Entry 17:
I have told every lie I could think of. Merely for the record, I must say that a thousand and seventy-three hours have spanned since I arrived to this floor. That’s a month and a half of uninterrupted poppycock broadcasting, of torturing the floor’s guardian. If I hadn’t started to repeat myself in the last tenth of that time, I’d go on, maybe up to the point where the ocean would beg for death. And while that could benefit me, I am not confident in my tolerance to my own bullshit. My wish for death hasn’t so far engendered one for madness.
“I am done, Guardian. I have told all the lies I ever wanted to tell,” I lied.
The ocean doesn’t answer. It is tired. Overwhelmed by my infantile behavior. I don’t think it deserves punishment or pain. I know I will be expected to express such sentiments in the nearby future. Desire to I foster none, however. Should my equanimity, born from millennia of watching the world unfurl, shatter, I can only hope none will be bothered by its splinters.
“I am done, I said. You can have my ability to lie.”
It abandons my body in droves, gushing out every pore, or so it feels. My talent to deceive betrays me, leaves me for dead and runs away with the foam. A weight rests over my shoulders for the first time since forever. I become an eidolon of truth. I manifest a ring composed of chalcopyrite with a lump of cubic zirconia set at the dorsal. My fingers part slowly, glacially even, to let it slip between them, drop into the ocean, not bouncing on its surface but sinking in.
It gets lost into the turbid blue, a feather falling from an abandoned nest and down an infinite cliff. I envy the ring. To fall to the bottom of Ilucaris would be a dream, to splatter onto the ground and be overtaken by pain, and then by unconsciousness. I stare at my hand. She forces me to take the winding path, the slow track to cease. I cannot lie. It’s the third floor of she knows how many, and I already lost not the power of a god, but a fragment of the humanity I so yearn to recover.
This is how it happens. This is how I die. Not in a glorious instant as I crawl out the gates at the bottom. Not in a last breath, an exhalation so magnificent and so pathetic at the same time. Not facing the sun or the stars and basking in their light as I perish. The ocean called me a puzzle, and one by one I am losing my pieces. And once all pieces are scattered, is the one behind the cupboard more of whole than the one that remains in the box? Because I never considered myself to be my godly skills. I am without knowing it all. I am without being everywhere. I could be without sight, without hands. But am I without lies? What will go next? The anguish? This anguish? I don’t want it taken away. My lies are… were… too precious, and I never thought they could be robbed off. I can only imagine how cherished suffering can become for me.
I had not noticed it but I am walking on thin air now, a hole has opened under my feet. I am floating amidst the ocean, but not on water. Funny.
“I have your lies, god. Let yourself fall into the deep blue tunnel, slide through it, and you will reach the next floor,” says the magpie, calmer than I have ever heard it.
“How can I know you are not lying?”
“You can read my mind, cannot you?”
I can. Indeed, the Guardian doesn’t lie. Teasing him, however, is still enjoyable.
I stop levitating and let gravity take me into the water tunnel. I begin sliding on the surface of the liquid as if it had frozen into slippery ice. I descend in a straight line, faster, faster. At the end, I can see a distant orange light, a maw of fire perhaps?
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I shall soon see. I shall soon see.
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Entry 18:
Starring this level of the tower, there’s a star. Fiery burning, magnificent arches of plasma, bigger than planets, adorn my horizons. The ocean’s tunnel-slide has evaporated; I am standing upon a solar spot that would take a man’s lifetime to cross walking. The diary is protected by my powers, otherwise it would be instantly obliterated by the overwhelming heat. It’s relatively cool down here on the photosphere, it should be noted. There are worse parts to stand on when it comes to stars. Relatively speaking, of course: any living being would be vaporized by the photosphere or the corona all the same.
As it is usual, I wander. As it is usual, I wonder. There’s not much to see when you walk upon the surface of a star. Plasma everywhere, a brightness that erases the other stars from the sky coming from under your soles. And no nearby stores to buy sunscreen. Factor thirty would surely be enough for a leisurely stroll by the nearest coronary ejection! What would my dermatologist recommend?
With a snap of my fingers I manifest a dermatologist. She gets immediately vaporized, as it would be expected. Why did I even do that? I cannot think clearly. There’s no fog in my mind, and yet… the distress acts as one. I cannot lie. I cannot accept that I cannot lie.
Hand flat as a blade, I bury it into the surface of the star. I want somewhere more homogeneous to rest, to think. The scorching core, bursting with energy, will provide the perfect garden to give my mind a respite.
I cut southwards, using my hand as a sword, opening a wound into the star’s skin. I don’t need to do so, but I am a god still: I may as well do godly things while I can.
As the star, confused and injured, bleeds scorching matter, I penetrate into the unwelcoming depts. I fall, headfirst, towards the core. The incandescent matter tries to burn me, but finds an unpassable wall of cold immobility.
I am falling since an hour ago now, seeing the layers of overexcited gas pass me by one by one. A funny shaped spot lies ahead. Pain. I have crashed onto a hard surface. A core?
As I incorporate and my eyes adjust to the local level of brightness I make out shelves made of the same boiling plasma as everything else, slightly colder, by the look of it. There are yellow, tiles under my feet. A tintinnabulation reaches my ears, even amidst the alien noise of the vibrating radiative zone.
A shopping cart has come to my aid. It bumps against my leg, and its bars of starfire almost feel metallic to the touch. I read its mind: the cart wants me to shop.
I may as well indulge. If ilucaris wants me to splurge a bit while I dive into a young star, why not indulge her?
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Entry 19:
The rats’ aisle is a mess. All the kinds of solar rat you can think of are stocked in the shelves: fat, thin, red, redder, yellow, blue, ultraviolet, male, female, asexed. Microwave. And one would think rodents made of starfire wouldn’t urinate. Yet the place stinks of rat pee, and it does so with an unwarranted passion.
As if that weren’t enough, the shelves stack impossibly high, such that I cannot see their tops, and they extend onwards to the horizon. No knot forms on my stomach when I gaze at immensity, but it would be a welcome feeling in these moments.
Uncountable aisles with uncountable items, arranged in a fashion I have not fathomed yet. The signs hanging from… nowhere. I’d say from thin air, but there’s no air in here. The signs, their support system notwithstanding, indicate the adjacent shelves stock scalpels, for the one to my right, and money, for the one to the left. I don’t believe that Ilucaris fails to understand the concept of a supermarket. Rather, what could be happening is that she is mocking it. Satirizing it. Like the Hall of fictions, this place if full of lies: the rats move and squeak and sniff around, but they have no flesh, no blood, no fur: it’s all plasma. All around me is hydrogen, helium, a bit of oxygen, a smidge of carbon. Energy. Even this — rather insistent and dog-imitating — shopping cart is a fiction. But the items are also solid, my fingers don’t go through them. They possess textures in accordance with the nature of the good they represent. A quaint illusion, if it can be called so.
I turn on my heels and push the cart to a random aisle. I don’t even bother with reading the signs: I don’t know what I need, but the tower will provide.
I keep crossing the market without taking any item with me, merely caressing some, poking lampposts and whales and phones as they pass me by.
And just now, Eureka. The aisle in front of me has what any lost shopper needs: papers. But not any kind of papers: these are hastily scribbled, these have rough edges and it’s plain to see that they were torn from bigger pieces of paper. Shopping lists. I guess I now know what’s the first item I must acquire in my journey through this place. All that remains is to choose one.