The next few days passed with nothing to remark on. They found more scrap here and there, but as usual very little of it could conceivably be of any use. In the evenings, they occasionally heard the far off cry of a shrieker, though the creatures never came close.

Despite the calm they enjoyed on their journey, the consciousness was never at ease. It always worried that at some point it would look back the way they had come and see that long line of figures approaching. Perhaps it was a baseless fear, but it was a persistent one, and it waxed to its greatest strength each night.

The consciousness didn’t really expect the pursuers to catch up during the day. The creatures had moved at such a crawling pace during their attack on the camp that if that was as fast as they could go, there was no chance of them catching up to the consciousness and its companions during the day, when they were travelling. But at night? At night the humans had to sleep. They were stuck in one place, in the darkness, simply waiting, and there was no indication that the pursuers had to do the same.

What if every cycle of day and night, they caught up just a little more? How long would it be before they were visible on the horizon? How long would it be before it was no longer possible to escape them?

Four days after the consciousness’s memory returned to it, they came to the end of the great flat they had been crossing. Large hills of gravel rose before them, up towards the sky. The slopes were steep, so they took them at an angle to make the climb easier, and with every footstep a loose scattering of stones went tumbling and clacking down from under them.

It would have been easy to lose one’s footing on terrain like this, but no one did, and when they came to the top of the ridge, the sight that fell away before them was something to behold indeed.

Sky had spoken of the ruined cities before, scattered about the world for you to find if you walked far enough, and it seemed that they had done exactly that. However, the ruins were not at all as the consciousness had imagined them. Sky had spoken of a similarity with the Scrap Heap, of a large, chaotic jumble of buildings made of junk, like bits of corrugated iron and wire fences and old planks of wood repurposed into doors, but the city whose vestige lay before them now had been one of stone. Sandstone, to be exact.

Tall walls rose from the ground, but lay at odd angles, partially destroyed. Thick columns stood at towering stone entrances to huge buildings, chipped, but still tall and strong. Statues flanked such buildings, though the faces of most had long worn away. However, the carvings etched diligently into the walls were still well-defined, showing people and animals in countless varied settings. And dotted in amongst these huge, important buildings, were the remnants of the smaller ones, the houses and shops of the common people, and buildings whose function was forever lost to time.

Towards the centre of the great ruin, one thing stood out more than any other. Four statues of figures with wings folded behind their backs stood, arms crossed, faceless from the years and years of weathering. They all faced out from the thing that stood between them: a great, towering obelisk, stabbing into the sky like a godly spear. The consciousness focused its vision on that spear, and as the lens in its eye extended, countless tiny carvings on the sides of the obelisk became visible.

‘This is impossible,’ Sky said in a soft voice, finally drawing its attention away from the city. ‘There are no ruins out here. People have been out this way.’

‘And what are these?’ Harna wondered. ‘I’ve never heard of anything like this. Could this have come through some huge portal?’

‘No,’ the consciousness said, firmly. ‘Look how the buildings are half-sunk into the ground. They have been here since before they were ruined. From the look of it, thousands and thousands of years.’

‘But they can’t have been,’ insisted Sky.

‘Perhaps this world lies,’ suggested the consciousness, remembering that Mirror had said the same of the Factory when it had led them astray. ‘I cannot speak for the two of you, but I am quite eager to see that obelisk in the middle up close. Shall we traverse these ruins? Maybe they will reveal the truth of themselves.’

‘Simpler than trying to go around,’ Harna said, with a shrug.

That was all the agreement the consciousness needed. It was too excited at the prospect of such a strange and apparently impossible mystery to wait for any further discussion ― it set off down the rather shallower far side of the ridge at a brisk pace.

Up close, many of the buildings were even large than they had seemed from a distance. Particularly, those adorned with columns and statues and engravings tended to tower above the streets even in their slumped, half-collapsed conditions.

The consciousness found itself passing in and out of long bands of shadow from some of the tallest parts of these buildings, and as it walked amongst the graveyard of a forgotten civilisation, in some way it began to feel that it could almost sense the history of that people, as though the echoes of it were somehow close. If only it could reach out and peel back the veil of the world, it thought, perhaps it would be able to peer through into the past and see what this city had been like in life.

But it could not do that, and the ruins remained silent. At times they were so silent that their silence seemed, in an odd sort of way, to be much louder than any sound could have been. It was the way their footsteps echoed among the hollow buildings and around the columns and rang back to them from far away. The consciousness could almost imagine those sounds bouncing from wall to wall and dancing away into the labyrinth to echo there forever, though it knew such a thought was fantasy.

It stopped for a while in a large plaza, and tilted its head. ‘I can almost hear their voices,’ it said eventually.

‘I know what you mean,’ Sky agreed, coming to a halt beside it. ‘It feels like there’s some sort of anticipation on the air, like the place is expecting them to return soon.’

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Harna stopped as well, but said nothing for a while. When she did eventually speak, she said only, ‘Skeletons,’ and pointed.

And there were indeed skeletons. The consciousness could not quite say how it had missed them before, for it knew its attention to detail was very good indeed and it should have noticed them from the moment it entered the city, and yet it had not, even though they were everywhere.

They were strewn about the streets haphazardly, fallen to bits; they were leaning against the walls of the buildings; they were gathered in the centre of the plaza, hands clasped; they were sunk into the gravel and they were all under the sun; they were crumbling or nearly crushed to dust and they were in pristine condition. They were all clearly as ancient as the city itself.

‘Something must have killed them all,’ Sky whispered.

‘But what?’ wondered Harna, her voice dark. ‘And is it still here?’

The consciousness looked at her. ‘Millennia must have passed. Nothing could live that long. But if it has, somehow… then let us hope we do not meet it.’

