The Neurovista dream world around us shattered from Sasha’s parting words or perhaps merely under the alien, inescapable pressure of the mere image of the Wormwood Star obliterating, rearranging all that it touched.

I let go of the dragon girl’s hands, staring at her wide, ruby and emerald eyes.

“That was… something,” Kliss muttered, blinking.

Fire crackled beside us in the large hearth of the dim and empty Fox and Fiddle pub.

“She’s lots of words and threats, simply searching for a way to escape her confinement,” I said. “I’ve no reason to trust in any of that doomsday nonsense.”

“I think that the Song of Wormwood is honest about the coming comet,” Kliss murmured. “At least she genuinely believes that it’s coming and that she is its herald.”

“It could all be deception,” I pursed my lips.

“Maybe it is,” Kliss muttered. “Either way, it is a distant threat and we have things to deal with in the present.”

A comfortable silence of trust and companionship fell between us for a few moments as we simply stared at each other.

“You did good,” I smiled at her, pushing Sasha’s words to the back of my mind as something to maybe deal with later.

“Hrm?” Kliss tilted her head forward, gemstones reflecting the flickering fireplace on her right.

“You claimed her,” I clarified. “A small section of the Astral Virus has been syntropically stabilised. It’ll help me study her.”

“I didn’t do that much,” Kliss shrugged. “And I cannot command her that well, I don’t think.”

“It matters not,” I said. “Now that a part of her network has been suspended by you, I can figure out how to thoroughly examine it with my Infoscpes, and understand how to take her apart."

“Are you going to take her apart?” Kliss asked.

“Yes,” I said. “On the account that she’s not something that could be trusted. All that talk of infinity is rather flimsy too, unsupported by evidence.”

“What if she’s right?” Kliss asked. “What if we really need her?”

“To fight the ‘gods of order’ or something?” I asked. “Time, space, safety, termination, order? What the hell kind of god is ‘safety’ anyway?”

“She didn’t say safety,” Kliss replied. “She said… assurance.”

“It could have been insurance or warranty,” I shrugged. “She said them in layered Omnicode. She was speaking in Omnicode, that’s how both of us were able to understand her.”

“Omnicode?” Kliss asked.

“The language of magic,” I explained. “It’s something I started to figure out before I was even born, when I was just a little Astral tree trying to survive other phantoms.”

“An Astral tree?” the dragon girl raised a red eyebrow.

I leaned back against the leather seat. I once again explained the death of my sixty-year-old self in Aralsk-7, my encounter with fake Gagarin and the Wheel of Samsara, my discovery of the Alanian Obelisk amidst the ocean of corpses, and my usage of Kopusha’s soul-song magic. I revealed to Kliss how I figured out Omnicode and turned myself into Astral Fungus and escaped from the Hollow Mother to be born as Dante Alan Skyisle.

“If they are indeed divine words, names of the true Gods of everything,” Kliss said, after I was done speaking. “Then it should be easy to check if Sasha’s lied to us about them.”

“What?” I blinked at her. “How?”

“Names have power,” Kliss said. “If you can speak the language of the Gods, then you can order reality around.”

“I’m already ordering reality around with spells that I design using fractal mathematics,” I said. “What’s your point?”

“You don’t understand,” Kliss said. “If those five words are the names of the true Gods, then I think that they should function differently from mere spells or other names or words.”

“Equality, Ishira and Amari call themselves gods too,” I said.

“Magic,” Kliss said, raising a glittering, gold-dust covered finger, “at least from what I learned in Cessna Academy correlates with true, sacred knowledge. Why don’t we put it to the test here and now, my scientist?”

“Fine,” I said. “What would you like to test?”

“Speak the name of Equality or other Novazem gods in Omnicode to try to manipulate reality,” Kliss suggested. “Then use the name of ‘Space’ to do the same. See if there’s a difference.”

“On what parameters?” I asked her.

“No parameters,” she said. “Just push your mana into your words and point a finger at the… fireplace. “If we see a discernible change within the flames, then we have proof that the Gods of Everything exist.”

I found myself smiling at her words. Usually it was me teaching Kliss something. I summoned up all five of my Infoscopes to observe what exactly would happen next.

“Fine,” I said, pointing a finger at the flames.

[Equality!] I barked in Omnicode, pushing magic into my words. Without a particular fractal, the spell didn’t manifest and the pulse of mana simply rushed to the end of my finger and sparked apart.

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“There you go, that was nothing,” I said. “As expected.”

[Ishira!] I yelled. The result was the same. [Amari!] Also nothing to show for it.

“Try random words now,” Kliss encouraged.

I rolled my eyes at her. Yelling words in omnicode at fire seemed very silly.

[Explode!] I ordered. [Ignite!] [Off!] [On!] [Cold!] [Hot!]

Exactly the same result. My mana was running low, I had just about enough for one more failed spell.

“Going to try one of the ‘god’ names now,” I said. “But then that’s it.”

“Just one?” Kliss leaned towards me.

“I could do more but then I’ll need to pull mana from your hoard,” I said.

“I’ll permit it,” she smiled. “Go on. Say the name.”

I readied my mana once again.

[[Space!]] I barked, replicating the word uttered by Sasha exactly, expecting absolutely nothing.

The mana around my hand did something impossible, unexpected. It organised itself into an orderly formation, suddenly fiercely pulling at the Syntrophic Boundary.

If I didn’t have five Infoscopes pointed at it I wouldn’t have noticed anything different. There was a tiny formation now hanging on my finger, so microscopic that my human eyes failed to spot it.

[[SPACE]] I repeated, pulling mana from Kliss’s hoard.

