Tai's first thoughts after Giada and Fallon's abrupt leave-taking are that of gratitude for there being two less people in his house.

This contentment is then compromised by the fact that he is now left with the following:

1. A patently immature bird-man, who almost tracked muddy rainwater onto one of his family's best carpets

2. An art-addled painter who can barely make her gift manifest power before it exhausts her

3. A confessed biblioklept with a key that grants her boundless access

4. Jasper

Refusing to keep this company for any longer than necessary, Tai finishes the account of their gifts by adding his signature with a flourish. In it, he lists their gifts, their discovered uses, and a description of the monster seen by both Jasper and the Taymons. Zahara even contributes a sketch of the creature, guided by Jasper's narration of it since she has yet to see one herself.

Tai concludes the account with a request for the city council to arrange for the body to be removed from the Taymons' cottage, where Edeline had pushed it temporarily out of sight behind the tree line, using a shovel.

There is little that Tai finds admirable, but he has always given due credit to Edeline's tenacity.

He wonders if the council will have the body examined, and if they do, what they will find.

The report now sealed, Tai considers asking his guests to stay for a meal, or at least refreshments, then decides against it. He wants to be alone again, to feel the silver run through his hands like water, to watch the flow of sand transform for him.

"Feel free to ring your way out now," he says to Jasper, who lingers anyway. He straightens his posture to look Tai right in the eye.

"Thank you for not telling them about me."

Jasper had requested not to be included in the account, explaining that as the chimera's first foray into inter-world gift-giving, he did not want to publicize his presence and foreign origin without being certain he would be welcomed.

Tai didn't care overly much one way or the other, and figured that the fewer people introduced to Jasper, the better. He cited an anonymous contributor as the eyewitness to the monster in the valley, and alluded no further to Jasper's presence in his writing.

He waves off the gratitude impatiently, but Jasper isn't finished.

"Also, not that it hasn't been a pleasure being dropped without explanation into wherever the bell takes me," he says, "But I was thinking it would be nice to have a map of this world, or at least of this area within it. And from what I've seen of your house, I'd bet you must have a map somewhere in here."

Tai wants to deliver some sort of scathing comment right now, but can't come up with one. Jasper makes a sensible point. Leaving his place at the ornate table to stride across the ornate floor and open the ornate double doors, Tai calls for one of the ornate household workers, asking her, ornately, to see to Jasper's request before escorting both him and Zahara to the exit.

After dismissing the two, Tai turns to Lionel and Kalila, who remain.

"You can leave the way you came," he says, gesturing toward the window where Lionel's bird-form had perched only an hour ago. 

Lionel looks outside to where the rain falls steadily now, small damp stars coming to earth. He tilts his head in thought, dark hair following the movement. "I don't know how well I can fly in this. I think I'll go the old-fashioned way."

He carefully picks up his boots, giving Tai a sardonic look as he does, and is nearly gone into the hall before Tai can work up sufficient resolve to say, "You may give my regards to your brother."

Lionel ducks his head back in, boots still dangling in one hand. "You reminded me! Skander had a message for you too. He says that he hopes your clock is now working to your satisfaction, and, in fact, that all your clocks work perfectly in the foreseeable future. But, on the off-hand chance they don't, not to come to him about it." And he leaves.

Tai, frustrated at the jab, taps a restless finger against the sealed letter, still lying atop the table. He tells himself he doesn't care about any of it before turning to the only guest left: Kalila.

"Before you leave, I'd like to see your key."

She dutifully pulls it off her neck and hands it to him, albeit with a notable degree of reluctance.

Tai goes to a small box on the fireplace mantel, decorated all around with radiant gold paint to form flowers, vines, and leaves. It has a lock,  the key of which no one in the family can remember the location of. Tai inserts the skeleton key but is unable to turn it.

After a few fruitless attempts, Kalila appears at his shoulder. "Let me try."

She takes the key, inserts it, turns it and opens the lid to reveal a fabulous treasure hidden inside: two pins and an ordinary black button.

Tai frowns and closes the box again. The key only works in Kalila's hand. Useful for her but useless in the hands of anyone else, save to keep that access from her.

Tai needs to know more: about any of this, all of this. Zahara's amulet, Kalila's key, his sand that can gather itself into a sword. What is Zahara meant to shield herself from? What is Kalila meant to open?

What is Tai meant to kill?

————————————————————

Days later, after sending in the report to the council but finding that his restlessness persists, Tai visits the university's alchemy department.

Children in Beledon attend primary school until turning twelve, often continue their studies at the city's sprawling academy until sixteen, and spend any further years in education either training in their chosen field as a hands-on apprentice, or moving forward with formal schooling at the city university for four years. The latter is the optimal choice for those wishing to become scholars in areas like medicine, alchemy, or the law.

Tai is tangentially familiar with many lecturers at the university through the connections and associations of his family, not to mention his personal acquaintanceship with Hilo, who often assists in legal lectures.

Still, he himself has spent few hours at the institution.

The university is comprised of four floors and so expansive that even to find the alchemy department on the ground floor, Tai has to ask for directions twice.

He finally comes to a grandiose wooden door bearing a carved image of an alembic. Since the door is already ajar, he lets himself in.

What he sees first is disappointing: just an ordinary desk in which an uninterested-looking university student sits in an otherwise-bare room. The desk has a pile of papers, a quill, and an ink stand on it, none looking particularly engrossing.

Behind the seated student is another door, likely leading to the labyrinth of offices and laboratories making up the full glory of the department, holding all manner of glass apparatuses: vials, bottles, alembics like the one advertised on the door. Mortars and pestles, distilled liquids, somebody doing something other than just waiting for Tai to speak.

