Draft Update 29/05/24 (Patreon)

(Sorry for the update gulf! If you didn't see on discord, I took a week off to do some revisions on the recent chapters, since it feels like they've been missing the mark a bit. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to finish what I wanted to do completely yet - hopefully I'll find some time for that after posting this one - but some of the changes will go live with the update tomorrow.

As for this one, I feel like I was in a bad headspace for dialogue writing this week, so hopefully it doesn't come across too awkwardly.)

Loge | The Timeless Realm

"What do you mean, 'what I came here to ask'? A-Aren't you the one who wanted me here in the first place?"

"I did, but that was a mere happy coincidence," she remarked. "You sought out my servant who gave you the invitation for a reason, did you not? To explain something Ptolema was unable to."

My mouth opened, twitched, then closed again. I had to admit, over the course of making my anxiety-laden choice to come here to begin with and the dozen bizarre turns and apparent revelations since I had, I'd let the original reason I'd set out from Ptolema's cabin in the middle of the night slip almost completely from my mind. I think at some point I'd started disassociating from the situation so hard I half-expected the credits to start rolling on reality itself when the conversation was over.

"I hope you don't think I've been rambling about all this for no reason," she continued with amusement. "My goodness, what sort of impression must you have of me? Some manner of exposition-dumping plot device?" She raised an eyebrow. "Seriously, though. That is why you summoned them, right?"

I swallowed. "...yes."

Right. The hourglass. I'd wanted to know - know rationally, I mean, not 'know' based on some indecipherable hunch - what it was. And what the hell had happened when I'd tried that experiment.

"I feel almost bad for taking the chance to explain something away from him-- So few people bother to use that little service I set up nowadays. But what can I say, I've never been able to resist an indulgence." She curled her lip suggestively. "Well, go on. Out with it, before we both grow old."

I bit my lip. I never would have expected the embodiment of death to have such a stupid sense of humor.

I adjusted my glasses, trying to get my shit together to even think of the best way to approach this. Deciding to just go for it, I reached back into the pocket of my dress robe, withdrawing the hourglass once again. I placed it down on the table.

"You can see this," I stated. "Right?"

She raised an eyebrow. "See what?"

My brow flattened. Her sardonic tone made it obvious she wasn't even expecting me to take this act seriously, but even after a few seconds of silence passed, she still continued to do nothing but stare with faux-curiosity.

"...don't mess around," I said, gesturing at it. "The hourglass. This?"

"Pray, what hourglass?" She tilted her head to the side innocently. "Perhaps all of this has been a little too much for you. Shall I have my Chorus fetch you a glass of water? Or maybe your mind is just rotted from disuse."

I sighed through my nose, gritting my teeth. Finally, she dropped the act, her lips widening as she once again let out a low chuckle.

"Why are you acting like this?" I asked pointedly. "I would have thought an ancient higher being would be a little more--"

"Boring?" She finished for me. "Tediously high-minded? 'Come forth, mortal, let me simply answer thy questions like thou is talkingst to a period-themed customer service agent?"

"--a little more mature, maybe!" I finished objectionably.

"Did I not tell you that this aspect of my consciousness is based around a person? Of course I'm going to have human mannerisms. As opposed to, say, my servant here." She stroked a hand through Aruru's hair. "And more to the point, you're simply too easy to fuck with to resist. That, at least, hasn't changed."

"What do you mean, it 'hasn't changed'?" I asked. "Can you stop hinting about things I can't remember? Not to mention acting like you know me, when all it sounds like you did was watch us like rats trapped in a cage."

"You wound me, Utsushikome of Fusai!" she spoke, holding a hand to her chest. "Our relationship went much further than that. Did I not say that you were the detective?"

"What does that even mean?" I asked with visible frustration. "Even if you won't confirm it, the other me... uh, well, the me in the past... told me that I'm the one who murdered people in half the loops for some fucking reason, and I barely even figured out anything compared to Fang and Kam in the one I do remember!"

