The Overdream. Riverbank Cabin.
Hannes had been invited to wait out the remainder of the Spelltome’s multi-week creation at Henry’s homeplanet, whose time progressed in parallel with the workshop’s. Surprised by this invitation, a first, the dev accepted, interested in how his research subject had been whittling out the centuries when not practising his ‘duelcraft’.
Before transferring, Hannes had been given a preview of the Legendary Spelltome in the middle of composition.
The original Henry had been performing an elaborate group ritual, amidst vast quantities of Alchemical supplies and Arcaneworker Runeography. Assisting him were 16 lower-level replicas of himself – the max number summonable for items transportable outside of The Overdream, their A.I. capable of handling subordinate and rudimentary creative functions.
The procedure had been horrifyingly cursed. While Henry babbled through a trance of clicks, three assistants alternated dousing him in acids, causing his body to bleed, while others continually healed him to avoid death. The fluid seeping from his wounds collected into Alchemical apparatuses before refinement into ink. This was then applied to his Spelltome as single dots condensed with information through a
To Hannes's surprise, the pages being scribbled on had been torn from a set of Tier-8 Spelltomes, won from an ‘azure defect’ in a wager.
This news had astounded the game dev. Karnon’s background lore, basically, hard-coded the deity into a chaotic opposition with The Company and its order-spreading Tyrant. What’s more, Henry, cyborg or otherwise, could never have out-schemed the God, whose development of a global teleport and assassination of The All-Mother were feats of near-Cosmic intellect. Therefore, the ‘winning’ of these Tomes must’ve been a trick of fatal proportions.
Was Henry aware of that? Hannes, censored by his role’s impartiality, didn’t inquire, refraining from even hinting at this matter.
Another matter that couldn't be mentioned pertained to the peculiar Heartspeech writing method that Henry'd invented. This—whether or not the craftsman knew—had approached one of Saana's unreleased features.
The clone Henry’d in turn held his own silent vigil. He refused to elaborate on the function of the Legendary being derived from the set and told the dev to wait the remaining 17 days or leave.
They arrived at the farm amidst its winter hibernation, when its lakes and rivers were paved by icy sheets, when its shuttered facilities burrowed under snowdrifts metres thick. Henry explained that he worked according to the rhythms of his planet, and these dormant months were ideal for extended projects - while the land and its distractions slept, the crafter could assume his most alert devotions.
In a cabin of simple design relative to their surrounding buildings, Hannes was shown various maps, of the farm complex, of the wider island. His host pointed out facilities for indoor recreation: a heated pool, a sauna, a cinema, a library stocked with his avant-garde literature, a pharmacy of wicked drugs. Outdoors, locally, the colder season offered skiing, ice fishing, ice-skating, sailing, and big-wave surfing on the western coast. Camping and hunting were ill-advised, the winter desolate. Abroad were many more exciting adventures, their locations indicated on maps for the rest of the planet as explored.
The host insisted on preserving the integrity of his realm by banning any use of the Overdream design functions. Before they even transferred over, Hannes was made to participate in a bizarre ritual to cleanse him of the workshop’s voodoo, and his clothes were swapped for an outfit of local material, which Henry adjusted manually to fit him. Adding to the oddity, they travelled through a purely-cosmetic portal. During Hannes's stay, wherever he might roam, the dev was ordered to stick to Henry’s own crude methods of transport, being taught the Elementosaur
Hannes, although irritated by the list of demands, managed to spend the first days happily chilling.
The farmstead’s residential area amalgamated a luxury resort, a zen monastery, and an art exhibition.
Everything was walkable, convenient, cosy, intimate. Saana’s game magic—in devices, in magical sculptures—integrated wonderfully, the gadgets suffused with the same artisanal affection as the wooden furnishings with which they merged. All of these decorations, all of the buildings, seemed as if they could’ve grown half from the soil without human input.
