“What do you mean my future doesn’t exist in the Astral? How exactly do you see my future and what’s different now?” I asked the painted girl on my dress.

“When I feed on a person, I automatically assemble, visualize their future akin to a massive tree. Every major decision they will make spawns a multitude of branches forward. If it’s a branch leading to the person’s death, the branch is cut off, dark. If it leads to a longer-lasting, more magical future it is bright and vibrant.”

“Uh-huh,” I mulled. “And my future?”

“You don’t have a f-freaking future anymore! That’s the problem! You… you really broke me! I didn’t think this was possible and yet here we freaking are!” Dawn lamented, sounding extremely upset.

I turned my head and finally looked at the dress hanging on the wall on my right side. The painted girl didn’t look like aged Grogtilda or Juni anymore!

A very distraught, female figure was standing there on a very dark canvas.

She didn’t have any color in the hair or skin at all! There was something terribly wrong with the poster which Dawn inhabited. She was grey, silver and blue - the colors of the Astral Ocean.

I gaped at the drawing, leaning in closer to inspect her. Dawn was now looking like a very strange ghost, woven completely from blue-tinted, silver… webs and constellations of stardust.

Her face no longer resembled mine!

An alien-looking tree woven from many moving threads stood behind her in the darkness, glittering with flashing, opening and closing flowers.

“Dawn…” I whispered in shock. “You’re not me anymore.”

“Oh...” Dawn glanced down at herself and then she looked back at me.

“Are you Ambiss? Is this what Ambiss would have looked like if she lived on as an Astral ghost?” I asked.

“I… am me,” Dawn nodded. “I can’t pull on your future thread, so I’ve reverted to look like my… real self.”

“You’re… beautiful,” I uttered, looking at the ghost woven from endless branches of silver stardust.

“This feels… so wrong… and so right,” Dawn whispered, closing her eyes filled with glittering starlight. “I’m me… I’m finally just me. Not someone else. Not a borrowed face. I’m what remained after Ambiss died, her imprint, her last echo.”

She opened them again and stared at me. “How have you done this? How have you erased your future out of existence?”

“I haven’t done anything, I swear!” I decried.

I heard Lambert's laughter in my head.

[What did she do now?] Anniya’s voice cut into the conversation. [Why is the tracking dial doing that?]

[She’s gone,] Lambert said, sounding flabbergasted. [Completely gone from precognition.]

“You’re tracking me?!” I yelped.

[For your own safety,] Lambert said. [I track everyone who works for me with the power of the Lomb's Constabulary Tower. Antoine made a very expensive, unique clockwork mechanism for the tower that shows a person's current position and approximates their present and future states. I would not send you into Undertown if I wasn't able to track you properly.]

"So… what's happening?" I asked.

[Your Astral future-tracker stat has just gone berserk,] Lambert said. [Antoine called this mechanism the Probability Engine. The future-stat display is now flipping letters endlessly. It's as if it can't find your future state. Whatever you're doing is messing up your Astral imprint big-time. Your future is currently incalculable.]

"I'm not doing anything, I swear!" I yelped into the armacus.

"You're not doing anything right now, but you are definitely planning to do something catastrophically stupid," Lambert said. "I'm ordering you not to stab the Gate."

"But I really, really want to stab it," I whined.

"Why?" Lambert asked exasperatedly.

"Because it… she pissed me off!" I snapped. "She showed me my grandfather and then ripped him away again! She deserves to be stabbed! How am I supposed to wait a thousand years and get to Novazem to find him? It's unfair!"

“Technically it wasn’t your grandfather,” Dawn commented.

“Hrm?” I looked at the painted girl.

“The Shogun gate doesn’t show people ghosts of their loved ones,” Dawn said. “I think… it shows us alternative worlds… alternative paths, alternative futures. Some of them running parallel, others moving at a slower or faster rate. That’s the only explanation for what I’ve seen.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Wait,” I paused. “You saw something else in the Gate? Something other than what I witnessed? You didn’t see my grandfather?”

“Yes,” Dawn confessed, starlight tears glittering in her eyes. “I saw Ambiss. She was alive, painting in her workshop and singing like she used to! It was her, but it also wasn’t her. It was an alternative timeline, one in which she had never made me - one in which she lived.”

“I don’t understand… Ambiss died because she made you?” I gasped.

“She was dying, withering away because she made me! She literally poured all of her life into me, sacrificed her soul to her drawings,” Dawn said. “She had plenty of Vitality… She could have clung to the world for a long time, but she wanted to create something unique, something far beyond anything that any other Depictomancer had made. She was terribly alone… she never made a single friend throughout her life that she could trust.”

