary educational material she might consider trivial.

Flight activities designed for children rather than professional training.

She didn't dismiss any of it.

That surprised me.

"The group activities might be useful," she eventually decided. "Especially those involving children my age whose upbringing differed from mine."

That was an extremely strange way for a six-year-old to describe socializing.

Still.

Useful was useful.

I granted her ordinary library access.

Then wrote a referral.

Not to another room in our academy.

To the educational liaison responsible for children whose requirements exceeded what a tower program could reasonably provide.

Everwell Prime possessed actual Academies.

Specialized instructors.

Advanced libraries.

Research programs.

Teachers whose Paths involved education at levels significantly beyond keeping twelve young fairies occupied while teaching them arithmetic without letting them crash into the ceiling.

Whether Solaena qualified for any particular one was not mine to decide.

But determining that was exactly what the referral system existed for.

Before she left, I gave her the one warning I thought mattered most.

"Knowing advanced things doesn't make missing basic ones harmless."

"I know."

That was a quick answer.

So I waited.

Until she reconsidered.

"I don't make that assumption anymore."

Better.

I sent the referral.

Someone above me would read it.

Possibly several someones.

Considering the subject list attached to her assessment, I doubted our little tower academy would be the last educational institution to hear about Solaena.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

Retirement had improved my tolerance for politics considerably.

As in, I no longer had to participate in it.

That left me free to discuss the subject without then spending the following one hundred and twenty-eight hours implementing whatever compromise everyone had reluctantly agreed upon.

I first encountered Solaena in one of the mid-tier gardens overlooking the central eastern flight shafts.

She landed on the rail near me, asked whether the adjacent space was occupied, then spent several minutes reading while I continued the more productive activity of watching everyone else hurry somewhere.

Eventually, she closed her book.

"How often does a political organization continue pursuing an objective after achieving the condition that originally justified it?"

That was our introduction.

I answered the actual question instead of forcing her to extract the explanation one sentence at a time.

Often.

Organizations were composed of entities who accumulated interests around them.

A group created to defend one location might survive after the threat disappeared because its members had acquired status, employment, relationships, obligations, infrastructure, and identity through the organization.

A coalition formed against one rival could outlive the rivalry because dissolving would leave all participants individually weaker.

A temporary diplomatic body might become permanent because rebuilding negotiations from nothing every time another dispute appeared was less efficient than preserving an imperfect structure.

Founding [Purpose]s mattered.

So did everything accumulated afterward.

Solaena listened.

"Then an organization's stated [Purpose] can stop being the primary cause of its continued existence without the organization becoming irrational."

"Obviously."

"It isn't obvious if one only reads its founding documents."

I laughed.

"No. Founding documents usually explain why an organization deserves to exist."

That was the first conversation.

The second happened by coincidence.

Probably.

By the fourth, I suspected she had learned where I preferred to waste my retirement.

I didn't mind.

I had spent more than a century working at the middle levels of the Fairy Court's political machinery, much of it around diplomatic relations between groups important enough to create problems but not important enough for the Court's highest authorities to personally solve them.

I had accumulated stories.

Solaena wanted failures in particular.

Successful negotiations also interested her.

But failures fascinated her.

I told her about an old family faction that had surrendered commercially valuable rights merely to prevent a rival lineage from controlling a ceremonial appointment.

Her first interpretation was that the decision had been economically irrational.

So I supplied the missing variables.

Prestige.

Historical legitimacy.

Internal cohesion.

Future access.

The ability to tell supporters that a rival had been denied something symbolically important.

By the end, she had stopped calling the decision irrational.

"Then symbolic resources can become materially relevant if enough entities behave according to them."

"Sometimes."

She tilted her head to the side and waited for me to explain further, the spark of curiosity unconcealable in her bright and lovely Serafae-lineage eyes.

So I explained why sometimes mattered.

Because reality had a habit of punishing people who converted useful observations into general rules.

She wrote that down.

Days later, she appeared with a different question concerning when representation stopped protecting a constituency and started charging that constituency for access to the representation supposedly protecting it.

I asked where she'd gotten that idea.

"Several Court service structures," she answered. "I don't possess enough [Knowledge] yet to make accusations."

That was better phrased than her questions had been several meetings ago.

So I explained intermediaries.

Specialization.

Gatekeeping.

Delegation.

How representatives accumulated information ordinary members didn't possess because becoming informed was part of the reason representation existed.

How that information imbalance created leverage without anyone necessarily planning to exploit it.

How deliberate exploitation could follow anyway.

Solaena's recurring weakness was that she liked reducing people into systems.

Interests.

Incentives.

Information.

Constraints.

Resource [Flow]s.

All helpful.

But all incomplete.

"People aren't contracts," I told her once.

"No," she agreed. "Contracts are people agreeing to make a subset of their behavior more predictable."

Annoyingly adequate.