"Never mind that," she said dismissively. "You were asking about that 'hourglass' of yours." She raised a hand to obnoxiously mime little quotation marks as she spoke the word. "So go ahead. What did you want to know?"

I cleared my throat, trying to keep my thinking focused and not let myself get derailed by the absurdity of being screwed around in such a childish way by an abstract concept. "A day ago, I woke up in a coffin in the sanctuary's guest house. At that point, I'd thought I'd been living a normal life on the Mimikos." I glanced to the side, off the edge of the balcony. "B-But when I talked to Ptolema, she explained to me that people in this world do something called 'dreaming', where they go into a kind of comatose stasis while observing the normal world, and sometimes they can... trick themselves, either accidentally or on purpose, into thinking they're living the life of their counterpart there. And that was probably my, uh, actual situation." My eyes flicked back up at her. "....I know you know this already."

"So why are you saying it?"

"Because I want you to confirm I'm not misunderstanding anything," I stated. "I know you made those jokes about me being older than I think and not having bathed in hundreds of thousands of years, but I want absolute confirmation that's the situation."

"Absolute confirmation? How bold." She snorted. "I'll at least confirm the core of what you want to know: You are, indeed, the version of yourself who was ensnared in 'Sanctuary B', and have been here the whole time since. There is no trick I'm trying to pull in that regard."

I held my hands together, glancing downwards. Even hearing it from the 'top', I still felt like I couldn't accept it. Like this all had to be some kind of strange prank that didn't have the decency to conclude.

But I could deal with that later, in less intimidating company.

"...in that case," I said, "then combined with what you've told me, everything about my situation right now has a 'logical' explanation. At least, logical by a certain standard. Which means... there shouldn't be anything fundamentally out of the ordinary with my situation."

"That's certainly what one would think," she said.

"But ever since I woke up," I said, "I've had this hourglass with me. With me. Attached in a way I can't explain-- Even when I'm in the Stage. And when I tried showing it to Ptolema, I did this experiment - I'm sure you saw it, too - where she couldn't see it, but I figured if I set a pebble down on top of it, she'd see it floating and so would understand I wasn't delusional." I frowned to myself. "B-But when I tried the experiment, it was like reality... unraveled. Like two things happened at the same time. And then it just hadn't happened. As in, Ptolema couldn't even remember our conversation."

"Mmm," the woman hummed neutrally.

"I don't know how something so dramatic - something that seemed to warp time and space, or at the very least someone's mind - could even have been possible, but if nothing else, it would need to have touched on whatever is most fundamental to this entire reality. Which apparently means you." I hesitated, my eyes fixing on the smooth black material of the object in front of me. "When I look at this hourglass, I get overcome by a strange... feeling. Like I somehow know, in a way I can't describe, that when it runs out, something bad is going to happen to me."

"Something 'bad'?" She smirked. "Like a nasty case of the runs, that sort of thing?"

"No, not like that," I said flatly. "That I'll disappear. Die, I mean." I fidgeted. "But that should be impossible here, shouldn't it?"

She clicked her tongue, resting her cheek against her left middle and index finger, looking like she was contemplating something. "I suppose I've told you enough that there's no more point beating around the bush." Her expression grew a little more serious. "I've been talking around it, but the truth is that your situation is a little bit of an exceptional circumstance in this world. Even among those of you who were in the sanctuary itself."

I stared warily. "...what do you mean?"

"Well, you've no doubt wondered over the years - or, well, your 'self' in the Remaining World did, at the very least - why you are the only attendee of the conclave who recalls the events of even one reenactment. And this explanation no doubt only raised further questions about how such a thing could even be possible, yes?"

It was true-- I had wondered about that, and now that I had a cursory understanding of the metaphysics of the situation, it seemed even stranger. From what she was describing, the two versions of the sanctuary (and the people within it) sounded like they'd been completely severed, existing within wholly different stratas of reality.

"The truth is, at the very end - at the start of the very final go around - you made a certain request." She looked back towards the balcony's rim. "Here, I'll show you."

