Draft Update 8/02/24 (Patreon)

(Early draft this week. The next couple chapters might be a little confusing.)

5:46 PM | Empyrean Bastion Approach | June 14th | 1608 COVENANT

Though severed from the Aetherbridge and with considerably fewer lights coming from within, the Empyrean Bastion looked, broadly, much the same as it always had: A floating, eight-towered stone fortress ensconced in a transparent bubble, a few kilometers wide from end-to-end. Even bereft of its old functions, it was still an important site in arcane history - obviously the government wasn't going to let it fall into decrepitude.

No, if there was anything which struck me about the sight as we finally approached the structure from overhead, it was how it hadn't changed. Even when I was young, I remembered being struck by how ancient and out of place the architecture of the Bastion looked, and that was back when the Grand Alliance had so little infrastructure in the empyrean that I'd only seen centrifugal force installations in books about the Uana and Lluateci. Nowadays, the dissonance of seeing such an overwhelmingly dark age looking block of rocks in a context where one would normally expect sleek, futuristic architecture was so strong that I'd probably mistake it for a theme park if I didn't know better. Just looking at it made me wince at the amount of eris that had to be wasted just keeping it habitable.

The pilot brought the shuttle about and docked it at the bastion's underside, though it took him a fucking dog's age to do it. Apparently he was used to modern designs where an automated system at the site interfaced with your ship's logic engine and basically did it for you, and struggled for about fifteen minutes in its absence, trying and failing to align the vessel's momentum in the vacuum with spurts of force from the onboard air tanks. At one point we seemed to end up in a horizontal spin, and I briefly felt I was about to die considerably sooner than I'd expected, but eventually he did manage it. The bronze airlock sealed behind us, the landing chamber flooding with oxygen.

"Not my prettiest landing," he spoke with a chuckle, sweat trickling down his forehead. "You want me to wait for you, right?"

"Yeah, if you don't mind," I said as I unbuckled from my seat and stood, shifting my aching neck back and forth. "I'll probably only be a couple hours, but you can go inside if you're hungry or whatever. I'll, uh, cover the cost of the food." This place still mostly uses the old economy, doesn't it? It probably does.

"Roger that," he said. "Just give me a call when you're done doing whatever you're doing."

"Okay," I told him. "Sorry for this trouble."

"Don't be sorry, talk me up to the guildmaster!" he joked.

I laughed awkwardly on my way out.

I headed inside the Bastion proper, showing my documents at the arrival office where the docks met and obtaining a guest pass from the surly-looking Inotian woman working the counter. There was a sense of unease that took hold of me as I left down the corridor. The place was so quiet and empty. Not a single other arrival in sight.

This feeling only intensified as I arrived at the circular plaza with the fountain at its center. It was like a ghost town; I saw maybe a few dozen people about despite us having arrived at what should have been the early evening rush, and half the lots that used to be occupied by shops and restaurants were vacant, with the ones that remained not exactly coming across as metropolitan. The storefronts were all worn down, and even the walling itself had gone from steelwood to more easily-maintained chrome.

The character had changed, too, the economy seeming to have reoriented around the bastion's value as a novelty for tourists. The gift shop Fang had enthusiastically visited had doubled in size, and there was now even a sizeable museum devoted to the construction of the place by arcanists during the Mourning Period. A large sign advertised that they offered tours of the line of statues that towered over the bastion's periphery, though unfortunately there was no mention of the old streets, much less the catacombs beneath.

Yes, that was the core issue at hand. The pressurized area extended over the docks and about 1/4th of the 'town' proper, with the remainder beyond the Sibyl's college now cut off by a new section of glass walling; more than enough for the maybe 60,000 people who still lived here. To pass into the ruins beyond, you needed a means to survive in the vacuum and, more pressingly for me since I was an arcanist, paperwork indicating you had valid business out there in the first place.

This was going to be a problem, though only the lesser of two. After all, I still had no idea how to even get to the lower sections of the bastion. Though the Order had covered the carriage windows, I remembered that between the two trips I'd managed to get a rough sense of how we were traveling just from the way we were moving, but... Well, that was 200 years ago. My memory for figures was almost perfect, but the rest of my memory was merely good, and not nearly good enough for something so specific.

