Reply To: The Hoards of Sanctorum AD26
Helier watched Yvoise squinting at the bone through her screen, trying to decipher the “map” amidst the noxious fumes. He observed the scene with a detachment that surprised him.
The room was vibrating with tension, but for once, it wasn’t coming from Yvoise —it was directed at her. She was standing by the window, phone pressed to her ear, nodding furiously at some invisible bureaucrat on the other end.
“I am violently in agreement with you, Mr. Prufrock,” she was saying, her voice tight but diplomatic. “The olfactory output of Unit 26 is indeed non-compliant with the Olympus Park Clean Air protocols. We are… rectifying the asset.”
It was the “Kyber-Auditor” from the Business Park Administration. The new management had been cracking down lately, restricting their “unauthorized usage” of miracles and enforcing standard operating procedures.
It was all too much noise. Above the smell, which was screaming of decay rather than play, there was the frantic energy of it all. Mrs. Fennel’s panic, Yvoise’s spreadsheets, the looming threat of this “Varlet” from the Council. It was pure Negotium, the active denial of peace, waging war on the idle time of the Romans: Otium. The world was demanding relentlessly that they justify their existence with hygiene certificates, clean surfaces, and significantly fewer piled-up treasures, branding their sacred collections as mere “trip hazards.”
Helier gripped the bamboo handle of his umbrella —a sturdy, shepherd-style thing he had almost tossed into the ‘Charity Pile’ yesterday. He felt a sudden, fierce longing for Otium, a sacred pause where one simply is.
Earlier that morning, a delivery guy had held the elevator door for him with a foot, balancing a mountain of cardboard boxes. A simple, clumsy gesture of kindness amidst the clutter. It had stayed with Helier. It reminded him that you could be overloaded and still have grace. That moment of suspension, of courteous stillness in the middle of the rush, had been a tiny bubble of Otium.
They needed that bubble now. They needed to stop the clock.
Spirius, who had been hovering in the doorway, seemed to hear Helier’s thought.
“A map is useless if you pass out before you can follow it,” Spirius muttered. He stepped fully into the room, brandishing a heavy glass jar like a weapon. “We need a Containment of the Sins.”
“A what?” asked Cerenise, holding her nose.
“Of WHAT?!” asked Yvoise, raising an eyebrow while covering her mouthpiece.
“Sins…” Spirius said doubtfully, “…that should bring back some memories.”
He marched to the table. “Hold on to your halos…”
Yvoise pulled back, shielding her phone. “Wait! I haven’t finished cataloging the striations—”
“The bone will be visible through the glass, Yvoise. But the miasma must be paused.”
Spirius didn’t wait for a vote. He scooped the yellowed bone—and its mysterious map—into the jar. He didn’t recite a Latin prayer. He didn’t summon a lightning bolt. The Administration wouldn’t allow that kind of energy spike anyway. He just screwed the lid on tight, with one word.
“Oïton,” Spirius incanted.
To Helier’s ears, attuned to the drift of languages over centuries, it didn’t sound like a name anymore. It sounded like a desperate, corrupted invocation of the old Latin. Otium. The right to be left alone, fierce as a dragon guarding its sleep.
Psshitt.
It was the sound of a pressure valve releasing. Soft, pneumatic.
Instantly, the stench was cut off. Deleted. The air was neutral again, smelling only of old paper and the faint, metallic tang of Yvoise’s anxiety.
“It is done,” Spirius announced, holding up the jar. The bone rattled inside, harmless now, an archived file. The faint lines of the map were still visible against the glass, safe in their bubble of silence.
“Mr. Prufrock?” Yvoise said into the phone, her voice smooth as silk. “I think you’ll find the sensors are returning to normal parameters. Yes. Have a productive day.”
She hung up and slumped against the curtains, letting out a breath she seemed to have been holding since New Year’s Eve.
“Well,” Helier said, tapping his umbrella on the floorboards, feeling the tension drain from his shoulders. “That felt… cleansing.”
“If we could do that with the auditor, it would be a marvelous idea,” Cerenise agreed, eyeing the jar with renewed interest. “A spiritual purification. Now, Yvoise, hand me a magnifying glass. If we have restored our Otium, we might as well use it to see where this bone wants to take us.”
“A Novena, even,” Yvoise added, a mischievous glint returning to her eye. “Technically, we have ‘cleansed’ the house of the impurity. The Will didn’t explicitly say we had to throw away the good stuff. Just the… bad air.”
Helier smiled. It was a loophole, of course. A massive, gaping loophole. The threat of the Novena still hung over them like a storm cloud that hadn’t quite burst, and the mystery of the Varlet descendant was still unresolved. But for today, the audit was over. The hoard was safe.
“Oïton,” Helier repeated softly, testing the weight of the word. He looked at his umbrella. He wouldn’t need to open it. The storm had passed.