After I pressed my palm firmly against the barrier, my consciousness was transported to a new location. Fortunately, no clash between violent deities waited on the other side of the tesseract.

A vast emptiness spread in all directions around me. Wary that I had been dragged back into Desolada, I slipped into the beginning stance of the legato. A ridiculous gesture in the face of the Goetia, but the martial posture felt comforting. It was a reminder of my discipline, my will not to succumb to my enemies.

The simple act of moving disproved my initial guess about my whereabouts. Though I could still experience sensations within Desolada, there was always the underlying feeling that I was separated from my true physical form, as if I was living within a dream. Here, all my various aches and pains made their presence known. I was truly present in my entirety.

Black lines flickered in and out of existence around me in all manner of size and angle. At first, most of them vanished and reappeared in another location. As seconds ticked by, more of them remained in place, as if they had discovered their proper arrangement.

I had once watched Lyra outline the initial draft of one of her paintings. Graceful, simple motions of her wrist, the charcoal stick forming light strokes across her sketchpad; with a flick of her thumb she’d erase one line and redraw it, sometimes obsessively repeating the same section until it was exactly right.

This felt much the same, though on a grander scale. An artist sketched onto the world around me. The flurry of outlines gradually resolved into a new environment. One that could only be described as madness, the doodlings of a lunatic polymath in the margins of his notebook.

The ground consisted of a checkered pattern of black and white tiles that stretched out infinitely in all directions. They were the perfect length to remind me of a latrones board if I was one of the pieces standing upon a square.

Instead of clouds, the sky was filled with a variety of optical illusions, occasionally colliding with one another before flickering out of existence and reappearing a short distance away. A repeating flight of stairs larger than a building drifting overhead, flipping and rotating almost lazily along its axes. Farther along, a pair of conjoined rings shifted against one another. The way they fit together deceived the eye, their curves fusing into unnatural arrangements.

Not what I had expected, but such bizarre sights had almost become commonplace since the first time I hallucinated my way into Desolada. None of this was random, even if it was confusing. Like dreams, these events followed their own peculiar internal logic. This was Brother Augur’s domain, a reflection of his inner madness imposed on the world.

In the end, perhaps that was what magic was. A rejection of the Increate’s Design, convincing the world to adopt the user’s vision. Within this tesseract, Brother Augur claimed he knew better than God himself.

Back when I wielded the sword Dasein, I had plunged my mind into its depths. It contained its own abstract pocket realm, not quite like this one, but with obvious similarities. It made sense that the same mind had created both areas.

Depictions with dimensionalism were one of the common links. Dimensionalism was mostly a fringe mathematical pursuit, bordering on heresy once studied beyond the basics. The occasional philosopher included some random formulae in their boring theories, mostly as a means to add false legitimacy under the assumption the reader knew even less than they did.

Interestingly, the most information I had discovered in an easily-digestible format came from a small primer on painting I had flipped through at Lyra’s home once. Even in a city like Odena, books were somewhat of a rarity, so I had taken to skimming through their contents in search of any interesting tidbits. Sometimes, a random poet from a backwoods village considered time or a related concept in a way a philosopher’s mind may never wander down.

Lyra’s primer explained basic dimensionalism in the context of painting, in terms as simple as could be. Length, width, and depth formed the first three dimensions, and artists manipulated them in an attempt to depict a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional canvas.

What had caught my attention was the writer discussing time as the fourth dimension. His claim was that the ultimate challenge for the artist was not to merely create the illusion of depth; a real masterpiece incorporates the higher ideal of time, which imparts motion onto a still image.

The grandiose declaration had made me roll my eyes and toss the book aside, but the casual mention of time as the fourth dimension stuck with me. The writer had stumbled upon a fundamental truth, or Brother Augur once read the same primer and believed in it enough to make it a central concept in his magic.

If the truths contained within Dasein were supposed to represent my relationship as a three-dimensional being experiencing higher-level concepts such as time, then this zone focused on the opposite. It attempted to inscribe higher-level geometries onto a three-dimensional space. That was, essentially, what a tesseract was in the end.

The optical illusions floating about this zone were prototypes, proof that a great enough artist could anchor impossible shapes onto the real world.

I had no clue how Brother Augur had managed to accomplish this, but it opened up an astonishing array of possibilities. My time magic affected only myself and my own perception. He proved that it could be externalized, used to alter time outside of myself. That meant I could potentially reverse or speed up another person’s aging, make objects rust and decay, and so on. An actual offensive use opposed to running away or slowing things down.

A smile threatened to spread across my face, but I forced it away. This land was rife with insights, but there might be a cost to harvesting them. Once I left this place, would I end up back in the Amphitheater, facing a legion of hostile faces wondering who, exactly, had emerged from thin air?

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How was I supposed to leave this place, anyway?

As if summoned by the thought, a door was sketched into existence in front of me. I exhaled in relief.

The safest route would be to leave and evaluate the situation outside. Entering the tesseract in the first place had been an insane gamble, one I never should have done if I was truly as rational and in control as I tried to convince myself I was.

I reached for the door handle. Paused as a shadowy figure rose from the ground in my periphery.