She snapped her fingers, and one more, a familiar scene appeared. It was one of the hillside highways leading to upper Old Yru. Though rendered obsolete in the present by the huge tram lines and transposition tunnels that now dominated the city's transportation network, back when I'd been attending the Academy of Medicine and Healing I'd taken this road almost every single time I'd traveled anywhere significant by carriage.

...including on that day, I realized. When I made that aborted, horribly awkward attempt to confess enough of the truth to her that she'd be able to figure the rest out.

The scene was cast in amber - the same shade I recognized from traversing to and from the Stage just a little earlier - and the carriages, though obviously in motion, were frozen in time, the hooves in the horses raised yet perfectly still. It was eerie, to see such an effect not only without the supernatural calm that had accompanied it the past two times, but also in such a familiar, mundane locale.

Yet not everything was frozen.

Standing next to one carriage were two figures I recognized instantly. One was Aruru, dressed much the same as she was now-- In the long dark dress with the veil. The other...

Was me.

"Understand this," the vision of Aruru said, the scene obviously starting in the middle of a conversation. "Your role in the scenario has been elevated from that of bystander to that of the heroine, and your victory condition is thus - you must ascertain the identity of your opponent, the cause of the bloodshed to follow, and prevent it before it comes to pass." It paused for a moment. "In order to accomplish this goal, you must pay close heed to all which transpires, and use deduction, alongside your skills and past experience of the events to follow. Do you understand your role?"

"Yes," the other me said, sounding - and looking - extremely depressed. Even within a single word, I could tell she exuded the exact same vibe as the one I'd spoken to in that vision.

I frowned. So... this is me at the start of the final loop, then?

That would make sense. Again, it would have begun right in the middle of Ran and I's journey to the academy. Was that our carriage right there?

"Should you deviate from your role, the scenario will be compromised, and a grave outcome is forewritten," Aruru continued. "But should you succeed, then you shall open the path to a brighter future. That is all. Should we begin?"

The other me hesitated for a moment. In the corner of my eye, I saw 'Her Ladyship' start to smirk.

"I have a request," the other me said.

If it was possible for a being like Aruru to express surprise, it did so, its posture seeming to shift somewhat. "I see," it stated. "Proceed, then."

Somehow, I didn't like where this was going.

The other me paused for a moment, seeming to be gathering her thoughts. Then, she spoke slowly and methodically. I knew the look-- It was the one I made whenever I'd rehearsed something in my head.

"I want... to remember it, this last time," she said. "Or at least, for whatever part of me that continues on in the outside world to."

There was silence for a moment, and then, another, more recently familiar voice boomed from overhead. "Why would you desire such a thing?" it asked. It didn't come across as so smug as what I'd been contending with for the past few minutes, but it remained unmistakable. "It will be irrelevant to the iteration of your consciousness that exists in the present moment."

"Because I don't want all of this to have been for nothing," she said. "And I'm sure that's what will happen, if I go back to how things were at the very start." She swallowed. "I know none of this is for my sake, and that if it will amount to anything is a complete gamble... But even still, I... if she can understand the tragedy that might have taken place on this weekend, of everything we suffered together, then maybe it will be enough to make a difference." She exhaled. "Maybe she'll be able to let things go."

"I see," the voice replied. And then, after a few moments. "Perhaps something could be arranged."

With that, the present-day version of the woman across snapped her fingers, the image vanishing once more. "We made a deal," she declared, "To allow a portion of your mind to be shared with the 'you' in Sanctuary A, an alteration was made to your nature. Your connection was always stickier than the others on account of your role - though let's not get sidetracked on that business - which was the only thing that even made it possible."

"What do you mean, my role? What--"

But I have never been one to shy away from a challenge." She interjected, then sighed and shook her head softly. "Unfortunately, such things come with a price."

My face paled. Oh god. No way.

I couldn't...

I couldn't possibly have been that stupid.

"The cost of the link," she explained, "was that I was unable to wholly 'swallow' you, even after the process was complete. A tiny fragment of your existence was orphaned with your other self, and subsequently your nature became more... mutable, than the others here. Not in such a dramatic way as the difference between what the people of this world call 'Primaries' and 'Secondaries', but still."

