Entry 8:
Is the third day since I entered this floor, and I have finally reached the end of the river. It spreads into many arms, as if meeting an invisible mudflat. They flow three-dimensionally: up and down, left and right, to and fro. Little albino dragons entangle on the rivulets like snakes on a branch, and gaze at me with their coal eyes. They are not afraid: the beings inside Ilucaris don’t pay respect to the concept of death. They exist due to her grace, and they cease to only due to it, too. They have been assured there is a continuity, that from her they come and to her they go, endlessly. They may be dragons on this floor of mine and of Teralos. I imagine they could be crabs on another. Flowers on a third. Talking birds, like the one that once long ago relayed this information to me, on a fourth.
I wonder where floors go when people leave them. Do they stay, unvisited, awaiting to host a new climber during a wee while? Do they disappear and get created anew when there is a need for them? If they linger, do they mutate, and are all those seemingly permutations of some floors reported by other gods (Ilucarology is a blooming field of research among immortals. I hope this diary makes it out the tower and into the hands of men, which would place it into the hands of gods, too. Something new under the sun draws the eyes of the nigh-omniscient, specially something born from Ilucaris.) just the same floors, changed to suit their new visitors?
I even wonder if Ilucaris is always a tower. Do the animals that find their way in see it as a cave? Would a rabbit see a majestic lair where it needs to dig deeper to progress? What about other beings that find their way in? What would a fungus or a weed perceive?
I may never know.
I pick a branch of the river to follow. I stroll through its twisting surface, walking with my head pointing to the earth at moments, and pointing at the horizon at others. The barrier of spray, a multitude of shining droplets, before me probably acts a curtain that will lead to a staircase. I cannot see beyond it. I expect a guardian to be found somewhere in there, to ask me to give him or her one of the gifts of Ilucaris to proceed. I won’t give them anything, if possible: I have already parted with my omniscience, and if I want to reach the last floor, I suppose I may need every last one of my skills.
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Entry 9:
A narrow passage carved into a flying iceberg contains the exit of this floor. The rivers have left behind, and a path of fragmented, floating breccias leads to the cave of glossy walls of blue. There’s no guardian. Either the tower considers I already made my sacrifice, or its forsaking me like I forsook her. She knows that if there is nobody to grant my gifts to, there’s no chance for me to come out of this as a man. I… resent the idea of surviving this trip as a god. Half a god, if she were vile enough to take everything but the immortality. And that’s an idea I fear, to be half divine. To have all the weaknesses of a man and be forced to suffer them for the remainder of eternity. Please no. Have mercy, Ilucaris.
And despite that fear, I must go on. To go back now is to remain incomplete, more so than I was before entering. Furthermore, cowardice would be the final conclusion I would arrive to when examining the why for my retreat. And I have been a coward in many of my life, of course I have been. But afraid… I don’t think I have been truly afraid since I stopped being a mortal. So I played the role of a coward, because it was fitting, because the performer needs to get in character for the sake of the play. But like an actor knows he is in no danger when pointed at with a prop gun, I knew my head being blown up by the enemy in wars that I could end with a finger snap would be inconsequential. Just an end to that particular story, to that persona that I had no attachment with besides incarnating them.
Climbing up to the cave, my steps are those of a weary man. I am not worn down; I cannot get tired. Yet the cave expects a traveler, and it is only polite to look like one. With my cape for a cocoon I advance like a man would. No teleports, no flying, only my feet upon the glacier-hewn rocks.
Breccias. I remember having studied them back in a life where I was a geologist. I remember long, delicate, golden hairs falling over one composed mostly of felsic minerals. Mine, probably: I think I was a woman back then.
A cave in the ice… it reminds me of that expedition to the Rediran mountains. It was me atnd a few others. Three? I think the group was mixed, regarding sexes. I can retrieve images of a bearded man reflecting his coppery skin on the ice walls of the cave, illuminated solely by the light of a torch held behind him.
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I look at my hand. I don pale skin now. I am unsure why I chose it last time I shapeshifted.
