We walked down the long winding tunnels with me scoping out hidden alcoves and Kliss smashing them open to claim crystal-filled urns.

“It’s kind of funny to see you this flustered over something,” she said.

“I’m usually not this frustrated,” I replied. “I just don’t get why it’s so stable and a rectangle.”

“You got something against rectangles?” Kliss grinned as she bit another gold-rune painted urn with her chompers and then slid it into her backpack.

“Actually, yes, I said. “There are no naturally occurring, perfect rectangles in space. Under the influence of gravity, stars and planets are spherical. Black holes warp the event horizon into a sphere, operating like giant lenses through which we can see distant galaxies. Galaxies are spirals. This begs the question - why the hell is the representation of Space a rectangle?”

“Maybe it’s a tiny doorway?” Kliss shrugged.

“Doorways aren’t natural,” I said. “A doorway is a human-designed shape.”

“Maybe people manifested the shape of the primordial gods by thinking about them as such?” Kliss suggested.

I frowned.

The rectangular thing on my finger refused to leave, didn’t decay, unnerving me to no end like a physical splinter. According to everything I knew, magic was either syntropic or entropic, it didn't just stabilise perfectly. It cost mana to cast a spell and to keep it in the air. Whatever the rectangle was, its mana waste was an absolute zero, which simply didn’t fit into established parameters of reality.

Worst of all, I had no idea how to turn it off. Magic passed right through it, the Infoscopes couldn't define it, and even saying the word ‘space’ in reverse didn’t make the rectangle any smaller. It had no effect, didn't show up in the Astral Ocean either, didn’t cast a magical shadow into the infinite abyss.

My only available option was to make the ‘door’ bigger and I simply didn’t want to do that, as that seemed like a one-way path towards unexpected results, akin to adding fuel to a fire.

Perhaps, the name ‘Space’ was some kind of a calling card of a monstrous entity from beyond our reality? Maybe, it was magic that functioned orders of magnitude beyond my Infoscopes, something along a level 1000 spell and its entropic decay rate was so slow that it was simply untraceable with my tools? I had no clue as to what it meant, suddenly feeling very insignificant and lost like a blind man groping in the dark.

“It’s fine, Slava,” Kliss said, “don’t sulk. Whatever this is, you can figure it out, I believe in you!”

She gave my shoulders an unexpected squeeze from behind and then hugged me and I momentarily relaxed into her warm embrace.

“Actually, now that I think about it, I know who might give us more clues about this!” she said.

“Sasha?” I guessed what she was implying.

“Yes. We should ask our Astral Virus more about these Gods,” Kliss nodded, resting her chin on my shoulder. “She might provide more details about how their names work. If she’s as ancient as she says, then she likely knows things that humanity had long forgotten.”

“Just one problem,” I said.

“You don't trust her?” Kliss commented.

“Yeah, that,” I nodded. “I don’t trust her one bit. For all we know she’s manipulating us into killing ourselves with whatever this new type of absolutely stable magic is.”

“I think that it's in her interest to keep you alive as long as possible,” Kliss said. “If the comet consumes keys to unlock the infinite door, or whatever, then the Keymakers must be given time to grow up and to make as many keys as possible.”

“This is so much worse than the Hollow Mother,” I said.

“The Hollow Mother might be ghosts of people and beasts who perished from the comet’s arrival, still afraid of it and seeking to escape elsewhere,” Kliss said. “Aradria didn’t see the Hollow Mother as that big a threat.”

“Oh?” I arched an eyebrow.

“Underside phantoms aren’t that good at affecting the physical,” Kliss murmured. “Maybe when I own the world, I could strike the comet from the sky with dragonfire?”

“You want to own the world?” I asked her as she smiled wistfully at her own words.

“The dragon part of me wants to own everything of value,” Kliss replied. “Right now, you are the most valuable thing in the world to me, but the world itself… It has great value too! Aradria would not be able to see the value of human life or the value of Novazem itself, but I can.”

“When did I become so shiny?” I asked.

“When you gave me back what Equality took,” Kliss said. “When you pulled me from the abyss, stitched me back together from dragon and human remains. I saw the Wheel of Death, you know… I was falling right into its all-grinding embrace when you pulled me back. Some part of Aradria did fall into it, I’m pretty sure.”

“I sent most of Aradria to Arx,” I said. “Through Amari, the Goddess of the Hunt. If Amari is to be believed then Aradria will be reborn in her domain.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Well, I hope that part of me is enjoying herself there then,” Kliss commented. “Aradria did like hunting lesser creatures, so it is a fitting afterlife.”

“Does the dragon part of you value me too?” I asked curiously.

“Without the human understanding of your value, no, but with the lens of foresight and the passion of human feelings, absolutely,” Kliss said. “Aradria was… fundamentally broken, a result of unstoppable, unchallenged, unhinged beastly nature, one that desired magical power over all, screw the consequences. Kliss was fundamentally empty, devoid of true passion, of love for nice things. Together we are…. something beautiful, something that actually functions at a higher level of mutual, uhhhh… accord?”

“That’s good,” I smiled. “Sounds like you are at peace with yourself then.”

“Yeah,” Kliss said. “I was terrified of being different, of losing everything, but now that I have a hoard of my own and kobolds, I'm feeling rather content. As a human I was lonely and hollow, sold an essential piece of myself to a higher power. As a dragon I was greedy and foolish, didn't play nice with others and paid a price for it.”

“What price?” I asked.

“You killed me,” Kliss said, her eyes lighting up with brilliant red rings from within. “You, a little, tiny thing brought me down from the sky, broke my neck.”

