Before they left, Zhura insisted on taking a look over the monstrosity of bone and metal that now lay, twisted and inert, on the stone floor. The man shuddered as she approached it. Collapsed as it was now, with giant ribs splayed out - Zhura could have easily fit entirely within its chest - it was somehow more ghoulish than it was when it was…well, he didn’t know whether it had ever properly been ‘alive.’ Was that thing really my mother, like it said? He didn’t really feel regret - how could he feel regret, the thing had been trying to kill him - but he began to feel a sort of strange nervousness, like a child who had been caught pulling a cat’s tail. You couldn’t blame him for not knowing better, but still, killing your own mother probably wasn’t something you should do.

He felt a slight tug on the sheet-skirt he wore, and looked down to see Paravel pulling on it. He couldn’t read whatever expression she was trying to make - her snout was wrinkled and her nostrils flaring - but her tone, at least, sounded human. “Do not worry,” she said reassuringly. “I heard.” She tapped a claw to her head knowingly. “Many things in the Tangles become old, become confused. I do not believe it was really your mother.” The man felt a brief flash of indignation. The little lizard-thing had said it could…taste his mind, but just how much of his innermost thoughts was it listening to?

“What? Did you think this thing was your mother?” Zhura said in shock, glancing back sharply as she rummaged through her pockets.

The man shuffled his feet nervously. “Well, it…spoke in my mind, saying as much.” He put his hands up defensively, and then immediately grabbed at his skirt as it very nearly slipped from his hips. “I swear, I promise, I had never seen this thing before. But I think that’s why it, er, attacked Sark. It was trying to protect me.”

Zhura absorbed this, then looked down at the tangled corpse-machine before her. “I sure don’t see any family resemblance,” she muttered. She had retrieved what looked to be a long, thin black rod from one of her pockets. She clicked a button on it, and the man watched with fascination as the rod folded itself, and then again, and again, until it had taken on the shape of a fluttering beetle, its eyes shining blue, hovering in front of her face. The little creature then flew away and began buzzing around the fallen abomination. “You can relax a bit,” she went on. “If Paravel says you’re bright and true, I believe it. I think you actually are as scrambled as you say. Wouldn’t be the most warped thing I’ve seen.”

The man barely heard her, however. He was too busy watching the scuttling beetle that she had unleashed. “What is that?” he asked with a sense of wonder.

Zhura’s eyes darted to the beetle. “That? It’s just - it’s a probe, looking to see if there’s anything interesting to salvage or whether it’s worth coming back for it later. I don’t know how it works, the Shas gave it to me-” she stopped, seeing him trying to start three separate questions at once, and sighed. “Look, I know you must have a thousand questions. You’re basically like a Newcomer. But you’re going to have a thousand more soon, and we’d be here all day if I tried to answer them now. Hold off for a bit, yeah?”

The beetle flew back to her waiting hand, and immediately folded itself back up into a thin metal rod. Zhura noticed the man staring intently at this process, and despite her protestations for no questions, gave him a bit of an exasperated explanation. “You see the light?” she said, pointing to a small, blinking purple light at the tip of the rod. “It indicates what the probe found. Red means danger, and we should zip off as fast as we can. Green means there’s nothing useful. Purple means there’s stuff we might want to salvage, but I’m no tinker. We’ll send some people back to take it apart later, if nobody else has by then.” She slipped the rod back into one of her many pockets. “Well, let’s trace our way out of here, yeah?”

With that, she took off, setting out down the stone hallways. Paravel, who had been snuffling in a corner, down on all fours, scampered after her. The man’s mind was swirling with questions; Zhura had been right about that. That beetle - he could feel the threads holding it together, much like he had felt with the skeletal machine, and they were so fine and intricate that it gave him the impression of almost wondrous craftsmanship. Where had she gotten that from? Who had made it? What, exactly would they scavenge from that…thing? And what was that thing to begin with? Paravel said she didn’t think it was his mother, but…

So many questions ran through his mind that he was actually silent, at first, as they walked along, unsure of what to first ask. Finally, though, he settled on what seemed like the most relevant question. “Sorry,” he began, feeling a bit bashful for burdening them with his curiosity, “But you said earlier that I was…uh, what you were looking for? If you weren’t expecting me, then what…”

“We weren’t looking for you, specifically,” Zhura huffed, brushing a damp strand of hair out of her face. She was leading them back the way that she, Paravel and Sark had originally came - ‘up and out of the Tangles’, she had said. They were currently marching up a double flight of stairs, and the ambient light seemed to be slowly but steadily increasing as they did, nearly as bright as midday in the halls now. Zhura seemed like perhaps she was a bit out of shape; simply walking up the stairs was really getting her out of breath. The much smaller Paravel was scampering up and down them. When she ran, she ran on all fours, and it was almost enough to make you forget that she could actually talk.

