Time Lady Katie
The Lily Girl
Katie as Adelaide Pierce and Mango as the Departed Spirits in
The Lone and Level Sands
4000 Words
4000 Words
Two in the morning wasn’t a very busy time. That wasn’t to say there weren’t people around the glorious division that was the Tenth; guards Adelaide all knew by name, young Mystics out too late, people enjoying life even at this ungodly hour. But there were fewer of them, and Adelaide didn’t want anyone who respected her, anyone who thought of her as a role model, to know what she was about to do. And she didn’t want Lilith to know.
There was a parable Adelaide liked to recite to herself. Two young men, idealists both, set out to change an unforgiving world. The former became a part of the world, he ascended to the top of power hoping that from the inside of the system mercy could be given. The latter organized people in the street, hoping for revolution. The former became just another face, a man with no will in a chorus determined to keep the status quo. The latter became a monster, who ran the streets red with his dear friend’s blood. Change was an illusion, a fever-dream pursued by madmen and idealists, that lead to suffering and despair.
Adelaide was going to change things.
She stood at the edge of Kosui Shinkoteki, the drab black of her uniform accented for one of the only three times she ever had by the white garment she was afforded as Captain of the Tenth Division. She hated it, she hated its symbolism and the idea that she was somehow anything more than her sister was, than Ren, than Evie. She also didn’t feel like she had truly earned the right to wear it. But tonight, she needed to borrow its authority, its mandate. She needed the strength the haori would lend her words.
Clearing her throat, the Captain gazed out over the lake’s surface. “You wanted to see me?” She had felt the pull toward the shore for near on two weeks, and had ignored it, she had made them wait for her. She didn’t hide well the open contempt she had for the attitude these spirits gave her, and standing before them she had decided was something to be done on her own terms, not on theirs.
We always want to see you, young Captain... the spirits chorused back, only heard in Adelaide’s mind.
As millions of voices rang together in an amalgam of sound, there was no leading speaker but a blending of men, women, children, and elderly that all spoke at once. No form appeared as its source, no change in movement, no physical manifestation of its liveliness. But the departed were awake and energized as they accumulated toward the edge where the flame-haired woman stood.
It has been some time since our last meeting... In fact, it has been some time since any member of the Tenth Division has come to meet with us.
“And who’s fault is that?” responded Adelaide curtly, “I protect you, I punish them for violating your lake, that’s what I do.” And she had. She sent Lucas away for abusing the spirits, she scolded Adele, she had handed down punishments to keep the Spirits’ odd obsessions and thereby prevent them from detesting her more than they already did. “But you only want to talk to certain people. You only showed me Eris after a year. A year, spirits. A lot of my darlings are younger than that, and those older, you’ve never elected to make contact with. They’ve been here. They’ve waited for you. Yuurei, Satoru, Adele, Ren, Apphia, Evie, Lucas...
“I haven’t wanted to talk to you since Lilith left, and I’ll take your attitude for that. That’s deserved, but they’re all waiting for you, so let’s not pretend I’ve led them away from you,” she sounded protective more than angry, like a mother protecting her children from burdens they oughtn’t be forced to carry. She wasn’t about to let the Spirits blame the members of the Tenth for the lack of contact when it was at the worst a two-way communication issue.
But, with a heavy, dark tone to her words, the firebrand added a note of humility after her display of protection, “I haven’t led them anywhere.”
The spirits remained silent for a moment, listening to the anger, the bitterness, the resentment in Adelaide’s voice. The statement about visits was not a judgment to blame but a simple observance of truth.
“That is correct. You have not led them anywhere, Adelaide Pierce, especially not toward us. But contrary to your defensive stance, there is no need to protect your mystics from us. We do not resent the youths of this division for their lack of connection with the divine. After all, their job in the Tenth is to learn more about the departed to gain awareness of the spiritual universe around them and utilize that knowledge to be an integral part of the Gotei.
“However, it appears that they have had no teacher. And it is only the Tenth Division captain, the leading mystic, the strongest link to the divine, that is capable of training the mystics to understand who we are, our mysteries, our knowledge, and the gifts we have to have offer.”
For a moment, there was dissonance among the voices as spirits tried to claim a separate point. Some wanted to deny that thought entirely. Adelaide was most certainly a great teacher, and the antagonizing statement was undeserved. But others attempted to fortify the response, describing the captain as vain, selfish, and spoiled with the divine’s offerings. Nonetheless, they all eventually pacified to agree on one point.
“Most notably, it appears that while you may be suitable for captaincy, perhaps even captain-level to lead the Tenth when they were formerly Arcane Specialists, you were not ready to accept the mantle of the Captain of the Mystics of the Divine.”
