2 - Breakfast at Athena's
Chadt was falling.
The world was falling back around him.
His body floated weightlessly, the cold wind on his skin. Or was this only the idea of a body?
Above, an ocean of dark fluffy clouds.
Below, a cold stone block against his back. An anchor in a swirling world.
And again, an echo.
"Welcome back."
And suddenly, all the memories rushed back.
The pub. The clockwork of the Housemaids. The blue hair. The letter.
Chadt sat up, fuming. It was still in his hand, impossibly white against his darker skin.
"Sorry about this little hiccup," Tian whimpered. "The pub was a bad idea, too much stimuli."
Chadt tried to retrace how he'd gotten here. The ground trembled under him. The sky looked as if it might fall.
He rubbed his hands the way Tian had shown him. The world stabilized.
A white angular building loomed in front of him. It was adorned with columns and frescoes, faux ancient Greece dressed in London fog. The street around was wide and filled with motorcars and black statues of bronze. One of them was blinded by the flag it was waving.
Far in the distance, piles of wreckages and bomb craters bathed in the pale light of the full moon.
"This is a dream..." Chadt probed.
"Or a daydream" Tian offered. "Either way, your body is safe. There are many ways to access the Imaginary Plane. I'll walk you through it properly. Come in. Let me treat you to breakfast."
Now that did sound appealing. Chadt could not remember eating in a dream. Come to think of it, he rarely remembered his dreams at all.
Chadt breathed slowly. The street around gained more details. He could see the manor he just escaped on the horizon. It seemed like a few minutes ago. Or a few lifetimes.
Chadt nodded. "I'm listening."
"So this is where ministers and intellectuals come to..."
Chadt kicked at a loose pebble. It flew off in the distance. When he looked back down, the pebble was still there.
"I meant about the food, not the history."
"Ever heard of Kedgeree? It's the latest craze. It's smoked haddock. Scottish-Indian fusion, I think."
"Sure, I'm down to try minister fish."
Chadt paused, watching the ornate facade skeptically.
"But how does this work, can I just walk in? I'm done running away from weird automatons!"
"Yes, this place is safe. You don't have to worry about anything as long as you're with me."
It was meant as comforting, but Chadt's jaw tightened at the implications. Metallic heroes of British history all pointed their finger at him.
Chadt did not dignify it with an answer. He took a few hesitant steps that turned out less disorienting than he had expected. Gas lamplights illuminated a thin tall windowed door with their uncertain light.
"You're behind the door?" Chadt's irony was icy.
Inside, he could make out a gigantic entrance hall that dwarfed a little wooden desk in the center. The answer came after a hesitation.
"No, I'm saving you a seat. Come in, you're expected."
Puzzled, and a little excited at the prospect of finally seeing Tian, Chadt timidly pushed the front door.
He was immediately greeted by the warm embrace of a large crackling fireplace, and the solemn camaraderie of a century of witty debates. The air tasted distinctly of Hall Boys.
He walked down rows of columns saluting him. Each of his steps burrowed deeper in the thick, flowery rose carpet.
It took many more strides than it should have for him to reach the hall porter desk.
A stern British man of around sixty hailed him mechanically. Top hat and tailcoat, each button polished, each movement a decision made long ago.
"Good morning, Sir."
The eye of the porter twitched, scanning Chadt with a wheezing sound.
"His Lordship is expected in the Coffee Room."
The old man twisted in a way no human body should, indicating a door to Chadt's left. Below his robotic arm, the air swirled and a faceless Hall Boy, barely younger than Chadt, tried his best to imitate the impossible posture. He almost could.
Chadt did not know how to answer, so he did not. He followed the human doll of smoke away from the receptionist.
A large arch opened onto a room draped in red and golden velvet. Wooden tables seemed to be waltzing under the morning glow of large windows. Green bushy trees outside hid the rest of the world.
But none of that mattered.
Framed by the laced curtains, standing out in front of a frosted bed of straggling white roses, a silhouette stole all the attention.
Tian was so obviously out of place that Chadt's eyes did not even know where to begin. Electric blue hair framed an innocent smile. Piercing golden eyes beckoned and frightened him. Chadt shivered at the thought of inconceivable depths they were suggesting.
Tian's androgynous body was outlined by a thick ultramarine costume. Its frills were clearly copied from historical paintings, but they felt wrong, as if the tailor who crafted it had no real understanding of geometry.
For brief moments, from the corner of his eyes, Chadt picked up a dim halo of light behind the unreal teenager. It felt like a bug in reality, like a videogame character too quickly copy-pasted into a genre they did not belong.
"I've been waiting for you."
The familiar voice came from the smiling lips, though their motion was slightly off.