“-but the boss, he said his dweomers felt something going on down here,” Zhura went on. “A ‘ripple in the Art’, they said.” She gave a dismissive shrug - that gesture, at least, the man knew. “But people wag on about warped nonsense happening down here all the time, so I don’t know how this was special.”

Paravel raised her head from the floor. She was very careful, the man noticed, not to let dust get on her dress, even while on all fours. “It was special because it happened in what he considers his territory now. He acts as though he has marked it.”

Zhura shook her head. “Stupid. No one owns the Tangles. Not even part of it. But the boss wanted us to find what caused it, so he ordered us all into the Tangles to search.” Grimacing, she turned her head and spat in contempt. “Stupid again. But I figure, you waking up in that tube - maybe that’s what caused the ‘ripple’.” She shrugged. “Or maybe not. But it’s as good a guess as any.”

The man absorbed this for a silent moment. In the aftermath of dealing with the horrific skeleton-machine, and with just being so glad to find other people, he had let his relief overwhelm caution. But now he began to feel a little bit wary. From the way they were talking, he wasn’t actually sure if their ‘boss’ was someone he actually wanted to meet. “And..who is he?” he asked delicately. “Your boss, I mean.”

“Doza,” Zhura replied, with more than a little obvious distaste in her voice when she said his name. Suddenly, she gave a start, as if realizing that she might be revealing too much. “He’ll, uh…” she looked at the man, biting her lip, then looked away. “He’ll want to wag tongues with you. It’ll be all set and tuned, I’m sure.” She sounded as if she was trying to reassure herself.

The man might not have any memories, but he’d have to be an idiot to miss the obvious warning signs there. “I see. And uh…this place, you called it the Tangles? What is it…?”

“Oh, yeah. The Tangles, well, not everyone calls them that. Some people call them the Guts, because they’re like the guts of the city. Anywhere in the city, you go down, and you’ll eventually come to the Tangles. Sometimes, the city pulls you down into the Tangles whether you like it or not. Nobody’s really sure how it works. People will hide out on the upper levels, mostly, but you go too deep and well - you saw. It gets dark. And they say that people that go much further than that never come back.”

They rounded a corner, and the stone hallways gave way to ones made of brick and mortar. Zhura seemed to be taking another breath to go on about the subject, but the man interrupted her. “Ah - the city?” he asked. “What city?”

“Oh! I guess, uh, I didn’t really explain that part, huh.” She frowned. “Damn. I’ve never had to explain things to a Newcomer before.” She clicked her tongue irritably. “See, this is why I told you to hold it with the questions.”

Paravel gave a dry chuckle from underfoot. “Zhura is laying tracks before her feet hit the earth,” she rasped. “But we are almost out. And seeing helps one to understand.”

They had come now to a ramshackle, wood-slat door through which sunlight - real, actual sunlight, not this mysterious ambient light - seemed to be peeking through. Paravel reached up to grab the handle on this and pulled it open, standing to one side with a bow. “I think sir deserves to go through first,” she said, giving him a wink with two of her eyes. “He has had quite the rough time in his first trip to the Tangles.”

Beyond the door were a set of stone steps, leading upward; a breeze carrying a dizzying array of scents wafted down to him, along with the chaotic sounds of a busy street. The man glanced around. Zhura did not seem to be objecting; in fact, she seemed to be watching him with an expectant smile. He considered, briefly, if this might be a trap; and then decided that if it was, there was not that much he could do to avoid it, anyway.

He walked up the steps, and nothing could have prepared him for the sight he saw at the top of them.

It was a city, to be sure, but some part of him knew that most cities were not like this.

