The Covenant Of Timeless Mysteries

Chapter 4

Polaris halted in the doorway, his lip curling slightly. 

His voice darkened, as he repeated "The timestream?"

Staring ahead, he mumbled, "Was I wrong? No, impossible." Then, turning sharply to Hoku, he asked, "You're familiar with the stream? How long have you known about it?"

"I only know about it because of the papers on the desk. I skimmed through them since the drawers wouldn't open," Hoku replied.

Finally, Polaris pulled open the door and walked down the steps to the next room.

"You skimmed through them? That quickly?" He asked once they entered the study.

"I only managed one. It mentioned things similar to what you've described. The others were all signed 'Timestream.'"

Polaris gave a curt nod and pivoted past the desk following Hoku to the rear wall. 

"I see, you must have glanced at my notes."

The two of them stood before the covered painting. 

"They were my own observations of the 'timestream' and how they forge into what I believe exists as something called the central stream." He added as he crossed his arms slightly below his chest. 

"If the time comes, you'll encounter it yourself."

Hoku frowned to himself as he gazed at the red tarp, 'Encounter what exactly?' he wondered.

Polaris lowered himself to the ground and picked up a few nails scattered on the end.

"For now, my role is to ensure your escape," Polaris continued. "That purpose separates me from my old life—to guide you to a place bridging this point in time and countless others."

Hoku raised his eyebrows and inclined his stance closer to the frame under the tarp, "Why haven't you escaped?"

Polaris's gaze hardened as he explained, "I've tried—over hundreds of times, at least. The issue isn't why I can't leave; it's how." He pressed his fingers to his temple. "I don't study the timestream out of curiosity. I'm looking for a way out."

"Is it the barrier you mentioned?"

Polaris stood back up and straightened his knees. 

He was carefully holding a few nails in his left palm. "The first time, I couldn't even get past the gate. Now I know better. Beyond the garden, there's nothing—just an endless field of white tulips looming back on itself. You can walk for days, but you'll always end up back in front of this Manor."

Hoku frowned again, suddenly feeling more unsettled by the emptiness in Polaris's voice.

"Care to help with this?" Polaris asked, pointing at that tarp after he had set the nails on an easel leaning on the same wall as the painting. 

Wrinkles formed along Polaris' fingers as he adjusted a solid grip on the tarp.

"You have to tug hard because the ends of it are nailed into the frame." 

Hoku gestured in acknowledgment before grabbing the material from the other side. 

He grimaced as his fingers brushed against its coarse texture. 

'Scratchy and old,' he noted with a hint of distaste.

Polaris offered a nod, and together they tugged outward instead of down.

The canvas tilted forward with a scrape, causing more nails to clatter onto the floor.

Clunk! 

Dust swirled upward, strewing like particles of glitter as the linen on the back drooped inward.

Twines of red remained attached to both sides of the middle frame.

"Got something to cut this open?" Polaris asked, gesturing at the back of the frame.

Hoku instinctively touched the locket beneath his shirt but briskly dismissed the idea. "Nothing on me."

"I suppose that's a given," Polaris remarked, treading back over to the desk.

After rummaging through the clutter for a few seconds, he retrieved a slender tool. "This will do."

He knelt on the same side and pierced into the frame's backing. 

As he scraped it along the side, his hand jerked, indicating the shaft had snared on something.

Polaris retacted it, with a strong tug before slipping his hand through the slit and tearing the linnen from the frame. 

Hoku leaned further over the large portrait and glanced inside the back.

Tucked into the corner where two wooden pieces met was a box with nine small holes carved into its surface.

"The first task," Polaris muttered, tossing the tool across the floor.

Hoku examined the box's intricate patterns and bit the inside of his cheek. "What am I supposed to do with this?"

"The center dial rotates. Align the correct symbols under the crescent to open it." Polaris leaned back, a smug grin appearing on his lips. 

"Of course, the pattern changes every time. If you were to get it wrong…" He trailed off, leaving Hoku to assume that making a mistake would rid him of the option to pursue forth.