It made a soft laugh emerge from the dark smile of the Captain. “You actually think higher of me than I do, Spirits,” she didn’t think she was even capible of serving as a Captain, but she was certainly not their Captain. On that, they agreed emphatically. The reason she couldn’t teach people about the gifts and wonders of the spirits of the lake was that she wasn’t very fond of them. They resented usefulness, they begrudged information that, in her estimation, could really help people and preferred to feed off the Tenth Division instead of sharing their knowledge and power.
She didn’t like them, and honestly that was the kind of thing that kept them from being more relevant. “I’ve taught them to revere you, as an ancient and foreboding force. You know things that make me wonder if the legends of the Akashic Record might’ve been real. But your gifts?” She shook her head. “I can’t teach them something I don’t know about. You shared gifts with Lilith. You shared disdain with me.” Folding her arms across her chest, Adelaide gave the spirits her best glower.
“I respect you, but only because Lilith adored you and I adore Lilith,” she really wasn’t just here to antagonize them, as much as it might’ve seemed like it, “and you dealt with me only because Lilith adored me.” That was a pretty fair assessment, she figured. Particularly after the Isogu incident and the indiscretion with Evie. “As you’ve been no less than the hundredth entity to point out, being Lilith is outside my realm of capability. I’m not going to be her. Even thinking I could’ve replaced Inuzuri is a richer compliment than I deserve.” So they needed a new deal.
“Replace Inuzuri?” Together, the spirits chuckled at the thought. “Never, Miss Pierce. But to be competent if he left his station the way that Lilith left hers... perhaps.”
The voices grew more stern as they approached the other topic. “As for disdain, young Captain... No. We do not disdain you. At your heart, you are good and you mean the best for the Tenth Division. Just as we do. Contrary to your beliefs, we have adopted the mystics as our own -- select shinigami that have shown interest in learning more about the intricacies of the spiritual realm. And because of that interest, that desire to learn more, we have offered to help their growth by bestowing abilities and items.
“You were not always a mystic, Adelaide Pierce, and thus you know what it is like in other divisions. The shinigami searches from within, grows on their own terms, survives on self-reliance and the aid of their peers. There is no alternate source of power to guide them. They are not spoiled like you are.
“Yes, as departed spirits, we have millenia of knowledge that we do not offer freely. Yes, we keep secrets from you and your division. Yes, we expect the mystics to develop their connection to the divine, to build a rapport, to learn as much as they can about us so that we may learn more about them. Our mysteries have been untouched before Lilith became captain, and thus, to earn the right to see such clandestine information, we demand to share only with shinigami that can be trusted.
“We do not believe in gluttony. In greed. In hedonism. It is what makes any living being weak, arrogant, selfish. It is what shattered our relationship with you, Adelaide Pierce, and it is the reason why the mystics only command a mere fraction of their former glory.
“You must know that the connection between shinigami and departed is dying. And if that bridge were to break, it would take millenia to establish that link again.”
She tried not to scoff at their sanctimonious bullshit.
“You guys are a piece of work,” she shook her head. The problems the two had with one another were far deeper, far more fundamental than she had first observed. Taking a breath, she continued. “You know, calling my charges spoiled because they have you and then turning around and saying a life worth living causes weakness is like you’ve learned from Eris’ echo exactly how to piss me off. Because what makes us weak is you. Every gift you give us we could learn to do for ourselves - we should learn to do for ourselves. Instead, Lilith wanted us to rely on your fickle ethereal asses.
“You know so much; you knew who I was. You know what I’ve done. Gods don’t intimidate me anymore, and you’re not even gods. So stop pretending that I can just be Lilith, because from the moment I walked through that gate you knew exactly what your friend was getting herself into by bringing me in. You knew exactly who I was.” She huffed, her ability to show reverence clearly gone in the arrogance and self-importance they had on display. She was at a level of disapproval wholly unique to the Captain. She’d never been so angry at the very notion of her home, and it was likely because she’d never know how deeply antithetical they were to everything that she believed in.
“So,” she didn’t give them a moment to respond to her harsher tone, “you want a bridge. Bridges connect two things. Relationships require two parties. Symbiosis requires living together, in unison. You want that, right? That’s what your deal with Lilith was all about?” she let a few seconds of silence sit over the lakeshore before pressing on, “Then we can come to an equitable arrangement.” The strong emphasis on that one word clearly suggested that it was a quality she found the current state of affairs lacking.
