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Jean-Pierre Duroy, the Grand Intendant of the Palace of Versailles woke up every morning an hour before dawn, when everything was still calm, the last fêteurs of the guest nobility were, at last, fast asleep and the stars’ lights were beginning to fade on the dark sky. The Palace was never sleeping really, but this was as close a moment of peace as he could get.
His wife Annie, the Head of the Royal Pastries Chefs, would usually sleep contentedly an hour more, waiting for the chantecler’s sonorous hail to the rising sun.

When he realized he had overslept for the first time in many years of services, he knew there was something not quite right about this particular day.
As usual, and especially during winter, there was much to be done. Preparing the routine menus for the noble tables, getting his army of little people bustling around to stock the fires with wood for the cold-fearing ladies, clean up, wash clothes, drapes and the darn mirrors. Receive the fresh foods from the local markets, clean up the latrines, which tended to get clogged with the dreaded cold… When that was done, he had to make sure the servants were doing their job properly, not abusing the generosity of His Majesty, taking good care of the Gardens, which was an horror when the snow started to melt, ensuring the guards reported to their duties, etc. etc.
And after all that, no matter what, do a meticulous accounting in the Royal Ledger.
Jean-Pierre was but a cog in that enormous machine, but a cog which could make a vital difference between a day gone right, and a day gone awfully wrong.

He had to turn that day around quickly lest it would be the latter, he thought while putting his white starched breaches. A last look at his wife who was starting to move her weight around and yawn, and he was out.

In Ed Steam’s old office, Lord Lemon was like in a mausoleum full of ghosts.
Mostly computer illiterate, he favoured greatly goose feather and dark Chinese ink soft purr on the paper over the annoying clickety racket of the keyboards. So he wasn’t exactly feeling at home in Ed’s old shoes.

The team’s greeting party had been cordial, but he didn’t feel an overwhelming welcome either, not that he expected it. It was Ed’s team after all, he was the Rooster of the chicks of roast, whatever they liked to call themselves. He was not found of monikers and preferred to be addressed simply as Sir.

The call he received on the morning was perplexing him. They’d found an auditor dead with a Surge Corp. business card in his jacket in the streets of a Spanish city, he couldn’t really remember which, the accent on the phone was as dreadful as that of a Chinese civet, but… What was that about already? He’d thought his memory was improving, getting back on the field, but there were relapses again, he had to concentrate. Afternoon Scrabble games were not that bad after all.

He’d perfected a neat technique to remember things, placing vivid images in memory palaces constructed in his mind were he could retrieve them later, but the thing was that his memory palaces sorely lacked a cleaning lady, and images sometimes blurred together or went missing, fading away. He sighed.

His gaze on the phone brought him back to his stream of thought. This would have been stored on the Suspicious Clues Palace, in Ed’s corner. His mind raced back in the atrium of his palace where he could see the various corners, and he went back into the Alley of Dark Secrets, then turned to the Corner of Lonely Puzzle Pieces. There were actually a lot of them, but the topmost one was vivid enough. It was a red blood hearing-aid spewing out a mean Larsen and bathing in paella. For “auditor murdered in Spain” obviously. He turned down mentally the volume of the hearing-piece. This was not a very elegant image, but he was in a hurry, and crude preposterous images always were remembered better he’d found out. The lewdest even more so. Which was why his Palace of Past Precious Moments was starting to look like a brothel he was loath to admit.

He was starting to wonder if Ed’s demise was not some sort of inside job. Circumstances were not really orthodox, but nothing was in their line of duty, so he had to look for something else. He’d already started to make an inventory of the storage room, just before the break-in, but computer handicapped as he was, between paper and memory palaces, he couldn’t figure it anymore and had to start it over with some help from Cornella.
At least, he’d sent Hyphen and Dash to discreetly investigate on the break-in and now, he will probably send them to investigate on… he faced a blank. All he could remember now was he was having the meanest craving for mussels and prawns.

After her little escapade with Yimho, and then with Brennan, and then with Gormitohl, and with each escapade, a new home, new relationships and relatives, Malvina was starting to feel homesick. ‘Home’ wasn’t really any place of course, but we all know when we feel at home or not. And right now, the feeling was clear and loud that she wasn’t.
Not only that, but her selfless outpouring of love (which dear Arona always found slightly exaggerated for her tastes) had oftentimes put her in awkward situations.
People weren’t always aware that even though her love was given so strongly to all of creatures, it could be found everywhere, in every creature. Ancients called that stream viwre. The only difference with her and the others was that she wasn’t discriminating and her love was outpourring in every direction, regardless of the intentions of the receiver. And that could become a terrible power.