That meant my only options were to try and scout using the Power - difficult, considering my skill set - or to obtain some sort of map. Since the Order had felt safe installing an entrance down there, I doubted that accurate information about the entire layout was available anywhere, but we'd seen graffiti in that abandoned section the carriage had dropped us off in, so obviously the means to access at least that area couldn't be a total secret... and I felt confident that if I made it that far, the rest would be manageable.

I decided to visit the museum - formally the 'Empyrean Bastion Foundation Exhibition' - which was actually quite well put-together for something that had clearly been assembled on a tight budget. It was split down the middle, one half devoted to cataloguing the lives of the Mourning Period arcanists who had built the place in quite thorough detail, and the other to the timeline of the construction itself, with special focus given to the technical elements of the endeavor and what had made it such a great accomplishment at the time. There weren't any fancifully-designed displays, but they'd obviously put a lot of effort into telling a compelling story with the artifacts they had assembled. I almost forgot what I was doing and got drawn in as I looked around.

Most of the actual items were pretty uninspiring, the good stuff probably having been snatched up by bigger exhibits down on the Mimikos. They had photographs, some letters between the architects, a few examples of old arcane tools they had probably used during the construction - this being before scepters had subsumed all others - and as the centerpiece, an early model of the bastion created during the planning phase. They also had a few choice relics from the hidden chambers imitating old world locations like the one the Order had constructed their gateway in, though the plaque explained the actual places were either in archaeological custodianship pending 'further investment', or private property and off-limits altogether. Reading between the lines, I was starting to feel bad for the people trying to keep the ship afloat here.

Finally, my guess paid off: At the back of the section devoted to the bastion's construction were blueprints of the earliest and lowest residential levels, with the display describing how these had eventually been largely abandoned on account of their extreme crampedness (due to the atmosphere needing to be maintained by the Power alone) and concerns about the air quality. Alone they weren't much help, If I contrasted them with some modern street maps, I was sure - well, pretty sure - I could figure out a way down.

So much effort for something so obviously futile, I thought to myself.

I pulled out my logic engine to access the logic sea and make the comparisons, and after about 20 minutes thought I had a route roughly in mind. Now it was just a matter of accessing the depressurized area. So far as I could figure it, I had three options. I could try to sneak in using the Power, which was a terrible idea that could easily get me arrested. I could approach some authority figure and try to throw my standing around and hope they'd simply give me a pass. Or, finally, I could take the tour and sneak off.

Of these three options, the least bad was probably the final one - it wouldn't involve endangering or embarrassing myself and, assuming everything worked out, wouldn't even create much of a fuss. I'd just show back up at the airlock after I was done claiming I got separated and lost. If the tour group was big enough, they might not even notice I was gone. And even in the worst case where they noticed what I was doing, I doubted I'd get into that much trouble. I could always just pretend to be a stupid tourist who couldn't follow directions.

I signed up for the evening tour on my way out of the building, which turned out to be free on account of my freehold association. Fortunately, the group ended up being surprisingly large: There was me, a large family of five, a young couple, a group of three women who seemed to be friends, a young man, and an older man who based on snippets of conversations took the tour regularly. If I lagged behind the rest throughout, I felt semi-confident I'd be able to slip away quietly.

After the tour guide arrived, she brought us out to the glass barrier and had us put on voidsuits - cumbersome garments of thick cloth and leather, though they'd grown considerably sleeker since the start of the war - then led out through the airlock and up the walls. The view of the Mimikos below was perhaps the best I'd ever seen, better even than the one I'd be getting at my destination. Because the glass ran from end to end of the fortress, it was like it wasn't there at all, the world laid out in all directions as if we were standing at the edge of a cliff.

I followed along for a time, listening to the tour guide while trying to give off as little presence as possible. The statues - towering, imposing figures with vague features, often hooded - were infamously ambiguous as to whom they were supposed to depict, though the identities of the crafters were known, and speculation between these two points formed the bulk of what was discussed. The marginally most popular theory was that they represented the leaders of the Ironworkers, but the fact that the genders of the eight figures didn't quite line up properly called this idea into question. Others held that they were the last emperors and empresses of the Imperial Era, the mortal rulers of the Earth who had ultimately failed to keep the Iron Princes in line. Others still believed they were figures more personal to the builders - the fact that each of them had been personally carved by a different Great Arcanist lent credence to this idea.