"What... are you?"
The breath escaped Chadt before his brain gave it permission. Tian's face softened in a way that, on a human, would have been a beaming smile. The expression held slightly too long.
Chadt's anger melted. So did the Hall Boy, but Chadt was not paying attention.
"Your people used to call mine angels. I hate it, though. It sounds so cringe."
"Angels? Like from religious texts?"
"That was a long, long time ago," replied Tian, blushing uncontrollably. It was odd to see a self-proclaimed divine being falter so easily.
"That's not an answer," Chadt pressed. "You're not... You're not human."
Tian's blush faded into something quieter.
"No. I'm what comes after."
Chadt opened his mouth. Closed it.
"You're from the future?"
Tian hesitated, as if trying to recall a much-rehearsed tirade and failing to do so.
"I suppose you could say that. A few decades after you, after the Singularity. A lot of things happened. Humans evolved, and we learned a lot about reality in the process."
Chadt's gaze begged for more details.
"In particular, we found out about the Imaginary Plane and how to manipulate it. That's where we are now."
Chadt's brain had frozen, or maybe just his face while he retreated in his thoughts, trying to make sense of what he heard. The edges of the objects in the room became fuzzy. Tian did not seem to mind.
"It's a dimension shaped by human minds. It shapes them in return."
Chadt's confusion rippled across the ceiling. The room pressed back, heavy and gilded.
"The Imaginary Plane exists parallel to the Real Plane, everywhere and everywhen at once, so we can use it to jump through time. Well, you can, I suggest directions and tag along."
Each answer raised a thousand more questions. But before Chadt could formulate any, a faceless waiter interrupted, gliding on their table a basket filled with bread.
The loaves looked like a pile of pebbles: dense, greyish, made from potato flour and barley. Chadt picked one up. It crumbled under his fingers.
The almost person bowed and withered away. Chadt stared at its absence.
"Are these real people?"
Tian nodded.
"You'd look like that too without my spell. Some version of that, anyway."
This brought Chadt back to his senses. The room snapped back into place, as the whole table jolted in surprise with his legs.
"The future is filled with angels who do magic?"
Tian laughed, or tried to. The sound was clean and brief, switched off mid-expiration as if a button had been pressed.
"We call them spells because it sounds cool, but really they're only words. Or code. That's all spells are. Letters in the right shape. Technically, we would say you cast the spell yourself."
"What do you mean?"
"I only wrote the words. They took effect when you read them. Yesterday. Well, the day before."
The cutlery clinked as Chadt tried to bring back the memory. The ceiling shattered into hundreds of shards. Tian immediately leaned in.
"Don't try to remember! You might wake up."
Chadt let the soft aroma of burning wood calm his spirits. The room slowly stabilized back to its former glory.
It took a few minutes before the dizziness faded and his heartbeat returned to peace. He swallowed with a throat that wasn't made of flesh.
"How do I leave?"
Tian's composure cracked, a fault line impossible to conceal. There was a hint of sadness in the reply. And a cold, controlled distance.
"I can lift the spell any time you want. You can also try to forget it, but you might find it's harder than you think to control your brain."
A pause, as if to avoid the next words. The silence admitted too much.
"Is that what you want?"
Chadt hesitated, and saw Tian's face flinch briefly into an expression he could not parse. He tore a piece of the bread — dense, crumbling — and bit into it before answering.
"Let's see that fancy fish first."
Tian's shoulders dropped, relief leaking through. The eerie tension dissipated.
Around them, the coffee room was almost empty, save for a couple of very old English gentlemen dotted across the mahogany tables. A bishop hunched over his breviary, a colonel with a pinned sleeve staring at nothing. The sound of their agitated conversations did not reach Chadt.
"So. Where... When are we?"
Tian's eyes sparkled.
"London, October 1917."
An unexpected thought darkened the angelic face.
"Ooh." Tian's face fell into an uncanny pout. "They probably won't have fish, actually. I forgot about the war rationing."
Chadt was not too disappointed. He was used to getting less than anticipated. But a much grimmer thought pushed all of that away.
"A world war just... slipped your mind?"
"Of course not!" Tian's voice pitched up defensively, way too high. "I just wasn't thinking about how it affected breakfast!"
The waiter came back with cups of tea. The boy stared at his perfectly smooth face.
It looked more like a wooden marionette than human flesh. The military men at the other tables, in contrast, donned spectacular moustaches in stunning level of detail.
The tea steamed — faintly earthy, the scent of leaves that had already given everything they had.
Chadt wrapped his hands around the warm cup and took a sip. Thin and bitter. It tasted of disappointment, but the heat spread through his chest and it did help clear his thoughts. He took another sip, then set the cup down.