“You’d think that you would seek vengeance, or something,” I commented dryly. “Demand some kind of retribution for being killed?”

“Vengeance?” Kliss laughed. “Haha. Oh, no… that’s not how it works.”

“How does dragon takedown ideology work then?” I asked.

“The male dragon must kill the female for her to submit to him,” Kliss purred in my ear. “He must break her neck and tear off her wings, damaging her enough for her to almost entirely lose her connection to her hoard. Nobody managed to bring Aradria from the sky before you.”

“I’m not a dragon,” I pointed out, feeling the pulse of deep syntropic magic radiate through my entire soul from her eternally-burning heart.

“Neither am I,” Kliss said, hugging me tightly and purring. “Not anymore.”

For a moment I forgot about the impossible rectangle hovering on my finger, forgot about the comet and Sasha, let go of all my worries and plans, simply melting into her embrace. I closed my eyes, feeling content.

When I opened my eyes, there were no gloomy catacombs around us, only what looked like blue, violet, emerald and orange tinted dragonfire that stretched across us like a galactic constellation. I realised that Kliss had managed to crash all of my infoscopes with her positively-charged magic and had pulled me… elsewhere.

[Where is this?] I asked, speaking without moving.

[Elsewhere,] Kliss answered with a voice made from pulsating stars.

[Where is that, specifically?] I demanded, seeing stars and nebulae all around me ignite and collapse and ignite again.

[In the moment between heartbeats, in the space between us,] she answered. [I think. This is… us. Real us. You and me. Apart and together. Across infinity. Forever.]

[How do you know this?] I inquired.

[I just… do,] she replied. [Do you want me to let you go? I think if I let you go, we won’t see… all of this.]

[No,] I replied. [I like the view, even though I don’t understand what any of this is without my Infoscopes. I can only assume that this is some kind of innate… dragon magic?]

[Maybe it is,] Kliss replied. [Maybe it’s not. I’m not sure. But it sure is something beautiful.]

I stared at the arrays of ever-shifting, ever changing constellations. Was I a galaxy of some kind that was observing itself?

Why was I an endless, vast, ever-shifting cosmos made up of infinite chains of stars? Did the doorway on my finger have anything to do with this view? I felt something akin to longing, to recognition when some of the stars collided with each other or orbited each other.

It was odd, enchantingly so, to be a universe, a network of patterns that entwined with other patterns, seeing the patterns within patterns but not really understanding what was what. Wherever here was, it wasn’t orderly, wasn't organised in any coherent manner.

In another minute or perhaps a lifetime, I became almost entirely lost in the undulating ocean of stars. Amongst the infinite whispers, I almost completely forgot who I was, who I had been. All I saw was the endless nebulae and all I felt was the ever-growing, vast connection between me and the stars that surrounded me, each one singing a different song, all at the same time.

Some distant, faraway part of my mind suddenly recalled how I’ve been here before, at the moment when I fused Kliss and Aradria. There was familiarity within these stars, like familial hugs, like a billion hands that reached towards me across the infinite divide and offered me their support, as if they were all my best friends or perhaps, even… me.

With a detonation of stardust, I was back with Kliss fiercely hugging me, my point of view once again constrained into my singular, finite human self.

“What was that?” I blinked.

“The in-between,” Kliss answered. “The curtain of personal sub-reality which Aradria dove into when she slept. An endless starscape of dreams where each pinprick of light has its own story to tell and is experiencing its own… adventure, triumph or misery.”

“It looked like a network,” I said thoughtfully. “Maybe a liminal space.”

“A liminal-what?” Kliss asked.

“Liminality was something I read about in a science journal that discussed ‘Bardo Thodol’ or ‘Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State’ from the Tibetan Book of the Dead,” I said. “A concept from Earth. The in-between two states of being where you are connected to your other incarnations. The threshold, an interval between death and the next rebirth.”

“A threshold?” Kliss asked. “But… this vision didn’t feel like death, didn’t seem like the Wheel of Death that grinds all souls to send them to Arx.”

“Liminality isn’t like the Wheel of Samsara,” I said. “There was… so much love in those stars, friendship, passion even. It was akin to… ‘sidpa bardo’ or ‘bardo of rebirth’, a concept from the same journal, featuring karmically impelled hallucinations, imagery of men and women passionately entwined. I think that what we just experienced was some sort of a different state of consciousness.”

“Your people studied consciousness states?” Kliss asked me curiously.

“The Book of the Dead wasn’t genuine science,” I said. “It was, as far as I could tell… just interesting fiction that speculated about consciousness and how one could attain a higher state of understanding of it through meditation.”

“Did you ever meditate…” Kliss began.

“Nah,” I said. “While I like the concept of liminality, my mind was always far too rationally analytical and far too focused on processing reality as numbers and vectors to actually consider meditating.”

“Hrmm,” the dragon girl slid to my front, letting go of me. “That was definitely real.”

“It was,” I nodded. “Although, you crashed my Infoscopes, so I wasn't able to properly examine it.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m not sure how to take us to the in-between without casting the way there from my dragon heart.”

“It’s fine.” I waved her off. “I might be able to hang an Infoscope on a crystal and use that to examine whatever is going on with us while we go to the in-between. Although, if you’re radiating magic-disrupting waves then even that might not work. I’d maybe have to create an Infoscope based entirely on syntropic magic.”

“This is why I like you, Slava,” Kliss commented with a smile as she grabbed my hand. “You just want to understand everything, always plowing head-first into figuring something out like a falling skyship.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, glancing at the tiny rectangle on my finger.