The woman also talked a little bit about why the bastion had been built in the first place, though of course I knew the story already. How its creators, the leading arcanists of the Mourning Period, had believed it would be possible to take up the Ironworker's labor, and perfect the world as they had failed to. How they had built the Empyrean Bastion in service of that goal, hoping to freely experiment far from where their tampering with reality could harm others, and where the Tower of Asphodel could be accessed more freely. How they even managed to make some gains in that area, such as learning how to manipulate how the tower distributed Seeds.

And then how it had all gone terribly wrong, bringing about the Interluminary Strife. How the conclaves of arcanists had descended into infighting, much of the nature of which was lost in the fog of those dark days... Uh, literally dark, I guess. How the bastion had stood abandoned for 500 years.

Come to think of it, a thought crossed my mind, the Order was supposed to have been founded at the end of the Mourning Period too, wasn't it? That would line up perfectly with the groups coming together to build this place. Could that be why they had portals here to begin with?

That would explain how they'd have the method to replicate a lost environment they also used here, too.

Actually, that line of thought only partially made sense. After all, the sanctuary hadn't even existed until around the time of the creation of the Grand Alliance. At best, we were talking about them tapping into some old knowledge centuries after the fact, not a direct connection.

If the dock and the statue overlooking it stood at one tip of the octagon of the bastion, then at the extreme other end was the largest of them, built by David of Asureth, one of the fathers of Aetheromancy and the creator of the World-Bending Arcana that allowed the Empyrean to be easily accessed in the first place. It depicted a long-haired, expressionless man with a long staff in one hand and an orb in the other. Because of the size of the thing, it completely dominated the rim's floorspace to the point that we'd need to descend into the town briefly and come up the other side to continue.

This was where I'd make my move. I waited until everyone seemed distracted by the young boy from the family asking a vaguely offensive question about how they were sure David's statue wasn't just of a 'really ugly girl', then slipped away as the party turned a sharp corner. Once I was a couple streets down, I used the Form-Levitating Arcana and ascended slightly into the air. The bastion wasn't important enough nowadays for the Censors to bother divining for anything less than sizeable use of the Power, and the quicker I could get this done, the better.

I floated through the empty streets. If the docks had felt a little eerie, then the atmosphere here was downright haunting. Most of the buildings were utterly desolate, stripped down to their skeletons, but occasionally I spotted ones still filled with furniture. The depressurization process had left objects scattered around in a mess, but because of the lack of atmosphere, there were few signs of decay; it was as if it had all happened yesterday. The only indication to the contrary was that nothing living remained, the trees decorating the streets and the occasional potted plant visible through a window having withered uniformly.

I found myself feeling chilled, a somber mood taking me. I couldn't stop thinking how obviously pointless this all was. How the real reason I was probably doing this was just to keep my mind from focusing on reality.

I could already see how the next fifteen years would go: It would be just like when I was trying to save Shiko. I'd waste the final years of my life chasing phantoms of hope that didn't even really exist, regret building in me with every failure, then would spend my absolute last days in abject despair and fear. I had complete self-awareness this was the irrational course I was traveling, and yet I couldn't pull myself from the track. I didn't know how I was supposed to accept the fact I was going to die. What did it even mean to 'accept' one's death? Beyond different flavors of passionate self-delusion, was that even a state that the mind, inherently unable to conceptualize its own non-existence, was capable of?

I guess if you reached some sort of dharmic enlightenment and let go of the self completely, that could probably do it, but I doubted I could get there, or even that I could build a good enough narrative to delude myself again.

When the stakes were infinite, the arithmetic for rational action broke down under the pressure. Maybe the people of the ancient past who had done things like drink mercury in the blind hope it would grant them immortality hadn't been superstitious fools, and were just as self-aware about the stupidity of their actions as I was. If all you had was a billion-to-one chance, why not take that chance? Why not be Gilgamesh, and travel to the edge of the world?

I said that, but it didn't make me feel any less bitter.

It took me longer than I'd hoped, but after 12 minutes of floating around the middle of the town investigating roads, I managed to find a ramp in one of the various tunnels criss-crossing under the larger buildings that led even further downward. That led to a maintenance tunnel that seemed to exist to provide access to the foundations and waterworks of the town, and eventually another ramp that descended even further still.

