The workshop smelled of ozone and beeswax, the signature scent of a truth being bent. Elara ran a finger along the cool brass of her torsion compass, its needle quivering not to the north, but toward the densest concentration of social belief in the city. Her job was to build falsehoods, but she prided herself on their structural integrity. A proper lie wasn’t a flimsy thing; it was a cathedral of conjecture, a fortress of fabrication.
Her newest client, the Duchess Anais, was a problem of exquisite proportions. She sat opposite Elara, twisting a pearl ring on her finger. “It’s not… formal,” the Duchess said, her voice a hushed melody of privilege and panic. “It’s more of a… situationship.”
Elara nodded, sketching on a slate. She drew two points: ‘A’ for Anais, ‘K’ for Kael, the stonemason’s son whose rough hands and low-born smile were currently threatening to dismantle a dynastic marriage. “An unsanctioned emotional entanglement,” Elara translated. The geometry was messy: a jagged, unpredictable line connecting two points that should never have shared the same plane.
“I can’t end it,” the Duchess whispered, a confession. “He’s… he’s everything.”
Elara saw the look in her eyes. It was a familiar, high-risk delusion she’d seen in dozens of clients, a shimmering hope that defied all social physics. The kids on the street had a word for it: *delulu*. It was the most unstable material to build with, but also the most potent.
“You’re not paying me to be a priest or a poet, Your Grace. You’re paying me for an angle. A new theorem.” Elara set aside her slate and picked up a crystal abacus, its beads carved from petrified whispers. She began to slide them, the clicks echoing in the quiet room. “The city believes you are the epitome of grace. Your marriage is a pillar of the state. This is our foundation.”
“But I meet him. Twice a week. At the old aqueduct.”
“The appearances are the problem, not the attachment,” Elara explained, her fingers dancing across the abacus. “We don’t erase the line connecting you and Kael. We simply prove it’s the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle they hadn’t considered.” She smiled faintly. “It’s a kind of girl math, Your Grace. The emotional expense is sunk cost. We’re just laundering the receipts.”
For a week, Elara worked. She abandoned her other, simpler projects—the merchant needing to explain a missing shipment, the guild apprentice covering for a failed exam. She felt a familiar weariness settle in her bones, the kind of professional ennui the young people were calling quiet quitting. She was still charting the lies, still cashing the cheques, but the thrill of the intellectual chase was gone, replaced by a hollow ache. This used to be her grand, challenging era; now it just felt like work.
Her investigation into Kael the stonemason’s son yielded the crucial variable. The man wasn’t just a dalliance for the Duchess; he had his own grand obsession. In his small rented room, amidst carvings of gargoyles and saints, were dozens of meticulously hand-drawn maps. They weren’t of their city, but of a place long dead: the Tecton Marches, the heartland of the fallen Aethelian Empire. It was Kael’s Roman Empire, the thing his mind returned to again and again. For the city’s scholars and historians, the rediscovery of Aethelian ruins was a quiet, fervent topic. A real IYKYK situation.
That was the missing vertex.
Elara presented the final geometry to the Duchess on a sheet of vellum. It was a beautiful, complex diagram of shimmering, ink-like light. The jagged, scandalous line between ‘A’ and ‘K’ was still there, but now it was part of a grander shape. A third point, ‘T’ for Tecton Marches, had been added. New lines of plausible connection shot out from it, intersecting with the Duchess’s known patronage of the arts and Kael’s humble trade.
“You are not his lover,” Elara declared, her voice resonating with the finality of a mathematical proof. “You are his secret benefactor. You, a known champion of history and culture, have taken an interest in this brilliant young man’s revolutionary work in historical cartography. Your meetings are not trysts; they are academic consultations. His low birth makes your patronage a quiet, noble gesture, not a public spectacle.”
The lie was a masterpiece. It was elegant, strong, and catered to the vanity of the city’s elite. Who wouldn’t want to believe their Duchess was a secret intellectual philanthropist?
A fortnight later, the final payment arrived, a heavy purse of gold that felt oddly light in Elara’s hand. The rumors about the Duchess and the stonemason’s son had vanished, replaced by impressed murmurs in salons and libraries about her discreet patronage. The geometry had held.
That evening, Elara stood at her window, looking out over the city’s rooftops. In the centre of her workshop, the luminous vellum still floated, the lie between Anais and Kael glowing as a perfect, stable, and utterly artificial construct. She had built a beautiful cage for their truth, a gilded prism that refracted scandal into acclaim.
She felt no triumph. Only the profound silence of a flawless equation that solved for nothing real. Her gaze drifted past the city walls, toward the unseen, dusty plains where the real Tecton Marches lay buried. She thought of Kael, his hands covered in stone dust and ink, chasing the ghost of an empire. He was seeking a truth, however buried. And Elara, the master architect of falsehoods, suddenly, desperately, wanted to feel the weight of something that didn’t need to be proven.
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