I stared wide-eyed at the little drone that hovered between Jun and I as the image it had been projecting winked out. “What the actual fuck?!” I said in exasperated disbelief, gesturing wildly at Okeria’s device. “He got all that from me saying ‘it’?! That’s fucking impossible!”

“I… I don’t… I promise I didn’t tell him that.” Jun said unsurely at first, but shook her head and steadied herself. “There’s a reason he lived so long, I guess. And… should we be talking out loud right now? We could be using messages instead.”

Realization hit me like a brick. “He just broadcast all of that to us on purpose. Which means he’s beyond sure that he’s right or he just threw a far-fetched theory at us to see our reactions. He’s gotta be sure now, but I’m not sure Keratily’s on board just yet.”

“Does it matter anymore?” Jun asked. “Okeria knows. He’s going to go and sell what he just found out to anyone and everyone who cares, and that might even include Endra. Skies above, he could’ve already leaked our exit point and all of this is just plain pointless.”

{If we could interject, we think that we have some information that might be of help.

-Mortician}

I didn’t think that was possible, but there was no harm in hearing Mortician out. {Go ahead. Anything helps.}

{And we do hope this helps. When Keratily had sufficiently tended to Okeria’s wounds, she attempted to remove a shard from one of our pods to aid his spoil-gathering efforts. Okeria staunchly refused and forced her to replace the shard, stating that he could not trust himself to give it to you if he touched the strength it contained. If Okeria planned to betray you to the rest of the world, he would not have done that.

-Mortician}

Or he was playing the long game. I sighed and leaned back, letting everything I’d just seen stew for a moment before I made any decisions I’d live with for the rest of my life. However short it may be.

If I trusted Okeria, then there was nothing to worry about. Everything he’d shown to me painted a picture that there was really only one person that mattered to Okeria; Okeria himself. Maybe I was wrong about that, and he did have space in his world for more than one person, but I really doubted it. Even when he gave Jun and I somewhere to run after Endra attacked, he’d only done it because he got the rest of the eel in return. Though when I thought further on that point, it could also be the reason why I could put all of my trust in him.

I didn’t know exactly how powerful The End was, but if the rules it had set were the only thing stopping it from coming down and obliterating Endra in a heartbeat, then it had to be pretty damn powerful. And if Okeria’s actions resulted in me, The End’s only chosen, dying? Well, there wouldn’t be much of Okeria left to benefit from whatever deal he’d cut. Or so I assumed.

Still, I wasn’t confident either way. The exact reason I couldn’t trust Okeria was the reason I could probably trust him completely, but that meant there wasn’t really a decision to make. He knew about my connection to The End, he knew that Keratily would protect Jun over anyone else, and he would factor those two facts into his master plan. Whatever the hell that was.

In the end, Jun made the decision for us. She let out a deep sigh and let her head droop down towards the floor, and even then she took a few moments before she spoke. “I think we should trust him, Seb. We only have Keratily for an ally in this world, and she’s definitely my ally, but maybe not yours. Besides, he managed to become the grand warden of an entire city. That has to mean something for his character.”

Jun paused, then raised her head with a worried frown. “Something positive for his character, right? I mean, he is a politician who abandoned his city to come here and do… whatever he said he was here to do. By the abyss, I’m not being a great spokesperson.”

“Honestly, I don’t think it matters if we trust him or not. We don’t have the power to resist if he decides to betray us. Why bother wasting the brainpower on that when we could be figuring out how to get the most out of Nia’s inheritance?”

I waited to see if Jun had a response before opening my interface to continue what Okeria’s drone had interrupted. I swiped away a page that had automatically opened when he’d mentioned the Maqdim with the intention to read it the moment I had some downtime, then opened the mass of information that was Nia’s inheritance.

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Jun plopped down next to me on the couch to get a better look at my interface. “Lesson number two time?”

“Lesson number two time.” I echoed in agreement, pressing on the ‘lessons’ box and then the little icon that mirrored Nia’s core opening up into a strange flower. The world around me bled away into nothingness, except this time Jun and the couch came with me. A little comfort for our viewing pleasure. “I don’t know what this is going to be, so watch out for anything out of the ordinary.”

