Little Memory

30/9/919
The Cog and Sprocket

Nurie’te’s repair came as more of a surprise to her than it should have, considering she’d spent at least an hour most nights working on him since they’d arrived in Endergaln. Staying put in one place, plus the access they had to the Beryl workshops, meant they had greater resources and more tools to pour into the effort of repairing him, even though they didn’t dare bring him anywhere public and solely worked on him in their room. Still, for months it seemed to make nigh on no difference. Every path they thought to try led to another wall of defeat, every inspired tack only a tired digression.

They kept trudging on, because giving up was unthinkable, but they’d stopped expecting results a month before something finally worked.

They’d been running through a minute series of adjustments to the substructural tetralodic array based on a schema they’d found described in Automaton Weekly’s special holiday issue that carried some similarities to Nurie’te’s. She tried first one arrangement, then shifted Tiny Splinter #1 over a sliver so that it touched Minuscule Splinter #32, then shifted it again so it fully crossed it, all the while humming the activation scale in various patterns while the harmonic tool Ethan had procured after much effort followed her voice, giving her something closer to an actual aasimar’s triple-layered voice. Somewhere around adjustment #5 with pattern #12, a spark flickered in Nurie’te’s orb, and Sav paused, their breath catching. The pencil made a note in their journal.

Pattern #13 yielded nothing, as did the rest of the patterns in sequence. Excitement draining, Sav was wholly unprepared when Adjustment #6 with Pattern #1 suddenly provoked a burst of blue from the power orb, a sputtering crackle of prismatic sparks, and Nurie’te’s octahedral body flipped at right angles to lurch upward, bobbing vertically into the air.

Sav literally screamed, dropping tweezers, pencil, and discretion all, throwing herself at Nurie’te to hug him, not even caring that his edges dug into her ribs and left a dent in her cheek. He lurched again beneath her weight, whistling in confusion and reassurance.

It took some time to sort out what he knew and what he expected. The last he remembered was gathering with them in the Circle to go to the Octurne, and then the voice of the Builders filling him until there was nothing left. Then here. He took in what Sav had to tell him, of the passage of time and the changing of the world and the angels, with a dimming of his blue glow. Eventually, he brightened again and volunteered that he still felt something, pulling at him; when prodded, it turned out not to be toward the Shard, but rather toward the north, likely toward the City at the top of the world. This time, though, while the call still sounded like the Builders to him, it didn’t seem nearly so overwhelming. Proximity, perhaps? Something about the way he whistled about it, and the very slightly-different harmonic registers he hummed at compared to what he used to before—more true E, less E♭—made Sav think it less likely. Perhaps the fall had jarred something in his notation lines, or the makeshift way she’d had to repair him had desynced him from the angels’ rhythms.

Then, of course, he wanted to leave to explore this new place, but much like when he’d been a stolen treasure aboard the Tide’s Song, Sav had to stop him. This time, though, she promised him it wouldn’t be too long before he could go about in plain daylight. She had a plan.

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