Mark rose out of the snow, rubbing the back of his head. After a moment, he realized that he had gotten up out of a carpet of snow despite being in a sheltered, dry apartment moments prior. He looked down, confirmed that it was indeed snow, looked up, and understood that that linen had pulled him much further than he had first thought.

Before Mark stood a vast face of stone and snow, stretching upwards into the sky where it was swallowed by the darkness of the ever-present clouds. Behind him, the mountainside continued downward, its bottom similarly shrouded in the darkness that so covered the world. To the sides, it stretched well out of view, any potential curve inwards obscured by some boulder or snow pile before the horizon could be made visible. For all intents and purposes, whichever mountain this was had neither a base nor a peak. It was simply a single, unending slope, defying the limited perception of a single human being. But Mark had a decent idea of which mountain this was.

The slow buildup of surprise formed a cloud of mist in front of Mark’s face as he slowly exhaled. It was then that he noticed his mask was gone. Panic flashed through his mind before vanishing when he recalled that this was no longer Portland.

Mark looked down to see the same threadbare, dirty beige linen wrapped around his left leg, like the leash of a dog. Or a noose. Mark’s eyes traced the other end of the linen as it rested daintily atop the two-foot-deep blanket of snow covering every vaguely horizontal surface on the mountain. The strand of fabric seemed to lead towards a sheer rock face about fifty feet up the mountain, too steep for snow to build up on top of it. If the linen continued up the small cliff or stopped at its base, it was too dark for Mark to tell.

Mark looked over his shoulder, confirmed that there was nothing but thin air in that direction, turned back, and started following the linen strand.

When Mark arrived at the rock face, he looked up to see the mouth of a cave burrowing into the stone of Mount Rainier. Mark blinked a few times and looked the cave’s entrance up and down. Surely he could have seen this giant hole in the side of the cliff from where he had originally been standing, right? It had been dark, yes, but pitch-black against grey would still definitely have been visible. The cave had not been there when Mark had begun walking, he was sure about it.

The linen did not care about such accusations. It simply led impassively into the depths of the cave.

Mark slogged through the last few feet of thigh-high snow, then stepped onto the dry floor of the cave. The sudden ease by which his feet could move caught him by surprise after fifty feet of exhausting wading, making him stumble and almost fall face-first onto the floor.

He did, however, manage to catch himself, propping himself up with one hand on the oddly smooth, unnaturally level floor of the cave.

Such gnats

The linen trailed off into darkness, the already dark sky utterly blotted out by the thousands of tons of stone and snow above the cave. Mark reached for his gun, ready to transform it into a flashlight, but found it gone from the spot where he had tucked it. He groaned, checked his boot for his knife, found that it was also gone, and continued ahead. If this cave would be his death, so be it.

do not seem

The sound of linen trailing behind him, brushing along the smooth stone floor, was Mark’s only companion as his boots padded mutely down that very same surface. His instincts told him to hold his arms out in front of him, so that he didn’t collide face-first with a stray wall. Some much deeper part of him, however, assured him that that would not be a problem.

to notice

His stray thoughts about the voice in Yang’s head that she had mentioned were interrupted when he felt something brush against the top of his head. Freezing in place, he stepped back a few inches, then reached up to touch whatever was hanging in his way. From the feel of it, another bolt of linen, of the same threadbare nature and roughly the same width as the one wrapped around his leg. He brushed it aside and walked on. A few seconds later, he barely registered the sensation of stepping on yet another bolt of linen, lying limply on the floor.

they are buzzing

After somewhere between a minute and an hour of walking, he noticed something rising out of the ocean of black. The beginnings of a dark red glow were beginning to emerge from the darkness in front of him, like the lure of an angler fish. As he approached it, it slowly shifted to orange, then yellow, then light green. Like the flashing lights of the monsters of the Down Below, yet almost glacially slow in comparison.

on the brink

Eventually, he himself emerged into the light. Dozens more strips of linen followed the same path as him as the source of the light came into view. The line of linen that had drawn him here vanished into the hypnotic mass of color as it went over the edge

of an abyss.

He stared down at the vast pit below him, from which the undulating light emerged. In terms of width, the hole was quite modest, though just elusive enough in terms of perceptibility for him to be unsure of exactly how big it was. It was almost certainly within the realm of ‘not very big’. But the depth… Oh, the depth…

The pit’s bottom, if it had any, was swallowed by the slowly pulsating light, emanating from whatever lay below. On the sides of the pit, embedded into the stone like ancient ships sinking into the seafloor, were great buildings of many different eras.