"But people still act against interests they understand."

"Then another interest outweighed it."

"Sometimes."

That qualification stopped her again.

So I gave her examples where the neat model became harder to maintain.

Spite.

Grief.

Pride.

Fear.

Habit.

[Ambition].

Commitments people continued honoring long after the material rationale vanished because ceasing to honor them would force them to reconsider who they believed themselves to be and the Path they followed.

That last category occupied her for a while.

She didn't argue.

She simply kept returning to it from different directions.

What made the conversations worthwhile wasn't how much she already knew.

Everwell Prime contained children with educational advantages absurd enough to make unusual [Knowledge] unsurprising.

It wasn't her memory either.

Plenty of Aspects could elevate it to the extent of becoming eidetic.

It was what happened between one conversation and the next.

I corrected a simplification, and several days later the simplification was gone.

I gave her an exception, and the next model included it.

I told her one assumption failed under a particular circumstance, and she started checking for that circumstance before using it.

Her opinions remained strange.

She once described a century-long rivalry between two Court factions as "a self-sustaining resource expenditure whose primary output had become mutual identity reinforcement."

I hated that the description wasn't entirely wrong.

But by then, she'd also acquired enough [Comprehension] of ordinary social behavior to know not to say it to members of either faction if she ever met them.

That was progress.

Eventually, I started looking forward to seeing the pale little nuisance land on my railing.

Retirement could get boring.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

I found both of my daughters hanging upside down from the balcony rail.

Their wings were spread.

Their faces were red.

Both were trembling hard enough that I immediately abandoned the laundry I had been folding.

"What are you doing?"

"[Cultivation]!"

Of course.

"Why?"

"Solaena does it!"

That was a name I had heard too frequently over the previous few days.

I righted my first twin.

Then my second.

Neither appreciated being rescued from whatever monumental personal development they imagined themselves achieving.

The explanation arrived in overlapping fragments.

Solaena exercised on public platforms.

Solaena could stay awake for days and only slept once every eight days.

Solaena had a broken bodysuit specifically for [Cultivation].

Solaena could fly very fast.

My daughters had apparently decided that the essential principle underlying all of this was hanging upside down until their arms shook.

"Did she tell you to do that?"

"No."

"She said not to copy her."

I looked between them.

"And then you copied her."

Two guilty faces answered.

Wonderful.

I had deliberately stepped back from pursuing the more demanding portions of my Path when I decided I wanted children.

I had not abandoned it.

Neither had I regretted it.

I simply came to accept it for the obvious trade it was.

Raising two tiny people whose earliest understanding of danger included discovering how far they could fall before remembering they possessed wings allowing them to roughly glide required time.

A lot of it.

And a lot of patience.

My companion had made different compromises.

His work within one of the Fairy Court's diplomatic-relations courts kept him away more often than either of us preferred, but between us, our daughters had grown surrounded by family, teachers, neighbors, other children, and enough adults ready to intervene whenever they invented a new way to injure themselves.

Solaena, according to the increasingly odd fragmented rumors circulating through Lylily Tower...

Had none of that.

So I investigated.

Not personally.

I had twins.

Personally investigating anything more complicated than where they had hidden my writing tool was a luxury.

I asked my companion, and he asked someone who actually knew which juvenile-safety information could be consulted without turning ordinary concern into an invasion of privacy worth a demerit if uncovered.

The answer came back remarkably boring.

Which was reassuring.

Solaena was a registered resident.

Barely more than six years old.

No guardian.

No known parents.

No known lineage.

Nothing indicating she had run away from someone entitled to retrieve her.

No active Court concern involving her welfare.

She had previously been associated with the Faith Of The Aspects.

More recently, she had qualified as an Aspirant of the Pulse Of Eternity.

I reread that part.

A Pulse Aspirant.

At six.

My companion had appended one sentence beneath the information.

I checked twice.

Apparently, so had whoever answered him.

That significantly reduced my concern that the strange child was destroying herself through whatever [Cultivation] routine my daughters admired.

It did not reduce it to zero.

Two days later, I encountered Solaena herself with them.

My first reaction was alarm.

Then I heard what she was saying.

"No. My body has undergone years of [Cultivation]. Yours haven't. You can imitate my [Cultivation] process, but copying what I'm doing without knowing what [Cultivation] is to begin with is inefficient, and this particular [Exertion] isn't appropriate for you anyway."

That was considerably better than what I'd expected.

One of my daughters protested that they could start doing what she did now so they could become good at it later.

Solaena pointed toward the rail.

"You don't even know what I was doing."

They became quieter.

"Ask your mother what you're allowed to practice."

Both immediately turned toward me.

Traitor.

Solaena noticed my presence at approximately the same moment.

"Is that your mother?"

"Yes!"

She nodded toward me.

"I told them not to imitate my [Exertion]s."

"I heard."

