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The Spire had been quiet since the Witches betrayed their Son and Vassal of Knowledge.
How diligently his disciples of deceit did work in the absence of their Master to keep his vision alive. Ruinous were the rumors spread by his first; Black Sapphire Cookie. Tedious were the stories strung by his second; Candy Apple Cookie.
How tirelessly his servants did toil in the service of their craft and study. The Sapphire was faithful in his efforts to keep the Spire in a stasis that would be familiar, should his Master escape confinement. The Apple was devoted in her attempts to redecorate and rearrange even the most sacred of chambers within the Spire.
How exhausted the Sapphire was when his work was found undone by his lesser. How fatigued was he to re-establish the normalcy he slaved to maintain. How spent Black Sapphire felt when, after the paint was cleaned and the unprofessional portraits removed and the glitter washed and the streamers cut, he would have an inconsolable sister to settle.
Quiet, perhaps, is not the word to describe the Spire. No, not with Candy Apple in its halls. Quiet, perhaps, is what Black Sapphire would have wished it to be (and he did, frequently, when faced with the alternative). But quiet is not what it was.
When Black Sapphire was not supervising the Rumor-Weavers in the mid and lower floors of the Spire, or sowing deceit and doubt of his own design throughout Earthbread, he was in the upper halls, doing nothing in particular at all.
It was there that Black Sapphire thought the most; both in a general, literal sense, and of himself. There, in the rooms and belfries where the Fount of Knowledge once paced, where the Beast of Lies had ranted and raved to his most dutiful servant. That was where Black Sapphire could still feel the influence of his Master. There was the closest he could get without storming the faerie gates and touching the Silver Tree itself.
The halls themselves had no sort of sanctity, and surely Black Sapphire’s Master would howl with laughter if he ever came to learn of his servant’s attachment to empty space. But, in the absence of such ridicule, Black Sapphire Cookie was free to do as he pleased.
And what he pleased to do was wander the halls, stopping occasionally by the odd window or two to gaze out over the twisted and desaturated land. There had been more color, once. When cookies had dared to live so close and care for the Fount’s Gardens.
Now, of course, the Fount was gone, and so were the cookies that worshipped him. The latter had vanished before the former.
The gardens had been his Master's vanity, or so the Fount had claimed--with that particular quality of dismissal that meant precisely the opposite, the sort of deflection that Black Sapphire had spent years accepting without question. Black Sapphire had seen the Fount’s ascent into deceit before his Master had: in the quiet little lies he told himself. The garden was never for the Fount. It was for the cookies who came to him, so that they might ease their minds among the Milkcrowns and primroses. The cookies that forsook him the moment they found the answer more terrifying than the question.
Of all the flowers that had once flourished, only the Milkcrowns remained. Black Sapphire would tend to the white flora himself, while his Master was away. He would not let them die nor wilt nor wither, for their only source was his Master’s honesty. Such a thing was precious in its scarcity. His Master had not destroyed his garden himself, he had let time and neglect do that. And yet, the Milkcrowns were a stubborn bloom.
Black Sapphire had only seen them sprout once. And he had been so very careful to not see them break ground again.
Black Sapphire did not think of that night often. There was no practical use in it, and Black Sapphire Cookie was, above most things, practical. There was no point to remembering the evening that had done it. Neither the exhaustion that his Master emanated nor the agony that ripened in his chest would bring further insight in his absence. And so, Black Sapphire let not his mind dwell on it.
(He thought of it constantly.)
The servant of pitch and violet turned from the window.
There was peace, in this moment. And it was one savored emphatically before it shattered.
Such as it is; the sound reached him before she did.
It always did. Candy Apple Cookie had not once in her existence approached a room without announcing herself, whether she intended announcement or not. Today, it was singing; a formless, wandering melody with no discernible structure. Sapphire could hear that and her thundering footsteps as she approached the hall he had stopped in.
Then one louder thunk than the rest, which ended her generously-named ‘song’. A pause. Then a shuffle of fabric, and a resumption of her rapid and careless approach.
The door to the upper hall swung open with a ferocity that Black Sapphire had barely managed to brace for. The knob had slammed into brick, and the better of the two had known he would have to polish that bit of bronze. Again.
And there she was: paint on her hands (Witches only knew how much she had smeared across the Spire before it had dried), a streak of something aggressively orange across her cheek (which, decidedly, was not a color suited to her), carrying what appeared to be a portrait (another portrait, a new one, appreciably larger than the last). And her face; an expression of triumph that summoned only a slight twist of dread in her elder brother’s stomach.
“Sapphie.” She said with a composure that juxtaposed everything else about her as she held up the painting. “I’ve finished it.”
It was, by any reasonable standard of assessment, a disaster. The proportions were wrong in ways that suggested either a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject's dimensions or a creative liberty so extreme as to constitute a separate discipline entirely. The colors were wrong. The frame was decorated with small candy apples, rendered in loving detail, which was either an act of profound self-centeredness--or a failure to understand that a memorial was not, as a rule, also a self-portrait. Black Sapphire had not yet determined which, and suspected the answer was both.
His Master's eyes, which had been many things in Black Sapphire's long memory of them--cold, furious, delighted, terrible, and occasionally all of these in swift and unnerving succession--had never been that shade of pink.
"You've been busy," Black Sapphire had said, hoping a terse response would do little to encourage her.
It may have worked, had Candy Apple not been an unholy spawn of enthusiasm and arrogance.
"You could tell, huh?” She beamed, tilting her head to appraise the portrait herself. “I thought I could put it in the east corridor, by Headmaster Blueberry’s pictures!”
The thought was insolent at best. At worst, insubordinate. And Black Sapphire, while he knew she meant no harm, could hardly just let her defile their Master’s home.
“Hang it--” Black Sapphire began simply enough, “and I will take it down.”
