Eggs Unsung Pt 3

You’re just egging me on.

I think…I think I may have made it through the minor holiday season (the one with my birthday, Mother’s Day, my sister’s birthday, and other assorted minor holidays). I even managed to write a thousand words last week.

Oh shush, it’s something.

This scene is…I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. It makes Cyrphon a bit too clever and Edgar a bit too foolish, especially considering their relative ages and life-experiences. But on the other hand, I need to convey that information, and it’s moderately important that Cyrphon acquires the information on this first night. Feel free to share thoughts you may have on the subject.

If you even exist.

Eggs Unsung pt 3 (of v2.0)

Unlike the parts of the manor Cyrphon had seen so far, the dining hall faced the sunset. The sky was orange and gold, streaked with pink and purple clouds, all over a range of distant blue and white mountains. It was an arresting view, made all the more so by the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Dr. Saige asked, almost startling Cyrphon.

“It is one of the more breathtaking views I have seen,” Cyrphon agreed, turning enough to look at his host. The light had turned his skin to gold, highlighted the shadows of his face, and darkened his hair to midnight. His formal suit had been replaced by a corded sweater, and the glasses were not in evidence.

“You have not been waiting long, I hope?” Dr. Saige gestured to the table, which had only two seats set, both near one the end.

Cyrphon demurred, and took his seat.

“How was the journey from…?”

“Left Star Station,” Cyrphon supplied. “It was long, but mostly quite comfortable. I usually find I quite enjoy travel by aethertrain. Have you traveled much, Dr. Saige?”

“Call me Edgar,” Dr. Saige said, waving that away. “You’re my guest.”

“You are my host, but also my patron.”

“If it costs extra for you to call me by name, I will pay it,” Edgar said. “I hear enough ‘Dr. Saige this’ and ‘Dr. Saige that’ during the day. It almost makes me regret earning the title.”

“Oh, yes, you are a medical doctor, aren’t you?”

“By degree, if not currently by trade.” Edgar sighed. “There are too many people who want me to run the world for me to run a practice.” There was a buzz from his pocket. “Case in point.” He gestured, but it didn’t stop him from pulling out his emitter.

Cyrphon tapped a finger on the table, but before he could truly become impatient, the first course arrived. He had plenty of chances later, though, because every few minutes the conversation was interrupted by a buzz from Edgar’s emitter. Going by Edgar’s reactions, this was not whatever disaster had claimed his attention before, which meant that it was just rude.

“So,” Cyrphon said, when the dishes from the last course had been cleared, and only dessert was left. “Tell me about this egg I am to sing.”

“Oh, right.” Edgar looked up from his emitter. “It’s sort of a pale green, about this big—” he demonstrated with his hands.

But Cyrphon waved that away. “The physical appearance of an egg doesn’t matter to its song. Green, brown, lumpy, smooth, small, none of it matters. Only the age of the egg, and possibly how it’s been treated over the years makes a difference.”

Edgar’s emitter buzzed again, and he glanced down at it. “I’m not sure how they’ve been treated, but—” he trailed off, distracted by whatever the device was telling him.

“They?” Cyrphon said, raising an eyebrow.

“They—it, it, the egg I found.” Edgar glanced up at him, but only briefly.

Cyrphon had had no cause to doubt what had been in the files about the Saige Egg, but now he wondered. “Where did you find it, by the way?”

“In an old treasury of the family’s,” Edgar’s eyes were once again on his device. “Back in…the…hills.”

“The egg was in the hills?”

“No, the treasury. We’ve been here for ages, there’s buildings all over the place that still belong to my family.”

“Your family has been here for a thousand years?”

“Well, the treasury was only five hundred years old, but—” buzz “—the shrine could have been a thousand.”

“The shrine.”

“What?” Edgar looked up, startled.

“You said the shrine.”

“The—I meant the treasury. It felt like a shrine to my ancestors.”

Cyrphon cleared his throat. “Let me see if I got it right. The official story is that you found the egg in a five-hundred-year old treasury located somewhere on your family property. Assessing showed some of the treasure to be older, including the egg, which was a full thousand, give or take.”