What do you mean, you 'couldn't have been this stupid'? My inner critic cut in. This is exactly the sort of shit you'd do. Making a decision that completely undermines your own future well-being out of some thickheaded, sentimentality-poisoned sense of self-sacrifice? That feels good in the moment but doesn't actually help or even make sense?

I can't imagine a scenario where you wouldn't do that.

"You mean... this hourglass..."

"Yes," she said, a pleasant smile on her face. "Your intuition was correct-- It is not an object at all, but a symbol of a higher concept." She stared into my eyes, the piercing, cosmic glare of her visible one bearing into my soul in a way that made my spine feel like it itched. "As I explained, everything in this plane is eternal. So nothing - not even you - can ever be completely destroyed. But nevertheless... once it runs down, your current existence will cease to be."

No.

"Are you telling me," I spoke tensely. "That I'm the only person in this entire place who is going to die? The only mortal?"

She scoffed, then laughed. "Why do you seem so distraught? You should be happy! It means you're special! Unique!" She gave a look that I could only describe as affectionately cruel. "I'll have you know there are quite a few people in this realm who would look at such a situation with envy. Aren't you humans always saying that being able to die is a gift? Something like that?"

I gripped the side of my head, feeling like I wanted to scream. I couldn't believe this-- It was like the punchline to a bad joke. I'd escaped from terminal illness to a world without death, only to find out I was the only one who was going to die anyway? Just as I'd started to accept it? To start to feel some kind of hope for the future, however warped, for the first time in years?

"Are you-- Are you screwing around with me, again?" I asked her, almost desperate.

"Would that I were," she stated sadly. "Unfortunately, unlike you creatures, it's not in my nature to misrepresent reality in any substantial way."

"Then how long do I have?!"

She chuckled. "That question must be giving you some deja vu, considering your current perception of events."

I grit my teeth, my face contorting with anxiety. "Please just answer the question."

"You should have a fair few years." She said with a shrug. "I wouldn't want to make you anxious by giving you a precise figure. But if you really want to know, you could always just eyeball it."

"Eyeball it?"

"Yeah, just look at the thing. Aren't you some sort of math genius? I'm sure you can manage it." Her tone suddenly grew aloof and disinterested, and she let out a small yawn, covering her mouth with her gloved hand. "Anyway. Now that I've let you know that, we should probably wrap this up for today."

I doubled-taked, the digression so sharp I could barely process it. "Wh-- Wrap this up?"

"Yes. This is getting a little tiresome, and I have some other appointments I should attend to." She mimed looking at her watch, despite not wearing a watch. "Time is money. One can't be in two places at once, you know?"

She's a god, some part of me observed. She can definitely be in two places at once.

"Chorus, show her out, please." Aruru nodded stiffly, then stepped to the side to roll away the backboard. "It was lovely to see you again. Thank you so much for your time."

"W-Wait, there's still a ton of things you said you'd explain!" I protested. With that done, Aruru turned towards me and began to advance swiftly. "C-Can't you give me a rough figure, at least? And why did you keep calling me 'detective'?"

"I believe I said I had other engagements," she said with a pointed smile. "But do feel free to stop by again. I have missed you, so it would be lovely if we could do something a bit more fun next time, now that we've got all this fluff out of the way. You should be able to find your way back, so long as you have something interesting to contribute."

"How can you have other engagements?! No one here even--"

But before I could finish the sentence, Aruru had closed in on my chair, having moved across the room with harrowing speed. Before I even had a chance to sit up and resist, she grabbed me by the collar and the posterior region of my robes and, with effortless strength, hefted me several feet in the air. As I yelled profanities and flailed my arms and legs, she casually walked three steps to the left.

Then, unceremoniously, she threw me off the balcony.

𒀭

Fortunately, I only had to experience about four seconds of plummeting into an endless abyss before the world shifted, and I found myself back in my body in the Crossroads, still floating in the void far above the Valley. That didn't stop me from screaming for several more seconds, though-- Going this excessively far away from land had turned out, in fact, to be an extremely good call.