That said, she gave the slightest of shrugs, “I’m not going to give a free ride to a parasite. You wanna play some things close to the vest, and I appreciate that. I would to, in your position. But look in the reflection of your precious lake before calling me selfish and spoiled. You can be relevant to those people or not be. The details of how I’m more than willing to negotiate, but I’ll be damned if you’ll choose to not be and then blame them for not seeking you out. I’ll be damned if you don’t want to participate in this relationship and expect me to play the role of some oppressor. I swear to Sappho, this bridge breaks it’s on your own damn terms, it’s because you refuse to try.
“And your definition of ‘try,’ Miss Pierce?”
“Things change. I imagine immortality gives you little patience for this, but that’s the nature of ephemeral life. Lilith is gone. I’m not Lilith. Hell, I don’t even really like you, but I want to do right by her. I want to find a way to work with you. I’m willing to enforce your mandates, I’m willing to give you way more control over the operations here than I’m comfortable with, and I’m willing to protect this holy site, but I want something in return. I want you to make an effort with my officers. You need trust them? Not that you shouldn’t already know about who they are from their dead friends, but hey, learn. You watch everything that enters this lake, you really expect me to believe you didn’t watch Lucas lose faith in you? You didn’t ever see Yuurei coming here as a bird to meditate or Satoru viciously protecting you? And they’re doing this with absolutely zero reason to believe in you other than the fact that they trust you. Not to mention every single damned person here puts their lives in your hands like idiots. They have a lot more trust in you than I do, and the only one of them that gets any of your graces is me? Seriously?
“That’s what I want. That would be a hell of an olive branch. You say you care about them, well it’s time to walk the goddamn walk, and not just talk a good game. That’d be trying to make things work. That’d be changing to a world that already left you behind once before.”
“We have attempted to speak with Yuurei, Satoru, Adele, and at one point, even Lucas. But this two-way connection that you speak of, Miss Pierce, must come from them as well. They need to have the proper education from you -- their role model and teacher.
“Their teacher who forgets too easily that we have given techniques and helped develop items for the Tenth Division. Their teacher who demands more and more, yet cannot spare the time to meditate beside us or apologize for her lewdness in our waters, for her excessive demands on information that we do not wish to share. Their teacher... who has ruined all that her mentor has worked to build.”
They had precisely one good point, and the Captain was in no mood to concede it. “Why would I be moved to meditate by you? If for no other reason, you should stop whispering and playing inane silly games and be forthright with my members to find people who have any fondness for you in their hearts, because I lack such an affliction. We have exactly one thing in common, Spirit. We both wish she was here instead of me.” And, honestly, both thought she should’ve apologized for the Evie incident, but she didn’t have the calmness require to do so at the moment.
Instead, she was comfortable asserting some high ground over them. “Your items, your techniques, they all bind us to you in chains of enslavement. We don’t have an equitable arrangement under Lilith’s bargain, we have an abusive relationship, and one I’m entirely comfortable with letting you shatter. But, I do have fondness for her in my heart, so I’m offering you a courtesy. A chance to hold on to the relevance you seem to want. I’ll give you everything you need if you stop treating this division as a collection of toys to manipulate for your amusement.
“I don’t expect you to cooperate, Sappho knows I’d never get that, or for you to ‘freely reveal’ yourselves, but if one of you tries to make contact, you’re doing it for a reason, one can only assume. Why be so damned cryptic? Why did Eris need to give some truncated message to me about luxurant graces? Why couldn’t she just have shown the hell up and said ‘I miss you’?” This was a question that sounded personal, but really wasn’t. Adelaide dismissed the shade of Eris as being a rather cruel game the Spirit liked to play, but wasn’t going to charge it with such an accusation when she was trying, though admittedly with progressively less fervor, to salvage this relationship.
“There is no relationship to salvage, Adelaide Pierce.”
They paused as the voices softened. “What we shared with Lilith was a relationship of love. Of purity. Of trust. She meditated to explore our knowledge, to know us both as one and as individuals. We have millenia of lives that compile into one amalgam of energy. Daily, she would walk with us through the histories of our children, through the stories of our wise, through the hardships of our suffering. She loved us just as we loved her. She learned from us, as we found companionship in her. And as she continued to discover, she expanded that knowledge to her division.
“We did not chain her, that was never our intention. She was too kind and good to deserve such abuse. As for your members... We can not share such an intimate relationship. More knowledge is still required, not merely by choice, but by necessity.
“Lilith, as you know, has the unique ability to read minds. Her clairvoyance and sublime understanding of the beings around her made it much easier for her to connect with the divine. As for you, Miss Pierce, you were Lilith’s closest mystic companion. She trusted you the most, shared the most knowledge with you, spent the most time with you. But you were still in training. She failed in properly teaching you.
