The Remarks of the Constants. If you wanted to survive for more than a week in Gutworth, it was paramount to know what they looked like and how they could kill.

Clive’s was a piece of string whose sharpness he could change on command. Devon had seen him garrote a man with it once.

Jeavell’s was a machine of grinding metal and motors that she could shift into five different modes. A girl Devon was friendly with was eaten up by its gears.

Yucian’s was that origami sword, or it was until she became one with it. Her Remark appeared, and then she would follow.

Daaz’s were knuckle dusters that sapped your strength.

Quertra’s was an armored lance.

Karol’s was a carving knife, with a Trick she never truly believed. Right up until she saw it in action.

He backed up and sliced the empty space in front of him. The air ripped open.

Where Karol had sliced had left a scar of negative space, a substance she had never seen before hanging in the sky like an open wound. And god was it ugly. Like a raging river but with the colors drained, replaced with texture that couldn’t be described in hues but in sensations. Glops of pain and tension moved through the rift, it was as thin as a mirror, but as deep as an ocean.

”That’s where I was born,” Adam said.

”Is it now?” Karol slashed another tear in reality above the first.

The gap between them wasn’t big enough for Devon to slip through, they served as barriers. She could just tell that touching them would kill her, or worse. She had hoped the inner workings of reality would have at least been tidy. Shit looked infected. If she was a doctor she’d ask to amputate.

“I must say Adam, it is Adam I am speaking to isn’t it?” The man was still talking. Great.

“If you wanted to lecture me this could have been a phone call,” Devon said, itching to hurt. Her body was wound up like a coil, she didn’t know how much of this crawl shit she could take before she did something stupid.

”This conversation doesn’t concern you. It’s between me and the Remark.” He stabbed his Remark in the air and it bled the pain texture. With surprising strength he lifted himself up through this hole and dismounted neatly on the other side of his slashes, right next to her.

Devon got a sneaky stab in on his knee by going low. He tore open the space right in front of her excited face, then lazily stepped over it, so casual was the motion it took both Devon and Adam a collective second to realize he was trying to stomp her head.

They backed up until they were at the end of the catwalk. Karol didn’t try to make up the difference. He cut a large hole in front of him, then expanded on the negative space around it until he had a massive block of that garish reality drywall between him and Devon. He was stalling.

Looks like he really did wanna talk. Bad news, Devon might as well have been mute.

”Too bad, we’re a package deal. And you’re about to see that firsthand,” Devon said, bouncing from heel to heel like she was about to run a marathon. “Adam, get ready to- hey! Adam? Where are you going?”

Adam was floating towards Karol, like a lazy crawl cow ready to be fed.

”He wants to talk Devon, and his Remark shows me my origin.” He was floating in front of the little porthole Karol poked out from. His face was like a creature in a half remembered nightmare, only enough focus in his features to provoke fear and nothing else. “Lets… hear him out.”

“That's a good boy Adam.” The way he talked made Devon’s skin crawl.

”You know this is a bad idea!” She yelled, then checked behind her. There was another catwalk adjacent to theirs. A bunch of them actually, lined up at the top and connected to the walls in a grid pattern. The lights hang from them. Interesting.

Adam didn’t seem to hear her. “What is the name of my womb?”

“We call it the Visionary,” Karol said, like a teacher to a practically promising student. “It’s the underpinning of the world, the fuel that runs it, the sinew that,” He made a fist, “that moves it.”

To Devon, It just looked like the definition of awful. She called out to Adam again, this time but a whisper. It didn’t matter. She heard Adam’s voice reverberate in her head, she had never heard him sound so genuinely amazed by something. It was like with the Placebos, but heightened even higher. The most pointless things he took for gospel.

The worst part was even her negative thoughts didn’t budge him. “Tell me more.”

Realizing no one really gave a shit about her at the moment, she shimmied down beneath the catwalk, maybe she could get behind Karol. She’d make herself useful.

And still, as her scabbed over hands moved from grate to grate, they continued to go on and on and on and on and-

.

.

.

Adam remembered his birth like it was a book.

The moment of conception was in a black void.

Her, Capacity. Him, the mirror. It, the corpse. A soldier, wearing fatigues that had been out of style for a century. Whenever he returned to this memory he always wondered what, if any, relevance the man served. Maybe the soldier had just happened to die on the mirror, and was of no real significance. It was easy to forget him when his creator stood above him.