Once I'd got that out of my system and realized I was back somewhere relatively normal, however, I spent several minutes staring into the void vacantly, feeling practically shell-shocked by the series of events I'd just experienced. I don't even really remember making the choice to do so, but at some point in that fugue I decided to head back to Ptolema's house.

Despite having been - or at least, felt - normally embodied during my meeting with... the entity, no time seemed to have passed here at all. It was still the dead of night, and even the clouds were roughly in the same shape as I'd left them. I snuck back in through the door (Ptolema was still snoring loudly), crept back into the living-slash-bedroom, and laid down. As I'd never gone out at all. As if I hadn't just had the most insane conversation in potentially my entire life.

I wish I'd managed to get some sleep after that, because I would have been able to convince myself the entire thing was just a surreal dream, but alas I spent the next several hours staring blankly at shapes along the wooden panels comprising Ptolema's ceiling-- Even these seemed to be bespoke rather than replicated, despite the relative humility of her decor.

On the one hand, a small part of me was relieved. Even if much remained unanswered, I'd spent so much of my life with the mystery of the time loop hanging over my head, that to have it explained at all felt like a sort of miracle. It was out there, to be sure, but in the end it was probably about the most logical sort of explanation for the complete subversion of my understood reality that I could have hoped to have got. It only really required me to accept as true one thing which I hadn't already, which was that Linos's story about the child implanted with a connection to the entropic consciousness was true.

Yes, it meant that the Order had communed with what was essentially a demon, and that was, well, wild. But from there, her explanation about the time loop and how any of this had been possible made sense in a way that only seemed a little supernatural.

...of course, that didn't make the idea of something like that talking to me like a human any less disturbing.

Not to mention how much of a weird creep she'd been-- What had even been the point of that stupid stunt at the end, other than just to freak me out? Not to mention all the insults about my intelligence and personality, among other things.

I guess her comment about being based on the human the Order used for their experiment does sort of provide an explanation, I mused. It's not a surprise that someone who spent their entire life locked in a creepy underwater facility with only them for company would come out a little... strange.

What was their name again? Uli?

But regardless. On the other, much larger hand, I felt filled with an almost numbing despair. At having the prospect of an escape from my impending death dangled in front of my nose, only to be pulled away at the last moment. While hardly mathematical, I'd taken a good look at the hourglass - which had reappeared in my pocket, of course, despite having been left behind on that table after Aruru had dutifully suplexed me into the cosmic firmament - and I could tell it would take a few years to empty out at absolute most.

Just the knowledge of what it meant made everything about this place seem so much more cruel. I'd been finding reasons to find it creepy, but the truth was that at least by every reasonable standard, it was paradise. A place without death or meaningful conflict, utterly free from fear or suffering... for everyone except me.

It was the same feeling as when I'd visited Shiko's house as a child. I was glimpsing a better life as an outsider. Something I could only touch as an outsider.

And worse, it was voluntary!

The whole thing was such a fucking shaggy dog story, it almost made me want to laugh. I remembered that speech the other me - I was going to keep putting it that way even if objectively wrong, just because the alternative felt weird - had given at the end, about how I ought to take what I'd seen as an imperative to understand that my life was worth living, and even if I'd never be able to completely forgive myself, I could still find some sort of meaning if I just kept living and 'done something'.

I'd denied her to her face. And of course I had! What a stupid sentiment! How did she expect me to take something so profound from just a day's worth of bad shit happening!? That wasn't how life worked outside of cheesy Akitum dramas about people's depression getting cured by angels and ghosts.

Sure, maybe without that to complicate my emotions, I would have ended up killing myself after my failure to get a solution from Samium as I'd originally planned. But even though my feelings weren't as intense as that night at the Deshur roadstop, that still felt like it would almost have been better. Because what had 200 years worth of effectively following that advice got me? Misery. Failure. The sense of bashing my head against a wall until it bled. And not a single speck of meaning.

