Chapter 2: Chapter 2: My Humming Master

“What’s your name?” Ananke asks him, staring at his back as he walks somewhere with intent.

“Humboldt.” He looks back over his shoulder. “But it’s just ‘Master’ for you, Apprentice,” he replies, almost sounding excited at getting to say that.

The morning air carries the scent of fresh bread and magical ozone as they walk through Hafen's winding streets. Ananke's damp clothes cling uncomfortably to her frame, but the discomfort from that feels distant and unimportant.

The Humming Man walks beside her with that same gliding stride she had often observed from a distance, his wide-brimmed hat casting his face in perpetual shadow as he ducks and weaves below and between things she can’t seem to see. The buzzing of his voice has resumed, that low, tuneless melody. Now that she is close enough, she realises it isn't random. There is a pattern to it, a rhythm.

“That song,” she ventures, her voice still rough from shouting over the explosion that never happened. “What is it?” asks Ananke.

He waits for something, staring at her and not saying anything. Slowly, he lifts his hands and gestures with them a light rolling motion for her to go on further.

The two of them stand there quietly.

“…Do I have to?” she asks, and he nods eagerly. Ananke winces with one eye. “What is it… Master?” she asks.

That’s going to take some getting used to. She’s not exactly a prideful person, but she’s never had to call anyone that before. It feels odd.

But he seems placated and claps his hands together once. “Oh, it’s not a song, in the conventional sense,” he replies immediately, before moving onwards in his strange, fluid manner. He’s like a cresting heron that became human for a day but still walked like it would in its old body. “I’m matching a vibration,” he replies without breaking stride. “It’s a little trick of my own to help me to stop from drifting to somewhere else.”

“Drifting? To where?” she asks, not following much of what he’s saying.

“I wouldn’t worry about all of that. Not all of us hear the humming,” he replies quickly as he glances down at her, and she catches a glimpse of his eyes beneath the hat's brim. “Only some of us. You will learn all of these things soon enough, though.” He leans down toward her, tapping the side of his head. “Although between you and me, I think the humming has made most of the others mad at some point, so it would be best if you aren’t one of the afflicted,” explains the Humming Man. “But I’ve handled it pretty well!”

He rises upright again with a pirouette and then leaps forward with a single, playful skip back into the direction he’s taking her.

“…Right,” replies Ananke, looking at the grown man prance through the middle of the city like a lost circus dancer. She’d feel a sense of external embarrassment for him, if not for the fact that literally nobody anywhere even seems to notice his absurd mannerisms. He’s like a ghost.

If she had thought she herself was an unseen spirit before in the eyes of the public, then this man is a full-fledged phantom.

They turn down a narrow alley she has never noticed before, despite living in this district for years. The buildings here lean inward, their upper stories nearly touching overhead, creating a tunnel of shadow that feels separate from the rest of the city. The air grows cooler, and tiny motes of light dance in the darkness, pulsing with the same rhythm as the emergency mana crystals in the not-yet-lit street lamps.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“A little detour before your first lesson,” he says simply. “But first, you need to understand what you have become. What we are.” He stops walking and turns to face her fully. “Tell me, what do you know of chronomancers?”

Ananke shakes her head. “Nothing. I've never heard the word before today.”

“What about mancers in general?” he asks.

She blinks, not sure if that is even a thing. “Uh…“

“The price of a really good, imported apple is four obols,” he adds, lifting a finger.

“…What?” she asks, lost entirely now. She shakes her head. “Wait. Four?!” asks Ananke. “That’s ridiculous!” she retorts, thinking about how expensive that would be for a piece of fruit that wouldn’t even satiate her for an hour.

He claps his hands together, rubbing the leather-clad palms together eagerly. “Good. Ignorance is preferable to misinformation,” he replies, ignoring the apple conversation entirely. She has no idea what that was about. He begins walking again, his boots silent on the cobblestones as he goes along. But there’s something off about the way he walks. He’s moving at an angle toward the left, despite the road being straight. “We are time mages, Apprentice. The rarest of the rare. Where fire mages burn things and healers fix all of those scorching wounds right up again, we are, instead, editors. We are the universe's proofreaders, correcting the small errors that would later grow into great catastrophes if left unattended.”