"Can I direct you anywhere?" the student asks, still bored and doing little to try and hide it. Tai wonders if she recognizes him, and if she would still speak so if she did.

The student, for her part, does recognize Taihei for the aristocratic offspring he is and would like him to make whatever demand he has quickly so that she can return to discreetly reading the book she holds under the table. She is in her final year of study, and if working a shift at the department's reception desk is dull, at least it gives her largely uninterrupted hours in which to catch up on her lessons.

"I'd like to speak to someone who can tell me more about this," he says, removing the glass vial of sand from his belt and placing it on the table.

The student leans forward, taking the vial in hand. Her hair hangs down in an uninterrupted sheet of darkness, black-brown and smooth. She has clipped it to one side, out of her face for moments like this when something new and exciting is brought to her eyes for a closer look.

She tilts the vial first one way, then the other, watching the sparkling silver particles shift with the movement.

Tai's thoughts absentmindedly turn toward the clockmaker, and how he had been remiss to let Jasper discover his name before he could ask for it himself.

Reminded, he asks, "What's your name?"

Eyes still on the silver, she replies, "Nakoma." Before he can make himself attempt any further indifferent conversation, she continues. "And you're Taihei, right? This is what the chimera left you?"

Tai is unsurprised that she knows about his gift. It's already been days since he sent the letter exposing his gift to the council, and news like that trickles quickly through their city.

"If you already know it can turn into a sword, which, by the way, sounds like a stellar gift, why do you want the university to examine it?"

"I want to know anything you can tell me about where it comes from, what properties it has."

"Listen, you're not the first person to want to rationalize the origins of a chimera gift, or even the first person to come to this department about it. But I don't think there's anyone I can give this to who will come to any more conclusions than you. We may be alchemists here, but this gift isn't meant for us. Would you even be all right with a group of strangers handling it?"

Tai thinks on this. Chimera gifts often spark possessiveness, but he had hoped to be above that.

He lets himself fully consider it now: hands uncorking the vial, sifting through the sand. Would it be dull and lifeless for them, or would it follow them too, catch on their thoughts and materialize an object for them the way it had for his sword? What could they discover that he couldn't?

Tai knows, instinctively, that it will not bend to any will but his own. Nor should it.

Before he's even aware, he snatches his vial out  of Nakoma's hand. "Never mind then," he tells her.

The sand dances and swirls from its glass confinement, waves and showers and a running river.

Like nothing before it, it seems happy to be back with him.

————————————————————

By the time a month has elapsed since his fight with the monster (the specter, according to the pages of Fallon's miraculous book), Rian is thoroughly sick to death of his siblings.

Upon waking that first morning after Fallon makes the salve, he had been confronted with the tearful, guilt-ridden faces of his brother and sisters. That conversation had been difficult to navigate, having to reassure them that yes, he is better now, and no, he holds no grudge against them for leaving him alone those few hours where his condition had so rapidly worsened. It had been completely unexpected, how were they to have known?

Still, his forgiveness doesn't save him from their constant attentions, questions, and coddling. Edeline works at night as an astronomer at the observatory, and Fallon and Giada spend the daylight hours at academy lessons and the archives, respectively.

That leaves Rian, who completed his studies at the academy two years ago and opted out of university, as the primary maintainer of the household: cooking meals, tidying, seeing to any household repairs.

Now, they won't allow him to even do that.

Edeline snatches the broom from him, Giada makes disastrous attempts at preparing their meals, Fallon tries to hammer things into place for him but only succeeds in breaking them more.

Rian needs to get out of the house. A month has passed, his rose thorn hurts have healed, his shoulder is closer to normal than he had ever expected. Still, there is no end to the wide-eyed looks from his siblings, as if he will shatter with a sneeze.

He sits now on one side of a desk in the headquarter building of the merchant guild, Viveka Diaman conducting an interview for a clerk position at the other. She is the third generation in a series of established merchants, her grandfather beginning the trade dynasty using capital originally obtained by, of all things, the chimera.

Viveka's grandfather had received a gift in his youth of a gold coin that, when left alone, would duplicate by the next time it was looked at.

He could have survived off of the properties of that gift alone, but instead generated enough to make initial investments into silks and spices, spending slow decades building a widespread trade operation for his progeny. A chimera gift's power often died with its owner, and he refused to leave them bereft.

And now Viveka, with her silks and smiles, reaps the benefit.

Her thick black hair is pushed back on either side by thinly jeweled pins, her smile is the sweet wide one of a person who has not yet known difficulty. She has two small birthmarks under her left eye, and Rian takes an instinctive liking to how it gives her face more character.

She has been nothing but direct and accommodating throughout their discussion, but Rian is still uncomfortable. Her friendliness only makes him more away of his own deficits.

Rian knows that he isn't always very personable, but spending two years largely cloistered in a cottage with his siblings for primary company, he had become gradually less aware of it. They knew and loved all of him, but Viveka is now seeing only his stilted awkwardness.

No one is more shocked than him when she gives him the job anyway.

(Honestly, Viveka pities the poor man. He is almost laughably stiff, but he also seems serious and dedicated. She isn't looking for anything more than that steadiness in an organization-based position like a clerk, so why not? She'll see how it goes.

And she'd be lying if she didn't want to be able to say that the man who was rumored to have fought a monster and lived now worked with her family. Maybe she'll be able to ask him about it some time.)

————————————————————

Far away, in another world, Jasper unfurls his recently-acquired map across the table in his room, the bell hovering at the edges of his sight like a promise.

Author's Note: This is the longest chapter so far, yet it has the least plot development. No one is more confused about the trajectory of this book than I am.