Traveling down this one - sparking a light with my scepter as I went - my surroundings started to look familiar. We were clearly in another residential area, but this one was far more utilitarian and on an extremely tight grid, the roof low enough that I wouldn't be able to stand on my own shoulders without bumping my head. Yes; this was the place.

Of course, finding the specific spot the Order's agent had taken us to would be a far greater pain in the ass: That took me almost another 25 minutes, and could have been close to impossible if someone had washed that weirdly high-effort image of male genitalia. Obviously there was no one left to care at this point, but it really had been peculiar that they'd just left this place in this state rather than tearing all these structures out and retooling the space for some other purpose, or even just cleaning it up for storage space. I could only assume there had been other parties keen on concealing their secrets here beyond the Order.

From there, it was a simple matter of remembering the path we'd been led up and down 200 years ago. I floated down the series of alleyways. I found the structure with the bronze doorway, now so completely in ruins I wouldn't even need to pick or disable the lock - the very brickwork had come down, now scattered in a heap on the ground. The elevator was fucked too, the shaft having come loose and dropped to the base, so once again I relied on the Power for my descent.

The great hall at the bottom appeared to have been partially ransacked at some point, with many of the smaller statues missing. Still, the primitive yet massive sculpture of a man at the center of the room remained, and that was still a striking sight, made much creepier here alone in the dark and quiet. Memories of our class strolled through surged to mind. Ran taking her photograph. Our collective nagging of our escort with stupid questions, and Kamrusepa and Ptolema egging him on to defy his orders. I could almost hear their voices...

What am I doing here?

I shivered. I felt cold, down here. I'd need to use the Power to warm myself up if I stayed for very long.

Well, we've come this far. Let's just get it over with.

The bronze door at the end of this room was, unlike its sibling, still intact and elaborately locked-- But that was no serious obstacle for me. I flicked it open with the Power, then proceeded inside.

One somewhat-disappointing change to the transposition chamber struck me instantly. Where I'd expected to be greeted by another view of the Mimikos, I instead saw only darkness: Whether it had been bricked up permanently or there'd always been some kind of shutter built in when the room wasn't being used to impress guests, the arcane barrier had been replaced by far more mundane stone flooring. All the sense of awe the room had was gone. Now it just looked like a tomb.

I guess that was appropriate, considering.

I floated over the gap, no platforms rising to meet me. I stood in the center of the seating area. I held my light up and regarded the mural, which remained unchanged and as unsettling as ever, though the colors were somewhat faded.

Well, grandmaster, I thought, letting out a small sigh. What now?

I cast the Anomaly-Divining Arcana, figuring that if something was going to happen - despite the impossible remoteness of anything happening at all - it would the transposition chamber turning out to still be somehow active and subsequently whisking me away somewhere, the sanctuary or otherwise. But of course that hope was dashed instantly; there was nothing. The incantations here were as dead as a doornail.

Still, even knowing it was futile, I felt obligated to wait for a few minutes, despite the atmosphere creeping me progressively more and more out. I huddled my arms together, pressing the thick fabric of the suit's inside against my skin.

"Guess you were right about what you said after all, Kam," I said, in part to make myself less uncomfortable. "I mean... I'm still right about people finding stories to cope with dying being what's best for them as individuals, but maybe if everyone had to deal with feeling like this all the time, maybe we'd have figured out a way around dementia by now. Then I wouldn't be in this mess, huh?"

The room remained silent. Distantly, I could hear the sound of water running through pipes.

I chuckled to myself. "Well, don't let it go to your head. That stuff you said about wanting to have every job to ever exist was still kinda nuts." I shook my head. "Let alone the crap about wanting to make it illegal for people to kill themselves."

I wondered how she was doing. Neither Fang's nor my own predictions about her becoming some great political mover-and-shaker had come true. I hadn't even heard any news about her in nearly 150 years.

I sighed to myself, my eyes slowly gliding along the mural; Gilgamesh leaving Uruk and going to talk to the boatman. Gilgamesh cutting down trees to build a bridge. Gilgamesh meets Utnapishtim in his hut. Gilgamesh falls asleep. Presumably because of how much we'd fixated on it back then, it all still felt abnormally familiar, like an oil stain on my subconscious. Looking at it started to give me a peculiar headache.

