A glance into her eyes conveyed boundless intelligence, unimpeachable authority, and a manufactured perfection centuries beyond the skills of any plastic surgeon. Voluminous hair that fell beside the high cheekbones of a fully symmetrical face. Ashen skin untarnished by a single wrinkle or blemish. She was flawless. Artificial. Her beauty eerier than the most stomach-churning uncanny valley. Like a masterfully crafted mannequin given life and immeasurable wisdom, the woman observed Dimitry from her cushioned chair, concealing an infinity of truths in her perceptive gaze.

And Dimitry stared back, terror locking his muscles into perturbed stasis. His instincts begged him to run—to flee an entity far beyond his understanding and wit, but with six featureless walls confining him to this cuboidal room, escape was impossible.

He was trapped.

Dimitry’s thoughts raced to make sense of his surroundings. A woman, a chair, and him. Two people in a bland environment—just like his previous visits to the dark hall. Dimitry must have been summoned again. This time, however, his conversational partner seemed different. Powerful. A being with more control over reality than a biblical deity. He couldn’t explain why he felt so minuscule, so outclassed, but before he could try, the words slipped out of his mouth. “God? Zera?”

“Even on Earth,” she said, “hello would have been a more appropriate greeting. Care for a seat?”

To hear that word again—Earth—elicited a surge of ecstasy strong enough to expel Dimitry’s mounting anxiety as an abrupt laugh. He hastily nodded to avoid souring his rapport with the woman.

As if possessing a will of its own, a patch of floor beside Dimitry expelled components as gray as itself. An armrest. Half a wheel. Mechanisms. They took on color and fused midair like three-dimensional jigsaw pieces until an office chair manifested into existence. A split-second process.

Dimitry ran a thumb down the backrest to discover it had the cool and smooth texture of high-quality leather. Smelled like it too. To create furniture from what appeared to be nothing—perhaps the woman was Zera. “What kind of magic was that?”

“If Saphiria found a computer, she might ask you the same question.”

His eyes widened. One sentence clarified two matters: she had been observing him and Saphiria, and the chair beside Dimitry was the product of technology so advanced he couldn’t distinguish it from magic. Or did she simply modify her magic to a higher degree than him? “Does God rely on gadgets to maintain her omniscience?”

“A god wouldn’t need you, me, or the situation we find ourselves in.” The woman unfolded her legs and stood up. She approached a gray wall and stared into it as if through a window. “I apologize if I’m curt. For us, information is the only commodity with value. For me to speak unnecessarily risks this meeting ending too soon.”

Dimitry thought he understood. Both he and she were gears in a system greater than either of them, and another entity had placed restrictions on how much information he could pry from her. Was that why his last two visits to the dark hall were devoid of actionable data?

Unlikely.

Neither man offered him a greeting, let alone an encouraging word. She, however, reminded him of home to dispel his unease, displayed hospitality by offering him a seat, and apologized for her rashness. The actions themselves were insignificant, but their politeness suggested they were on the same team or at least shared interests. Her purposeful use of ‘we’ when referring to the situation further proved their camaraderie. Was she the patron the previous dark hall hosts mentioned, or was she simply a representative in a towering hierarchy of interests?

Should Dimitry ask? If the woman was limited to how much information she could divulge, his senseless prodding might cause her to omit more pertinent details. He inquired only enough to momentarily satisfy his curiosity. “Who are you? Are you my patron—the one that gave me the accelall and invisall tomes?”

“You can consider me your minder, and those tomes have indeed passed through my hands. I’m sure you have many questions. We may speak in detail at a later date assuming you continue to triumph.” The woman pointed to his wrist. “A bishop brings hope.”

Dimitry glanced down to discover the silhouette of a bright blue bishop on his forearm. A promotion he fortunately didn’t have to experience. Did his successes in Malten allow him to avoid the pointless pain of a machine cutting into his flesh? Was that his triumph?

Better yet, could he now access the shrine in Amphurt? Perhaps Dimitry shouldn’t. After barely surviving his encounter with the red carapaced devil, he feared activating a shrine unprepared. While more relics would hasten technological progress, he would be an idiot to risk his life or those of trusted allies without taking every precaution.

Or perhaps this promotion offered him entirely new perks. He needed every advantage he could get to resurrect Malten.

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“Some promotions come with boons, and while you have to discover most for yourself, I will continue to support you the same way I always have.” The woman raised her arm, and a book materialized atop her palm. Slender despite a thick frame, gold embroidery decorated the cover.

As he had hoped; a spell tome.

Now that was useful.

Thinking of the lives that could be improved and the technological advances that could be made with another advanced spell, Dimitry jumped forward to accept her gift. His heart sang as he took the book into his arms, but upon reading the title, his eagerness turned to dread.

The words on the cover. They were written in interwoven hieroglyphs that had become familiar to Dimitry. Before, he could only read them. Now, after studying the gospel, he could name the language they belonged to.

Rostlen.