This would be fascinating, but she is more preoccupied with him. His slightly angled trajectory has led him straight into a house’s wall. But instead of colliding into it, he’s walking sideways on it as if its front door and outer windows were the ground for him. The fabric of his clothes doesn’t even drape downward with gravity, as if he were simply distinct from it.

“How are you doing that?” she asks.

“Don’t worry about it,” he replies, waving her off as he goes on.

The alley opens into a small courtyard dominated by an ancient well. It’s long since dry. The stone is worn smooth by centuries of use, but the water has been gone since the war. He walks in a corkscrew spiral, coming across upside-down over her head where two roofs meet in the middle of the road and then walks back down the other side until he is planted firmly back onto the road ahead of her as before. The Humming Man approaches the well's edge and gestures for her to join him.

Somewhere nearby, she hears a cat.

“There are always a baker’s dozen of us,” he continues, his voice taking on the cadence of a lesson long rehearsed. “No more, no less. We are called the Twelve Hands,” he explains, showing her the well. She doesn’t see anything special about it. It’s empty. He looks at her, holding his hand by his mouth. “I didn’t think of the name, in case you’re wondering. Terrible,” he notes, shaking his head. “We are the agents of forces far greater than ourselves. Each hand serves a different aspect of temporal stability, though we rarely work together directly. One of us is responsible for handling matters of famine. One of us is always cleaning up incidents relating to war, and so on. Everyone has their little niche.”

Ananke's brow furrows as she processes this information. “If there are always twelve, and you are taking me as an apprentice…“ She looks up at him, understanding dawning. “That means there are thirteen now. Or? Unless?”

“- Unless one of them died.” His tone carries no sadness, only chipper, matter-of-fact acceptance. “Which, unfortunately, appears to be the case, as you are certainly alive and standing here before me right now.”

“But how is that possible?” The question bursts from her before she can stop it. “It’s not like I was just born,” she replies. “If I’m… like you, then shouldn’t whoever I am replacing have died a long time ago?” she asks, trying to understand the logistics of it all. “So this can’t be a surprise for you.”

He nods. “I’m sure they did die a long time ago,” he replies, as if this were obvious. “But sometimes you’re talking to someone and neither you nor the poor fellow you’re conversing with have realised he actually died decades ago, right?” he asks. “You know how life is.”

“I…“ she stops. Her head hurts.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he remarks again, seeing her confusion.

Ananke looks at him. “If chronomancers can manipulate time, couldn't they just… undo their own death?”

This is her question, but Ananke can’t deny that her mind is already travelling back a year, two years, three years. Her thoughts are going back to the face of her family.

If time powers like this are real, then could she go back? Could she save them?

“There are those who would do so. But we don’t condone that,” he replies quickly and sharply, so much so that she’s actually surprised by his quick shift away from his usually playful tone. The Humming Man is quiet for a long moment, his attention seemingly focused on the well's dark depths. When he speaks again, his voice is softer and more serious than she has heard it before. “The use of time magic is not some portion of pseudo-omnipotence, Apprentice. It is a correction performed on the fabric of reality itself, and like any good healer mending a mangled body, we must be careful to mind that there are limits to what we can do before our care causes more harm than good,” he explains sternly. “Everyone has their time, their moment when the thread of their existence reaches its natural end and there are forces in this world of ours, even beyond us, that ensure the… core natural order remains intact at scale.” He looks at her directly.

“Forces?” she asks. “What kind of forces?”

“Bigger ones than us,” he replies, vaguely. “The ones we answer to. We edit the people-things and redirect the flow of events toward outcomes we are asked to achieve and sometimes this involves living longer than most people would, yes. But we cannot cheat death indefinitely. We cannot ignore the most fundamental law of existence. Everything dies.” He holds up his hands and spreads his fingers apart. “We’re the twelve hands on the clock, but there’s something bigger that owns the house the clock is hung in,” he explains as a metaphor of sorts.

“A clock has two hands,” she notes, dryly, wanting to touch on that something that has been bugging her. She stares at his ten fingers, which he’s spread out for example, as he says the name of the organisation. The fact that he’s missing two, she decides to leave unspoken.

