📖 The Celestial Codex (2/7) 📖
The Codex
The queen’s working chamber lay between the antechamber and her bedchamber—modest in scale, but dense with years. Its stone walls bore the softened edges of age, once hung with maps and standards, now pale with dust outlines where color used to be. The tall, partially shuttered windows let in thin, angled shafts of morning light that caught on motes suspended in still air. The smell was a mix of drying herbs, old vellum, and linen gone slightly sour from time and use.
The queen sat beside the table, in a wooden chair softened with added cushions and a lap blanket tucked neatly around her knees. She was eighty-four, and wore her years the way old books wear dust—quietly, without apology. Her hands, pale and thinned, rested lightly on the arms of the chair. Her posture had once been straight but now leaned slightly, like a sapling bowed too often by wind.
She looked neither at the door nor at the few attendants moving carefully through the room, but at the light itself—watching it move across the flagstones as if trying to remember what day it was, or what she was supposed to say next. From the corner of the room, the faint ticking of a travel clock marked the minutes—though she no longer counted them.
"Your majesty," Leona said. "This is Moses. He will be here each day to take down what you say."
Moses bowed deeply.
"Very good," the queen said. "What is your surname, Moses?"
"Miller, your majesty," he said, feeling oddly nervous at the thought of speaking directly with her.
"I knew a Gerard Miller in my youth," she said.
"My grandfather," Moses said.
"Is that so?" the queen asked.
Moses nodded.
"Does he live, still?" she asked.
"Unfortunately, no," Moses replied.
This time the queen nodded.
A table sat at the room’s center, long and sturdy, but warped just enough to make ink pots wobble. No fresh ink remained—only a scattering of brittle quills, old correspondence in cracked seals, and the spine-warped remains of a ledger, its binding bowed under its own weight. Shelves along the back wall were dense with parchment rolls and clothbound records, most untouched in decades, their titles smudged by years of humid summers and cold stone winters.
Leona made quick work of clearing the desk, placing the ledger on a shelf and discarding the dry inkwells and broken quills into a rubbish bin. She placed two sets of parchments, two inkwells, and four pens on the desk in two neat stacks, one on the left and the other on the right.
"Sit," she instructed him.
He did.
"Any official orders go here," she said pointing to what appeared to be normal parchment and ink. "And other musings go here," she said, indicating the special parchment and inks. "Do not mix up your pens."
Moses frowned and then looked at Leona. "How will I know?"
"She means," the queen said. "That when I tell you my dreams and thoughts, that you should write them on your right-hand side. But when I give instructions or histories, you write them on your left-hand side."
"Yes, your majesty," Moses said, dropping his eyes to his desk.
"Well, go on then," said the queen.
"With?"
"I've just told you where and when to write. Instructions. Write them on your left-hand side."
"Oh!" he said. He wrote:
Orders on the left-hand side. Dreams on the right-hand side.
"Don't summarize," Leona said. "Don't paraphrase. Write exactly what she says."
"Understood," Moses said.
He sat, pen in hand, but the queen said nothing for an hour.
"Mabel?" she finally said.
A lady-in-waiting appeared out of the shadows. "Majesty?"
"I shall like a slice of brown bread, the crust trimmed… Warm, not toasted. A spoon of fig jam, if there's some left. An egg, soft boiled. An apricot, peeled. And tea. Not too hot."
"Yes, majesty," she said.
Moses wrote it down on the left-hand parchment.
Leona observed as he did, and nodded her head in approval, before she turned to sorting linens. She handed fresh sheets to two who disappeared into the queen's bedroom, returning a few minutes later with soiled linens they tucked into a rolling wooden bin destined for the laundry.
Mabel returned with enough breakfast for three, and the queen indicated that Leona and Moses should join her.
"It's a grey day," said the queen after taking a bite of warm brown bread with fig.
Moses set down his tea and began writing.
"Oh, you needn't write every word," the queen said. "We're just having conversation. Orders on the left. Musings on the right. That's it."
Moses wasn't sure he understood, but was determined to try.
They ate mostly in silence; the queen commenting on the food occasionally. When she finished, she set down her teacup and stared off into the sunlight, troubled. But she said nothing for a long time.
Moses inspected his quills, frowned, and picked up a penknife from the desk and recut the nib, shaking his head slowly. He wondered if Leona had prepared them. He tested the quill on a scrap of parchment and then trimmed a bit more keratin from the tip, testing it a second time. Satisfied, he folded his hands on his lap.
"Where is my son?" the queen asked. "Where is Alric?"
Leona paused. She had been straightening linens near the hearth but turned slowly, her hands still. Moses glanced up from his writing but didn’t speak.
“Has he not come today?” the queen continued. “He never missed a morning when he was a boy.”
Leona stepped closer, keeping her tone light. “Majesty… Alric passed, five years ago. He fell ill. Do you remember?”
The queen blinked. Her mouth opened slightly, but no words came. Her hands—thin, veined—gripped the arms of her chair a little tighter.
“No,” she said at last. “No, he was just here last week. He had the blue sash. We were in the west garden. He asked after the roses…”
Leona knelt beside her. “That was a memory, my queen. A beautiful one. But it was some time ago.”
The queen’s lips trembled. She looked beyond Leona, as if returning to herself. “Is that why the garden’s gone? No one’s seen to it in years.”
Leona didn’t answer.
The queen closed her eyes briefly, drawing a long breath. “I have no heir,” she said, voice brittle, lost in time again.
“You have grandchildren,” Leona said gently. “And great-grandchildren. Three, last count. One named for you.”
The queen’s eyes snapped open. “That cannot be.”
“It is.”
