In the beginning, Mari was cold.

She tried to logic it out. She was pretty certain cosmonauts actually needed cooling more than heat, and her rudimentary recollection of intro physics with Ms. Elkers gave a gentle but approving shrug.

But she was in a sea of perfect nothingness and she was getting colder.

Maybe physics didn’t even exist out here. Her molecules still existed and time was doing a pretty decent job of pretending to march forward, but her mind reeled at the uncertainty of just how screwed she might be.  Floating out in the void of perfect absence was not at all like the asensory chamber they had at the academy. The darks were darker. The blanks emptier. And her body heat was going somewhere.

Well nowhere really.

She recalled her grandmother staring into her eyes with such a pained concern. She wasn’t really supposed to tell her family about her mission, but she knew Flap had been lying about the likelihood of success to make her feel better. She couldn’t just go dying on them, right? Mari thought she would feel some sense of relief for being honest and doing the right thing and so on, but all she had was this guilt that churned deeply in her gut when they looked at her.

They didn’t tell her not to go. They really didn’t say much about it. Technically, it wasn’t even legal for them to oppose her -- their government-sponsored rights became incredibly one-sided once Mari had found a muse -- but only in the gravest of circumstances would someone wield such a threat against their loved ones. Most proteges themselves found their preferential status distasteful but necessary in day to day life, and an actual problem when they visited home.

Her family didn’t need to say anything though. It was present everywhere in the home.

When her sister misspoke and asked about grabbing cake together on Friday.

When her usually chatty father kept tripping over the gaps in conversation when they cleaned the dishes together, overthinking, underthinking, but not fully there. 

When her mother’s gaze was ever so slightly pulled away, as if she couldn’t bear to look Mari dead on, and a tiny deviation somehow made the strain tolerable.

Worst of all was her grandmother. Nony didn’t step around the issue, she tackled it with unyielding concern, even when the others reminded her to stop. “Maritt, will you be chilly on there? Without the sun to hold?” she inquired in broken Coriani. Her mother, across the room, was poised to intervene but turned and halted paused awkwardly instead, her own curiosity overpowering her sense of duty, hoping to get the tiniest of clues about Mari’s fate.

Mari struggled to hold onto a small smile, while meeting the old woman’s stare. «Nony, I will bundle up for you. I don’t know how warm it will be, but I know how Pipya would scold me if I didn’t prepare.»

In truth she only wore a typical fall jacket, scant enough for the first snowfall of the year, much less the Place before the Beginning of All Things. She hadn’t lied, but the time to leave had come suddenly, and she knew 

She didn’t want to give it that grandiose name. Minting long turns of phrase was what self-important proteges did, and she hadn’t yet come to terms with how her arts had treated her over the past 3 months. How her muse had treated her.

It wasn’t really fair to blame them, but in case she was going to die alone, or worse, float for eternity, she would indulge in a little scapegoating.

Small tears of frustration trickled down her cheeks. She wasn’t impaired or inconsolable but for once she indulged the release. “We don’t need to analyze it. This is objectively an awful place to be. An awful non-place.” She didn’t even bother the box-breathing technique she had been so reliant on during the first two weeks of classes. 

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When the droplets pulled from her face they chose to stop caring about gravity and simply floated away from her.

“Look, even the violation of natural laws isn’t provoking me. At least I matured a little before my suicide mission.” She let out a singular chuckle of the pitiable variety only accomplishable by someone who just finished crying.

“Now’s as good a time as ever to discover how stupid I am.”

She readied herself for Introspection. Lots of students took joy in Introspecting but Mari’s increasing disappointment with her life trajectory pushed her avoidance into overdrive. She knew in her heart she would be met with depression. It was a nice enough visual, to see her own abilities rendered as a carefully curated bonsai of crystalline evergreen, but Introspection had only ever shown her a handful of arts in its branches distributed among a meager two themes. Worse, nearly all of them were inactive -- the tree hadn’t yet looked sickly and she feared the day it might, but she could read it as stagnant for sure. No one’s heart looked the same or even had the same metaphors, but from what little she gathered from other proteges, they saw something more inspiring to say the least. 

Her muse would not be accused of making things easy.

She shivered briefly. This getting-cold thing was going to be a real thorn, and she didn’t need the irony heaped on top. She gathered what gumption she had, a contradictory pile of leftover courage and growing inevitability, and tapped into the art.

Then, just before she saw it, she felt a skip.

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“🄸NTROSPECTION was actually something that was taught. An art form that had been passed from person to person.”

Lots of people thought of it as something proteges were gifted directly by their muses. Other than a few strange cases, practically everyone could do it on their very first attempt, and no one needed any dedicated training. Clearly it was one of the universals, right?

It didn’t help that this was a convenient idea for the academy. While most of the trainers and lecturers wouldn’t lie outright, they could still say in perfect honesty that it wasn’t well understood. That was enough of an answer for most. What protege, awash in a strange world of weird powers, wants to unravel one of the few reliable parts of their everyday life after all? Most of them had come to rely on Introspection as the source of truth about their arts long before their first term at the academy after all. It was a friend that needed no introduction.”

“🅃here’s a lot of fascinating parts to it, now that I actually understand it myself. Its original creator had a knack for symbiotic thought patterns, but he always struggled with how to grow his powers beyond a mere trick. Getting everyone at the dinner party to think up the same random number is awesome for a late-night cable magician, however it was useless for the grand dreams he had for himself.” I lose myself in an indulgent bit of… nostalgia? You can’t quite tell. Mostly because you cannot perceive me yet. My aside is a bit of professional courtesy, after all.

“🄰nyway I’ll cut to the chase: Introspection isn’t a requirement and it isn’t guarantee. Its ability to respond to novelty is incredible, but not perfect, and ultimately you should be thankful for what you get because it was cobbled together in a mere forty minutes by XXXXX XXXXX X on what would be his deathbed.”

I strain slightly, as a long resonant creak echoes from the ship’s hull beneath us.

You notice the ship and its implied hull.

“🄸’m sorry I don’t have the flexibility to say more yet. Her arts are a bad matchup for me. But you’ll do well to remember: there are no rules, there is no system, and the gods are to be determined.”

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By all accounts no time had passed, but Mari felt like her heartbeat had been interrupted. She recalled the momentary naps she would fall into as a child while listening to her father spinning a beautiful story before bed, desperate to get to the next turn, the next sentence, before sleep fully closed in.

Pondering this feeling and this memory further was tempting, but Introspection’s gears were in motion and it had the attention-advantage of a literal, built-in light show. Mari was stunned out of any nostalgia. 

The bonsai unfurled violently with never before seen sparkles and shimmers, fountainous arcs of silver and white and bright ash and dark pearl, bounding in all directions, parting and rejoining into grayscale rainbows of incomprehensible light. The tree itself fought triumphantly with her brain’s shape recognition subroutines, defying precise geometry with a fractal grace. Trunks begat branches begat leaves begat stomata begat the void containing the pot containing the tree. And in all of it was understanding, fake glyphs beholding real truths, constantly dancing upon her retinas and divvying up the scene into a patchwork overlay of linguistic families.

If there had been any observers out in the infinite black void, they would’ve seen Mari transfixed, mouth agape, her face illuminated against the harsh lack of existence by a million soft auroras glancing off of her cheek.

One such observer couldn’t help himself. “Oh, it’s beautiful Mari. This is what you become?”