Claudius of Elsinore

With Dark well in the rearview mirror (a metaphor Claudius is allowed to make, with his newfound automobile expertise) Claudius can finally stop stockpiling spices, and dedicate himself to the more frivolous sciences. It’s taken him three seasons to isolate the compounds from the remarkable plants that bloomed all Rainbows, or to find a use for the shimmering salts his elfin counterpart guaranteed were magic. Claudius would have declined to buy bags of 'magical salts from another world,' but the other Claudius insisted they were a gift.

(Because, he wrote at his most condescending, apparently Hydaelyn knew you weren’t getting anything from your planet this Rainbows, and deemed this worthy of pity. No wonder they call her the Mothercrystal, she is so endlessly ... mothering.)

Regardless of the source, those salts were magic. Lan Wangji said he could sense the subtle, twisting flows of qi within them, and so could Galahad. Which led, of course, to Claudius heaping praise after praise upon his husband, asking for details on every qi-bearing object in the room. (Which was, of course, all of them.)

When he got around to testing, the otherwordly salts produced results Claudius would have once considered unlikely, if not plainly impossible. He had a lifetime's disappointments to draw on: herbals all over Europe possessed plantlore to improve a person's luck, or protect loved ones from harm. In alchemical texts, the more outrageous of these claims could be explained away as metaphors, or as codes and keys. Alchemists loved to hide their secrets behind coded language, almost as much as they loved an extravagant metaphor.

In the end, no concoction ever changed Claudius's fortunes, except for poison. He had no magic salts. Simply by mingling with salts from a magical world, dill and vervain warded off malicious witchcraft. (Modified cells from the Sun-Moon Dew Mushroom -- phyllobaeis humiformis, he's taken to calling it -- improved the admixture's efficacy.) Distilling a fern flower brought out all its promised luck, though Claudius found love-lies-bleeding to be superior as a sleep and fertility charm. Days passed in his workshop, refining formulations, filling his batch-book with recipes. That done, he began brewing and bottling batches.

With crates he certainly didn't move himself, Claudius set up shop in Café Ami. He sits at the table with his stock is on display, indulging in a glass of full-bodied wine and waiting for custom.

Lan Wangji could not leave it to Magnus to trot information back and forth. Luo Binghe has already endured his presence, and although their conversation was not pleasant – it never could have been – it was brisk and concerned only with logistics. Of course Claudius himself is the next person he seeks. How much time have the two of them spent untangling this mystery, buffeted about by good luck, bad luck, random happenstance, determination, and a relentless grip on the unshakeable fact of their trust in one another? No one could deserve more to hear it straightaway. Aornis is here, thinly disguised as Thursday Next. She has, as Claudius himself might say, overplayed her hand. Luo Binghe’s mind is closed to her manipulations.

Claudius paces the room right after receiving the news, from time to time tangling a hand in his hair, whole body alight with anxious energy. It’s an energy that’s built since he first saw Aornis’s image in black-and-white, and promised Galahad to take care.

No peace is possible with Aornis. The only thing she wants – revenge – is something no one here can give her. Without it, she has nothing left except to live out her brother’s legacy, a legacy of evil for evil’s sake. A legacy that would mean inflicting the mansion with more and more pointless miseries, all to make a dead man proud. Claudius never lived the events of his play – never saw what came of ghosts compelling the living to recreate themselves in the image of the dead – but he knows it was a tragedy.

He knows that Aornis needs to be stopped. He also knows that fate is on her side – fate, and history, since she can warp every resident’s memory to reflect whatever narrative she needs to make. At least he and Lan Wangji have a handle on history, making their own records, affirming their shared truths. But fate is another thing altogether. No one can tell the future, and by their very nature, Aornis’s powers can’t create exact outcomes. Only the unlikeliest, the ones no one would think to predict. There’s some assurance in that, in knowing even Aornis isn’t fully in control. But the unknown is still more frightening than the known.

“We need to give ourselves the very best chance,” he tells Lan Wangji. “And for that, we need to rely on one another. I’m not opposed to working with Luo Binghe – under ordinary circumstances, I’d be quite happy to furnish Luo Binghe with information, point him in her direction, and let him solve our problem for us. But with all Luo Binghe’s power, his power alone isn’t sufficient. It failed him once, under the power of entropy. If he tries it again, tries it alone, then she’ll unleash that same entropy to win against whatever the odds. Then who’s to say with Luo Binghe out of the way, she won’t clear the board and start the cycle anew? A lone protagonist is too easy to erase. Our advantage has to be our numbers. Entropy and memory manipulation aside, she’s only one woman, and there are many more of us.” At that, he snaps his fingers. There’s a whisper of potential, seized out of the empty air. “That’s how we stack the odds closer to our favor. There’s so many of us, from so many worlds. Where one person’s power fails, another’s may still function. Anyone with unique martial abilities, anyone who’s made protecting the mansion their duty … we need all of them. Then we have a chance.” Here he pauses in his pacing, takes in a slow, steadying breath.