I sighed to myself. What would I do next? Turning to options with at least a sliver of plausibility, there were bound to be experimental treatments I could try that wouldn't yet be widely known. The bastion hadn't been moved, so it was still quite close to the station that had supplanted it as the host of the Aetherbridge. Maybe I'd ask that pilot to just drop me off there, then go down to Old Yru and see if I could talk to some of my old connections. It was a more appealing prospect than going back to Deshur, at the very least.

Gods, I thought to myself as I finished following the sequence on the wall, Gilgamesh losing the flower to the snake and returning to Uruk. That's it, then, I guess.

No sense deluding myself any further, I thought, resigned. Time to get going.

I came all the way, I thought, resigned but just a little desperate. I guess I might as well take a closer look around the room, too.

Wait, huh?

Something was strange. It was like I hadn't had any volition over that second thought at all. It had just popped into my head, aggressively, from nowhere.

Suddenly, my mind thrummed with disorienting stimuli that seemed to have been injected from nowhere, almost like I was in the midst of a vivid nightmare. I felt like I could barely think straight at all, and pulses of pain reverberated through my skull, my senses left muddled in a way I found it hard to describe.

But then something even stranger happened. My body... It began to move, independent of what I was telling it to do. It turned, scanning the mural again.

Maybe I'll start by taking a closer look at that image of the snake, I thought. It was different on both sides, right? Or maybe there's a message hidden around somewhere--

No! I didn't think that! Those weren't my thoughts!

Something was terribly wrong. I was walking towards the mural itself now, my limbs not responding no matter how insistently I commanded them. Everything felt like it was growing more distant. I couldn't breathe𒊹𒊹𒊹𒊹𒊹𒊹𒊹𒊹

𒊹

I woke up again. I could move again, just barely - like I was on anesthesia - but it was dark, so dark, and hard material hemmed me in from all sides. I tried to force myself awake, but visions kept pouring into my mind like a roaring river, and I couldn't, I couldn't--

𒊹

My perception shifted again, now putting me somewhere else altogether, my mind now in a state of complete confusion and panic. The foreign thoughts that had been intruding into my consciousness seemed to have ceased, but my body was back to moving without my say so, striding forward with purpose as if none of this was even happening. I couldn't even control the directions my eyes were moving.

It was cold and dark, but not as it had been a moment ago. Now 'I' was outdoors, trudging through the snow in the middle of the night. It can't be snowing! It's the middle of the summer! It took me a second to recognize where I was, since I'd never seen it so poorly lit: The grounds of the Old Yru Academy of Medicine and Healing, approaching the auditorium.

Everything was happening so quickly that I couldn't even consciously keep up. I was taken aback. All I could do was watch.

I pushed open the doors of the auditorium, snow falling from my cloak. The room was empty and in total darkness, though for the first time, I saw a flare of light coming from outside. I gasped for breath, but only increased my pace, dashing towards double-doors that led to the gallery tower. I rushed up the stone steps, lit only by the moonlight, towards the top, cursing under my breath. My heart was racing and my stomach splitting with anxiety, even if I had no idea why.

I pushed open the doors at the top. The gallery was also empty of people, but looked as if it had been decorated for some recent event. The tables were laid out and covered in snacks, and celebratory decor was hung on the walls, a banner displaying a message I couldn't make out in the darkness, though I could at the very least distinguish the word 'anniversary'.

There was a distant bang of what sounded like a firework going off, and another flash of light. I advanced a few steps, my eyes scanning the area urgently. I opened my mouth as if to speak𒊹𒊹𒊹𒊹𒊹𒊹𒊹𒊹

𒀭

"AHH--Uuogh! Fuck!"

I jumped, finally feeling both wide awake and decisively in control of my body, only to bump my head against hard stone, then slump back against more hard stone like my skull was being kicked between two opposing ball teams. Fortunately it wasn't enough to give me a concussion, but it nevertheless wasn't pleasant. I moaned in distress, cradling my injured scalp and forehead.

My free hand darted around, and I was in the dark place I'd been in a moment again, smooth stone surrounding me at all sides, the only exception being a sliver of light in a long, extremely thin line to my left. The sharp angles made it clear that the space was of human making. Now that I was lucid, it only took me a second to make the obvious connection.

