A profound silence fell as Zephyrin tried to convince himself that he had somehow misheard. ‘…sition?’ Inquisition? Was the boy talking about one of their exams? But no—if his question were as banal as that, he wouldn’t have come at this hour. For that reason, and anticipating Foudris’s words with a sinking feeling, Zephyrin finally articulated his thoughts.

“What did you just say?” he asked in a hardly audible tone, suddenly conscious of the dryness of his throat.

“The Transition,” repeated Foudris, his whisper airy and urgent. “I’m sorry about reading your journal. I’ve been trying to forget what I read, but the words keep coming back to me, no matter how hard I—”

“—you were the one who cracked my cipher?” Zephyrin interrupted deliberately, as if his mind was trying to stave off the inevitable by means of fastidious but ultimately meaningless clarifications.

“Yes. It was easy,” replied the boy, before wincing a little in regret of his unthinking remark. He needn’t have worried; Zephyrin was too preoccupied by the content of his revelations to worry about their form. “Let me make sure I understand you correctly. You had already heard of the term before coming across it in my journal?” he rasped in a tone close to his speaking voice, only remembering to lower it at the sight of Foudris’s eyes darting over to Viristin’s sleeping form.

Returning his eyes then to Zephyrin, Foudris licked his lips nervously. “Yes. And of others. ‘GNC’… that stands for ‘Gaulyrian National Church’, right?”

How could this child know this? How? As the shadows cast by the pulsating orb of mana in his palm writhed on the walls, Zephyrin felt his world twisting along with them. First his father, and now this. Formerly well-arranged, he had the creeping sensation that reality was changing form before his eyes, like a contortionist in a circus of horrors bending his limbs past what seemed to be their breaking point to assume a grotesque posture. And worse still, he perceived himself not as an actor on the stage of history, or the director of the grand proceedings, but a mere member of the fascinated gallery, given only the opportunity to watch the unnerving spectacle unfold.

What had happened to his vaunted foreknowledge? To the optimism that had sustained him throughout the soul-crushing wait to be reborn and walk anew upon the earth? And then, seconding these doubts with unwelcome rapidity, another misgiving surged in his mind, one so wild that he was inclined to overpower and banish it from his speculations completely, yet which resisted all such resistance.

Did the Goddess send someone else back to the past?

Zephyrin shivered again, but this time not of cold. The possibility had to be ignored for now—not for the sake of his sanity, as Zephyrin knew himself to be at least the equal of an unseen party endowed with knowledge similar to his own, but because grappling with it now would hinder him from properly managing the present situation.

“Foudris,” Zephyrin said quietly, exerting himself to the utmost to sound and remain calm, so as to not scare off the boy. “You did a good thing, telling me this. But I need to know—where did you hear these words, and from whom?”

Foudris regarded him unblinkingly. “At home.”

“Home.” Zephyrin repeated the word blankly. While the natural follow-up demanded by that single word readily occurred to his mind, the inadvertent cause of his worries spared him the trouble of asking. “All sorts of people come to my house,” the boy supplied. “High and low nobles, clerics, bourgeois…even male Exalted, from time to time.”

Zephyrin was a hairsbreadth from speaking up, but an undefinable something told him that if he remained silent, the tidbits volunteered by Foudris would become a flow of exposition.

“I should explain… I’m the last d’Érazh. My grandfather squandered what remained of our fortune gambling, and my father had no choice but to practice law. He couldn’t maintain our estate with his income. After he sold our ancestral domain and died, his last client took me in.”

Foudris’s words roused Zephyrin from his intellectual torpor. Albeit with some difficulty, he found himself integrating this information to his existing body of knowledge. Though House d’Érazh had once belonged to the landed lower nobility, that was now no longer the case, and certainly explained Foudris’s ready acquiescence to Loris’s underhanded proposal. “What’s the name of your guardian? Is he a noble?”

“It’s a she, and she isn’t nobility.” Foudris’s tone and expression were unified by a curious sobriety.

A baseblood—and a woman, at that…? Who could she be? Zephyrin carefully posed the question to his unlooked for, but now very important guest.

“Mademoiselle Nydalie Huron,” answered Foudris, in a quiet but decided manner that plainly indicated Zephyrin should be familiar with her identity. In point of fact, however, he was a complete loss.

“D’Érazh, I’m far from well acquainted with the ways of the city…” This was a bit of a gamble. Viristin had sniffed out one way or another that ‘dy Valensis’ wasn’t his true name, and that he hailed from the country; had Foudris arrived at the same conclusion?

To Zephyrin’s relief and Foudris’s credit, he inclined his head apologetically “I beg your pardon. It slipped my mind that you’re a new arrival to Lutesse…” A pause. “Mademoiselle Huron earned her reputation first by the… liberality of her affections; and then in after years, when her beauty had waned, by the vivacity and wit of her correspondence. Her salon was famous in the days of Kings Rudolf XI and XII.”

“So she was a courtesan,”

“… Yes, that’s correct.”

“And so, the vestiges of her beauty and lingering fame still attract many distinguished personages to her drawing room?”

Foudris nodded in the dim lighting. “Yes. Just recently the cardinal-bishop of Lutesse came to visit...”

Zephyrin had heard enough. His agitation rising, he asked with open impatience, “So who was it? Who mentioned the words that you came across in my journal?” Foudris opened his mouth…

*creak*

The crunch of boot on wood interrupted their whispers. Foudris’s eyes widened. He raised a finger to his lips. “Shh!”

Zephyrin whipped his head back and saw light flooding through the gap between the door and floor like spilled water. There was no doubting it; behind the door, portable lantern in hand… stood a prefect.