He looks at her.

Ananke lifts a hand, putting up two fingers herself to add to his ten, so that the total number will be twelve. “The marks on a clock aren’t its hands. A clock only has two hands,” she says.

The humming man tilts his head, staring at her lifted fingers and then back at her. “I already said it was a dumb name, Apprentice,” he notes dryly.

She doesn't really understand it, not fully. The concepts are too large and too abstract for her mind to grasp completely. But she nods anyway, filing the information away for later consideration. There will be time to learn and time to understand.

“Will I meet the others?” she asks. “The other, uh, ‘hands’?”

“Eventually.” He turns from the well and begins walking toward the far side of the courtyard. “We have a meeting place. I will show it to you when you are ready, when your training has progressed enough that you won't embarrass me in front of my friends.”

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“Pardon?” she asks, not sure if that should hurt her or not.

“I’m yanking your chain,” he remarks, winking to her as he walks backward. “Between us, they’re kooks.” He shakes his head, making some sort of gesture with his hands that she doesn’t understand. She thinks it’s supposed to look cool. He never walks backward, though. Instead, it looks like some fundamental part of his locomotion gets stuck and she watches in nauseating awe as the humming man just seems to slide backward with one leg in the air as if something were pulling him along toward itself before he could finish taking a single step.

“Wait!” she calls as he slides off down the way faster than she can catch up after him. “Why did we come here?!” she asks, gesturing back to the empty well.

They never did anything with that. They took a detour to even reach it.

It’s quiet.

Ananke stands there, staring at the empty alleyway. He’s gone.

“Ah… excuse me. Pardon me,” calls a weak, cracking voice from nearby. Ananke looks, turning her head as an old woman peeks out of her house’s window. She expects to get told to be quiet and go away, as is usually the case. Instead, the old lady looks down at her hand. “Are you… uh, oh dear.” She squints, trying to read a note with her old, weakened eyes. “Miss Apprentice Ananke?” she asks.

Ananke stares, perplexed, and then nods quietly once. “Yes, Ma’am,” she replies.

The old woman reaches out of the window, holding a slip of paper. “I was given this a week ago. Your master said you’d be here and paid me to give it to you,” she explains.

Now she’s truly lost.

Ananke takes the little note. “…Thank you,” she mutters and then looks down at the folded paper, breaking a small wax seal and opening it.

‘Meet me at the market. Bring the cat’ is all that’s written inside.

What in the world has she gotten herself into? Ananke stares back down the empty alleyway again, lost.

“…Where am I supposed to get a cat?” she mutters, looking around herself.

As if calling in response, from down inside the empty well comes a long, sad meowing.

She jolts, turning and looking down into the miniature abyss where the sound came from.

image [https://i.imgur.com/pUoDcs0.png]

There is an audible purring as she holds the rescued cat, arriving at the marketplace an hour later after nearly breaking her neck trying to climb down that well. The rolling vibration against her chest does make her feel better, but it doesn’t help lessen the biting sting of the many red, bleeding scratches covering her arms from her attempts to get back up the well with the trapped cat that had fallen inside.

It was hard to communicate to it that she was trying to help it. Cats aren’t easy to placate when they’re riled.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” says the Humming Man, as she arrives and stands next to him. The two of them look over the marketplace. The tired black cat meows as he reaches over, scratching its head.

“Is that a chronomancy lesson, or just sadism?” she asks, looking at him.

“Why, it’s valuable life advice,” replies the Humming Man, scratching below the cat’s chin as it lifts its head contentedly. “You’re quite welcome.”

The buildings on this side of the marketplace are blackened by fire and there are crooked, lightning-like scars in the stonework across the ground from where the blasts hit here during the war. She stands on one such scar, looking down at the broken arcs in the stonework where magic had flown through, shattering it apart.

“Today's actual, first lesson is simple. Mundane. It won’t be as dramatic as our meeting was,” the Humming Man continues as they walk. “Observation and intervention. You have already proven you can see the threads of causality, the connections between events,” he explains as they walk. “Now you must learn to touch them, to make the smallest possible adjustments that will yield the greatest results. But with a little more… finesse than your last, quite interesting, trap.”