Broken people most often stay broken. That was the cold truth of the world, then one worn into my soul through incalculable first-hand experience. They can become wealthy broken people, or even beloved broken people. But they're still broken. And as much as stories might try to convince us otherwise, that's not something that can be fixed by any single moment of perspective or revelation. Life just goes on, and you try your best to bear it.

To learn the other me had given up a chance for immortality for something so pointless and ridiculous... what had she-- Had I been thinking? How had I not understood that, with 10,000 years of experience?

I didn't understand.

Ptolema, contrary to my expectations from the previous day, turned out not to be a universally early riser - it was almost 10 AM when the snoring finally ceased, and she emerged from her room wearing a non-matching set of pajamas. She headed straight for the kitchen, seeming to have forgotten I was here at first, and set to work boiling a kettle and heating up her stove. After a few minutes, though, she abruptly stuck her head through the door.

"Hey, Su, you awake?" she called out, at a volume that answered the question.

"...yeah," I said. "I think so."

"You sleep okay?"

"Not really."

"Oh." She sucked in her lip, not seeming to have anticipated this response. "I'm sorry. I slept great."

There was an awkward silence for a few moments.

"Uh." She cleared her throat. "You want some breakfast? It's probably a bit late to get the good stuff from the bakery today."

I couldn't work up the will to refuse, and now having eaten nothing since our last restaurant outing in the late afternoon, I did feel pretty hungry. So after a few minutes, I forced myself back out of the awkwardly placed bed, dressed, and stumbled into the kitchen.

Ptolema's idea of a home-cooked breakfast turned out to be a little strange, or perhaps the better word for it would be minimalist. She ground some more coffee, cracked open two goose eggs, fried and peppered them, then boiled a large bowl of white rice. And that was it. Coffee, a goose egg and some shared rice.

I was quickly remembering how Ptolema was one of those people who would always surprise you, even if the direction of the surprises varied wildly.

"I've got an assembler over in my room if you, uh, want somethin' a little more substantial," she told me, seeming to pick up on my reaction. "Assuming you don't mind it being made by a machine, I guess."

"That's okay," I told her. Instant-perfect-meals-on-demand on not, it would feel pretty rude to turn my nose up at a plate of food in front of me, and I wasn't really in the mood for something world-shattering anyway.

"I'm not really used to cooking for other people, to be honest." she confessed. " I don't even do it for myself, 'cept when I'm feeling like comfort food."

"Comfort food like... this?" I asked, puncturing the goose egg and flooding my plate with a frankly absurd amount of yolk.

"I'm sure it seems weird," she said, with an awkward laugh. "But my dad used to make this exact thing for breakfast for me when I was a kid, after my mom died. Had no idea how to cook without her, and I could barely work a toaster, so he had to just wing it. Guess I got attached to some of the highlights." She shrugged. "Pretty stereotypical, I know."

"No, I get it," I told her, for what I realized was the second time "I'm like that with a lot of stuff, too."

She nodded. "You said somethin' like that yesterday."

"...oh yeah," I mumbled. "About squatting in ruts, right?"

"Yeah."

I sipped from my coffee mug. "We might have more in common than I thought."

We ate in silence for a few minutes, the sunlight slowly creeping down the table as the morning went on. For what it was, the food was surprisingly pleasant-- I suppose good enough ingredients could go a long way just by themselves. As soon as we got properly started, Ptolema dumped her share of the rice straight into the middle of her fried egg, then mushed them together, creating what seemed to my eyes to just be bad egg fried rice with extra steps. Though I'm sure there was some appeal I couldn't perceive.

It was such a kid thing, though, that it almost felt endearing.

"So, how come you slept bad?" she asked, after a while. "You sound kinda gloomy. Still feelin' freaked out by ending up here outta the blue?"

I chewed on my rice. Did I want to tell Ptolema about what had happened? On the one hand, it was completely insane, apparently even by the standards of this reality. If she had any sense, she'd probably think I was having a psychotic episode.

But on the other hand, I'd already confided in her despite similar concerns yesterday, and that had turned out fine. Plus, well, why the hell not?

What consequences even existed for making people think you were nuts, here at the end of the universe?