All stillness in contrast with Claudius’s restless motion, Lan Wangji has been watching without interrupting. “SecUnit will want to help.” He sees no reason to dissuade it. He gently turned away Gideon’s offer of her sword, but while he worries about SecUnit’s happiness, he has no such concern about its safety.

“We’d be fools not to accept,” Claudius says, with a smiling shake of the head. Neither of them are fools. “Of everyone here, I know the least about SecUnit … yet I would trust SecUnit with my life. That’s not the usual way for me, knowest thou. SecUnit doesn’t have to be familiar with a person to believe they’re worthy of protection; it’s rescued me, and the ones I care for, time and again.” It means something to Claudius, who spent his whole childhood hoping for a protector, knowing he’d never earn one unless he learned to play the game and ingratiate himself. SecUnit is as far away from those games as it can possibly get. “SecUnit is perfect, actually,” he muses aloud. “It can communicate over distances. For coordination, it could be invaluable.”

They have been circling Aornis for so long now, months of inaction and lurching from one sickening discovery to another. Lan Wangji is not, quite, eager for the fight. He is eager for it to be finished. He is eager to face her directly with his sword in his hand, knowing who she is and that she can be stopped. “I am willing to fight alongside Luo Binghe,” he says. Luo Binghe may not be willing to fight alongside him. He doesn’t care. “His sword is corrupted.” He darts a glance at Claudius, who pauses long enough, holding eye contact, to catch the rest of his meaning: that when Luo Binghe buckled under Aornis’ power, the blackened energy of his blade may have done him no favors. “Bichen obeys me.”

Claudius smirks with appreciation. “Thy way with words, Wangji. Thou sayest well.” He nods. “Thou’lt be our advance guard. It’s best to keep some cards in our hand, reduce the chances of friendly fire, should those chances rise. It will also keep reinforcements out of range while coincidences are small — remember thou, that’s how she said it started. We’ll have one team with thyself and Luo Binghe, another in abeyance, and SecUnit’s drones to coordinate between them. SecUnit should also have some sort of back, or second — another way of signaling in case a drone shuts down at a crucial moment.” Claudius is a little too good, he realizes, at thinking of all the ways a sure thing could fail. Perhaps that’s why planning soothes him; it puts his restless mind to use. “How does that sound to thee?”

“Agreed.” Lan Wangji draws his hands from where they have been folded behind his back and curls his fingers around Bichen’s hilt. “Magnus and Luo Binghe are both concerned about her weapon. The gun.” He hesitates. “If coincidence does not stop me too quickly, I will restrain her or remove her hands.” Naturally, that will also remove her ability to use the gun. These are gruesome details to consider, but he can’t imagine Claudius would ask to be spared any detail of the strategies he is weighing.

“Ah. The Gordian knot.” Recognizing his friend might not know the reference, Claudius laughs. Despite how dire this all is, he still finds it in him. “Hast thou read the legend? It’s one of those emperor-aggrandizing tales – but in it, an empire was promised to anyone who undo a fiendishly complex knot. Many tried, and found it beyond them. Alexander the Great – the aggrandized emperor, you can tell because he’s been named the Great – was the one to finally succeed. Rather than struggle with the untangling as so many others did before him, he used his sword to cut right through it. Thou hast found a similar solution to a knotty problem.” Far from horrified, Claudius appears to admire it.

That Claudius has the good humor to pause and explain himself has the ring of a fortunate omen. “Mn,” Lan Wangji says, mustering up wryness. He hopes their resident emperor is amenable to working in concert with him. He finds Claudius’ gaze again, steady. He is ready to carry out whatever is asked of him.

“I’ll organize this,” he decides. “Find those who can help, and let them know what we need from them.” Claudius gives Lan Wangji a smile. “It’s no worse than organizing a wedding dance with two disorganized grooms. Or a wedding of one’s own. Thou wilt come to a fitting with Kade after all this is over, wilt thou not?”

Lan Wangji relaxes his grip on his sword, softened by the thought. For too long, it has felt as if everything is leading up to this fight. Considering the moments of happiness that may come afterward is heartening. “I would not miss it.”

Claudius spends his time below the pavilion focused on research: comparing records made with a luxmeter to ensure the balance of sunlight and moonlight doesn't stray, collecting samples of the loamy soil to conduct tests on in his workshop, or with the few alchemical arrays he'd packed to bring along. He exchanges signs with Galahad and Magnus when he needs assistance, or to explain what a device does so Magnus can relay it to Luo Binghe. At some point, he decides to do away with the vagueness of keep the soil moist with exact measurements made in watering globes, set to slowly release throughout the day. It will take that particular worry off Magnus's plate, he thinks. Much of what he does is slowly teach Magnus ways to sustain a garden without constant attention. He also sits with Galahad, while Galahad draws, and takes exacting notes on what Galahad is seeing.