“Yes, that’s—”

“But what really happened is that you found the eggs in a shrine in the hills, which was itself a thousand years old. Eggs, as in, more than one.”

Edgar stared at him, and his jaw dropped slightly, then his gaze slid slowly to the emitter in his hand as he realized what it had just cost him. “And they want me to run the place,” he muttered, turning off the device and handing it to Mr. Taylor, who had appeared with dessert just then.

Conversation stalled as dessert was placed before them; two small cakes, decorated like eggs.

The one placed in front of Cyrphon looked just like the Sun-Egg he’d sung for the Emperor of Sugar, which was both amazing and flattering, but he didn’t comment. He didn’t even pick up his dessert fork, waiting until they were left alone for the fallout of his discovery instead.

“Your contract specifies discretion,” Edgar pointed out, making no move for his fork, either.

Cyrphon nodded. “I won’t betray you. But why the subterfuge?”

“There are hundreds of shrines and tombs in these hills, each one with multiple offerings, many of which are eggs formed from stone or some other hard material. The youngest of them is five hundred years old, the oldest dating back a thousand years to when this world was first settled. If the shrine I found had three eggs—though I suppose I haven’t shown the other two to anyone, so perhaps they are not—but regardless, can you imagine the affect finding that many ancient aethereggs would have on the economy of a sparsely inhabited planet such as this one? Not to mention the local ecology that would be destroyed by people seeking undiscovered shrines. Or the fact that many of the shrine eggs have made their ways into local homes.”

“Tomb robbing—”

“It’s not,” Edgar interrupted. “Well, it is, technically, I suppose, but those are our ancestors, and so the eggs are ours, too. Besides, all the information we could want about them are still recorded; there’s nothing for an archaeologist to learn that he can’t gain from the records of that time.”

“And no one ever thought that these might be aethereggs before?” It felt like a gross oversight to Cyrphon, but then, aethereggs were his life.

“We’re miles from the nearest entrance to the aether, and no one knew what an aetheregg was a millennia ago. Besides, ovoid objects have been around longer than mankind, of course they crop up in our art.”

“But singing eggs is so common now, surely someone—”

“There have been other eggs sung on Sagia, of course, but it’s not like a singer—or even an assessor—can tell an aetheregg by looking at it. And how many of them would be interested in seeing egg paraphernalia from a millennia ago on a lark?”

It may have felt harsh, but that was a fair assessment of the egg-singers Cyrphon had met, himself included—except for the part about not being able to tell an aetheregg at first glance. Cyrphon was excluded from that category. He didn’t say anything, though, opting instead to pick up his fork and try to choose where he would mutilate the sugary egg before him. “This is really very exquisite.”

“My cook is quite the fan of egg-songs and egg-singers,” Edgar said, accepting the change of topic. “He’s one of the very few people who know who you are and why you’re here, and that mostly because I feared food poisoning if I told him after the fact.”

That would explain why the cake looked like the Sun Egg; it was the first famous egg Cyrphon had ever sung. “You’ll have to tell more than one person if you’re going to have an unveiling.”

Edgar shrugged. “I figured something much more intimate for the primary unveiling, and besides, two of the three eggologists who looked at it claimed that it would be silenced. Not to mention its origins and the economic effects if they come to light. No, if you sing it, and it’s beautiful, I will move it off planet for a proper unveiling, far from speculation. And if you figured out my secret so easily, I will probably not even attend.”

Cyrphon had his doubts about the possibility of getting proper security to transfer an egg worth more than certain worlds off of a backwater planet like Sagia, but it wasn’t his place to say. Instead he braced himself minutely and stabbed his fork into the cake before him, expertly cutting off a bite. It was as exquisite in taste as it had been in decoration, and Cyrphon smiled in delight.

Edgar cleared his throat. “Would you like to see the egg tonight? I don’t expect you to begin work on it, of course, but it is worth seeing. Or so I like to believe.”

Cyrphon took another bite of cake as he debated his answer. Under normal circumstances he would say yes unhesitatingly, but he hadn’t salted his scar before dinner, which meant it would be more sensitive, so a thousand-year-old egg would probably be an intense experience for him—but then again, it was a thousand-year-old egg. “I would love to see it this evening.”