Old Portraits and New Beginnings
The records stacks are more a dating aid to the timeline of improvement in archival preservation techniques than a useful archive to the spire's early history. Those pictures not migrated endlessly to new formats and storage substrates have decayed; archival-quality materials rotting, on the scale of the occupants' longevity, in a negligibly different span.
The originals of the pictures are shreds and powder, the inks denatured ages past to outgas, fungal mulch, and unintended homgenising tints in the palette of decay. There are scant upcopied versions, from so long ago. Ambiguous faces in ancient clothing, politely gurning for group photographs: The Spire Project Research Division's Lifespan Extension Working Group (L-R): and a litany of names meaning nothing.
"That could be me," the Fool says dubiously, thumbing a patch of pixels, a smile in a squinting face cragged by strong sunlight, an ancient from a lost age.
"Alas," Ser Glorie says gravely, "with no point of comparison for a smile of thine own, we can never know."
"What a ready wit you have," the Fool says, biting, but not half so much as accustomed.
Glorie waggles a brow. "Is she?" the knight leers. "Who knew a subject so dry would make a wit w—" and coughs around the Fool's well-applied elbow.
"Wouldst have my job?" the Fool says. "Be mine guest, put on the motley and my hat of bells, and give me in turn thine swo — ah. Wait."
Ser Glorie snorts a laugh, nudges her shoulder, and pages through the few additional photographs they have, searching for any better view of the long-ago Lifespan Extension researcher. The Fool hesitates from the long habit of dour suspicion, then relaxes herself gingerly, letting her head rest sideways onto the knight's shoulder.
"Inconvenient," she mutters. "That thou weren't there, for some additional chance to triangulate dim memory...."
"Aye." The knight settles her own head gently atop the Fool's. "Sad ist, in that respect, that th'art the older woman, maternal genius to the spire's own design—"
"If dubst me milf, my boot thou'll catch in thine behind," the Fool says, peaceably enough, eyelids fluttering sleepily from the warm support of Glorie's form.
"Simply marvel I," Glorie says, "that ancient as we are, thou might be still so much earlier, have seen so much. One thinkst one's seen turmoil in one's span—" she turns her head to tenderly press her face to Foolish hair, "but after all; we didn't start the spire."
