Chapter 54: A Different Frame of Reference

With no further source of information on Sydney Underhill, Prima, accompanied by a dozen clockwork soldiers, was returning to Hunter Chamberlain's manor.

It was rather conspicuous, the way they were marching down the cobblestone streets like this – but there was no one else on the island and all ways in were surrounded by a myriad of ships. She was sure, with mathematical certainty, that she was in no danger now.

Protocol was here for protocol's sake. They entered the deserted manor and found it just as empty as before, with a bit of the dust blanket that had settled over everything more disturbed in the areas that Prima had trod the last time she had been here.

"Station yourselves at the doors," Prima said, gesturing to four of the marines who had accompanied her. They complied.

Hunter had a study that she had not yet explored, and that was her primary objective today.

Given what she had seen of Sydney, she was most likely under the influence of some type of hoodoo curse. Given that Vadima was missing and that the witchdoctor's coven had been completely obliterated to smithereens when Prima had launched her initial attack on the island, Hunter's manor would be her next best source.

Before Skull Island had been driven to desolation, this house had harbored two of the most powerful and capable witchdoctors to have ever lived. Surely, there would be some remnant of their practices – they would not have had time before the attack to hide everything away, there was no grace period for precautionary measures.

Prima herself had made sure of that.

She climbed the staircase, going to the one room that she knew served as Hunter's study – she had encountered it during her first visit to the manor, but she had not thought anything of it at the moment. In fact, even now, she did not know why she had made the first investigation at all. As odd as it was for a clockwork to find themselves in a state of bewilderment, that was exactly her current predicament.

The carpet of dust had remained mostly undisturbed as she stepped in, the long train of her coat sweeping up a good deal of it into the air and creating a greyish haze that obscured nearly everything as she continued towards the desk, the remaining dragoons and marines having positioned themselves by the window, by the doorway, on the stairwell.

Once she was in the center of the room, the dust had cleared, and she could take in the surroundings.

There was one window – it was small and barely larger than a porthole but still large enough to allow sunlight in, and the short wall was lined with a single bookcase and a long-dead plant. The desk took up most of the area in the room.

Reaching out, Prima ran a finger along the spines of them – the books were old, archaic, and likely had not been touched in years. She recalled that many Marleybonian noblemen did this, put collections of books on display that they had no interest in themselves for the sake of décor or propriety. Inherited from his father, most likely.

Most of them were books on the Polarian Wars – on strategy, even a thin one on the limited details that the Islanders knew of the Valencian Armada. How little they knew, Prima internally mused. How little. They knew that there were different types of soldiers built, that they had different specialties, and that they were commanded by a singular force.

There was not much more than that, she found, after briefly pulling it from the oak bookcase and scanning through it in a few brief seconds. How little they knew, indeed.

The books on war and strategy were likely from classes – she knew they offered some instruction in battle tactics – and there were some others which clearly had not been touched in ages, marked with strange scriptures. Manuals on hoodoo, most likely, but he had been considered a master – him and Dangler both – for a long, long time.

Prima had one of the soldiers standing guard collect about a dozen of them.

Having taken everything of potential relevance from the small bookshelf, Prima now moved on to the desk. It was a fine work of furniture, with detailed carvings all down the legs of it and polished brass handles on each of the drawers – which she pulled open and rifled through, one by one.

Small compact leather journals and portfolios, dozens of quill pens, both broken and intact. Prima only had to flip through one to realize that these contained the details of his personal life – these were his journals and diaries. Within the portfolios were sketches – he was not a professional, obviously, but each of the drawings were done with a certain level of mastery. It was a pastime that had remained with him for years.

At the bottom of one of the drawers was a thin sheet of parchment that Prima dug out, brushing off the dust and laying it flat on the desk, recognizing the feminine, shapely figure featured in the very center of the page as none other than Dangler.

She was wearing a very typical Marleybonian dress, with stays and corsets and petticoats and all. Her black, curly hair was tied away from her face, her eyes were closed, her sharp, angular cheekbones cast graceful shadows. Five lilies had been tucked into her hair.

She was smiling. In her lap was her violin.

Prima remembered that violin.