The colorless spark at the end of my finger grew fatter, brighter yet, actually becoming visible now. It hung there, as if expecting me to unleash it. I had no idea what to do with it, didn’t expect for it to exist at all. The permanent thing affixed right at the edge of my fingernail stood against absolutely everything I knew so far about magic, didn’t fit into the Magical Assembly Theory.

“What the shit?” I whispered.

Kliss stared at the spark hanging in my finger and then back at my wide-eyed, shocked face.

“It worked,” she said. “It bloody WORKED! I was right, aha ha ha!”

She looked extra giddy like a young pupil that just beat her wise instructor at chess.

[[S-p-a-c-e,]] I repeated very slowly, making spaces between each letter. The spark grew bigger yet, rearranged itself, formed a visible square. To my Infoscopes it looked like an edge of unreality that was there and also wasn’t. All of my magical identification tools were telling me that what I had created had no right to exist.

Kliss grinned at me with sharp chompers, looking far too smug.

“This… this cannot be real,” I said, staring at the impossible spell, a square rune of some kind that was just hanging there, minding its own business. “Specific names don’t, shouldn’t have special power. Spells don’t just self manifest, magic doesn’t just self-organize from a single word into a rectangle. This is absurd!”

“We should try the other names,” Kliss said giddily.

“The hell we should,” I muttered irritably, scanning the rectangle in front of me.

“Slava, why are you so snappy?” Kliss asked, examining my face. “Shouldn’t this be a good thing, magic that we can use?”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “This isn’t a spell, isn’t magic. It’s just… some kind of, I don’t know… dimensional distortion, a dimensional anchor, a gate to nowhere? It’s not even a proper magical fractal. It’s just…”

“Just what?” Kliss asked. “There’s magic glowing around it that I can clearly see.”

“Yeah, but that magic… that’s just my own mana, simply being pushed to the edges of it, like electrical current that’s dancing atop of a metal object. But within, it’s… just… a rectangle of some kind,” I said. “I can’t even get any information about it with my Infoscopes, can’t identify it properly. All the System says is that it’s just [[Space]].”

The two dimensional structure hanging on my finger grew bigger yet. I gulped, cutting off the flow of mana before I made it too visible.

I pointed one of the Infoscopes at Kliss, just to make sure that it wasn’t broken, that I hadn’t gone completely insane. A vast array of information filled NeuroVista with everything about Kliss, detailing her current state, level, anatomy, vital functions, soul-state, etcetera. I pointed it back at the rectangle. It simply said ‘Space’ in Omnicode.

I felt my mind sliding sideways.

I switched my Infoscopes to scan the surrounding mana. It was stable, perfectly static, not even sinking away into the Astral Ocean.

What I had cast was a self-sustaining spell, one that didn’t seem to come apart at all. It was somehow absolutely stable, just like Kliss was, somehow, maybe permanently bent Syntrophic Boundary to reinforce itself into existence, spatially affixed itself to my fingernail, as if waiting for something.

I waved my hand around. The spell wrapped around the rectangle didn’t come apart, didn’t fire, didn’t waste a single unit of mana. It just was.

“Stop gawking at it and explain what’s going on,” Kliss said.

“I don’t know what the hell is going on, that’s the problem,” I stammered out, stumbling over my words. “I’m completely stumped. It’s just… ‘Space’, something that’s there. It’s not even doing anything, it just exists!”

“Hrmm,” Kliss murmured. “I think that this proves that the elder Gods Sasha mentioned exist. This is clearly evidence that their names have power over reality.”

“What about the comet?” I asked.

“That could be a lie,” Kliss said. “But I don’t think that it is. It felt… seemed real, like a dire threat looming over us all.”

“I don’t even know what to do with this,” I eyed the inexplicable distortion on my finger with great suspicion.

“Apply it,” Kliss said. “You’re good at figuring things out and applying them.”

I cautiously touched the edge of the table with the affixed formation. It went right through the table as if it wasn’t there at all. I unfolded my armacus and fired a microscopic Electricity spell at the rectangle. The spell went right through it and detonated against the table, leaving a dark imprint there made by a tiny ball of lightning.

Kliss watched me curiously.

“It’s not affected by physical matter or negatively-charged magic,” I said.

“What about positively charged magic?” She asked.

“I’d rather not get my finger burned off with dragonfire,” I said.

“I’ll be super careful,” Kliss said. “Just a little spark, come on.”

“No,” I said. “Not until I figure out how to move it off my hand, damn it. I don’t know how this thing interacts with syntropic magic.”

“Huh? Can’t you vanish it away, maybe cast it onto something?” Kliss asked.

“No I cannot,” I said, waving my hand. “Ordinarily negatively-charged spells fire or dissipate, have some kind of a visible effect.”

“Is it like dragon magic then?” Kliss asked.

“No,” I said. “Dragon magic also has a physical effect, obviously. There’s no positively-charged spiral flowing around it. It’s not interacting with magic, it just doesn’t make any sense, that’s the problem. I cannot see a cause to effect pattern to it at all, it’s not influencing the Astral Ocean, not interacting with the physical world, not doing a god-damn thing!”

“But you can make it grow if you say Space in Omnicode?” Kliss asked.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I can make it grow, but I don’t understand how it works one bit.”

“What happens if you make it really big?” Kliss asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “And I’m not going to try.”

“Why not?” She whined.

“Because one does not experiment with an unknown tool,” I said. “Whatever this is, it could be dangerous.”

“Didn’t you experiment with Omnicode and Alanian Song-Spells before you were even born?” Kliss asked.

“That was… different,” I said.

“How?” She asked.

“I was bored and didn’t have someone to protect,” I replied.