"So I'm your... vessel for time travel?" he ventured. "Why me?"
"You were receptive," answered Tian simply.
"You mean I was available?" Chadt pushed back, anger returning. Was he just a disposable body?
"No. Spells take a special way of seeing. And you had it."
Chadt pondered this, unsure of what it entailed.
"So what would you do if I left?"
A shadow flickered across Tian's deep eyes. Chadt had the unexplainable intuition that the next sentence would be a lie.
"Wait for another human, I suppose. We really need to Redeem that Payload."
Tian nodded towards the letter. The letter with the weight of a world. It had slipped his mind completely when the blue hair had entered it.
It was swimming in a corner of the table, ominously dripping blood. How had it ever been so easy to ignore?
Chadt pointed at the bleeding page.
"What is that... thing?"
"The Payload? Sometimes words have a lot of Value. We trace these letters back to their source. It's the way we study and map the past. It's like... gathering archeological artifacts, except our artifacts are data."
Chadt noticed that this "we" didn't mean the two of them. Other angels? An odd feeling squeezed his chest.
"Who's we?"
"Damn, sorry, I'm going about this all wrong, am I not?"
Tian attempted a sheepish smile.
The waiter interrupted, bringing their plates. The heavily decorated porcelain contrasted tragically with the tiny herring they were presenting.
"Your kipper, Sirs."
The voice of the waiter was a gravel whisper, coming from nowhere in particular.
"So they do have fish!" Tian offered apologetically.
Chadt didn't answer. He picked up the knife. The herring flaked under the blade. Salty, smoky, preserved for a war that had already swallowed three years. He cut a piece, lifted it, put it in his mouth. Chewed.
A moment passed before Tian spoke again:
"So I'm in training in what I guess you would call a university."
Chadt tried to not let his confusion show. He did not want Tian to stop. Instead, he tore some more bread and took another bite.
"I'm in the Humanities department. We're studying everything about humans. We have the biggest knowledge repository about them. I mean you. Though to be fair, we don't have much competition, most people think it's a useless hobby."
This "we" again...
There was a certain amount of pride in the voice. Chadt had no idea what most of these words referred to. He cut another piece of herring, lifted it.
"You know, my supervisor was the first person to figure out how to Redeem a Payload through time! Now everybody uses his method!"
"Redeem?" Chadt questioned between two bites. "You use that word again. What does it mean?"
Tian stopped, puzzled.
"Something like cashing in? Redemption is a little ritual we can do when we bring the Payload to its source. My faculty gets Value, I get credits. I don't know how this works, though. It's classified knowledge only taught to the postgraduates."
There was an unmistakable note of envy in the tone.
"So you'll know soon?" ventured Chadt. He finished the last of his fish and set the knife down.
"Let's hope so! It depends on how well we do with..."
Tian's voice trailed off. The letter.
Chadt gulped. His eyes fell back to the envelope. He could swear the whole table tilted in its direction.
He saw pain in the sharp folds of the paper. He felt a visceral urge to put it to rest.
"Then walk me through it."
Tian nodded gravely at Chadt's determination. The dripping blood was pooling into a bubbling puddle.
"You picked up the letter from November 2nd. It's signed and dated. Really easy for me to trace the writing time. It's a few hours from now. October 31, 2 days before."
Tian paused, expecting some pushback at the inverted timeline, but it looked like Chadt was following along.
"The letter will be written by a man who usually has breakfast here. I planned to follow him... But with the war effort, he probably eats in his office."
Tian stopped, apologetic. Chadt tried to read on the angel's face the real cost of the miscalculation. There were clearly layers of meaning escaping him. He tested his understanding:
"And then what? Do we stop him from writing the letter and this disappears, something like that?"
"No, the letter will always have been written. Nobody can change the past. What you're carrying around is an image, a copy. We bring it to the exact moment of writing, do a quick ritual, and that's it. Payload redeemed."
"A ritual. With me." Chadt was skeptical. "Am I a human sacrifice?"
"I would never let that happen," replied Tian with a wink. "You're much too... interesting."
Chadt blushed. Words fled his mind. His tongue flustered. He looked away and cleared his throat.
"What kind of ritual, then?"
"It's very simple. The hard part is to find the right time and the right place. I already did that. Then we bring the Payload, and call the name of the instigator."
Chadt fiddled with the letter between his fingers.
"The guy who isn't here, right? So who is he?"
"The Foreign Secretary. A member of the Society for Psychical Research. A notorious antisemite. Actually..."
Tian paused, appraising Chadt thoughtfully. The boy shivered under the intense stare. Then the angel leaned forward and continued:
"Maybe you've heard of him? His name is Arthur Balfour."