As chaotic and inexplicable as the Tangles had been, the street that greeted him was, if anything, even more discordant and strange. Small cheap hovels made of slats of thin wood crowded the alleyways beside large brickstone buildings, some of which must have been ten stories tall. These lay side by side with gigantic, exquisitely carved statues of beatifically smiling men and women, clad in flowing, windswept robes - gods, goddesses - upon which people were laying out their clothes to dry. To his right were a row of dark, foreboding buildings built of dark stone, with sweeping buttresses and sharp angles, whose entrances seemed to be carved into the wide-open mouths of grimacing, wicked stone faces. And dominating this area, rising well above every other building by at least twice their height, was what appeared to be an enormous dome of multicolored glass. But its patterns did not stay constant; no, the rainbow danced across it in the sunlight, in swirls and whorls, almost mesmerizing.

Even more astounding than what lay nearby, however, was what he could see in the distance. A glittering spire that looked to be made of crystal that must have been as tall as a mountain. A bone-white cliffside that, when he looked closer, actually was bone - the skull of some impossibly large creature that people had built around, on top of, above and inside. Further down, one or two rib bones still towered over the rest of the city, too - perhaps the others had already collapsed. And against a clear blue sky, he could see several flying craft - most of them bulbous and slow-moving blimps, though there were other, stranger ones too.

And on the streets were a bizarre arrangement - people of all possible colors and manner of dress, and non-humans as well. He saw a curvaceous woman whose neck seemed to be covered in glittering rainbow fish-scales walking past, followed by a retinue of lithe, dancing men and women; all seemed to be wearing nothing but scraps of transparent blue cloth that concealed nothing. He saw men walking by wearing vests and jackets of darkest black that covered every inch of them, and squeezed their bodies until they seemed to be all sharp, intimidating angles. He saw a humongous, black-furred man-beast standing head and shoulders above everyone else, apologizing gruffly as he bumped into someone. He saw a trundling troop of gleaming multicolored beetles, each nearly two feet long, darting between people’s feet, which would buzz their wings in warning whenever someone almost accidentally trod on them.

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And all this was just what he could take in at a glance; every moment bought fresh strangeness, odd sounds, bizarre smells, some new wonder that he glimpsed just over the horizon. It was overwhelming, almost, and he might have felt the need to sit down, or cry out in amazement, wonder or fear, except that…

Except that this all felt so familiar to him, again. Even in all its madness, in its alien otherliness, something about this chaos, this bustle, the taste of this place felt recognizable. Not to the point of being mundane, no, but enough to blunt the shock he felt. Perhaps somewhere in his memories he had seen it before.

He glanced to his side to see Zhura, who had joined him at the top of the stairs, looking at him. Perhaps she had been expecting a bigger reaction, because her smile had faded. She looked oddly sad, even as her face was flushed with exhaustion. “This,” she said softly, “Is the City of the Lost.”

The City of the Lost. The phrase rolled around and around in the man’s mind. This, too, felt familiar. And even so, it filled him with a sense of dread. From somewhere deep within his mind, a scrap of memory whispered to him.

You can never go home again.

“Where does all this…” the man gestured around him, trying to take in everything. No gesture he made seemed adequate to contain everything in the scene before him. “Where do all these different people…where’s it all come from?”

“Nobody’s sure,” she replied with a wry smile. Even smiling, she seemed sad. “There’s no one way that people…or places, for that matter…find their way here. But the wise all agree, that everyone and everything which comes here is lost, somehow.” She barked a harsh laugh. “For sure, the evidence seems to agree with them. Wag tongues with any given stranger and half of them will have some story about how they’re trying to get back home. More than even the chroniclers could keep track of.”

“It is a space between,” Paravel piped up from below. Two grimacing gargoyle statues flanked the flight of stairs they stood on, and she climbed one of these, her claws clinging to its smooth surface where human hands would have found no purchase. She perched dexterously upon the membrane of an outstretched wing, fixing him with an intense stare from her three purple eyes. “You can find here the dying remnants of lost civilizations,” she murmured, her long tongue darting out between her teeth as she spoke. “Leaving behind artifacts that none now know the secret of…”

“That’s where the little probe…the ah, beetle, came from,” Zhura interjected, patting her pocket. “Someone found it, and people figured out how to make use of it, but nobody really knows who made it.” She considered for a moment. “Well, perhaps some do, but nobody knows the making of the thing anymore.”