And Candy Apple stomped that little stomp she always did when something didn’t go her way. Her face had crumpled into an awful little scowl, and she had adopted all the intimidation of a wet merengue kitten.
“You always take them down.” Were her voice not so gratingly shrill, it could have been said that she growled out the accusation.
“They barely even resemble him.” Black Sapphire said, reaching to take the frame from his sister, but it was pulled beyond his reach. “Just because Master Shadow Milk Cookie isn’t here at the moment does not mean--”
“It’s not supposed to look like him!” Candy Apple Cookie took her brother’s surprise at her interruption as an invitation to continue, “It’s impressionist and it’s just supposed to be something on the wall! Something for when he gets back!” Her grip tightened on the frame and Black Sapphire rolled his eyes. “So he knows we’ve been thinking about him.”
And then Black Sapphire blinked. Their Master had been trapped within the prison of the Silver Tree for years now. (Not a century, not nearly so long--but still, a considerable length of time.) It was a point of shame, now, to realize he had not grasped something so elementary: that he and Candy Apple, for all their differences, worshipped their Master. And that they did so in vastly divergent methods.
Clearly, his method was more correct than his sister’s; it was not obtrusive, obscene, or obnoxious. Even so, Candy Apple was right. Not about everything--or most things--but that Shadow Milk should know that their devotion never wavered.
“He will know.” Black Sapphire said--at first, only meaning to comfort the diminutive little cookie. Then he added: “He will know because the Spire will be exactly as he left it.”
“That’s not the same!” Candy Apple snapped, breaking whatever upper limits of volume they had been maintaining.
“No, it isn’t.”
Then, there was a silence. A decent, considering silence and for a moment, it looked like Candy Apple was mulling the things her brother had said. She looked down at the portrait in her arms, then up at her brother with an expression that, on a more disciplined face, might have been called calculation.
“I’m hanging it in the east corridor.” She said.
“You are not.” (As if declaring it would make it so.)
“I’m hanging it.” She said again, already turning. “And if you take it down, I’ll make another one. A bigger one. I’ve got the paint left.”
She always had paint left. Black Sapphire had stopped trying to determine where it came from--all previous renovations had been done by their master, and it was by way of magic; no paint. There certainly was nothing of the sort in the Spire when Shadow Milk was stolen, and the nearest villages had vacated when he abandoned the title of Fount.
As far as Black Sapphire knew, Candy Apple had not mastered conjuring yet. Aside from flying and minor illusions, she had very little magic prowess at all. And yet: Paint.
“Candy Apple.” (He should have known better.)
“With more glitter!”
Then she was gone, and Black Sapphire did not follow her.
There was no need; he knew where she was going, and what she was going to do. He was entirely capable of removing the portrait--and he would. In his own time. Following Candy Apple in this moment would do nothing but antagonize her further, and source a conversation not dissimilar to the one they just had. It would be louder, of course, and more colorful, undoubtedly.
They’d had similar conversations before, you see, and they ended alike: with Candy Apple doing what Candy Apple had intended to do from the beginning, and Black Sapphire having succeeded only in wasting more time than he had and more patience than he could spare.
So, Black Sapphire would pass the Eastern Corridor later, when Candy Apple had found her next victim to torment.
Instead, he went to the study. “The” was an important word, there. It was not his, it was his Master’s. In that very same way everything in the Spire was his Master’s, and in that same way he was, as well. But even so, Black Sapphire would never be comfortable using anything that belonged to Shadow Milk Cookie without his Master’s permission. And thus, it was the study that Black Sapphire found himself in. The study with the desk and the books and the chair. It was all stuff when it had that particular word preceding it.
And it was all stuff that Black Sapphire had used freely, before. Stuff. Things.
Black Sapphire sat in a chair that had molded to the shape of his dough from his time as a disciple of the Fount. And the acolyte wondered, for a moment, if he was not unlike that chair. If he was not once a cookie with his own shape, a sturdy shape, that now had a shallow crater to anticipate his Master’s presence.
There was comfort in that. That Sapphire would remain molded to the memory of him, even in Shadow Milk’s absence.
Such a thought was poetic in a pathetic sort of way.
If it was not clear already; Black Sapphire did not sit often. Sitting implied a quiet that Black Sapphire was not keen to confront. There was always something to be done. A thread of a rumor to pull taut or to cut loose. A weaver to collaborate with. A sister’s machinations to thwart.
If he sat, then Black Sapphire would slow, and to be slow was to think about everything he had been so good at not thinking about.
It was then that Black Sapphire took the Journal from the shelf that overhung the desk. It was empty--all the journals in this room were. The Study was for writing, and one could not write if one had no paper. (An obvious thought, I know--but how often have you had a thought and nowhere to write it?)
The books that had been filled were printed and stored in the library--The Fount had been of knowledge, and knowledge of him. Until he separated himself from the Cookies that took, he had catalogued everything. Filled uncountable journals. (The Sapphire had read them as they were written, and in his Master’s absence, he’d managed to catch up on many more that were written before his time.)
He turned the journal over in his hand--it had an aged but pristine jerky-leather cover, and when he opened it, the pages crackled with old glue.
Knowledge unwritten is knowledge lost.
But what was there to say?
Black Sapphire turned a page, and a pen appeared in his hand.
The Silver Tree had claimed his Master, and if the Faerie magic Sapphire had witnessed was any indication on this-- well. It was not unlikely that his Master would be without knowledge of what has and what would transpire beyond the Bark.
In such a case, it would be his acolyte’s duty to preserve what he could in words, to ensure his Master was properly informed, should he return.
Sapphire thumbed the grip of the pen, letting its weight become familiar once more.
And he began.
To my Master
Without whom, I would never have been
For whom I remain
And To whom I owe what follows