“...And we all failed to fill in the vacancies after she transferred to the Central Forty-Six.”
Hearing their story and the softened tone, Adelaide let go of a lot of the hostility they had inspired. It wasn’t just Lilith’s unique abilities when it came to the area of linking minds, but the trust of the Spirits that gave her that Adelaide was incapable of mimicking, and she was well aware of this. She didn’t believe that they had much in the way of individual identities, any more than a ripple on a pond was substantively different from the rest of the water. This alone undermined her trust of them, it made her see their very nature as deceptive and misleading.
“You probably were never fond of me, given your disposition and the fact that you know who I am better than anyone else. Maybe that was wise, maybe that was self-fulfilling. I don’t know. I do know that none of us wanted this. I never wanted to be a Captain, Lilith never wanted to be a judge, and you never wanted to lose her and get me. I mean, hell, there are people who you’d approve of less than me, but not a lot of them I’m sure, and honestly it’s only because you know I’d do anything for the people Lilith cared about.” No one had asked for this reality, and no one particularly enjoyed it. But they were powerless to change it.
What did Adelaide do when she found herself powerless? What she always did. She was a literate, noble Briton, and she drew comfort from stories from her youth. “Ozymandias was the king of kings,” she recited, having no knowledge that the story she had known was largely fictitious, “and Babylon was a wasteland in the blink of an eye. No great work survives the relentless march of time. I just wish hers could. We don’t have fondness for one another, but we do adore her. You’re immortal and I stop time and we can’t make her legacy at least last five years? Does Babylon fall so quickly now?” She knew it better than most, honestly, because of kindou. You can play tricks on history and pull wool over it’s eyes, but time marches on eventually, and eventually everything crumbles to dust.
“Babylon fell a long time ago, Adelaide. We have only been walking in its ruins.”
Distant wailings echoed in the background, begging, pleading for another chance. To stay. To teach. But despite their cries and the dissonance in the voices, the leading persona remained firm.
“We anticipate your next move, Miss Pierce.”
“I could just leave you like this,” the tone she spoke with made the fact that it wasn’t a serious consideration clear. One other quality they seemed to share was an eagerness to embrace certain fates, “I could just see if those other voices win one day.”
“You’re a terrible liar. Those other voices are the same ones that thought being Captain of the Mystics suited you.”
“Ah, so there are those among you who I like. Good to know.”
It was an improbable event that this encounter ended with her sensing a humored grin from the spirits for the first time in all of ever. “I expect to be welcomed by them in a very short period of time. The rest of you, though, should enjoy the quiet while it exists, because I imagine my footprint will leave one hell of an impression when all is said and done.”
With that, she finally gave them the fate they knew was coming, and honestly that she knew was coming, from the moment she approached the shores of the lake. Green-hued energy began to surround the area even before words left her mouth, “The recluse seeks lost sanctuary. The forsaken seeks paradise. The nomad seeks his home.” The shimmering lights of green clung to the lake like a curtain of brilliant energy and the world around Adelaide seemed to buckle and warp under the power. “I seek a path where the uninvited may not follow!”
Coursing through her mind alongside the words, the images, the raw force of the universe being torn, Adelaide saw faces. Eris, the Mystics, Isogu, Issei, Lilith... she remembered the times by the lakeshore with thrown shoes and the birth of a forbidden romance and a soldier wounded deeper than magic could heal. She remembered the affection she had for her dearest and closest friend. She remembered the joy and wonder when her young recruits discovered the Spirits, usually by angering them. She remembered two years as a Mystic. Assuming they could feel her thoughts like Lilith could, she mournfully pushed those out of mind, powerfully commanding them as she commanded the Spirits themselves; I cast you out!
“Let the chosen find shelter amid the growing storms!”
There was no way to know what the world would be like when the sun rose again. Who would accept Adelaide’s betrayal, who would leave. Would her sister forgive her? Would her commander? Would her friend? Who would understand what she had done?
“Kindou number One Hundred and Four!”
At the end of the day it didn’t matter who forgave her, or who understood. This wa always going to happen, the only question that needed asking was when. And after the incident with the Ninth, even that question ceased mattering. Who she was, who the Spirits were... this was all doomed to be the case from the start. Probably from the moment Sayis refused to be a Judge. Maybe from before that, from the moment the growing discontent between the Gotei and the Forty-Six necessitated that meeting.
“Kaichuu.”
It was done. With a rush of wind and a flash of green energy, the world ripped and spun and burned and tore and finally, in the most terrifying act of landscaping ever known, Kosui Shinkoteki ceased to exist.
And boundless, bare, the lone and level sands stretched on.