Well, after all the traveling with her teal-coloured dragon Leörmn, and occasional visits from the young dragon breeder Irtak she felt more than ever the need to reconnect. It’s been too many years now, and the world of the (still) warring Kingdoms didn’t feel much of a better place. So there was still work to be done.

Of all people, she knew where to turn to.
It was too early to start her trip around the world to physically reunite with her sisters. A lifelong project which had strangely stalled ever since they started to mention it.
But she remembered Kalliona, a beautiful woman living south of the Marshes of Doom. She wasn’t really a woman either, but rather an E’elim of the woods, but she appeared as a beautiful woman to almost anyone.
She would help her realign with her path.

“Leörmn!” She called “We’re packing!”
“To where, may I ask?”
“Olliburthon”
“Oh great… A stinking harbour now.”

“Franiel, dear lad, are you here?”
The voice was sweet yet authoritative.

“Yes, M’am. Is there anything I could do for you?”

Franiel had been at the service of Madame Chesterhope for a few moons, but he felt like it had been his whole life. He quite enjoyed the peaceful life at her mansion, which was interestingly only seldom visited.

He was offered food and shelter for his doing some repair work for Madame Chesterhope when she was requesting it. The rest of his time was free, and he used to go wander in the calm neighbourhoor to observe the nature which was so different from anything he had seen before. It was as though the whole countryside was by eerie mimicry perfectly suited to the strange lady with the foreign accent.

The simple work in communion with this nature had streams of words rise inside him like seeds sprouting after a warm rain. He wasn’t sure he wanted to express them however.
He had tried a few times to tell Lydia, but her merciless laughter alone would have nipped any of his attempts in the bud.

One of his greatest satisfaction was to go to the ‘motorbike’ and try to figure out its functioning. Lydia had laughed at his stubbornness to try to make the old piece of junk work —by her own words, she’d rather delete the whole thing out of reality, if it was for her to decide. Luckily enough, it wasn’t for her to decide, and nobody else really cared for his attempts.

He wasn’t seeing Madame Chesterhope so often, and sometimes she seemed gone for hexades without anyone being able to tell if she was there or not. She simply seemed to have disappeared.
He had been buggered for a while to figure out who the “Others” she had mentioned on their first encounter were, but apparently, had said chatty Lydia who believed the lady to be completely nuts, she was referring to “TEAFERS” (said in a mock-conspiratorial tone). “Teafers?” Franiel had asked puzzled. “Ahaha, you’re so thick sometimes.” had answered Lydia almost chocking herself into gales of laughter “Thieves! She’s obsessed about thieves! I suspect she’s got some precious stuff she would hate to lose. But believe me, to be as obsessed by thieves as she is, she probably hasn’t got all this stuff willingly given to her…”

Anyway, with all that being said about Madame Chesterhope, she remained to Franiel as much a mystery as she was the first day he’d met her.

— “Yes. There is something I’d love you to do, sweetheart. There are people who seem to be coming, and the mansion hasn’t received that many gentlemen for a while, as you can obviously tell. I would love you to assist Lydia in preparing the ball room, and the main hall, do some fixing where it’s needed, that kind of things.”
— “Yes, sure M…”
— “I won’t be there the next days, so be sure to make all things necessary before I come back. I count on you.”
— “Very well M’am.”

After he sent his reply to Yann, Yurick took a deep breathe in appreciation of all that had been done the last past days.

However tedious, all in all, it had allowed him to stay away from other people’s trauma, and stay focused on his own issues. Now, the feeling of the energy at hand was starting to become lighter. Like a thin ray of light poking through a thick layer of rainy clouds, announcing that the silver lining was more than just a consolation. It was announcing the sun to come.

He took the book of stories that had been unburied (like his pleasure to write) from the bottom of the sofa’s cushions when they’d received hosts last week-end, and looked with amusement at the opening note about the “random quotes”.