“Of course.” Jun nodded. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

I nodded back and pressed the play button, then waited for a moment as the lesson slowly pieced itself together. It started off by building up a massive stone chamber with chalk-white etchings carved into every inch of the theater-sized cavern. I thought they were cave paintings, or something of the like, but when I used a discerning eye to take a better look I saw them for the claw marks that they were.

A fire with a ring of flames that looked like burning algae swaying in an undersea current sputtered to life before us. Three rocks with pores the size of pennies sat in the middle of the ring, leaking smoke that took on a barely-green tint as it rose to pool on the ceiling. It somehow cast enough light to illuminate the entire cavern while also not tinting it green.

And that was it. No Nia, no Inopsy, no nothing. I turned to look over my shoulder and saw that the cavern had been blocked off by a perfectly square rock that filled a perfectly square hole. The claw marks on the rock didn’t match the orientation of those on the wall around it, so someone or something had to have flipped it at some point. That had to be Nia.

“This is different.” Jun said warily. “If this is a lesson, how are we supposed to learn from an empty cave? Ooh, unless that’s the point of this. We need to go get a better look at–” She stood up eagerly and took a long stride away from the couch, only to find herself constrained to the same small space as the previous lesson. “Oh. Nevermind. I’ll just… sit here and wait. I guess.”

“Don’t forget that I can fast forward this thing.” I said equally to Jun and to myself. With a press of my finger the fire before me began swaying at a breakneck pace, but no matter how far I fast-forwarded, it never went out. The ceiling filled with so much smoke that I couldn’t see the claw marks from halfway up the cavern any more, but even then, the bar on the lesson barely moved. How long was this thing?

I held my finger on the progress bar for a second. What popped up to greet me was a number that I hadn’t been expecting at all. “Twenty-two days, twenty-two hours, twenty-two minutes, and twenty-two seconds. That has to be on purpose. Is there anything sacred to your people about the number two? A prayer to one of your gods that lasts that long or something?”

“Not that I know of.” Jun said, deconfirming my theory in one swift strike. “Go through this as fast as the lesson allows you to. We’ll see something in this eventually, unless enduring the entire thing teaches us a lesson somehow.”

We fast-forwarded through a large amount of the lesson as smoke filled the cavern. I coughed reflexively as I breathed in a lungful of perfectly fine air that looked as if it was filled with smoke, then removed my finger from the fast-forward icon and shook my head. It was impossible to see much of anything at that point, as even Jun was a smudge in the smoke next to me.

“Something has to be wrong.” I said with a frown. “Do we have the wrong point of view?”

“Are there even multiple of those?” Jun asked. Her voice was slightly muffled by the smoke, which was something I was pretty sure normal smoke didn’t do. “Just keep going forward. Something about this place gives me a feeling that it’s incomplete. Like a flower that hasn’t bloomed yet.”

I didn’t have a reason not to trust Jun, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t rewind later if we missed something. “Alright. Back to going forward it is.”

The smoke grew thicker and thicker as time passed quickly by, filling the already full cavern to a degree that should’ve been impossible. I raised a curious hand to try and swipe away some of it, only to feel a resistance that reminded me of trying to walk up a knee-high slow-moving river. The unnatural current pressed to the opposite direction of any movement I tried to make, not quite keeping me in place but very much trying to stop me from moving any further than I already had.

If I had to sum it up in one word, that word would be insistent. The smoke insisted I stay in place. It didn’t demand, and it didn’t force, but it was very much attempting to keep me from moving. I looked to my right to see how Jun was faring with this, only to find that she was completely obscured from me now. I shimmied over with quite a few grunts of effort until my thigh touched hers, then felt her elbow press into my side.

It was strangely relieving just feeling her next to me. “Can you still hear me, Jun?” I asked into the smoky void between us. And got nothing in return. “Shit, this is fucking weird. Good thing the smoke can’t actually hurt us, or else we’d be struggling to–.”

The smoke was shot through with lines of green-tinged fire, sparking out from the fire in the middle of the cavern like the branches of a monstrous tree. Even though I couldn’t see anything through the smoke, I could see every line of fire like it was nothing. They split and split until they touched the outer walls of the cavern, filling the claw marks with a molten glow. They glowed hotter and hotter until they actually melted into a viscous liquid that slowly dribbled out of each and every mark, splattering to the ground with a sound like popping grease.

And from the rain of molten rock, Nia emerged.