By ‘threads’, she assumes he means those strange connections between events. She’s watched him work so often that she understands the cascading nature of time that he’s talking about, somewhat.

It’s like the threads of a sweater. If you pull on one, it’ll pull on all the others around it. Manipulating one event will change all of the others around it, even if they weren’t directly touched themselves.

“It worked,” she replies, not wanting her partial success to be diminished. “Sort of.”

“Sort of,” he agrees.

They emerge onto a busy street where merchants hawk their wares and tradesmen stride purposefully toward the guild district. But the Humming Man's attention is focused on something specific. He points to a young courier racing through the crowd, a leather satchel bouncing at his hip.

“That boy carries a message that will start a regional trade war if it reaches its destination unchanged,” he says calmly.

“A trade war?” she asks almost unimpressed, not sure if that’s really anything.

He nods. “The merchant who sent it is angry about a shipment delay, and his letter contains certain… inflammatory accusations about the recipient's parentage and business practices. In two hours, those words will escalate into familial violence. In two weeks, that seed of violence will spread to involve several separate trading houses. In two months, the resulting embargo will starve a village hundreds of miles from here where the wares are produced, leading to an undead plague that will kill thousands more in the surrounding region.” He raises his hands into the air in exasperation. “Worse still, the price of a good apple here will be twelve obols before the end of the year,” he says, pointing at a popular market fruit vendor and shaking his head. “Twelve!”

At first, that also doesn’t seem impressive, compared to their stopping a war criminal terrorist bombing the city.

But then she thinks about it a moment more. She could barely afford to live as is before with her alms. If the price of food in the city doubled or even tripled because of some stupid squabble between the merchant families, she would have starved to death. That’s not including the destruction in some place far away she’s never heard of.

Her eyes look around past the crowds, toward the alleyways and the corners, where she sees figures sitting in shrouds and squalor. They’re also out of home and shelter because of the war.

She would have died. They would all die.

…All because of some feud between two people she’s never heard of. Is this really true? Or is he just messing with her?

Ananke watches the courier disappear around a corner, her mind struggling to follow the chain of causality her mentor describes. “How can you possibly know all that?”

“Practice,” he says simply. “And a great deal of very tedious record-keeping by others with minds more aware of such things than my own,” he replies, tapping his head.

He raises his hand, and the familiar shimmer begins to spread through the air around them. Time doesn't stop completely, but it slows and becomes thick and malleable. The crowds of people move like figures wading through honey, their voices dropping to incomprehensible bass rumbles. Dust motes hang in spiralling patterns, and the mana crystals embedded in nearby buildings pulse with languid, hypnotic rhythms.

“Your turn, Apprentice,” the Humming Man says, his voice cutting clearly through the temporal distortion. He points toward the fruit vendor's cart. “Move a single apple from the left basket to the right. Nothing more, nothing less.” His tone grows serious. “You must not touch anyone or anything else on your way there or back. The slightest additional contact could unravel everything we're trying to accomplish.”

Ananke nods, her heart racing with the prospect of her first real chronomantic work. She steps into the slowed world, feeling the strange resistance of thickened time against her movements. Each step requires deliberate effort, like walking through invisible molasses.

As she approaches the vendor's cart, awkwardly shuffling around and through the dense crowd as if any of them were fragile glass statues, the sweet scent of ripe fruit fills her nostrils with overwhelming intensity. Her empty stomach clenches painfully, reminding her that she hasn't eaten since… well, she’s lost track. Time has been meaningless to her for a while now. The apples gleam like jewels in the languid light, their red and gold surfaces promising relief from the gnawing hunger that has been her constant companion for so long.

She reaches toward the designated apple, but her hand trembles as it hovers over the basket. Just one small fruit. The vendor wouldn't miss it. He has dozens, maybe hundreds. Her fingers drift toward a particularly perfect specimen in the front of the display.

But she stops herself, remembering her master's stern warning. Her hand moves to the specific apple he indicated, lifting it carefully from the left basket and carrying it to its new position on the right.

That’s it.

