Eggs Unsung v2.0 pt 3 v2

Because I didn’t like how part 3 was going and redid it. I adjusted some of the stuff before pt 3, too, but mostly that was insignificant things, whereas this is a whole new world. It’ll probably change yet more still, too, but that should be minor (except maybe that Edgar will put his damn ‘emitter’ away).

I’ll go delete the other pt 3 shortly to prevent mass confusion.

Eggs Unsung pt 3

The view from the opposite side of the manor was vastly different from the mossy gully Cyrphon expected, which he learned upon entering the dining hall. The hall was long and narrow, with the side across from the door made entirely of floor-to-ceiling windows which looked straight out into the sunset—it appeared that Crosshills Manor could just as easily been called Cliff’s Edge Manor, for the ground was hundreds of feet below, and the horizon was hundreds of miles away. 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, and a startling contrast to the humble gully at the entrance.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Dr. Saige asked. Cyrphon jumped slightly, for he hadn’t heard his host arrive.

“It is one of the more breathtaking views I have seen,” Cyrphon agreed, turning enough to look at the doctor. The light turned his skin to gold, highlighted the shadows of his face, and darkened his hair to midnight. His Sugar-cut jacket had been replaced by a corded sweater, and the glasses were thankfully not in evidence.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. Edgar’s emitter remained, however, and every few minutes the conversation was interrupted by a new buzz from it. Going by Edgar’s reactions, this was not whatever disaster had claimed his attention before, which meant that it was just plain rude.

“So,” Cyrphon said into the conversational lull after the penultimate course. “Tell me about this egg I am to sing.”

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. Only the age of the egg, and possibly how it’s been treated over the years makes a difference, though there is much debate on that latt—”

Edgar’s emitter buzzed again, and he glanced down at it. “I’m sure you got the official file on how I found it.” He spoke slowly, distracted by whatever he was entering into that device.

“It was a dry account,” Cyrphon said, his own tone dry for different reasons. “I’d love to hear your personal story about it.”

This got Edgar’s attention, and he set the emitter aside. “There’s not much more to tell, I’m afraid. I was looking through an old treasury that belongs to my family, and there it was. I didn’t think it was an aetheregg at first—the treasury itself is five hundred years old, and society had hardly any understanding of the eggs that long ago.”

“Your family has a five-hundred year old treasury?”

“Crosshills Manor itself is nearly that old,” Edgar said. His emitter buzzed against the table, the sound enhanced by the wood, and Edgar’s eyes slid towards it. “Emphentia—Sagia, rather—has been occupied for slightly over a thousand years, and my family has been of some importance for all of its history.”

“Do you know how your family came by the egg?”

Edgar shook his head. “It was without papers of any sort—it wasn’t even inventoried.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

“Yes, but not entirely unheard of.” This time when the emitter buzzed, Edgar picked it up, and glanced at the screen. “Most of Emphentia’s history is carefully documented, but some things were deemed unimportant and lost.”

“Unimportant enough to store in a treasury for half a millennia?”

Edgar shrugged. “There’s a pair of seven-hundred-year-old baby shoes in there. Things go in, they don’t come out.”

Cyrphon couldn’t argue with that, though it still didn’t feel right. “But the egg would have been five hundred years old when it went into the treasury.”

“Perhaps it was part of an older collection that got moved.”

“Then wouldn’t they have thought it worth documenting?”

“Green rock: five hundred years old.”

“If your family was rich enough to afford a treasury five hundred years ago, they ought to have at least heard of singing eggs. It was all the rage back then; that’s why we have so few unsung eggs older than five hundred years. You’d think—”

“Look, I don’t know what my ancestors were thinking. All I know is that I found the egg without papers or documentation.” Their eyes locked until Cyrphon looked away, reminding himself that the origins of the egg didn’t matter to his job, and it was idiocy to argue with the man who’d found it.

Mr. Taylor appeared then, as if he’d been waiting for a lull in the conversation to slip in with dessert. Dessert was a pair of exquisitely decorated cakes made to look like aethereggs.

“This is the Sun-Egg,” Cyrphon said, staring at his with his hand hovering over his fork. The Sun-Egg had been the first named egg he’d ever sung, and he only received that chance because his father was an old friend of the Emperor of Sugar. It had been the one to kick-start his career, the one that opened the door to the smaller stepping stones leading eventually to the Egg of Ambient Crystal.

“Is it?” Edgar asked. “My cook has a fascination with aethereggs. He’s one of the few I’ve told of your coming, and that because I feared food poisoning if he had learned after the fact.”