A guest’s worries soon softened to a suggestion of tranquillity. Peace captured one unexpectedly wherever one might roam. Whether dozing off inside a bath or standing in any random corner of any random room, one was cradled by the handmade comforts and offered some sensory curiosity. Down an anonymous hallway, without a change in temperature, the roof peeled away overhead, and the path guided one on through luminescent lilies floating in a pool of snowmelt. In the contemplation of such surprises, another knot of concern unravelled.
Hannes, who’d touched too much of Henry’s inner thoughts, initially found this disquieting. In the abundance of the design, he detected the insomniac search for a rest never obtained. However, the place itself soon cleansed him of this uneasy tension.
Meals were a particular source of enlightenment and rapture. His host—immortal in the kitchen, too—prepared each dish with his craftsman’s love for microscopic harmonies. He served from self-grown ingredients, cultivated for multiple lifetimes towards the single goal of epicurean delight, and these mingled in delicious compliment with exotic meats collected in his travels. The stories of the latter’s procurement went over Hannes’s head, but his tongue always understood; as it wrestled with the complexity of tastes, it shivered with wave after wave of culinary discovery.
Hannes likely wouldn’t have bothered leaving the island, since his top-down, everything-spoiled view of Saana extinguished the exploratory instinct as it thrived in his player base. However, the earlier warning did spike his curiosity. One morning, he took to the clouds and surveyed the impressive march of human infrastructure as it fanned out and conquered the island and then the neighbouring continent.
The developer didn’t have to venture far into the mainland before he met the first unnerving signs of abandonment.
In a nearby swamp converted to agricultural land, a dam had collapsed, flooding the downstream fields. Further on, two segments of a broken bridge stabbed into a frozen river. Further still, the mills and silos of a farm had been smashed by roaming colossi, and, judging from the height of the trees emerging between their scattered ruins, the loss had not been recent.
This devastation accumulated over the kilometres. South, beyond the snow, Hannes couldn't locate the facilities listed on the maps by eye. The system had to highlight the last vestiges of cottages and labs, their crumbling frames sunk beneath the canopies of jungles decades old.
Upon the dev's return, Henry laughed at the ‘youthful’ questioning of this neglect. The quest for permanence was madness in this realm, he warned. He, older than that folly, had long accepted his station as one man, outnumbered by the wilds, incapable in his finitude of pushing back its tide in all directions always. Peace derived from adopting nature’s mindset. Like the foliage of a forest, he allowed the borders of his domain to contract and expand across the seasons, and his full extent—if such a thing could be delimited—was only the organism’s species pattern over epochs, the constellation of the places where he’d buried seeds to be renewed when local frosts had thawed.
Hannes chalked it up to cyborg oddities.
As the idle stay progressed, such metaphors replaced the weirder duel-crafting-hybrid gibberish that Hannes couldn’t fathom. Slowly, his host seemed to descend from the heights of his obsessive labour, and he began to talk of more mundane topics with slightly less eccentricity.
The dev would eventually find this dream-aged Henry a much-improved source of conversation compared with his younger self.
The teen, towards Hannes's neurological research, had always been indifferent, his investment in Project Aevitas limited to the impacts on his career. When would the dev stop obstructing his access to the greater time-bending artefacts? Could he stack this item without nuking his brain? Would Hannes ever stop being an apathetic c-word and adjust the cyclical pooling of the World-Substance – whatever that was? Questions like these—trivialities in a videogame—were all that he’d been pestered with.
In contrast, the current Henry’s concerns had been broadened by his digital maturation. He seemed, finally, to register the more exciting goals towards which Saana constituted but a step. Their touring of the island’s recreations became a heated, ceaseless interrogation. As Hannes was taught surfing, as he sampled exotic dishes, he was probed about the technological minutiae of Aevitas, about the timeline of its planned roll-out, about the space expansion that it enabled after surmounting the fragility of biological systems when inhabiting other planets and navigating to their distant stars.
The dev didn't refuse the theft of these secrets.
Due to the project’s illegality, there were few others he could converse with, and this matured Henry was a fascinating, one-of-a-kind interlocutor.
The cyborg’s neurological know-how was paradoxically proficient yet archaic. While he lacked experience with the latest technology, he had a profound hands-on grasp of the brain due to his martial arts, and, intellectually, he’d mastered hundreds of pre-modern schools of thought on thought.