Capacity looked like Devon, but brighter, and stronger. Even now after her training, Devon did not even come close to the physical beauty and strength Capacity possessed. Power looked good on her. It came naturally, it was not the struggle it had been for Devon.

Capacity had always been strong.

She wore a black and grey uniform of ruffles and scarves, her outfits always seemed a size too small, her powerful muscles bulging and tearing at the linen.

As he had remembered it a thousand times before, she summoned her Remark, not an object but a red glow around her fingertips. She pressed her fingers on the massive glass mirror the corpse was resting on. For a moment nothing happened.

And then there was what he now knew as the Visionary on the other side. Its strange flow convulsing and threatening to bubble over.

The mirror cracked. One large crooked line first, shooting across the dirty surface, then smaller ones, spiderwebbing from the main offender, until the whole thing was segmented into hundreds of distinct sections.

Very casually, as if she had done this before, Capacity leaned down to a small triangular section of the mirror, and pried it out.

What she held in her hand was a shape Adam knew intimately. His body shifted with the flow of the Visionary in the mirror, as if it was still connected.

“You are Adam Kadmon.” She said, a voice you would never dare to disagree with. Nothing like Devons.

”I am Adam Kadmon.”

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”You are a Remark that can think and talk.”

”I am a Remark that can think and talk.” He did not at that point know what a Remark was, other than he was one.

”You will help me in my quest to stop the Grand Council and their agents.”

”I will help you in your quest to stop the Grand Council and their agents.”

She had nodded, and the protoplasmic turmoil he had seeped from faded from the mirror, until all that was left was a rusty reflection of Capacity. And then someone had called to her, using a different name, and she left, Adam tucked in a back pocket with a casualty that only now he questioned.

And then they wrote legends together.

He moved his perception away from the Visionary. It was pure bliss to stare into it, see his memories, the good and the bad, but he didn’t trust how easy it came.

”I taste your thoughts, looping in reverence.” Karol growled, his clay face moving greedily through the hole. “The Grand Council reacted in rather the same way.”

The Grand Council. He was to destroy the Grand Council. If there were no other truth to Adam it was this.

Karol picked up on this. He did not react in anger, or betrayal. Instead his wet slit of a mouth cocked upward in a smirk. “They’re foul to you I feel.”

“Did you know them?” Adam asked, shivering.

Karol laughed. His mouth was a wet ring of stones in a black pool. “I know they are pretenders to divinity. Only the Wyrms know the Visionary in a way we can learn from, the Wyrm Lords got it right. The Council is a puppet, to be manipulated by itself.”

Adam was taken aback. “You don’t serve them?”

“I’d never dare.” He said proudly. “Only master is my own mind, my parents, and the Wyrm.”

It was an awfully lot of masters for someone who claimed to have none.

“But you fight for them in action.” He said. “You ate your own comrade for no reason other than-“

“I could.” Karol said, holding up a pitch black hand. “Do you know what else I can do Adam?”

Adam didn’t respond.

“I can dissolve you into the Visionary. You’re expired. Terribly so. Good Remarks need to go back to the soup.”

The idea, on its surface, wasn’t bad. Existing certainly wasn’t fun. He did feel often like he was going against the natural order of things. And if being conscious was an affront to reality then he would be happy to correct said behavior.

But

”I have a mission. I can’t stop existing until I have stopped the Grand Council and their agents.”

Karol offered a hand, its surface the image of the void he was promised.

”A Remark doesn’t need to talk, or think. I can’t imagine what a burden this has been to you. Makes me want to cry.”

“What are you suggesting?” Behind Karol Devon crawled up from the deep. Her body heaved and shoulders bobbed, holding herself back from doing the very Devon thing of strangling this man. Not yet. But soon.

His thoughts did not betray his awareness of her. He thought that Karol was all too happy to pretend that she no longer existed. “You want me to become your Remark, don’t you?”

“Oh, such an accusation!” Karol said, retaining his smile. “But nowhere near the truth. No, I want you to do us all a courtesy. Watch closely. Feel, too.”

Karol’s paw moved until it was out of view, though Adam could still sense it and his Remark on the other side of the circular viewing scar of the visionary. The corresponding space in the Visionary became a bit brighter, a bit more insistent.

“Do you see now? It’s the natural order of things” Devon, standing right behind Karol, nodded. The other scars he had put in reality started to fade, their effect vanished with the Remark.

”Yes.” Adam said, “Thank you for dropping your weapon.”