"Good."

And that was apparently our introduction completed.

She returned to stretching one wing through a slow, controlled range while my daughters redirected their enthusiasm into demanding a proper [Cultivation] routine from me.

Up close, another concern faded.

Solaena looked cared for.

The bodysuit was pitiful.

She wasn't.

Clean skin.

Well-kept hair.

Wings without obvious damage.

No signs of malnutrition.

No unstable movements despite the reports that she'd remained awake for several days.

Her appearance in social clothing made even more sense now that I had seen her directly.

Beneath the fashions, she simply possessed most of the broad physical traits fairies tended to consider attractive, then maintained them properly.

Whatever strange life she had built for herself, neglect wasn't the correct description.

Anomaly was closer.

But anomalies weren't inherently bad.

Especially when the anomaly had enough [Comprehension] to stop two impressionable children from copying visible [Exertion]s without understanding anything behind them.

I looked down at my daughters.

"You're not sleeping once every eight days."

They hadn't asked yet.

Their expressions told me they had intended to.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

High-tier gardens were wonderful places to practice being useless.

The air was carefully maintained.

Artificial sky-radiance struck the suspended pools at pleasing angles.

Most visitors possessed enough social sense not to interrupt someone sprawled across a flowering branch with both wings hanging loose.

I had spent sixty-three years acquiring exactly the sort of reputation required to be left alone in expensive public spaces.

Then Solaena moved into Lylily Tower.

She never bothered me.

Not that this was the issue.

The issue was that I noticed her.

At first, she was simply another young fairy passing below the garden.

Four wings.

Pale hair.

Well-kept.

Expensive social clothing.

Nothing worth opening both eyes for.

Then my [Fate] shifted.

Barely.

By the time I bothered looking properly, the child was gone.

I took notice then.

The next time she passed, I paid attention.

Not deeply.

Reading another Entity's [Fate] without permission was an excellent way to create problems, and my abilities weren't remotely developed enough to justify turning idle curiosity into a contest against an unknown defensive, occulting, or retaliatory Aspect.

So I touched only the obvious.

Present tendencies.

Near possibilities.

The loose threads every existence dragged behind itself merely by making choices.

And immediately encountered a veil.

A familiar one.

[Secrecy].

Not perfect.

Not beyond everything I could perceive.

But deliberate.

Something had been wrapped around the future direction of the child's Path with a remarkably clear conceptual statement.

I respected that.

Mostly.

Curiosity still existed.

So rather than trying to pierce the veil, I let my [Fate] reading slide along what remained visible around it.

And saw...

A thread.

One.

Thin.

Distinct.

That was all.

No blinding convergence.

No dazzling radiance.

No grand declaration that Civilization had decided the next Era would revolve around one six-year-old fairy.

Just a thread of [Fate].

It wrapped around her.

Then around something she touched.

And from it, I read...

A conversation in a gathering hall.

A merchant.

Several merchants.

A patrol post.

Then another.

A teacher.

A document leaving the tower toward some educational authority.

An old Court functionary sitting in a garden.

Two children watching her perform [Cultivation].

Their mother.

Little intersections.

None grand.

None individually world-changing.

The image reminded me of the web-weaving creatures that sometimes emerged from the Everwell Realm.

Tiny things.

Almost unimpressive alone.

They moved across branches and structures, trailing strands so fine they disappeared unless light caught them correctly.

One strand became two.

Two crossed three.

Then ten.

Then a hundred.

Eventually, what had begun as one creature moving between convenient points became a web extending across everything nearby.

That was what I could glimpse around Solaena.

Not a road.

A web under construction.

The stranger part was that I couldn't tell how much belonged to [Fate] at all.

Most entities moved along relationships already present.

Solaena seemed unusually intent on creating new ones.

A question.

A conversation.

An introduction.

A correction.

Another question.

Another person.

One more point connected to what had come before.

Perhaps that was simply how strong [Ambition] looked when interpreted through my Aspect.

Perhaps my reading was biased because I'd watched her spend most of a week moving throughout Lylily Tower as though remaining uninvolved with anything constituted a misuse of time.

Perhaps the veil of [Secrecy] around her actual future made the mundane connections around it appear disproportionately distinct.

My [Mastery] wasn't sufficient to decide.

So I didn't.

I released the reading.

The veil settled back into irrelevance.

Below me, Solaena emerged from one of the garden routes wearing the tragically patched [Cultivation] bodysuit I'd seen several times now.

She stopped beside a passing fairy.

Asked something.

Received an answer.

Changed direction.

Nothing magnificent happened.

No [Fate] trembled.

No hidden force announced that the meeting mattered.

Another thread merely joined the others.

I closed my eyes again.

Whatever she intended to build here, Lylily Tower possessed an abundance of places for the web to attach itself to.

Only remained to see how this web would survive its first ponderous exploitation.