The latter asset was especially fascinating. He’d absorbed an esoteric collage of phenomenologies, psychologies, and metaphysics. These had been picked up from both his cultural studies of Saana’s civilisations and from a prodigious literary hobby in which, so far, he’d read almost every Earthly text preserved from before the 9th century. As his lucidity increased during the stay, he demonstrated the ability to re-examine the data shared by Hannes from any one of these schools and their novel syntheses. The scope eventually became so exhausting that the pair switched to—a filtered—
In less than a week, these discussions had stoked in Hannes an irresistible urge to work. Staring out upon the winter canvas, mute and colourless, he began to hunger for the vibrant bombardments of his neural readings and his digital interfaces, to wince at the separation between his theories and their implementation. This call of his own beyond soon became intolerable - he, thoroughly modern, hadn’t exercised his patience over centuries of rustic dwelling.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
He thus decided to enter a dormancy and skip straight to the Legendary’s completion. His host agreed to rouse him if it finished earlier than scheduled.
And while the scientist slumbered, Henry executed his scam.
His exaggerated tinkerer's madness, his intrusive
Henry, now unmonitored by the over-trusting dev, teleported back to the workshop. There, he joined his original self, whose lie at the beginning about being too busy to talk had tricked Hannes into duplicating him. The doubled pair, in a silent conspiracy, then scrapped the Legendary in creation and combined their multiplied powers to rush a newer, stronger book to rule and duel them all.
That future sci-fi stuff? Yawn. His love was only for that which transcends all of time: his immortal duelcraft.
Hannes awoke none the wiser, a blink thrusting him the days ahead.
Disoriented by the sudden disappearance of the host he’d been chatting with, he glanced around the cabin's lounge, relocating him in an adjacent kitchen dining area.
His host’s outfit had changed, the clothes sharp and tidy, his hair freshly cut and styled as if preparing for a party. Before him, on the hand-sawn table at which he sat, rested a condensed Heartspeech-generated volume summarising their discourses for his original self, plus a thicker fiction novel, which he’d scribbled manually over the previous week – or, Hannes corrected himself, previous fortnight. Accompanying the writings was a fresh brew of tea, steaming with an aromatic readiness for the dev’s return.
Henry, noticing his guest’s awakening, poured out a cup and reangled a digital projection he’d been monitoring to allow both to watch.
The display showed the ongoing ritual in the workshop.
The Legendary approached its completion with a Hamlet-esque murder orgy.
One after another, the replica assistants around the main, click-vomiting Henry with the Tome were dying gruesomely. They stabbed each other in the face. They committed seppuku. As each died, their corpses—preserved by demonic magic—fell on designated stations of a network of Arcaneworker runes, and these remains rapidly disintegrated as if attacked by a swarm of invisible leeches that devoured blood and soul.
If one studied closely, the runic layout had been altered. The lines were denser, the pattern larger. It had an additional sacrificial station.
Hannes—oblivious to the change—caught a cup floated telekinetically towards him. “How long left, my,” he paused to sip his drink and never finished the sentence, his tongue stolen by the golden, berry lips of Aphrodite herself, his eyes glittering with a vision of flower-carpeted meadows, his waist embraced by the olive arms of a thousand citrus-scented maidens. “Wow…” Tears of joy spilt down his cheeks. “That’s…that’s the nicest thing that’s ever happened in my life.”
Henry shrugged.
The dabbling during Wankalgalese Shortsword hadn’t brought him close to tea-craft’s peaks. Of course, by human standards, all his cooking had achieved divinity. He’d avoided serving this guest from the god menu since the taste would've prompted unwanted loitering.
“My prediction was off,” said Henry. “Three minutes left. Tap back out if you desire.”
Hannes—who’d have to be forcefully removed from the teacup’s affections—lingered, watching the clones get massacred.