She picked up one of the leather portfolios and gave it a firm shake and several similar sheets came flying out, scattering all over the desk and the floor with a great series of rustling noises.

Dangler in a sleek dress, Dangler with her arms raised, a crystal ball at eye level, Dangler turned away, lying on the bed, a thin blanket the only piece of fabric covering her nude form –

Prima looked away. These were intimate. It did not have any meaning to her, of course, but there was still something intrusive about seeing this part of any being's life, she knew. If there were consequences of disturbing it, she was not aware of them.

But if anything, now, she truly did know the depth of the relationship between Hunter and the strange, skeletal madwoman that had held both her and Albus captive for more than a year.

Dangler at the piano bench. She was thinner now. Dangler, half finished, the features of her face erased, but the sharpness of her collarbones had increased. She could imagine how the scenario went – no, Hunter was saying, please just smile for me. Dangler. You're so beautiful when you smile, because he truly did think that she was the most beautiful being to ever grace the spiral and he hated seeing her in pain, but she would only cry and scream for him. Where is he. Where is he.

Where is my Decimus.

There was a very popular phrase from one of the mortal worlds – a picture is worth a thousand words. It had no specified origins and yet all at once Prima understood its meaning.

And then there were the scraps of unfinished sheet music, which Prima did not know how to read, she only knew that it was indeed music, but the fact that Hunter had devoted his time to actually composing meant that he had been mentally, emotionally invested in his music.

Again, Prima remembered the piano, the violin.

And writings centered in the middle of the page, spaced out lines in refined fonts –

Of all the words within all of the worlds

You yet surpass them all

Crouching, your arched back

And glimmering claws; they

Steal my breath and blood

My body and soul ensnared.

There were more writings of this nature, short and abstract and having no specific meaning, but Prima had enough knowledge to know that this was poetry, and these were sonnets – love-poems, if one would.

He had written them for her.

Prima stopped and considered why she had come here in the first place. Surely it was not to observe the artwork or the writings of Hunter Chamberlain – rather, it was to cripple him, to locate and destroy him with the help of any traces of information left behind in the manor.

And so why was she still here?

Because, she answered herself, she still remembered how he had come into her cell like a child seeking advice, how he sank to his knees and sobbed and told her their story, and she had no other option but to listen and understand. These little personal affects of his were the missing puzzle pieces of what was needed to understand exactly what happened between them, what transpired –

Hunter watching Dangler die. Slowly, day by day, she deteriorated, her health sank lower and lower –

And she lost the last shreds of her own control. Prima remembered what it had been like to hold Albus in that cave, wondering day after day if he would function the next morning, if that wound in his side would bleed out in the middle of the night before it could tarnish over. That, that was what Hunter had felt, but dilated with emotion and amplified with a deadly combination of love and grief.

Briefly, Prima considered leaving the books behind, along with the sketches and the sheet music, and sealing the door to the study forever, as if she had never come across that room in the first place, as if it had not been disturbed from its eternal rest.

But there was still advantage to be gained.

"Commander. Shall we retrieve Chamberlain's belongings?"

"Affirmative," Prima answered, sweeping up the remaining loose papers and stacking them neatly together.

Just as the pirates had much to learn about the Valencian Clockworks, Prima herself still had much to learn about human beings, about mortal beings who not only thought, but felt.

In a few short days' time, they would be going against a horde of these beings, who both thought and felt, and they would feel rage, rage at the takeover of their island, they would feel sorrow, the sorrow that came with the deaths of their loved ones, of their close friends and companions that now were nothing more than a contribution to the body pile. Prima remembered the six pirates that they had found floating, adrift in the skyways with no clue as to where the rest of them had made camp. She remembered the resilience that they had shown as she gave the order for them to be torn apart until their hearts stopped.

She remembered his pain. The pain that would still be there, because Dangler was dying and there was nothing, nothing he could do about it. He would take that pain and he would face her in battle with it hanging onto its chest with Dangler's jagged nails. And Prima, ever the strategist that she was built to be, would find out each and every one of his secrets, his weaknesses, so that she would not just know the face of her enemy when he stood before her, but the man himself –

Body and soul.


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- Severina