After that their mood was subdued as they progressed further through the ruin. Now that the consciousness was aware of the skeletons, it could not stop looking at them, for there were thousands upon thousands of them. From the size the city had looked from the outside, it could only imagine the population had been in the tens of thousands, or even the very low hundreds. Was every single one of them here, flesh wasted to nothing, bones lying weathered and bare, all throughout this colossal wreck that must once have been such a grand and proud place?

It knew it should not have been horrified by such a thought. It was a war machine, after all; it had been made to witness and to help bring about this very sort of ruin, to raze cities to the ground, bring empires low, and slaughter their armies and their civilians in the glorious pursuit of victory. Now that it could see such a devastation of the kind it would have made, it had never been more glad that it had rejected that pursuit.

When they finally came to the centre of the city and another great plaza, with the statues and the obelisk before them, it was greatly relieved to no longer have to think about such things. Instead it hurried forwards, ignoring the skeletons scattered around the base of the obelisk, walked right up to it, and carefully placed its hand against the stony surface.

The carvings had become quite weathered and indistinct over the ages, but the care and expertise in their design was still evident. The consciousness could hardly begin to imagine the time and the delicacy that must have gone into crafting them. And to stand at the very centre of their city ― it must have been impossibly important the people who had lived here.

‘This is what you wanted to see?’ Harna asked, peering up towards the top the obelisk.

The consciousness followed her gaze and tried to guess how tall the monument was. Over a hundred metres, easily. ‘You cannot tell me you are not fascinated by such a thing.’

‘I can. I’d much rather be moving on. A city is all well and good, but one full of the dead is not a place I’d like to linger.’

The consciousness said nothing and instead turned to look at the statues. Their wings, though weathered, still held a wonderfully detailed impression of feathers. Walking around them, it peered up at their faces. They seemed to be wearing headdresses of some kind, and they gazed proudly ahead, thin beards descending from their faces, but much of the fine detail had been lost.

Frustrated, it walked back to the obelisk and placed a hand against it. It was certain there was something more to this place… there was a kind of oddness about it that just seemed to draw its attention, as if a hidden force was beckoning. And as its metal skin touched to the stone, it felt something stronger, like a hum beneath the very rough and cracked skin of that monolith. A power, it thought, a power running below the surface.

‘Impossible,’ Harna said somewhere behind it.

‘Quite incredible...’ it agreed.

‘How could they catch us so soon?’

The consciousness’s head snapped around. Harna and Sky were backing away towards the obelisk, as at the far edge of the plaza there slowly approached a long line of dark, indistinct figures that slipped and slid around in the consciousness’s vision so that it could not ever quite focus upon them. The pursuers had arrived.

It turned back to the obelisk and put its other hand against the stone, searching again for that aura it had felt.

A moment it heard a gunshot, then a violent swear word. ‘Damn these things,’ came Harna’s voice. ‘Time to go.’

‘Not yet,’ the consciousness whispered, even as more gunshots rang out from around it, its companions both fighting. ‘There is a way, I feel it… a separation.’

There was. Whatever was in the obelisk, it felt in a way fragmented, almost as though there were a crack running through the middle of the stone, but when it looked with open eyes there was none, so it closed them again. And there the crack was once more. It could not have explained it to anyone else, but the consciousness felt a long, thin split there, and the energy that leaked through the space in between did not feel like the energy of that world, of the Wasteful Plain.

‘Come on!’ Sky was saying, tugging at its shoulder, her gun in one hand.

‘I understand,’ it said, not moving. ‘These worlds all fit like components of a machine, all tuned to the overseers’ design… but this is different. This is a component that was never meant to be.’

The humans were not listening. Sky was heaving with all her might, but the consciousness was too heavy for her to move. Harna was a few metres away, her gun raised, firing at the line. Even as she stood still, there something ready about her posture. She seemed to be fighting the urge to flee, but her body was poised to surrender to it.

‘I suppose it was for this creation that these people were killed,’ the consciousness continued, turning its attention back to the obelisk. It reached out, pushing one hand against the stone, and though that hand came to a halt, it pushed further with its mind, reaching inside the form of the obelisk itself.

‘If this is indeed a prison,’ it glanced back at the pursuers, ‘well, perhaps they are the guards.’

And with that it found the crack. It was as though its thoughts slotted perfectly into the narrow, dancing crevice between two halves of reality, and with its mind and its hands alike it heaved and pulled them apart, and the sound that made was like a great crackle of thunder, for before them the obelisk was sundered and the veil of the world peeled back.

A column of light descended from sky to earth. The consciousness peered in, and within that light it saw a simple door, grey, with a round metal doorknob. Its frame seemed to dissolve into the light around it, but the door itself stood strong and defined.

The consciousness stepped forwards and placed its hand upon the doorknob, and in that moment it finally remembered the one thing that had still been hiding from it, even when the rest of its memories had returned. Some sort of other energy emerged from behind that door and jostled its mind, and brought its name back to it. It turned to its companions.

Harna was hovering a few metres away, her gun in one hand, but she seemed to have stopped using it. Perhaps she had run out of ammunition, and perhaps it was because they sensed that that the pursuers had begun to sprint towards the centre of the plaza. Her eyes flicked between them and the obelisk, and though she still seemed eager to run, she bore a look that was woven not just of fear, but of amazement.

Sky appeared to have forgotten the danger entirely. There was something else hiding amidst her expressions; a tiny hint of familiarity. Perhaps she was remembering her last day in her own world, a day when maybe she had been through something not wholly unlike this.

‘Well,’ said Bronze, giving them each one last glance, ‘are you coming?’

And without waiting for an answer, it twisted the doorknob, pulled the door open, and stepped through.