The official language of the Church.

A hounding chill flushed across Dimitry’s body. Did the Church write this book? The rainbow glowing heathen barriers he saw in Estoria and Coldust suggested they had similarly colored enchantments, but did they have the same spells? Accelall, invisall, decelall, and now ‘impedeall’. How many more were out there? How many could the Church use?

“You have made a frightening opponent,” she said.

“Like I had a choice. They came after me.”

The woman turned back to gaze at the featureless wall. “Have you ever wondered why you awoke as a beggar in Ravenfall? The pilgrim robes you wore made the Church your obvious choice for survival, yet you circumvented them. We predicted someone with your morals might, so we gave you invisall, a spell that would eventually become a crutch that led the Church to you. However, through Saphiria, you managed to escape to Malten. Your path is aberrant indeed.”

Dimitry gritted his teeth. She intended for him to join the Church from the start. “Good thing my path is so aberrant, then. I prefer to avoid becoming a slaver’s new pet.”

“Every route leads to the same destination. Whether you hide, fight, or flee, two will eventually become one. We never place a piece with excessive potential for deviance. You should end the conflict early.”

“End the conflict? Are you asking me to turn myself in? The best way that could end is with thousands of deaths and a steel collar around my throat.”

“Considering the elements at play, there are worse alternatives.”

“Like what?”

She did not answer.

Dimitry leaned back in his chair and massaged his eyelids. “Let me guess, answering my question would be you speaking unnecessarily?”

“Some matters the committee does not permit us to tell you. Others, we do not know.”

“The committee?”

Instead of clarifying her explanation, she straightened her sleeves. The alien fabric folded like cotton and gleamed like platinum.

He sighed. “Look, can you at least tell me the point of all this bullshit?”

“Politics, research, entertainment, war, hegemony.”

“I mean if you can predict everything I do and everything that happens to me, the whole thing’s meaningless.”

“Meaningless?” She chuckled wryly. “You still don’t understand. Your every success and failure creates ripples larger than you can imagine, shrinking and expanding our borders, bringing prosperity and decline. As you have surmised, information is invaluable. We are hardly more informed than you. Just as we did not know if a Ravenfall barber would have successfully killed you to placate his ego, we don’t know what the future will bring or when it’ll bring it. Our predictions are as accurate as our data. With every decision, trillions of possibilities are born, and the future grows murkier. That is why we watch you with anxious breaths. Your actions are being written on a blank slate.”

A weight that didn’t belong to Dimitry hung heavily from his shoulders. “Why should I have to bear the burden of your expectations? What do I get out of it?”

“Your life.”

“My life?”

“Succeed entirely and we will return you to Earth as you were. No cancer. No time elapsed. Life will go on, and everything you have learned will—“

The room rattled.

Dimitry glanced left and right. Nothing looked amiss, yet a nagging sense of impending doom warned otherwise. “What was that?”

The woman paced back and forth, fury at an unknown stressor obvious through the gritting of her teeth.

As if tossed aside by a lopsided earthquake, the chair Dimitry sat on launched sideways, and he jumped off right before it slammed into a wall and disassembled back into the gray components it once was.

“Zaĥario,” she said. “Zaĥario! Do you hear me?”

Her scowl hinted that Zaĥario did not hear her.

The rumbling intensified, and the gray of the walls faded into a revealing translucent brown. This room was just one compartment in a facility larger than an aircraft carrier. Like mass-produced mannequins escaping from the factory that molded them, eight-foot-tall humanoids rushed through countless corridors.

Distress, horror, and wonder petrified Dimitry.

“Kajla!” a man’s voice cut through dozens of shouts. “Parietal links are down!”

“Obviously!” said the woman. She turned to Dimitry. “The book! Now!”

Dimitry glanced down at the tome huddled in his trembling arms. He willed countless questions into submission as he thrust open the cover and read the contents. The characters—which puzzlingly weren’t Rostlen or any other language he could decipher—glowed blue, twisted counterclockwise, and vanished from the page.

“Send the bishop back!” Kajla shouted.

“Power is failing!” said the man. “Charging will take time!”

“Stall the anomaly and charge a course!”

“Both at once? We might not survive.”

“Do whatever’s necessary to send the third away.”

Zaĥario briskly saluted. “Eternal are the Tel.” He shouted orders as he ran through a crowd whose eerie uniformity resembled that of monozygotic twins. In a distant compartment, odd antennae whose bright white luster didn’t match the transparent brown floor they connected to bent and aimed at something unseen.

Even as the room rocked, Dimitry felt the weight of innumerous hopeful gazes focus directly on him.

“Is it ready?” Kajla yelled past the wall.

“Entanglement vectors primed!” a response echoed.

Kajla grabbed Dimitry’s shoulders. “Bring glory to our kind!” She pushed him away.

He had many concerns, many questions, but he couldn’t vocalize any of them. The quakes of what might have been everything collapsing into itself faded as his body went numb and the world transformed around him.