For one not soothed by the angelic drink, the finale might’ve been repulsive. As the main Henry wrote the terminal full stop, his last surviving clone hobbled up from behind him. In one hand, it held the spaghetti of its entrails inside its eviscerated belly. With the other, it wielded an executioner’s sword, which, with its drying breath, it brought down upon his exposed neck. The main Henry’s quill, whose nib dealt the closing punctuation, was pressed to the page by his headless corpse.
At once, the kitchen display through which the cabin pair monitored flashed a glowing white. The tableau of mutilation was obliterated by a blast, white and bright and hot and expansive as a nuclear explosion.
Hannes knit his brow. “Did you screw up?”
Henry's soul winced with another passing despair at the inattention of this game’s creator, this component of the ritual conventional. “The energy’s being absorbed. It’s…inhaling. It is…alive.”
Hannes hadn’t been remarking on the aftereffect. “I didn’t receive an Aevitas notification.”
This was peculiar, considering the type of magic incorporated within this item and the others.
Henry groaned. “Must every miracle labour at these convoluted tricks on time? I say some crafts belong to the present’s brute simplicity. Raw, brute power - on occasion that might be the most far-out, the most thought-provoking, the most futuristic of inventions. The simple man sees an insect pushing upwards at the air, at seemingly nothing, and, after a moment of bemusement as to its purpose, he laughs, he sneers, he spits, he moves on, his eyes averted to the wonderous shine of tomorrow. It takes a higher, more miraculous vision to endure these insect days, to kneel beside your puny brother and grant him the strength of arms to lift the falling sky.”
He provided no clarification.
After a few minutes, the display cleared. The blinding energy was absorbed by the Legendary, which lay on a ground polished glassy smooth by the explosion.
At the consumption of the final energy mote, the scene blinked through a fast-forwarded cooling period. The figure of the craftsman then appeared. Stooping, he snatched up his magnum opus and examined its immortal contents.
Henry—the watching duplicate—filled his mouth with a last sip of his tea.
Victory had raised the drink’s flavour to a sublime number. Even the bitter notes danced lovely on his tongue, identifiable within the brew yet transformed by the moment of triumph into another carousel of sweetness.
“The rest,” he said to the game dev, “you can get from the less transient me. Accelerate him past the silence if needed. I will not deprive myself of the final savour.”
“Hmm?” Hannes took a second look at Henry’s attire, and he realised it’d not been for a party that he’d dressed up. “Are you sure? We can copy the Overdream.”
Throughout their Aevitas experiments, countless clones had been deleted. However, all of those had either aged hundreds of thousands of years beyond human interests or driven themselves into irrecoverable voids of madness.
The current Henry, as Hannes had gathered from their conversations, was neither. He was still relatively young, still driven by a clarity of vision and purpose and by the insatiable lust for life through which he tolerated his extremes.
The dev could effortlessly transport this one to another realm for the remainder of his days. He saw no logical reason why they shouldn’t.
Henry—knowing all this himself—returned a complicated smile of rejection.
Unfortunately, his latest climb had made him utterly distinct from his previous selves. He was not this sociopathic alien, content with an eternity of disembodied isolation. He may not have been in the world but he was—most irrefutably—of it. The reversal of this transformation, while possible, would be torturous, and, unlike his flesh-connected self, he had no incentive beyond his individual existence to stomach the suffering and boredom between the climbs.
Much more could be said, but—to the reckoning of the current him—the conclusion deserved no great attention. Whatever significance man perceives in his death is but a pair of shadows cast by the infinities it interposes. On the larger, brighter twins alone, we should fix our gaze, on the life that shines before and after.
With his stint upon the slope concluded, Henry, as much as it went against his nature, brought to mind the evening conversations with this researcher about the future days beyond him. Into them, into their distant substance, he launched his heart, leaping from the present’s lonely summit.
“I must not go over Jordan,” he quoted from his biblical antiquity, “but ye shall go over, and possess that good land.” He tossed a military salute, a touch ironic but—mostly—sincere, having stayed the dutiful soldier till his end. “In the next cycle.”
Hannes, although he still didn’t understand, nodded back.
He issued a mental command, and then the cabin was empty of one of its presences.
A silence poured into the sudden vacuum, dampened by the banks of snow piling outside.