“I would have remembered that. I would have—” She looked down at her hands as though seeing them for the first time. Then she lifted her gaze, trembling. “Leona… fetch me a looking glass.”
“My queen—”
“Please.”
Leona stood, moved to a nearby cabinet, and retrieved a small oval mirror framed in tarnished brass. She handed it to the queen without a word.
The queen turned it toward herself slowly, as though bracing for a vision. For a long moment she said nothing, only stared.
Then, in a whisper:
“Who is this woman?”
No one answered.
Her fingers traced the sag of her cheek, the crease beside her mouth, the clouded edge of one eye.
“She looks… tired.”
“You’ve carried much,” Leona said quietly. “More than most.”
The queen nodded once, then lowered the mirror to her lap.
“I meant to leave the kingdom ready,” she said. “I meant to… to finish things. Now I’m not sure I’ve even begun.”
Moses, still seated at the writing desk, had not dared move, but nothing she said seemed like a dream or an order, aside from the demand for a looking glass, which Moses had written.
"I meant to do something with Alric, but I can't remember…," the queen said, her eyes drifting closed as she spoke.
Leona hastily motioned for Moses to write on his right-hand side.
"The red stone on the…what's the word for…hush now. The ink is awake," the queen said, eyes closed.
Moses wrote, the ink flowing smoothly, almost too smoothly, on the treated parchment surface.
The queen almost chanted a rhyme:
Name the candle but not the flame.
Speak the door, but not its frame.
Forget the name of what you hold,
And memory will turn to gold.
Moses wrote it verbatim.
The queen continued to speak, as if quoting seven stanzas of rhymes.
And then she stopped, opened her eyes, and smiled.
"With your permission, I shall return later, majesty," Leona said.
The queen nodded her assent and then turned her attention to Moses. "Have I told you how magic left the world?"
"No, your majesty, but I would love to hear it," Moses said. It might not be orders, per se, but it had historical significance, so Moses decided to write it down.
"What is the year?" the queen asked.
"1467," Moses said.
The queen paused a moment, and then said, "Write this in the right-hand parchment, for the ink is awake." She closed her eyes and spoke, as Moses wrote.
"Some believe," she said, that it was a seed planted in our singleverse by an original creator. Some believe the creator planted multiple seeds and that there is a multiverse beyond our own singleverse."
Moses dutifully wrote this on the left-hand side, as it seemed to be a history.
"This is both unknown and unknowable," the queen said, "For no person has seen other verses. Tynes argued that it was the subject of speculative philosophy. What do you think Mr. Miller?"
"That there might be other worlds?"
"There certainly must be other worlds," she said. "What about other verses?"
"I've not thought about it much," he said. "I'm more of a natural philosophy kind of thinker. Things that can be seen, felt, heard, sensed, or known."
She nodded. "I, too," she said. "So we will concentrate our efforts on the natural world. It is said that when this singleverse was created—" Here she stopped and motioned for him to write rather than just listen.
Sheepishly, he looked down at the parchment and wrote out her words.
"The first celestials were sent with great haste from the center of the singleverse to take their positions in the night sky—a trio of forms: Astral, Sentinels, and Watchers."
"Will this come around to how magic left the world, your majesty?" he asked.
"I'll get there. The beginning matters," she said. "The blue Astrals are wanderers to mark the signs and seasons. Then the white Sentinels formed the constellations, which watch us, advise us, and teach us wisdom and knowledge."
The queen became silent. At length, he raised his eyes to see that she had nodded off in her chair.
Moses went back through his writings, cleaning up mistakes and inserting words where he might have missed one or two.
Two hours later, she stirred and spoke, as if she had only paused mid-sentence.
"The third of the celestials, Watchers, were dwarves, yellow and red, being least of the stars in size and power. They were sprinkled around the singleverse, but had a different purpose. They carried a power called life."
"So life comes from the stars? Does magic?"
"I'll get to that," she said.
She sipped her tea, now cold.
Leona returned and looked over Moses' shoulder and whispered, "She's taking her time."
"I don't mind," he said.
"The fourth celestial came later," the queen said. "The planets. Each found a companion celestial to give it warmth and power. Some that found Watchers and obtained. Terra is our planet, and Epherion, our star, gave her the seed of life."
"And," Moses said, "Terra gave birth to the twin moons Ashira and Isen."
"Who's telling this story?" the queen asked. "You or me?"
"My apologies, my queen," he said.
"But, you are quite right, and magic, of course, came from Ashira."
"How so?" Moses asked.
"She recorded the Song of Creation. She wrote it down to preserve it. And in so doing, but without intention, she created the Celestial Codex, from which all magic derived."
"Where is this codex?"
"It has been gone for two centuries," the queen said. "I am tired now and must retire. We shall pick this up in the morning."
Leona stopped Moses in the antechamber.
"You did well today," she said. "You may find that she repeats, and there is no need to recapture every word of repetition, but pay attention as she speaks and read through your original to make sure you capture anything new."
"How long has she been doing this?"
"Just a couple of days," Leona said.
"What is it she is saying? Stories and rhymes?"
"I'm uncertain, but we want to capture it for posterity. As you can tell, she is fading, and I think it's important that we get this down before the end. I believe it's tied to Alric somehow."
"Yes, she mentioned him several times," Moses said thoughtfully. "It seems like she forgot to do something with him and she sometimes seems desperate to revisit that. I wonder what that's about?"
Leona hesitated. "I don't think you need to worry about that. We just need you to write," she said. "Be back in the morning. She usually wakes by the first bell, so be here by then."
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.
Loved the sentence : "She was eighty-four, and wore her years the way old books wear dust—quietly, without apology".
Slow-paced world-building. I enjoy it a lot. Looking forward to reading more.