Hoku poked his finger into the last hole and rotated the dial experimentally. "This feels like an old phone dial."

He stood up and gazed at the wall behind Hoku.

"A fine interpretation," Polaris replied, taking a few steps toward the door. 

Hoku lifted his finger from the top and watched as it shifted back into its original position with a measured motion.

"Once you've solved it, meet me in the parlor. I'll give you that compass I had intended to earlier."

"So am I supposed to just sit here and tamper with the lid until it opens?" Hoku questioned, rising from the floor as well.

Polaris nearly matched his height, but the thick heels on his shoes made him stand just above Hoku's forehead.

"You can do that, or… there's a considerably more efficient approach."

"Breaking it?"

Without dismantling it, Hoku had planned to smash it onto a sturdy surface once Polaris had left the room.

"Certainly not, That would cause the contents to disappear," Polaris said, shaking his head.

'Disappear?' Hoku looked down at the box in his hands, "My only option is to solve it?"

"Do you recognize the symbols on the box?" Polaris asked, pulling back without moving closer.

Hoku narrowed his focus on the marks inside the circles.

"Cards… They are the original French suits preserved on a deck of cards." 

Polarise nodded in agreement before continuing, "Have you ever heard of the hierarchy on a deck of cards?"

"Isn't that just the order of numbers printed on the face of a card?" Hoku asked.

​​"A deck of 52 cards has ten suits per category. I believe I said the pattern of the box changes, not the order. This puzzle box was invented as a prototype of the first Enigma machine discovered by a German engineer in 1918," Polaris exclaimed, from slightly across the room.

Hoku squinted at the puzzle, slowly piecing together a similar enigma of thoughts in his mind.

'Maybe, instead of specific letters substituting other letters, the characters on a card's face substitute numbers…'

Hoku raised his eyebrows and darted his attention to Polaris. "I think I may have a general idea of what you're implying," he said. 

Polaris' smile had surprisingly diminished into one of a more delicate nature.

"How embarrassing, you figured that out much quicker than I could."

"How many numbers are in the enigma?"

"Four, the code has always been the year the enigma was broken."

'1941, a man named Alan Turing, alongside his colleagues, cracked the Enigma machine, revealing the secrets of the American opponents during World War II.' Hoku swiftly recalled an excerpt from a memoir he had read on the event.

Had Jiang Hao been anything other than a history professor, Hoku's situation would have undoubtedly been far more troubling.

"The hierarchy traditionally follows ace, king, queen, jack, and so on. Since the first four are missing from the puzzle, you'll need to replace them with the pattern on the box. It's simpler than it seems. The shapes directly adjacent to each other will always form a nine. Count and follow the order; I can only guide you so far," Polaris explained, his expression turning serious near the end.

With that, he moved to leave again, but just before stepping through the door, he turned his head slightly toward Hoku and shared a final hint, "Once you get it open… please try not to burn the manor down again."

"Again—?" Hoku flinched.

Through the wall, he could already hear Polaris' footsteps ascending the stairs.

The box was heavier than Hoku expected. 

He continued to study its surface, tracing the order of the nine shapes engraved in a circular pattern: club, spade, club, diamond, diamond, club, heart, spade, club.

A hierarchy of suits. Cards. That much was clear.

Hoku pressed his fingers against the rotating dial, thinking through Polaris's cryptic instructions. 

'Align the correct symbols under the crescent.'

He stared at the silver crescent a moment longer, remembering the brief exchange about the puzzle's origins. 

'The first Enigma machine substituted letters for numbers. Can the same logic really be applied?'

His hands trembled slightly as he began to turn the dial, aligning the heart beneath the crescent.

1.

The box emitted a faint click, but nothing more.

Next, Hoku focused on the diamonds. There were two of them grouped closely. 

Jointly, they formed…

9.

Hoku swallowed, turning the dial again. The clubs came next.

There were four in total, spread unevenly around the pattern. 

As he Aligned the crescent with the last club he heard a third click.

4.