Paravel nodded. “You can also find lost tribes, last members of extinct races…or sometimes, people who simply disappeared from their worlds. And not just people, either; places get drawn here…buildings…” she gestured towards the towering statues of fair-faced gods down the street. “These things, they certainly were not made here. They were drawn here, when everything else has left them behind. From many worlds. Some worlds are so similar that you could never spot the difference yourself.”

The man listened to her, but her voice seemed to fade away as he simply stared at the grand chaos of the bustling streets before him. A world between worlds, something within him whispered. Touching all, hidden from all. Home to the dregs, the abandoned, the unwanted, the forgotten, the lost. And always remember, now and forever:

You can never go home again.

You can never, ever go home.

An intense sense of melancholy welled up within the man, and he didn’t know why. There was no home he knew, no home he could remember, so why should he be sad? Still, he couldn’t stop the tears from springing to his eyes, though he hastily tried to wipe them away. “Are you alright?” Zhura asked him, not unkindly, sounding almost as if she had been expecting this.

“I’m fine,” the man said, then gave a desperate laugh. “I don’t even know why…” He coughed, sounding a bit strangled, to hide the fact that he was holding back a sob. “I, um,” he continued hoarsely, fighting back against the foreign emotion that had him in its grip, “Could it be that I’m from one of these other worlds? Though I don’t remember how I got here. How would I get back…?”

“You wouldn’t necessarily need to be from another world,” Zhura said after a moment, as if worried that he would break down. She turned away from him and, shading her eyes with one hand, scanned the street, wearing a worried expression. “Plenty of people are born here, too. But they can all trace themselves back to someone who…” She made an odd gesture, twirling one hand in a way that suggested, you know the way it is. “But if you were from…someplace else, the one guarantee is that you couldn’t find your way back.”

The man’s shoulders slumped. You can never go home.

Though this place seemed familiar to him, was this really where he was meant to be? Amongst all this oddness, this strangeness? He watched as a bright yellow, many-tentacled creature, with three gaping, drooling maws, crawled over the face of one of the gigantic statues of a goddess, a beautiful young woman holding a flute to her lips. It left behind a trail of smoking slime as it went, and as he watched, it pulled open a straw basket and began laying out what looked like dripping animal hides to dry on the statue’s forehead. They dripped onto a creature that looked like a furry frog that was resting on the statue’s nose, which croaked angrily, and soon the furry frog and the tentacled creature were flailing wildly at each other, wet slaps filling the air. Was this really where he belonged? Or was it simply where he was doomed to be?

A sense of vertigo came over him, then, and he felt his chest tightening. No matter how oddly familiar everything was, he still didn’t really know anything. He didn’t know this city. He didn’t know himself. His stomach turned sour as he battled with a surge of panic. He couldn’t afford to panic, not right now. He still wasn’t safe. He had to think clearly. But for a moment, his head filled with fog as the odd melancholy and panic pulled him this way and that.

Paravel seemed to know what he was thinking - she might actually literally know, he realized, with the way she could ‘taste’ his thoughts. “There are doors to elsewhere, sir. Please don’t cry.” The little creature actually sounded genuinely hurt and saddened by his tears, to the point that it did actually make him suck it up a bit. “There are many doors, here, to other worlds.”

Zhura was less sympathetic. “You’d never find the door you wanted, though. The door back to your world. And this place has a gravity to it. No matter where you went, you’d be drawn back here. You’re lost forever.” She laughed, suddenly, a dry, mocking laugh. “At least, that’s how everyone tells it. Who knows if it’s true? Certainly if someone ever did manage to find their way home, they never came back to tell anyone, and smart of them too.”

“I see,” the man said gruffly, clearing his throat. That intense wave of sadness and panic had begun to recede, but the unknown heartbreak still had a grip on him, and he wanted the silence to be filled, or it might grow. “And the, uh, the…” he struggled around the lump in his throat, and gestured behind them.

Zhura saw the man glancing back at the door they had come from, and gave a start. “Right. So the Tangles, where you came from - it’s like….” she struggled for a moment to find the right words.

