"But is there a Queen?" I asked one of my fellow scribes.

"Well, no," he admitted. "Right now we have a King. But the names just stuck. Anyway, can you take this?"

He handed me a bundled sheaf of papers in a folder, with twine wrapped around it. I took it from him.

"Sure! Where is it?"

I put the folder into my messenger bag, potentially using it for its intended purpose for the first time.

"It's hard to miss," he said with a grin. "Just head toward those giant buildings in the centre of town and look for the sign. Thanks! Besides, you need to go see those buildings." He winked.

I was pretty sure I knew which ones he meant, so I nodded and headed out.

Queen's Records. It was apparently something like a City Hall back on Earth, but mostly the paper filing department.

Once on the right road, Ru Fí-Réalta, the buildings in question were indeed hard to miss, rising up above other buildings in the city from almost any angle. Graceful stone curves, spiral shapes rising high, and what looked like white lacework on the outside, glass filling the spaces between the lace. Plain ivory coloured stone in the shape of a giant crescent with intricately carved facades on one, stacks of rectangular prisms painted bright primary colours on another, with animal faces popping up at random, like a child left their play set out and it froze into a building. Yet another looked like it was built out of honeycombs curving around in a wobbly shape, and mass amounts of greenery were clearly visible on each level inside.

Starweave architecture, people said, made with magic somehow or other, some sort of magic or skill well beyond that of most people in Fleuve Clair. The buildings were not as tall or imposing as buildings in Vancouver, or elsewhere on Earth, but they had a certain something... I couldn't see people on Earth building these.

As I drew closer, the vibe shifted quickly from commercial and residential to park land, mostly open grass. The roads became meandering stone pathways with curving, spiralling, boxy, and diagonal patterns, two or three shades of something that looked like concrete. I bent down to look at it more closely, and I couldn't see any sign of joins or paint. The stone was simply several colours that felt like growing in that shape, as far as I could tell.

I reached out to touch it gently, and something seemed to shimmer gently, almost like heat waves, and some kind of bell-like tone seemed to sound inside me. I quickly removed my fingers.

Some sort of magic resonance I was able to perceive now that I'd touched Síle's magic?

I stood and walked onward, looking for a sign. After not too long, I found a painted metal sign in dark green, with white Clair lettering, and followed the path.

From a distance, the buildings were interesting. Up close, even underneath some of them, like the colourful cube that seemed like it had started to fall over but changed its mind mid-fall, they were a little bit intimidating.

I followed one last sign toward a door into the cube building. That particular cube seemed to be nearly hollow inside, providing a huge atrium. A square of countertop desk stood near the door, and a grandmotherly woman stood behind one side. When I got closer, her eyes lit up, she smiled widely, took a breath, and clapped lightly with her hands.

"Oh! You're finally here."

"I, um," I stuttered, not really understanding the woman's vehemence. Surely these papers from the guild couldn't be that important? "I need to deliver these from Consoeurie Fí-Réalta."

"Of course you do," she said, grinning widely. "Go down that hallway, third door on the right."

"Thanks!" I replied, waving.

She just kept smiling.

Strange. I'd had no idea the guild person had given me something so important to carry over.

Three doors down, I went inside and knocked on the wall briefly, since the clerk inside hadn't noticed me. He looked sharply up at me from his place crouching on the floor, reading files. He did a double-take and tipped over before standing up and walking to the desk.

"I need to deliver these from Consoeurie Fí-Réalta," I repeated from earlier.

"Yes. Yes. I see!"

He lifted his glasses from where they hung down and placed them over his ears, opening the folder and looking through the papers inside. Occasionally I caught him peeking a glance at me as he read, as if checking that I was still there.

"Is there anything to take back?" I asked him.

"Oh!" he said, looking up. "No, you can go back. Thank you." He took one of my hands in both of his briefly and then went back to reading.

Strange folk. Definitely strange.

By the end of the week, I
could feel my return time coming with increasing intensity. Somehow, I was still only at the Sunday evening of that same weekend, but it felt like the number of days I'd spent in Fleuve Clair were at least twice as many.

I was sitting on a bench in a nearby park, watching kids and parents play with their dogs, spacing out.

In my time there, I'd learned the fundamentals of a whole new language, I'd settled into a job that I'd become pretty good at, I'd made some friends. Heck, I'd even formed some attachments to favourite shops and ways to relax in the evenings.

And that was before thinking about knowing and seeing that magic was real.

The Alyx from the first arrival felt practically like a different person that I was looking back at. I thought back to the question I'd asked myself when I thought that leaving early was out of the question:

At what point won't it be out of the question?

As I'd suspected, it hadn't particularly resolved itself. All I had was a time at which it was out of the question that I not go back and figure out what to do, to somehow make an arrangement with my parents that wouldn't leave them frantically filing missing persons reports.

When did this change happen? When did I go from exploring this place in curiosity, to figuring out how to just stay? I searched inside myself and found, surprisingly, that I wasn't even as homesick as before.

I coughed a couple of times, briefly. I'd had a sore throat the past day or so. I hoped I wasn't picking up new pathogens to take back with me; after all, I didn't have vaccines for the diseases in Shanaclair, and they had none for Earth, a briefly horrifying thought. Anyway...

It wasn't like I could say, hi Mom, hi Dad, hi friends, I'm moving to a monastery in the Himalayas. In that case, we'd at least be aging at the same pace, we could still write letters and occasionally call each other or internet chat.

I sighed and stood up, walking back toward the guild, where I could study a bit in my room and sleep. When I went back to Vancouver, a week at school or even putting my affairs in order would be multiple months of time in Shanaclair. I wondered if the guild would even let me hold on to my room that long. Would I leave my clothes in that room?

I'd been putting it off, but it felt like it might finally be time to start talking with them about my departure.