A many-tiered pyramid, its plateaus replete in waterfalls, canals and verdant foliage. A stoic parthenon, hundreds of blank scrolls spilling out of its overturned windows into the void below. A ringed tower thousands of feet high, each new layer slightly thinner than the one below it. Two perfectly rectangular grey towers, identical save for the antenna that jutted out from the roof of one of them. Each and every one affixed to the walls by yet more linen that threatened to drown out every distinguishing feature of these bygone edifices.

He reeled away from the edge of the hole, having glimpsed a road to eternity. This was impossible. All of it. The hole itself was perfectly modest in its width, yet dozens of these enormous buildings clung to its walls with no difficulty despite the passage clearly being no wider at its bottom than at its peak. He wanted no part of this; further exposure would simply twist his mind beyond usability.

Yet the linen, accompanied by its innumerable siblings, trailed ever downward into nothingness, patiently waiting for him to follow in its wake.

He knew that he would not leave here, wherever here really was, the same way he had entered. He shut his eyes, returned himself to blindness, approached the edge, and fell before he could stop himself.

He did not dare open his eyes. He would not allow himself to. Yet he felt the linen unwind itself from his ankle as he fell further and further, only to wrap itself around both his legs, tying them together. Then he felt another strand detach itself from one of the passing buildings and wrap around his arms, pinning them to his torso. Then more and more strands arrived, enwebbing him in coarse tendrils until no part of his body could move.

And then they released him, and he was standing on solid ground. And with great reluctance, he opened his eyes.

Two rows of figures stood before him, forming an avenue between them that led straight ahead to the source of the light. While they doubtless had concrete forms, the slowly-shifting light rendered them into nothing more than shadows, each one a full head taller than him at least. Only one thing was able to differentiate them from one another: Their eyes, each glowing a single unchanging color, was all that could be used to tell them apart.

The figures stared ahead at him expectantly, waiting for him to pass along the length of their formation. At the far end of the path ahead, the thousands of linen strands converged and piled together, forming an enormous mound of loose fabric that dwarfed even the tallest of the figures in front of it. The light was let off by something at the mound’s heart, flowing through the cracks in the linen and filling the air around it like a cloud of incense. If the linen had not been present to cover up the source, the light would doubtless have been blinding. Or, perhaps, the linen did nothing, and the light simply flowed through it as it pleased. It was not his place to say which was the case.

He ventured an attempt to look past the figures and the mound. There was nothing. All around them, space continued into an infinity of nothing, filled only by the ever-changing light and the linen strands that emerged from its depths like strands of spider’s silk.

Nowhere to go but forward. The light beckoned.

He went ahead. The lights of the eyes followed him. Fifty-six different colors among the ever-changing mass. The linen’s core drew nearer.

The two nearest to the mound turned towards it. Four hands held forwards. An apple in one and a stone bowl in the other, conjured from nothing. Both disappeared into the folds of the linen. Neither reemerged.

Figures in front of him, figures behind him. He knew better than to look over his shoulder, see the faces of the ones now in the light.

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The light within the linen grew more solid. More defined. Not one light, but two. Eyes. Eyes at the zenith of a shrunken, skeletal figure, contrasted in barely-visible darkness through the threads of the linen.

A person, once. Now something else. Reduced by aeons to nothing but directionless power and terror of all beyond its preservative cocoon. Sustained by its creations, the first of their kind. Its shattered will bent to the purposes of the greatest of their kind. A repository, for all that which was desired to be forgotten by the world.

He knew all this as he walked the final steps. He just knew. Where before, its teachings could almost be called words, it now simply allowed him to know that which it had observed. And it had observed much, since before the oldest cities. Since before life-giving civilization. Since before the world beyond death. But the snow had been there long before. And it had brought them both here.

He reached the end of the line. Stood before the cocoon and the sub-physical remains within. He had been brought here because they had defied its will, their will as dictated by that of another. They had been forgotten, and they would make themselves be, very briefly, remembered. And it would be found. And it would rejoin the path it had stepped off of so long ago.

And he needed to know. For while they had made their victory already assured by using the limitless cruelty of the world the way a surgeon uses its forceps, he could perhaps still find a way if he just knew. For though it may have access to all the world’s knowledge and all knowledge outside the world’s grasp, the future was not the realm of the known. The past and present could impose their will upon the future to whatever extent they pleased, but how the future will respond cannot be known until it is no longer the future.

He nodded. He had said that he would accept anything, and now that it had brought him here to prove that, he decided he would be a man of his word.

He touched the linen.

47°02'27.6691237906"N 121°35'47.2744902551"W

Baker.

Sun Top.

The watch station.

The hatch in the ceiling.

