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January 1 - January 15, 2025
Ophelia stood still for a moment in the doorway. She watched the threads of sunlight slide slowly across the floorboards as the day broke. She inhaled deeply the scent of old furniture and cold paper. That aroma, in which Ophelia’s childhood had been steeped . . . soon she would smell it no longer.
“You’ve come straight from the cloakroom again, huh?” growled the archivist, wiping his loupe clean with his sleeve. “This obsession with traveling through mirrors at ungodly hours! You know very well my little abode is allergic to surprise visits. One of these days you’re going to get whacked on the head, and you’ll have asked for it!”
“Don’t pull that long face, please. Your mother’s found you a chap, and that’s the end of it.”
She wiped a plate with her sponge while staring into space. Touching all these dishes without protective gloves had sent her back in time. She could have described, down to the smallest detail, everything her great-uncle had eaten off these plates since he’d first owned them. Usually, being very professional, Ophelia never handled objects belonging to others without her gloves on, but her great-uncle had taught her to read right here, in this flat. She knew each utensil personally, inside out.
Ophelia dropped a plate and it broke in two in the sink. She handed the pieces to her great-uncle, he pressed them back together, and, instantly, the plate was as good as new. He placed it on the draining board. The great-uncle was a remarkable Animist. He could mend absolutely everything with his bare hands and the most unlikely objects yielded to him like puppy dogs.
Ophelia froze, sponge in one hand, cup in the other, and closed her eyes. Plunged into the darkness behind her eyelids, she looked deep within herself. Resigned? To be resigned you have to accept a situation, and to accept a situation you have to understand the whys and wherefores. Ophelia, however, had no clue.
“Say, you’re pretty skilled when it comes to mirror-traveling. Couldn’t you do those little journeys of yours from the Pole to here, every now and then?” “I’m unable to do that, uncle. Mirror-traveling only works over small distances; covering the void between two arks is unthinkable.”
At “Pole” she found only one. Ophelia couldn’t afford to be clumsy with such precious archives. She placed the sketchbook on a consulting lectern and, with the utmost care, turned the pages of drawings. Pale plains, just above the rock, a fjord imprisoned in ice, forests of great firs, houses encased in snow . . . These landscapes were austere, yes, but less daunting than Ophelia had imagined the Pole to be. She even found them quite beautiful, in a way. She wondered where her fiancé lived, in the midst of all this whiteness. Close to this river edged with pebbles? In this fishing port lost in
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Ophelia fell on a drawing that she didn’t understand: it looked like a beehive suspended in the sky. Probably the outline of an idea.
hundred and fifty years old. And they don’t show everything!” That was precisely what was worrying Ophelia: what Augustus didn’t show.
She passed beneath a pediment on which the archivists’ motto was carved: Artemis, we are the respectful keepers of your memory.
For Ophelia, the second basement of the Archives was the most fascinating place in the world. That’s where, safe and sound under those protective cloches, the shared heritage of the whole family was jealously preserved. Where the documents of the very first generation of the ark resided. Where all the repercussions of year zero had ended up. Where Ophelia got closest to the Rupture.
The Rupture was her professional obsession. She dreamt sometimes that she was running after a skyline that was forever eluding her. Night after night, she went further and further, but it was a world without end, without a crack, round and smooth as an apple; that first world whose objects she collected in her museum: sewing machines, internal combustion engines, cylinder presses, metronomes . . . Ophelia wasn’t remotely drawn to boys of her own age, but she could spend hours in the company of a barometer from the old world.
Just as she was about to turn back, she came across the most dusty, most enigmatic, and most disturbing Reliquary in Artemis’s whole collection. She couldn’t leave without bidding it farewell. She turned a handle and the two panels of the protective dome slid apart. She laid her gloved palm on the binding of a book, the Book, and was overcome by the same frustration she’d felt the first time she’d made contact with it like this. She couldn’t read a trace of any emotion, any thought, any intent. Of any origin whatsoever. And it wasn’t just due to her gloves, whose special weave acted as a
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What story was this strange document telling? Why did Artemis want it to feature in her private collection? And what was that message engraved on the base of the Reliquary—Never, on any account, attempt to destroy this Book—all about?
She had said her farewells to the past, in due form. Over to the future now.
Ophelia was an excellent reader, one of the best of her generation. She could decipher the life of machines, layer after layer, century after century, through the hands that had touched them, used them, been fond of them, damaged them, patched them up.
This valley, in which she’d been born, seemed to be slipping away from her as fast as the carriage was crossing it.
“Charm is the strongest weapon given to women, you must use it without scruples. A mere trifle is enough, a timely wink, a radiant smile, to have a man at one’s feet. Look at Charles, putty in my hands.”
Was she attractive? How can one tell? From the gaze of a man? Would that be the gaze Thorn would direct at her, this evening?
Ophelia was rooted to the spot. He was there. The man who was about to devastate her life was there. She wanted neither to see him nor to speak to him.
Sometimes she still asked herself this question: what really were the family spirits and where did they come from?