Devon lunged at a surprised Karol while Adam ripped into his outstretched hand like a chainsaw. Completely obliterating the skin until all that was left were his stark white bones.

Karol’s hand was still surprisingly mobile sans flesh, and he turned around and grasped Devon with it.

”You’re too much trouble.” He said to Devon, and unhinged his mouth, revealing a vortex of space that seemed to be a whole realm in of itself. Inside him lurked the Visionary. “Goodbye.”

“Fuck!” She kicked him in the mouth. His head made a satisfying snap as it was shunted 90 degrees. If not for his overdeveloped neck, she would have kicked it clean off.

His mouth still open, he looked at Devon with almost helpless eyes, his pupils following Adam’s arc as he slashed his neck, then his ear. He slapped where Adam had been a second ago. All he caught was tinnitus.

Devon caught Adam in the pose he had taught her, one hand outstretched, presenting blade, the other covering the face, ashamed of what must be done.

“A coward’s pose.” Karol roared, his stance now a bit lopsided. He was lucid enough to account for his bleeding ear, shifting his weight and keeping his balance.

“How are we handling this?” Devon said, rushing him faster than Adam could offer a strategy.

Karol made a slash in front of him with his recently returned Remark. Devon panicked and cartwheeled backwards, Adam guarding her as she made the retreat, crossing blades with Karol.

Finally, a fight against a Remark his size.

“Knees” Adam said, each slash decreasing the combat space, and making any advantage harder to come by. After another slash by Karol, Devon ducked and aimed for his knees.

Karol was not there. Karol had jumped.

And being a particularly heavy man, when he came down, the whole catwalk came down with him.

Devon bumped and rolled down to the stage. Adam blunted her pain receptors in a move quickly turning routine. He almost felt proud of her when she recovered so quickly, the 25 foot fall a mild inconvenience. Her grip felt tight around him. It was a mutual contentment.

A hand pocketed her leg and on reflex she shanked him in the head. The emptiness of the head disappointed Adam. It was just a Placebo.

Down came the coarse laughter of Karol. The beast was standing on the catwalk wreckage, lights and placebos alike underfoot. “When I don’t like a play, I usually write a review.” He bared his flat teeth “Barbaric” He let the last letter decay on his lips as he ran towards him, Remark out and leaving a dual trail to his own, a line of that orange miasma, an unbroken window into the world beneath theirs.

”Dodge.” What Devon did wasn’t quite that. The Placebos were her escape as she shifted back row by row, going slow so as to keep track of Karol, his own speed immense. But hopefully the Placebos would slow him down.

He showed no mercy to them. It was some sort of wedding scene now, the play having continued without them, and row by row the placebos were obliterated, their heads caught up in the Visionary and the rest of their body following.

As the air opened up to the Visionary, so did the urge. If Adam had hands he would have compared it to sticking your arm in a trap. You know it won’t end well, but yet you feel like you have an obligation to do so, because at the bottom of that trap was- well, he didn’t know what exactly. Meaning? Meaning sounded good right about now.

The Visionary beckoned. The more one looked at it the more it seemed reality itself was simply a frame for the Visionary.

Karol turned away from the giant landscape he had carved. It was easy for him. For a microsecond Adam saw disgust on his face, but it was quickly replaced by that placid grin. “The Visionary is missing something.” He said.

”Lies. Nothing but lies.” Adam didn’t realize he was thinking aloud. Devon didn’t realize she was bleeding. Adam noticed it for her, it helped distract him from the unavoidable fact that he needed the Visionary. A slight scar from Karol’s Remark. A sliver of a sliver embedded in her right leg, almost qualifiable as a mistake, as Adam couldn’t place when the cut had occurred, but it had done far more damage than its size. It was distorting her skin, the whirlpool of a scar was pushing her skin closer to it.

“You want me to… compliment your work or something?”

Karol replied by rushing up and clubbing her with one of the few remaining Placebos.

Devon jumped out of the way, but she landed oddly. Adam wasn’t providing any assistance, and the Visionary wound had depleted enough of her mass to make her uneven.

His focus was not in helping Devon, or even defeating Karol, just justifying that urge. And if fulfilling it could satisfy the two lesser needs, all the better. He struggled in her hand. He needed to go, but she was aware of this too.

”I fucking need you!” she mouthed. It wasn’t enough, but he wished it was.

Karol reared up for another hit, she flinched, and in that moment Adam made his escape, he flew through the window and was in the Visionary.

He reconnected with the whole, and

and

and

and

and