The castle.

The core.

The vulture could not get it.

The renegade would have to stop them.

The husk had been the first choice.

The husk had been found wanting.

The renegade would have to stop her.

The blue in the ice had always been the sign.

It was too late now.

None would return.

The future was not the realm of the known.

But the present decides the past.

And educated guesses can be made.

April 6, 2029. A margin of error of approximately three weeks in either direction.

The final survivor.

Two alternatives.

The first, the worst of the three.

3-5 hours from now.

The second, by far the best.

Salvation.

By the renegade’s hand.

He understood most. He had to understand all.

And when the time came, he had to refuse.

He had to know better.

And he had to do it anyway.

Just promise me one thing.

Understand, and refuse.

I know. Promise me this.

Anything.

Don’t hurt any of my friends again.

A promise made.

He had to understand.

Understand what?

It could no longer say. What little remained of its mind could not remember that far back.

And either way, it had no doubt lost the ability to communicate on such a level a long, long time ago.

It was a minor miracle that the renegade had been following along so well for this long.

He had done much worse in his communications with its old tenant. Just as the tenant had fared poorly with it.

But time had a way of making the worst happen.

The renegade would have to find out himself. He would be able. It found him to be the right sort of person.

But how do you know that? You’ve just been here the whole time, so why are you

IT SAW EVERYTHING.

And so did he.

Both remaining sides had been watching the renegade.

For differing amounts of time.

The third had left before the renegade had become important.

Its first viewing of the renegade began on February 7th, 2028, 09:22:41 Pacific Standard Time, and ended twenty-nine seconds later.

He had been watching him since before then.

But not long before.

The renegade was a recent development.

As far as he cared, he could have been anyone.

He had been chosen through circumstance and blind luck.

Whose luck, it did not know.

And it knew many, many things.

That was why the husk had not been brought here, even though it had been attempting to communicate with her ever since she had been cast adrift.

She had been hand-picked.

She was perfect for him, in spite of her protests.

The more she struggled, the better tool she became.

Like a lobster walking into its own trap.

Like the rest of the world.

She was the contingency.

The renegade was the primary.

The vulture was the safety net.

The vulture could not be stopped.

He had made sure of that.

Fine, I get it. Lots of people between me and fixing this. Anything else?

He had to understand, and he had to refuse.

Yes, you told me already.

HE HAD TO.

The best of the three possibilities.

He could still bring about his preferred outcome.

But this method was the safest.

This method had hope. However little that was.

I’ll do my best.

The renegade would.

It knew.

The renegade had touched its cocoon.

He had reached its core.

He was the fourth ever, not including those who had been created here. He was the first to do so to be the same as what it had once been.

It had freed the renegade from its power, that which the third of the four had leashed for his own use. The renegade would not be held down by its great forgetting.

That was the one thing that the third could not stop it from doing.

The renegade was the second ever.

He had seen what had become of the first. The tenant.

0.12749 seconds had passed since he had first touched its cocoon.

The tenant had suffered the first few permanent effects after 0.16283 seconds. Things had only gone downhill for him from there.

And he had not had to re-remember that which it had stripped from him.

The renegade would.

It would be best to retreat now.

The renegade had already learned plenty.

Yeah, thanks for the tip. Certainly better than… than… which name does the last watcher actually use again?

It did not know.

The semantics of which names were preferred eluded its perspective.

As did many things.

The renegade would refamiliarize himself once he had detached himself.

The snake was devouring its own tail while the two communed.

It was in its nature, after all.

But he still had time.

It did not.

He was allowed to leave.

It never would.

It recommended that he took the opportunity while he still had it.

Thanks. I will.

-

Mark fell forward out of his linen cocoon, his mask the only thing that stopped his nose from smashing itself to pieces against the cold brick of the sewer floor.

Groggily, Mark stood up. He could feel that his weapons were back in the appropriate places, as was evidently the case for his mask. But the darkness around him made it clear that he didn’t need it at the moment. He took it off and, without a backpack to stash it in anymore, kept it in his offhand.

He looked over his shoulder, at the person-sized cocoon of linen that had seemingly grown out of the wall of the sewer tunnel. He stared at the burst-open hollow shell for the better part of a minute as his brain reorganized itself around more familiar modes of thought.

Eventually, he blinked and turned around. “…Huh.”

He recognized the part of the sewer that the… thing had deposited him in. It was only about thirty seconds from the locals’ station. The first place he had ruled out as a valid rendezvous spot with his friends.

He sighed. Of course they hadn’t realized how bad of an idea that was. He started trudging forward, with more than a few topics to catch the rest up on.