Coffin. I'm trapped in a coffin!

There were many, many questions, but all of them were superseded by an intense desire I suddenly possessed not to be in this situation. Without even recognizing I was deciding to do so, I started pushing my arms firmly against the lid in a desperate attempt to dislodge it, the blood vessels in my neck and head welling up from the difficulty of the task.

After a few moments, they fell back down, and I gasped for air. This was no good; it would only budge a tiny bit, and only when I was putting all the strength I had into the effort. I reached for my waist, then widened my eyes as I realized my scepter wasn't there.

Okay. Don't panic. This called for a more radical measure. While it was generally dangerous to use the Power without a scepter or equivalent source of free and easily-conceptualized energy, one thing arcanists learned in basic combat training was how to draw a little bit of eris from ones body heat in an emergency, while avoiding the obvious pitfall of giving yourself hypothermia. I didn't need much. I was pretty confident that if I could slide the lid just a little to the side, enough to get my fingers around it, that I'd be able to take care of the rest.

I took a breath, then closed my eyes, doing my best to conceptualize the heat all through my body evenly, save for sensitive locations like the bloodstream. I spoke the words of the Object-Manipulating Arcana,focusing on the sliver of light--

There. The slab grinded sharply to the slide, the shaft widening significantly. I didn't even feel cold.

Wow, I thought. That was easier than I thought.

I grasped the edge of the lid and pulled with everything I have, my body welling with sweat at the effort. It took several minutes and a couple of breaks, but eventually I managed to heave the lid far ahead to the side that gravity did the rest, causing it to crash to the floor with an absolutely thunderous thump. I sat up without delay, climbing up and sitting on the rim.

Being free, as it turned out, did not offer much clarity on the situation. Contrary to what the logical part of my mind had been vaguely presuming - that I'd probably suffered some sort of stroke in the bowels of the bastion, and was mistaking having been placed into an unusual medical stasis pod as being buried alive - I could instead see that I definitively had been in a coffin, or maybe the better word would be 'sarcophagus'. It looked quite ornately designed, with a vaguely monstrous, cat-like figure depicted on the overturned lid. The outside seemed to be plated with silver.

It matched the rest of the small chamber I'd found myself in, which looked to be some sort of ancient ruin. The floor was flooded, with diminutive reeds sprouting from the dirt, and the walls were covered with mold and vines. The lamplight, as it turned out, had been coming from a window off to the side, itself partially covered by plant life that wouldn't have been out of place in a jungle.

I gaped at the sight. I gaped generally.

What the... hell just... happened...?

I tried to gather my thoughts. I'd been standing in the transposition chamber, when my body and mind had suddenly started to rebel against me. I'd suddenly awoken in this room, then been pulled into some strange, incredibly vivid vision of myself in the old academy grounds. Then I'd awoken in this room again.

Had... had I been transpositioned, after all? And had then been laid here, for some reason?

No, it was more than that. I looked down, and my clothes had completely changed. Not only was the voidsuit gone, but the grey-and-black skirt and tunic I'd been wearing had been replaced by more traditional Saoic clothing in aquamarine, my favorite color. And... my hair had changed. Not tremendously; it was still long, with the same part I'd had it in forever. But now it was a little shorter and appeared freshly cut and cared for, falling from my scalp gracefully.

In fact, now that I was paying attention to my body, I felt surprisingly - perhaps unsettlingly - good in general. My skin felt very fresh, and other than the fact I'd just given myself a headache, I couldn't feel a single ache or pain across my entire form. I felt well-rested, too, like I'd just had the most amazing sleep in years, my mind already throwing off the disorientation it'd been suffering and becoming surprisingly sharp.

I blinked, processing this information for a few moments.

I didn't know exactly what conclusion to draw, but I could say this much - there was only one other time in my life where I'd encountered a phenomenon completely beyond my capacity to understand: At my visit to Apsu. Which meant whatever was happening now was probably connected.

Which meant--

Which meant I hadn't been reaching for false hope or operating under some stupid misunderstanding after all! That this really had been what Neferuaten had wanted me to do, and she'd somehow set this up in advance!

...right? That was the correct conclusion, wasn't it?