She returns to his side with empty hands save for the work she was asked to perform.

“Well done,” he says as time resumes its normal flow around them. The change is so minor it seems absolutely meaningless, but the approval in his voice fills her with pride that rivals any feast. “The courier will return this way in a few minutes,” he explains as time resumes its normal flow around them. “He will be tired from his run, and the vendor, seeing him and the apple at the same time in a singular glance, will offer him that fruit as a friendly gesture from one stranger to another.”

“Why would he do that?” asks Ananke. Nobody ever gave her a free apple.

Her master looks at the vendor. “Why, obviously because the runner looks eerily like his lost son, who died in the war,” he explains. Ananke stares at the merchant and then back at her master. How in the world could he ever know something like this? “While eating it, the boy will notice it is particularly sweet. This small kindness will put him in a fine mood, and when he delivers the inflammatory letter, he will add a simple verbal caveat about the author’s temper, suggesting the recipient not take the words written inside of it all too seriously. And that will be that. Nice apples will still cost four obols by the end of the year.”

The elegance of it takes Ananke's breath away. A single apple, moved from one basket to another, will prevent the deaths of countless lives.

“That's…“ she begins, then stops, unsure how to articulate what she is feeling.

“Terrifying?” he suggests with amusement, leaning sideways toward her. “Overwhelming? The weight of knowing that every action, no matter how small, ripples outward through time in ways we can barely comprehend?” he asks, holding his hands above her head and wiggling his fingers like an elder telling a child a frightening story by the hearthfire.

“Stupid,” she says softly, and he pauses in his walking to look at her with what might be surprise.

“Yes!” he eagerly says after a moment. “It is that too.” Her master stands there with his hands on his hips, watching the world with a happy look in his eyes. “Life is very silly,” he agrees. “But here we are.”

The cat meows.

“Here we are…“ mutters Ananke.

They watch a carefully orchestrated, entirely unremarkable series of events unfold in a marketplace.

The runner comes back, stopping to catch his breath. The merchant, seeing him, waves him over his way.

“So is this just what we do?” she asks, watching the events unfold exactly as he had said they would.

“Among other things.” His tone suggests there are depths to this work she has not yet begun to fathom. “The future is a garden that requires constant tending. Sometimes we plant seeds. Sometimes we prune overgrown branches. And sometimes, we must pull a few weeds before they can choke out everything else.”

She nods.

“This is just the introduction,” the Humming Man tells her as they make their way back toward the guild district. “Tomorrow, we begin your real, formal education. You will learn to make your own adjustments, to touch the threads of time without breaking them. And eventually, when you are ready, you will take your place among the Twelve Hands.”

“When can I… do what you do?” she asks. “Pausing time and all of that?” she asks.

“When it is the right…“ He starts, falling silent and staring at her. Ananke tilts her head, waiting for him to finish. “- time,” he replies. She groans, rolling her eyes.

Nonetheless, her mind is already racing ahead to the possibilities that await.

“Wait. What about the cat?” she asks, stroking the still-purring, warm thing resting in her arms. “We never needed it for anything,” says Ananke, looking down at it and then back toward her master. She was expecting this to be some piece of an intricate, ten-step chain of events or something.

The Humming Man looks at her curiously. “Well, you weren’t just going to leave it down there, were you?” he asks incredulously, staring at her for a long moment before shaking his head and walking off. “Come along. We have things that we need to get you.”

She watches him go and then looks back at the cat.

The world is full of threads, and her mentor moves among them with the confidence of someone who has spent lifetimes learning to read their patterns. But as they make their way back toward the guild district, Ananke notices something that makes her skin prickle with inexplicable dread.

Three figures stand motionless on a distant rooftop, their dark robes billowing in a wind that doesn't seem to touch anything else. Scarves of different colours obscure their mouths and noses despite the mild weather, leaving only the suggestion of eyes watching from beneath fabric that ripples with otherworldly movement.

They are perfectly still, perfectly silent, and perfectly focused on her and her master.

But when she blinks and looks again, they are gone, vanished as if they had never been there at all.

The cat meows and she snaps out of her confusion, quickly setting it down and running after her mentor.