You may believe I like to lie about having a very good memory. There are books that I could recite from memory, even in tongues I don’t speak anymore. It’s just oo many lives, too many moments that held no significance for me. Of all my weddings, I remember only the few that went, to put it somehow, horribly wrong. When I and Cortiala (Cortiala?) burned alive after I silently pleaded the wind to topple a candle. When I messed with the mafia just enough so they would kill as I carried my wife out the aisle. When my jealous ex-boyfriend ran in with a knife and stabbed me despite my husband’s best efforts to defend me from the assassin enhanced by godly will. I have had so many endings, left behind so many bodies I didn’t consider mine. But as I said before, had them been mine in the truest sense, the deaths would have been just as inconsequential.
I enter the frozen throat, knowing the shape of the inside and that of the outside won’t fit together. A tepid and putrid breeze comes from its depths, as if it were the breath of some titanic monster. Just another of Ilucaris wonders; another reminder that the tower exists above logic, unbound by it.
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Entry 10:
The cave wound down for about three minutes, and then it ended. The way back melted on the lava pool behind me. The sky here is tinged in charcoal. Ashen creatures show only their eyes when they peek over the surface of the sea of sky-blue molten rock. I am sitting over a platform composed of something resembling basalt. It could be basalt, regardless of floating on blue, lukewarm lava.
Yes, I have tested it with a finger. It wouldn’t burn a man’s skin unless he kept it submerged it there for a long while. It’s not the scorching oven of nature we often regard a volcano as. And it’s definitively not a cryovolcano, one of those you can find in other planets and their moons: This is molten rock. With three-eyed creatures swimming in it like alligators in a swamp, with a sky hue on its surface and among its blackened, cooled-down blotches, and barely warm. But molten rock all the same.
The end of the platform hangs over the air, over a massive… lavafall, for lack of a better word. Imagine the widest waterfall you know, and add floating debris, pieces of it that got a tad too cold, falling slowly over what seems to be the edge of the benighted world.
There’s a zigzagging path of rock going down, an unsupported projection of the platform. I could follow it. Still, looking down… Jumping seems like a good idea. The worst that could happen would be Illucaris pulling one of her dimensional manipulations on me and making me fall further away from the bottom. And while time isn’t of the essence, I’d like to take a shortcut. At worst, I am delaying my death a few minutes or hours. So little gained, so little lost.
Yes. I will jump.
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Entry 11:
Inside the lavafall live these two-and-a-half eyed rat-headed giraffes, to provide a description of these long-necked creatures. The half eye is found on the left side, and it’s just the right part of the ocular globe and surrounding tissues inserted vertically immediately below the “normal” eye, creating a T shaped form. They extend their necks from under the curtain of liquid, cutting long lines in it, and sniff me as I continue my, now half-an-hour-old, freefall. The bottom is nowhere near and the falling speed feels slowed down. I could give up and fly towards the nearest portion of the zigzagging, winding path down. I won’t. If Ilucaris wanted me to play by her rules, she would have provided me another idyllic paradise, and not this alien plane of wrongness.
Now, if you excuse me, I have a fall to complete.
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Entry 12:
It’s the wisdom of the common folk that seasons last for about three months. Their defining characteristics can extend a little, and in some places of the word there are just two of them, six months long each. I bring not a chat about summer or the wonders of spring, but a complaint about winter: it never comes, as the fall never ends.
I had a lot of time to think of that introduction: Today is the fourth mensiversary of the day I took the jump, and I begin thinking it may have been a bad idea. However, I must persist. Falling is effortless progress, and the tower cannot stretch the fall forever. Or, rather, she can, but not for longer than I can remain stubborn. I know the time inside Ilucaris doesn’t match the time of the world. Whether it passes faster or slower, I cannot know, and thus worrying about it is an empty endeavor. Furthermore, even if there are no more men when I emerge holding my pyrrhic victory in my dying, trembling hands, there will be gods to read my diary. Can you die? Can you conjure a star ex nihilo? I wonder. I write this with the intention of it being intelligible for mortals, but you could be a children of the tower too. And if you are, I assume you are haughtily laughing at me.
One of the giratffes just licked me as I dropped by. They do that sometimes. Judging by the spots on her gray hair, I think I saw her before. I don’t understand if there are copies of the same rats spread over the height of the lavafall, hiding behind it, and they all get information from the others faster than I fall, or if I am trapped in a sort of loop.
I am going to nap until the fall ends. Otherwise I will fill the diary with useless ramblings about the giratffes and their behavior.