“I don’t recognize your egg,” Cyrphon said. He knew most of the more popular named eggs on sight, and quite a few of the less popular ones.

“Oh, it’s mine.” Edgar sounded so nonplussed that it took Cyrphon a moment to understand what he meant.

“Your millennial egg? The Saige Egg?” It was a pale green, mottled with cream and tan, hardly a flashy sort that were usually kept so long.

“Yes, that one—the Saige Egg?” He wrinkled his nose.

“It must have a name.”

“I suppose it must.” Edgar picked up his fork and carved off a piece of cake.

Cyrphon still couldn’t bring himself to do the same. “The Saige Egg, the files said you’ve had it assessed three times?”

“Yes, all agreed that it was a thousand years old, though I didn’t let them see each other’s assessments.”

“And two said it was silenced.”

“Yes. I believed it was worth a chance that the third was correct.”

Cyrphon would have done the same himself, even before he’d sung the Egg of Ambient Crystal he’d had a few experiences with silent eggs that…did not go the way his professors had anticipated.

Edgar frowned at his dessert for a moment. “As you are an egg-singer, perhaps you can explain more clearly what it is that makes an egg silent. I’ve never yet understood an oologist’s explanation.”

“It’s complicated,” Cyrphon said, tapping his fork against the table a few times before he caught himself. “And lately it’s become controversial. Both of which are largely due to the fact that we don’t fully understand what aethereggs are. I mean, hell, as a society we barely understand what the aether itself is. And then sometimes it lays eggs.” He waved his hands in a hopeless gesture. “Those eggs gather sound or stray pieces of aether—”

“Or siphons off souls,” Edgar interjected.

“Sure,” Cyrphon said. “Far as science can tell us the craziest theories are as possible as the mundane ones. But eventually an egg-singer comes along, and using resonances and sound theory and maybe an echo machine we wake the egg.”

“Or he fails and damages the egg into silence.” Edgar sounded downright bitter, which was curious.

“Yes, one way to silence an egg is to sing them so poorly that their music never reaches audible levels. Or if an egg is damaged, usually a pretty significant crack or split is needed, but sometimes just an idiot who tries to turn it into a necklace.” The Egg of Ambient Crystal had suffered internal fracturing when someone tried to steal it during the rebellion. “And lastly, if an egg is too old, it is speculated that it’s simply not possible to sing it.”

“Speculated?” Edgar leaned forward intently.

Cyrphon sighed. “As an egg ages, its song becomes more and more complex, which makes it harder and harder to sing. Even if an older egg is not technically silent, it may be impossible for humans—or machines—to awaken the egg, trapping the song and rendering it effectively silent.”

“What about environmental factors?”

Cyrphon needed a moment to think through that one, and so he looked to his dessert, hardened his heart and stabbed his fork deep into the frosting. As far as he had experienced ‘environmental factors’ was a load of fake salt hawked by people who wanted to make money off egg storage. “If your egg was in a treasury for the last five centuries it’s probably fine.”

“But what if it wasn’t?”

Cyrphon’s first bite of egg cake stalled half-way to his mouth, lowered back towards the table. “I suppose it would depend on how it was stored.”

“Oh, this is just speculative, of course,” Edgar said hastily. “Well, mostly speculative, as I don’t know what situation my egg was in before it came to the treasury. What if it had been left in a—a cave or something?”

“Moccan Marnie found an egg that had been in a tomb for three hundred years, and it was fine. I doubt a thousand in a cave have done your egg any ill.”

Edgar sank back in his chair, relieved. Then he abruptly straightened in his chair. “Not a thousand, just five—”

“You can’t unspill the salt,” Cyrphon said, finally eating that first bite of cake. It was as exquisite in flavor as it had been in decoration.

“Then I assume you’ll be discreet?”

“It’s no matter to me what the official story is versus the real story. I don’t understand why it has to be an egg from a family treasury and not from a cave, but I know better than to gossip it about.”

“I have my reasons,” Edgar said.

They sat in silence as the very last purple rays of the sun dipped below the distant mountains, the very last bites of the Sun-Egg vanished as well.

“Would you like to see the egg tonight?” Edgar asked at last.

“Of course,” Cyrphon answered without thinking—and then he could almost have kicked himself when he remembered he hadn’t salted his scar. He rubbed a hand over it as they stood, wondering if he should change his mind—but no, a short viewing of the egg wouldn’t be too bad. And anyway, Cyrphon was really quite desperate to catch his first sight of this thousand-year egg.