Finally, the spades. 

They seemed out of place, isolated from the others. 

Hoku's thoughts lingered on the sequence. 'Could the heart be repeated as the first? Or did the order descend toward the spade?'

Hoku exhaled slowly, aligning the crescent with the heart once more.

1.

The box shuddered in his hands. 

For a split second, he feared he'd made a mistake.

'Have I erred the first attempt…?' He worried, looking around the room in a state of trouble.

Then, with a dull metallic click, the dial retracted, revealing a seam around the box's edges. 

Hoku pressed the box against his abdomen with one hand, carefully prying it open with the other.

He set the lid on a stack of papers and glanced inside. A folded newspaper clipping lay within, bound by a thin piece of string.

"This is it?" His brows knitted in confusion.

'He had seemed so serious over a piece of…'

Hoku lifted it from the box. The thread straightened as if pulled taut by something overlooked. At the end, a small bronze key hung, swaying slightly.

Hoku yanked the string loose, setting it back inside before unfolding the brittle paper.

 The text was cramped, accompanied by a grainy photograph of a man labeled Doctor Francis Barret.

'Doctor Francis Barret secures a considerable sum in donations to further his research.'

"Doctor Francis Barret, frequently acclaimed as the 'father of transdimensional and interdimensional art,' has secured a substantial portion of public funding to advance his research into worldlines—paths that may allow for the revisitation of past events. However, his more profound ambition lies in discovering a dimension where the stories and words, buried in the dirt, may be preserved. This isolated realm, which he intends to call The Sequel, is conceived as a place where the worlds within books will endure, long after society has forgotten them. Barret envisions it as a return of the past into the future, a way for every book ever written to be remembered once more."

Hoku frowned, scanning the article again. 'Worldlines? Revisiting the past? Is this connected to the timestream Polaris mentioned in his notes?'

Turning to the next folded page, he found a fresh headline, accompanied by a tarnished photograph of the manor.

'This seems to have occurred after the accident... But why does it date back to the 1800s when the manor was demolished in 2014?'

'St. Francis Barret Reports Mysterious Incident'

"A violent intruder broke into my study, setting my research ablaze," Doctor Barret lamented. "Years of work, destroyed by those who opposed an evolution." Despite this setback, Barret remains undeterred, vowing to rewrite his findings in full.

Several lines in the article were underlined, but their meaning wasn't immediately clear. 

Hoku set the newspaper clipping aside and reached back into the box, retrieving the small bronze key.

"Setting research ablaze… years destroyed an evolution?" He murmured, carefully enunciating each word. 

He repeated the first three words under his breath, as though their meaning would shift with repetition.

Polaris's earlier warning resurfaced in his mind: "Once you get it open… try not to burn the manor down again."

Hoku tightened his finger around the key, feeling it's cool edges bite against his knuckles, then turned to approach the desk.

'A small key, in a room where there's only one type of lock,' he mused, the thought slightly steadying his nerves.

Lowering himself to his knees, Hoku inserted the key into the first drawer and gave it a deliberate turn.

The lock clicked, and Hoku pulled it open to find stacks of papers, neatly divided by faded yellow tabs.

Each drawer unlocked the same way, revealing file after file, all meticulously labeled. 

He sifted through the first stack, allowing his eyes to skim complicated phrases like 'Ranked Potency of Spell Grades' and 'Temporal convergence.'

After unlocking the final drawer, Hoku's gaze fell upon its contents. 

The same yellowed edges exuded the scent of old paper and he quickly realized what they were.

'These are all the research files mentioned in the clippings…'

His pupils shrank and once again he was covered with a sensation of unease.

An absurd thought surfaced in his head, 'I'm supposed to be the intruder?'

The Memoir Chapter 2

Rule 8

To save the world you must start from the very beginning. This is the only exception to changing the past. Repairing the former alterations within the world's epochs is necessary to avert the decay spreading in the outer universe.

This is not a guide for survival. Your persistence solely depends on the choices you make in the present.

-The Memoir Chapter 2 End-