Its form shifted. After a few seconds, the gelatinous mass of humanoid shadow resolved into a solid black replica of Brother Augur. My breath caught in my throat.

“Thank the Increate,” I said, slipping past the door to come face-to-face with him.

He remained silent. More and more details appeared across the figure, lighter shades of black and gray adding depth to its features. Its lips moved frantically, but no sound emerged. Perhaps it needed time to shape the anatomical landmarks necessary for speech, though that seemed like a silly requirement given the circumstances.

The shadow replica raised its arm, pointing in accusation and mouthing words at a frenzied speed. Not a behavior I had ever witnessed from the man himself. Truthfully, Brother Augur had treated me with little more than apathy.

I summoned my magic. The orb of time threw off an occasional flare of unstable energy, but no signs remained of the force that dragged me toward the tesseract. I reversed time for a fraction of a second, half-expecting some disastrous interaction with the environment, but nothing out of the ordinary occurred.

The shadow replica continued ranting.

I slowed time to half-speed and leaned forward to examine the replica’s face. Even up close, the resemblance to myself was subtle. We were both unmistakably Avanchean, with the same dark eyes and strong jaws, but he looked like a distant uncle at best. None of the philosophers had remarked on our similarities either, though perhaps they simply chose to remain quiet about a bit of nepotism within their ranks.

He looked about two decades older than myself, but if he had mastered time magic, no one but the man himself knew how long he had lived. He would have mastered the staccato at some point. Altering his appearance would have been child’s play for the man.

The reduced speed did little to help understand what he was saying. Either he was spouting nonsense, or reading lips was more difficult than I thought. If this was a message from Brother Augur, could he not have found a better way to communicate? But if this was not the man’s messenger, then what was it?

As much as I wished to investigate the mysteries of this place, curiosity alone was not worth risking my life. Before I wasted more time, I needed to confirm that the outside world was safe. Assuming my internal clock as precisely as usual, I had spent a little over a minute of standard time within this bizarre little pocket world.

I returned to the exit door and, steeling myself, turned the handle.

In the blink of an eye, I was back in the Amphitheater, right where I had first entered. Instead of touching the tesseract’s barrier, my outstretched hand hovered a couple inches away, still locked into position as if grasping an invisible doorknob.

The arena was about the same as before I left. The old man who had called out to me had straightened his posture slightly. His moist eyes widened at the sight of me reappearing in front of him. He lifted a quivering hand to point accusingly in my direction.

More people in the crowd seemed on the verge of awakening. Their confused and angry murmurs had intensified as they slipped out of whatever demonic spell suppressed their consciousness.

A quick survey of my time magic confirmed the connection with the tesseract had been severed. The compulsion had guided me in once, and now I was free to leave if I wished. Interesting. That meant it hadn’t been an unintended consequence of wielding my magic.

My powers still felt unstable. While it may have been smarter to flee and avoid relying on magic, there was an argument to be made for testing my limits. Better to face any sort of backlash in a controlled environment, opposed to praying disaster didn’t strike in the middle of a crisis.

I reversed time five seconds. No obvious anomalies or forced connection to the tesseract appeared. I repeated the process with the same results. The arena already looked similar to when I entered the tesseract, so I went back a second at a time until the scene was identical.

Sixteen seconds had passed in the real world in comparison to seventy seconds within the tesseract. I scratched my chin and glanced back at the barrier. Some part of me had expected for the temporal difference to be much greater, but that strange subspace must not have been the true core of the tesseract. It served as a boundary, perhaps the first of many one would have to traverse to make it to Brother Augur’s location.

Still, I was only a little disappointed. According to some rough mental calculations, I could stretch out my subjective experience more than fourfold as long as I could freely travel back and forth. Spend an hour within the tesseract, return to the real world, reverse something like twelve minutes, repeat.

As long as everything proceeded smoothly, I could spend over a day inside, though I was loath to exhaust all of my reserves before venturing outside of the Amphitheater. Most likely, I would not be able to accomplish much with such limited time, but it was better than nothing. At least I would have some time to think.

I moved to return to the tesseract. The old man from before called out, more of a pained moan than anything. Something about his pitiable state dredged up a smidge of empathy I thought had been wiped clean in the past year.

I turned and walked over to him. His eyes widened even further as I approached, toothless mouth gaping open, lower lip quivering. He pulled back as I leaned forward. Ignoring his distress, I grasped one of his liver-spotted hands in both of mine.

“Everything is fine.” I squeezed his hand gently. He returned the gesture with more strength than I expected. “You’re safe now. It was only a bad dream.”

He nodded once, clarity and hope surfacing on his face like a sunrise. After a few seconds he loosened his grip. I guided his hands back to his lap.

Unsure why I had bothered when I planned on reversing time before this point anyways, I returned to the perimeter of the barrier.

I had never met the man before. He did somewhat resemble my paternal grandfather, in the way that most men look the same once they’ve turned gaunt and sickly. Even that nebulous connection usually would not have sparked such a reaction—Senior Ansteri had died when I was seven, when I was too young to truly understand the meaning of death.

I shook my head. Now was not the time to waste precious seconds on something so inconsequential.

I touched the barrier once more.