“We have granted you a final chance. Be an honor to our family, child. If you fail at this task, if you make this marriage fail, I swear to you that you will never again set foot on Anima.”
An object repaired itself quicker if it felt useful, it was all a question of psychology.
this man, who seemed disgusted by everything on Anima, what benefit did he really hope to reap from this marriage?
“You have the strongest character in the family, my child. Forget what I said to you last time. Here, before you, I predict that your husband’s will is going to shatter against yours.”
After a final wary glance, Thorn pushed the two women behind a door, which he immediately closed behind him and double-locked. Aunt Rosaline gasped with astonishment and Ophelia’s eyes widened behind her glasses: resplendent at the close of day, a country park flaunted its autumn foliage all around them. No more night. No more snow. No more Citaceleste. By some unbelievable conjuring trick, they had popped up somewhere else entirely. Ophelia turned on her heels: the door they’d just come through was just standing there, absurdly, in the middle of the lawn.
She looked at the grass of the lawn at her feet, then at the sparkling streams, then at the leaves trembling in the breeze, then at the sky turning pink in the dusk. She couldn’t dismiss a slight uneasiness—the sun wasn’t in its place here; the lawn was far too green; the russet trees shed not a leaf. And neither the singing of birds nor the buzzing of insects could be heard.
“So here’s the new blood coming to save the Dragons,” she said with a dreamy smile.
“You must find us terrifying,” she whispered. “I notice that my dear nephew, true to form, hasn’t bothered to put you in the picture.”
“The Dragons,” Ophelia suddenly whispered, “is that the name of your family?” Berenilde raised her finely plucked eyebrows and looked at Thorn with amazement. “You explained nothing to them? So what did you spend your time doing during the journey?”
Here was a man going to great lengths to protect a woman that he didn’t like . . .
“You should know that he doesn’t just work ‘in a finance office,’ as you say. He’s Lord Farouk’s Treasurer, the principal financial administrator of the Citaceleste and all the provinces of the Pole.” Since Ophelia’s glasses were turning blue, Berenilde gently confirmed: “Yes, my dear, your future husband is the chief treasurer of the realm.”
Ophelia knelt down and placed her hand flat on the surface of the door. She’d made the most of all her strolls in the park in preparation for this moment, whispering friendly words to the lock, breathing some life into it, bringing it out of its shell, day after day. Everything now depended on her performance. For the door to consider her as its owner, she had to behave as such. “Open up,” she whispered in a firm tone. A click. Ophelia seized the handle.
On the seat opposite, Freya, hands in muff, didn’t move a muscle, and yet an almighty slap flung Ophelia against the window. Completely dazed, she stared wide-eyed in disbelief at the blurred figure before her—her glasses had fallen off her nose with the force of the slap. “That,” Freya said, icily, “is a kindness compared with what that man will have in store for you in private.” With the cuff of her sleeve, Ophelia wiped the blood trickling from her nose down to her chin. So was that the Dragons’ power? The ability to hurt at a distance?
Ophelia was flabbergasted. The spirit of the family? This woman was pregnant by her own ancestor?
Ophelia now saw the rain, beating soundlessly against the windows, through different eyes. Did the weather here reflect the moods of the lady of the manor?
As she glimpsed a patch of night sky through a lace of frost and icicles, she held her breath. Strange whirlwinds were leaving colored trails in the midst of the stars. Could they be the aurora borealis? Mesmerized, Ophelia wondered how long it was since she’d last seen the sky.
“Thanks to your ability to travel through mirrors, you could keep me informed of the situation at Clairdelune. And,” he added more quietly, taking a sudden interest in his shoes, “I think I’m starting to get used to you.”
Ophelia stuck her finger into the mirror as though it were dense water and, suddenly, she caught sight of the two of them. A small Animist swallowed by her too-big coat, looking sickly and dazed. A Dragon, huge, edgy, brow furrowed by constant mental tension. Two irreconcilable worlds.
He didn’t have the right to fall in love with her.
He had had the poor taste to turn a conventional marriage arrangement into a soppy little story, and she hadn’t forgiven him for that.
Ophelia was scared, viscerally scared, that he might have grown fond of her. She felt incapable of loving him in return.
“It’s nothing,” Ophelia assured him. “Show me.”
“They’ve got absolutely everything to do with it! Have you been told about the ceremony of the Gift? It enables family powers to be combined. This ceremony takes place at marriages, and only at marriages. It’s Thorn who will be Farouk’s reader, not you.”
She collapsed heavily onto a stool and stared at Mime’s patent shoes, on her feet. She’d said to Thorn, looking him straight in the eye, that she trusted him, and, like a coward, he had looked away. She’d felt so guilty for rejecting him and so grateful that he hadn’t repudiated her!
Ophelia drew her chin to her knees and looked at her hands with bitterness: some women are married for their fortunes; me, I’m married for my fingers.
“Freya, Godfrey, Father Vladimir, and the others,” he said slowly. “It would seem that they are all dead.”