A strong sense of an inkling started to dawn at him.
Thanks to the random quotes —or more appropriately said, to convenient synchronicities— “stuff” was never lost or buried in the insides of that ever-growing story, which was eating with gluttony at the edges of its expansion. Things were popping up here and there, reminding of old loose threads, or pertinent inclusions or links to be made.

But there was more. He, for a long time, had thought that imagination was expanding things to make physical reality look smaller in proportion than it was. Like when they’d looked at Dory’s pictures, and everything looked so big on them. Even the mere thought of nine dogs was huge. But when they’d met her, and Dan, and the dogs, it was all so much smaller. Even seeing Dory manage her dogs made having nine dogs seem manageable.
But the reverse was true: physical reality had its way of dwarfing imagination. Not so much making it smaller, but compacting it, making it fit in an unbelievably condensed and small space.

Take that book. Thousands of words, billions of probabilities, endless threads and hundreds of characters, all packaged in a small stack of inked paper. The trick was that when you look at it that way, when you got that small stack of paper in your hands, it all seems so manageable; one starts to get accustomed to it, then fails to see the newness in it each time it’s opened to tell a story.

Imagination is the true gauge of the vastness of the universe. It’s so easy to forget…

It may have been the sudden change of environment, but Leörmn had great difficulty at staying focused.
By staying focused, he meant more than just focusing his attention and thoughts. Actually, not much more, as nothing more than his thoughts and his attention were creating of everything —his body included. When he failed to focus as he was now, usually he simply started to disappear from other’s awareness, even though he could be aware that he was still present in their proximity. For most of his activity was happening in the Unseen, and his body was unnecessary for him to manipulate that environment.

The twin dragons, Heckle and Jeckle were equally disturbed, but to a lesser extent, perhaps because their communicating together made their de-focusing less of a concern.

The place where they had been guided to was really unusual. Unusual for dragons at least. Even possibly hostile.

It was like crossing that door had made them turn the physical reality inside-out, and though it was very similar on the surface, the exterior was significantly different.

Apart from the twins, Leörmn was feeling energies, strong energies focused nearby. They were possibly as strong as dragons’ energies, though their configuration was unfamiliar.
Where were they? What was this place?

Leörmn was feeling so powerful undercurrents that it was very disturbing. In his discomfort, he tried to reach for a familiar energy.

In the pool, Salome was feeling the disturbance, as it was already making the cave wobble slightly ever since Leörmn had taken off.

Georges was having fun shape-shifting his skin to get more dolphin-like slickness, and was trying to bring her into his games, but she was caught by the demanding feeling and couldn’t concentrate on the game.

She made a foam bubble around herself to lift her up above the surface of the water. “There… I’ve always felt better in the air.” As a matter of fact, be it only the slight gain of altitude, but her thoughts felt clearer already.

“Oh, my… They are on the Murtuane… Georges, you knew that?!”

Georges was having too much fun to actually physically answer, but Salome knew he was more than vaguely aware of that.

She went deeper into herself, trying to see what was the issue… As far as she knew, the Murtuane was very closely tied to the Duane, and actions made into one of the planet had repercussions onto the other. They were close counterparts for each element, and perhaps it was the drawing closer of these which had created an imbalance of some kind.
“Yes…” she smiled. She was seeing how it could be made easier.

She sent to Leörmn the clearest picture she could make, then popped her foam bubble, to gracefully dive into the pool, having changed her skin to that of a black and white killer whale.

“Thank the Elder Gods,” Leörmn thought, as he just received the warm familiar energy of Salome from deep inside himself.

So that was it… He had to find his counterparting Nirgual, and merge with her for the duration of their little excursion here.
N’meôrl was the name. Salome had met her already a long time ago. She was a brilliant shade of abrigot (some orange smooth fruit).

It would be quite easy actually. Like the Dragons, Nirguals were summoned by their true name, no matter the distance.
Blessed be Salome…

Popping back into focus, Leörmn pronounced loudly “N’meôrl, I hereby summon thy!”

When the huge bird appeared all the others who had started to assail the dragon with question were startled.

Contrary to all appearances, Leörmn was not a dragon of many words, so very few needed to be actually exchanged. The two creatures both knew what had to be done to preserve the balance. And even if they had not known, the pressure on their energy fields was so intense that the merging was just like two magnets drawing closer naturally.

And One again they were.