Stars Rise

XXIX. Exequi Cytheria and Cristo

"Please get to business," said Liao Cytheria. "I have a meeting in fifteen minutes."

He crossed one leg in coal black slacks over the other. The old woman wore white business attire.

The elderly woman behind the name tag on the desk that read Exequi Liao Cytheria. Yet he knew Exequi Liao Cytheria, and this aged, ancient, wizened person was not the woman he knew.

The woman he knew a hundred years from now would have her youth restored by a magic spell. 

Tilting his head slightly, he kept trying to find her. Wrinkles and grays seemed like an optical illusion, a temporary mirage placed over the Cytheria he knew. Unchanged dark irises, the blacks of her eyes, the clever glimmer in them. She was in there.

More and more recognizable facial features revealed themselves, but he had to search beyond a false facade placed over her skin, concealing the roundness of her cheeks with a crinkled paper sleeve. A paleness changed the look of her button nose, too. The skin on her hands, thin, flecked with age freckles.

Honestly, he just wasn't accustomed to seeing an aged person in the flesh.

In a hundred years most every immortal would have bought the eternal youth spell. No one would be elderly. Though it was so contradictory, in a hundred years Cytheria would be younger. The clever eyed woman would gleam radiantly, the rosy cheeks of an adolescent augmented by blush. Shining blackened hair reflecting light like yunzi stones would be contained by the same bun worn by this white haired elder.

Today the spell didn't exist except as a secret, a rumor, and in Cytheria's case in particular, a promise.

Cristo answered her, "We spoke last night after the masquerade. I said I was a financial seer."

"You said you were a financial seer." Nothing got past her.

Speaking again, she confirmed that her voice remained smooth and full, not a crack in its musicality.

"That's not exactly the case. The service I offer is a little different. It still contains a vision, yet one unrelated to financial affairs — or at least, related only indirectly." He paused to let her wonder what he was offering.

Behind her back and that of a looming desk chair, a precipice dropped a thousand feet. At the center of the skyline, literally soaring above downtown, they floated above dozens of skyscrapers. The view never ceased to shock — not for those with a slight fear of precipices, at least.

He continued, "You're aware of black market magic use, and even the black market development of magical advancements?"

He knew this elder did, because Cytheria told him she did. Answering only with a slight narrowing of the eyes, Cytheria listened.

"You know that it's possible to see through time. As an executive of the company that invented magic, you must be able to imagine how an innate future telling ability granted to few by the stars can be developed, through trial, error, research and development, into an exact science." The body language identical to that of his Cytheria turned the looming magic-cast chair into a throne, its back slightly translucent so that the view of the cityscape began where her shoulder ended. A greater image of her power Cristo couldn't imagine, complete with her regal posture.

After those words lingered, he had only two more to add. "It has."

While she screened him with patient dark eyes, she did have an authoritarian clock ruling this conversation, and she moved forward with little caution. "I have heard rumors. Whispers of intentional, controlled and reproducible forays through time. Constellation does not develop such magical advancements for a reason, Mr. Somnare."