I found myself accepting this idea, at the very least, and my mind shifted gears. I knew she wouldn't have sent me a weird message like that for no reason. I should have had more faith in her!

Despite myself, I felt relieved. Something had happened which defied my expectations. Maybe it was just my physical state influencing my brain, but I felt a spark of promise rising in me for the first time since my diagnosis.

Easy now. Just because her instructions actually led somewhere doesn't mean the outcome will be good, my inner cynic said. Look at where you are. Does this seem like a safe place?

That was a good point. Wherever this was - and whether it was real or unreal - it looked like I was somewhere far from civilization. I'd lost all my supplies and even my scepter. If I couldn't find food and drink, or if I got bit by a snake in the water or something, I'd be fucked.

Don't catastrophize, my inner rationalist said. Let's start by getting out of this building. There's light coming from right there, so an exit can't be far.

I nodded to myself. That was probably what Neferuaten would have intended, and would at least give me a better sense of where I was.

I lifted the hem of my robes (seriously, if whoever did this dressed me in an outfit they knew was one of my favorites on purpose, then that had some pretty creepy implications) then jumped down into the water, hoping I could spend as little time in it as possible. The chamber had two doors; one led merely to a smaller sub-chamber that was so packed with flora I could barely get through, while the other led out into the hall. I grasped the handle and, snapping several vines in the process, headed through.

The door frame felt light, like it was made of wood. That felt pretty peculiar for a setting like this. Wouldn't it have long rotted away?

The hallway wasn't particularly long, and soon led to a more open, square chamber, the right side of which seemed to have been colonized by a large, bent-over tree growing out of some sort of hole in the structure, a hefty mound of dirt at the base. I felt water dripping from the leaves onto my scalp. Every part of me seemed to be getting soaked just moving around in this place - even the air was humid as hell. Opposite the tree were another set of windows and, between them, what looked like double doors.

This time around I decided I'd just kick them open, feeling strangely energetic. My foot smashed into the frame, and they popped open with no resistance.

I stepped outside.

And my eyes boggled. I don't know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn't this.

I'm sure I mentioned this at some point already, but two planes down from the Mimikos - beyond the unending ocean of the Atelikos - lies the Diakos, or 'crown-world' to translate the Inotian. It's a ring-shaped world of significantly larger size than the two above it in the planar hierarchy, with the lamp at its center set in a spin and partially shadowed, creating a much cruder imitation of day and night. It's also known for its landscape being dominated by dense jungle, swampland, and shallow ocean.

I mention this because for several seconds, I was entirely sure this was where I was. The first sight that greeted me, rising above the surrounding marsh, was the arc of the ring, looping breathtakingly all the way across the sky, the whole world even more visible than the Mimikos. Ring, marshland. Straightforward, no?

But then I squinted, and I realized that... everything was far too small. Looking at the scale of it all properly, the ring couldn't have been more than 200 miles in length, and off in the distance, I could seethe horizontal terminus just a few miles away. That wasn't a world, it was more on the scale of one of the Triumvirate's habitats. But as far as I was aware, they didn't make ringworlds like this; they weren't considered efficient compared to cylinders, since it took proportionally longer to travel from one side to the other.

...but now that I was looking at it... there wasn't any glass encasing the structure. So how was I breathing? How was it holding its atmosphere?

And also, were those holes? I was pretty sure I could make out little pieces where parts of the ring were simply not there. Not enough to cut it into different pieces outright, but sufficient to make it look patchwork. It shouldn't have been possible for this to even work on any level, not without eris expense on an unfathomable scale to do the job physical barriers could be easily.

Something was bothering me about my more immediate surroundings, too. Just a few meters ahead, there were flowers growing amidst the swamp, many half-submerged and clearly out of their element. I saw roses, lilies...

I blinked. Something in my head clicked.

I'd found myself in a small room with a smaller side room. I'd walked down a hallway and found myself in a larger area with a hole in the wall opposite double doors. A hole in the wall. Like a fireplace.

I turned around and looked at the building. I blinked a few times. I reached to the side of the doors I'd just passed through, picking away the moss and vines. As I suspected, I found a bronze plate underneath.

The words on the plate were clear. 'Abbey House'.

I stared at this for a few moments, feeling in disagreement with the world.

Then someone threw a spear into my back.