Within the heavy quiet, Hannes considered approaching the table. A curiosity drew him to the book his host had been scribbling in throughout the stay. However, he decided this would not be wise.
That was not his mountain.
The researcher didn’t like this feeling…not one bit. Wondering if the tea had been laced with something, he had the system purge it.
Two instants later, he reversed that mistaken command.
No, the tea had been a courtesy.
He gave the system an order to remove all of this part of the visit when he’d left. Then, discarding the ritual portal silliness through which he’d arrived, he teleported directly to the workshop’s testing site.
The workshop of the finished miracle.
Hannes, with a sweeping glance, reground himself in the changed environment. A circle of detonation-cleared soil spread out for hundreds of metres before a gradual transition to black-charred grass. The distances beyond were empty, nothing but a blazing blue sky to interfere with the focus on the craft.
Beside him, his original research subject lay exhausted on his back. His face was scrunched in a smile of elation unfolding at the approach of a well-earned sleep. To his chest, he clasped the completed Spelltome tight, like a mother hugging her newborn after two weeks of continuous labour.
Hannes found nothing in the item to distinguish it from any other Legendary, nothing that would warrant its creator's jubilation.
The dev was about to inspect its tooltip when then Spelltome vanished.
Henry, detecting a presence, snapped his head in its direction with a hostile glare. An instant pillar of soul-destroying light, summoned from nowhere, blasted the intruder, bathing them in millions of degrees of agony.
“My buddy,” Hannes waved off the attack and chuckled at the oddly-primitive gesture of hiding, “this is my game. If I want, I can summon a quadrillion copies of your item. Allowing you some control over its revelation has only been a polite formality.”
Henry, slowly recognising the dev, continued to stare back with a silent flame of hostility, within whose flicker hid the elation of defiance.
Too exhausted to speak, he sighed and cast an all-confessing click.
“Paskiainen!” Hannes swore in disgust, both at the
This ‘Legendary’ just combined the spells of the set he’d received into one book. Beyond some minor tweaks, most of the additional effort had gone into pumping up the Tier-8 stats. It was nothing. A sledgehammer.
Continuing to rage, the game dev vanished. His departure fused him with and delivered the spied information to his real-life self, for whom only two seconds had transpired.
His absence was replaced by an uproar of laughter.
“Hahahahaha!”
Henry laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.
Somewhere, within the animosity and ecstasy of his cackling, dwindled the small annoyance at the indifference of the intruder, tempered with a solace in the thought it could’ve been much worse.
No, indifference wasn't so bad. Nothing that he’d witnessed in this universe or any other suggested that those who watch from up above must acquiesce to such a gentle mould. Heaven mandates of itself neither good nor evil. It simply is. At best, one can only pray for mortals like himself, for the rare craftsman willing to earn another callus as he seizes the defective gods and casts them back into the furnace of creation.
The weeks of production had drained him of any strength to stand.
Henry summoned a crew of replicas. They assisted him through his rituals of cleansing and dosed him with a temporary Alchemical pick-me-up.
Returning to Riverbank Cabin, he gave a passing notice to the signs of occupancy. He then heaved his worn-out body into bed, bringing for a companion the fiction book written by his deleted clone.
Lesser sages gazing at their doom would scribble down a poem. Naturally, he—in the exultant spirit of the More—had composed a novel cycle, concentrating the sentiments of self-annihilation into a full-blown epic.
Had this been a genuine effort? Or had it been a step in their deception?
Henry—at least the one who remained—didn’t know. They’d only split two weeks ago, yet this brief division alienated him from any desire to write such a functionless memento. If there was any sincerity in it, he supposed, logically, the underlying emotional architecture would be returning to him shortly.
Puzzled, he searched within the book’s opening lines for answers. Alas, due to residual hallucinations, all the letters kept receding, swirling, and reforming into the configuration of his superior work.
After he’d scanned a few paragraphs, with none of their contents registered, the book slipped from his relaxing fingers.
And thus his eyelids closed upon the centuries of crafting, and the pillow cradling his head whisked him forward on dreams of ink and iron, forward to meet his final arts.