"It needs to be part of a living ecosystem," Claudius says one day, after a moment's reflection. "Any plant, where it lives natively, has a network of native connections supporting it. Symbiotic or parasitic, predating or pollinating, systems which break down the soil in which it can grow, propagate, and thrive. That's only slightly metaphorical," he adds. "Most of that's quite literal. Some plants will not start the propagation process, unless the conditions are such that their progeny will thrive. I think the Sun-Moon Dew Mushroom might be one of them, and that's why its environment is so particular. The perfect balance of sunlight and moonlight, and all the other descriptors that make it hard to find."

He taps his fingers, caught up in all the other details of the theory, before he comes to the point. "Keeping qi circulating certainly fulfills many of its needs. But we really ought to plant more around it, replicating what we can of the Bai Lu Forest. Fortunately,” he says to Galahad, “Magnus and I have some experience in that regard." Not with re-planting the Bai Lu Forest, but certainly another world's landscape after careful questions and research.

He casts a look in Magnus's direction, signing ask LB about forest? He's given up fingerspelling Luo Binghe each time, likewise given up creating a name-sign that avoids all offense. Planting will also help SY body.

Perhaps, in time, he’ll speak to Luo Binghe directly. The cool distance Claudius gives him for now is respect, not fear, though he doubts Luo Binghe understands or accepts it. Luo Binghe believed respect was born of fear. But Claudius feared his brother more than anything in the world, and all that fear turned to was weary disdain. What he respected most, in his world, was Gertrude’s magnanimity, her kindness.

She would be glad, he thinks, to see him gardening. She would be proud, and that pride carries him through, along with his own conviction.

All of Claudius's plans are more or less in order -- the dance the longest-running, but there's little left do, the room set up with Galahad's assistance, food and music arranged, flowers growing in the greenhouse so he can still create centerpieces in the last breath of autumn. (The gentians for Lan Wangji are growing, too, and their first buds starting to show.) His social schemes will unfold naturally for the time being, so that when Claudius needs to push, it can be with a subtle hand.

This morning, the morning after the zombie attack¹, Claudius is out on a more personal objective. Once again, he's taken a leaf from Laurel's old habits of exploration, roaming the mansion and opening drawers, with the hope of something needful within them. A silver watch for Galahad, he thinks. Two silver watches, in complementary styles. And then an assortment of silver watches.

He needs his choice of them. Some are squared-faced, some are round, some are set with with numerals, some have radial lines to mark the time. Some have the phases of the moon and it shouldn't surprise him, that the phases match the moons over the mansion. Claudius holds them up, trying to imagine what would suit Galahad best, a heavy band or a delicate chain, and what would look handsomest peeking below the sleeves of his soft sweaters.

¹ That's what this morning is, no one question it.

 A spray of soft myrtle is easy enough to find. Claudius half-expected to find myrtle blossoms weren't in season, the way it went when he was searching for hawthorn flowers with Sagramore -- but the mansion gardens have a way of either confounding expectations or clamoring to meet them, with herbs for herbal remedies and charming flowers for the welcome table. Whatever mischievous witchcraft makes the garden last for months without rain doesn't ignore expectations altogether.

Myrtle blossoms bloom, but high up enough that Claudius needs a ladder to reach them. He's sure even his very tall friends would struggle, though Lan Wangji would no doubt gracefully and effortlessly float up among the branches with cultivation. Claudius doesn't have that option. But if this is the only obstacle he has to face to make his feelings known to Galahad, then it's an obstacle worth fetching a ladder for.

(It isn't the only obstacle -- there are obstacles aplenty -- but the thoughtful array of flowers Claudius received and Laertes's dismayed conviction that a jonquil means one thing both keep Claudius motivated.)

So here Claudius is atop a ladder, overdressed for gardening with a white silk opera scarf, a pair of shears in his hand as he bends down a spray of myrtle to snip. The things he does, he thinks, for love.

Claudius has made what he considers to be an imminently reasonable decision to address his current troubles with alchemical intervention. He's hardly the first to do it. The effects of poppy-juice are well-attested, and when powdered, dissolve beautifully into alcohol. No one could condemn him.

Yes, all right, many people could condemn him. Many people could condemn him, and bid him to repent for the myriad sins he's committed in his short time in this mansion, never mind on Earth. And he'd condemn himself, if he had the mind for it, for not imbibing the concoction in his room just before sleep. But he hasn't slept well enough to predict it.

That doesn't mean he should be drunk on laudanum in the middle of the day in the parlor. But there are so many parlors. Who actually cares? Claudius sprawls on the sofa, bottled drink in hand, and reflects on the many things he doesn't care about.

 It's a strange, Claudius thinks, how accustomed people become to their circumstances. On the way back from the garden, with marigolds for his room, he reflects on how many unexpected twists and denouements his life has taken. He recalls Laertes's mounting horror hearing Claudius tell of his recent brush with death, after it had become near-trivial to Claudius. Or at least, no longer out-of-the-ordinary, since it happened in the course of ordinary life.