Paravel rescued her. “When something is forgotten even by this city of forgotten things,” she said, grooming one of her long ears, “it sinks down, to become part of the Tangles. And the city, it changes it…rearranges things, blends things, and they sink down, down, down into the dark. No one knows why, or how. Scholars have dedicated their lives to studying the city and its Tangles and lost their minds in trying to unravel the secret.” She gave the man a sympathetic pat with a gentle claw. “I think you must have been forgotten, handsome one.”

He was quiet for a moment, staring at the chaos of the city around him. The sadness had died down, now just a small, painful ember in his heart. He stared at the rainbow dome that rose above all other buildings here. Sunlight played off it, and its hypnotic patterns washed back and forth, back and forth over each other. “You make it sound almost as if the city were alive,” he said softly, but a voice somewhere inside him was already saying, Of course it is, fool.

The little lizard-creature gave him a mysterious toothy smile, blinking its three purple eyes slowly, and the man felt a tickling at the back of his head. He wondered if she was “tasting” his thoughts again. “Of course it is, curious one,” she said, patting his hand. “Alive and bigger than any of us. Some even worship it, though I’ve never heard of any prayers being answered.”

“Idiots and lunatics,” Zhura scoffed, her already-red face growing even redder. She was, the man realized, downright offended by the very idea. “This city might be alive, but it’s nothing you ought to be praying to. Utterly cracked.” She gestured to the distance, to the part of the city the man had seen earlier, built upon the impossibly huge bones of some unknown creature. “Look at the size of that. How many folk do you suppose died when the City drew that beast to itself?”

“I don’t know,” the man said solemnly. “How many?”

Zhura blinked. “I…well, I don’t know either. Happened long before I was here. Ages ago. But I bet it was a lot of people. If you forget everything else we’ve told you, remember this: The City of the Lost is dangerous.”

“Much of it is beautiful, too,” Paravel said quietly. The man got the impression the two had debated this point many times before.

“Sure, and while you’re ogling someone picks your pocket. If you’re lucky that’s all they do. Some parts of the city are mostly safe, sure, but right now, we’re in the Awts. Which isn’t the nicest burg. And…” she paused. A horrific looking fellow was walking by, with skin that looked burnt black, except for blood-red, raw cracks in his skin. He had horns where his eyes ought to be, but as he passed, he whipped his head to “look” at them, and gave them an unpleasant smile full of rotten, jagged teeth. Zhura gave this creature a hard stare as he passed by. “Enough standing around, wagging tongue,” she muttered finally. “We shouldn’t stay here...” she tapped a finger on her lips, absentmindedly fiddling with the zippers on one of her pockets. “Let’s bring you to Ragged Square. Maybe someone there’s heard of you. Or is looking for you. If they’d be anywhere, they’re most likely to be there. And we could maybe get you some proper clothes, too.”

“Zhura”, Paravel said cautiously, “We need to bring him to see Doza.”

“We will! We will. Doza can wait a little bit. I want to…” Zhura struggled to find words, gesticulating helplessly. “Give him a chance to…you know.”

Something about the situation dawned on the man. He was a prisoner of sorts, here. These two were being friendly enough now, but it seemed to be an unspoken implication that of course he was going to go talk to their boss, Doza. He certainly did not have the choice not to. He wondered if their smiles and good nature would disappear if he refused.

But they were also currently his only guides, here. And he might want to meet their boss, he supposed; though Zhura seemed nervous about it. At least they did not seem to be bringing him to Doza right away. Perhaps he would find an opportunity to slip away from them, if necessary. And then what? Wander aimlessly around the streets of a city you know almost nothing of?

He saw Paravel looking at him, and realized with a start that he’d need to be careful with his thoughts. He didn’t think the creature could know exactly what he was thinking, but she might sense his desire to escape if she happened to ‘taste’ his mind. “If someone at this…Ragged Square might have heard of anything about me, I’d really appreciate the favor,” he said aloud. He fingered the torn bedsheets tied around his waist. “And some actual clothes would be very fine.”

Zhura nodded, and without a word took off, diving into the crowd of people crossing back and forth on the street. Paravel scampered after her, and the man had to struggle to keep up with them. If he was their prisoner, they certainly didn’t seem all that worried about him escaping.

Which may very well mean that they have others watching you, a voice in his head said. Keep yourself together. Who knows when you’ll be safe.