“Ah,” I mumbled, feeling sorry for Dawn's painter.

“Ever since she was a young student at Nemendias, Ambiss was terrified of death, scared of getting hurt, afraid of going outside, not trusting people. Her parents and her first love broke something in her, something vital that made her close in, block out the world… made her into a Vitality maxer and a Depicomancy absolutist. What the damned Shogun Gate showed me was... Ambiss who didn’t have childhood trauma, who’s heart wasn’t broken at seventeen. I saw Ambiss who was completely free of her social anxiety. It was my painter… but it also wasn’t her.”

“So… the boy I saw was…”

“Not your grandfather,” Dawn said. “Not someone you knew personally. An alternative, different path. A path where he lived on, chose to do something completely different, made a step towards a future in which he somehow ended up on Novazem. The way you've described it to the Inspector... it was like he didn't even know you.”

“So that was... my grandfather, Vladislav Kerenski… alive… in some alternative universe because he made a different choice in his life?” I mulled. "Alive because he's never made a choice to settle down to adopt and raise me?!"

“Essentially,” Dawn said. “I believe that the Shogun Gate is an Astral gateway, a pinhole that allows anyone who stands under it to take a minute peek into the possibility of the future in which their loved ones are still alive. The Gate is an artifact with its Luck maxed out. It has the same power as I do - calculating future paths based on alternative parallels, but with far, far better, absurd clarity. It is a very devious device, because it misleads the observers into a belief that they’re talking to their own ancestors.”

“I see,” I said darkly. "I've been had."

[If I cannot derail you from the path of messing with the Gate, then at least I can delay it,] Lambert said. [Don’t use the knife on the Gate until we secure it.]

“Fine,” I shrugged. “So you agree with my idea of poking the Gate with the knife, Inspector?”

[I do not,] he replied. [It produces an unknown future in which you might not be safe or alive.]

“So then... what?” I waved a hand.

[As long as you’re firmly considering using the knife on the Gate - it produces an untraceable future,] Lambert said. [I believe that this in itself is of great value to us - if I cannot predict your future actions then neither can our enemies.]

“Ohhh, I get it,” I smiled. “I’m unpredictable!”

[Essentially,] Lambert affirmed from his end of the connection. [You’ve figured out a way to break all precognition of your actions. Plus Dawn no longer looks like you, correct? This in itself, is of great value to us.]

“Correct,” I glanced at the black and white starlight-woven figure in the poster.

“I didn’t understand it before… but I think I know why the future-seers of the Empire were unable to catch or to stop Eunice for centuries,” I mulled. “She used the knife on her gate!”

[Indeed,] Lambert said. [It makes sense now. The combination of access to two of these Inarian artifacts and the desire to use them on each other completely closes the eyes of the precogs.]

“I’ve used the gate beneath Eunice’s house,” I mulled… why didn’t the future observation of me break back then?”

[You saw a figure nodding at you from the Shogun Gate at the market, correct?] Lambert asked.

“Yes,” I nodded.

[The Undertown gate was likely unclaimed,] Lambert mulled. [Potentially, the Inarian artifact acknowledged you as its wielder. If you could barely tolerate the smell of Undertown in your… monster body, then the other seven heroes… most likely refuse to go anywhere near the sewage river.]

“How can the mere act of thinking about doing something have so much impact on precogs?” I asked.

[It has to do with the nature of the System and the Astral Ocean,] Lambert said. [I can see words trying to come up on Lomb Station’s Probability Engine, but they’re swiftly buried in gibberish nonsense.]

“Precogs aren’t seeing or calculating your future,” Dawn said. “They see alternative paths… alternative possibilities from parallel worlds where events unfold… faster. You’ve somehow reached a threshold, a decision upon which a large enough number of your alternative selves from alternative worlds connected together by the weave of the Astral have made a deep connection with the Shogun Gate or used the knife on it.”

[Correct,] Lambert said. [The Astral infinite curve cannot be defined with a number, cannot be listed on a page because it is so vast, but it can be defined with simple statistics. More than 50% of your alternative selves have messed with the Gate from their end and thus probability artifacts are now struggling to calculate your future actions. Precogs are now struggling to assemble coherent information about you, unable to see the alternative decisions made by countless parallel Yulias.]

“Good job alternative me-s,” I puffed my cheeks out, imagining that slightly more than half of an infinite line of me-s was stabbing the black Gate. “Thanks for being so stubborn. Show that Gate who’s boss.”

[Right, I think we’ve caught up fully. Don’t stab the Gate without my approval,] Lambert ordered. [Feel free to think about doing it though. I’ll call you when I find out more.]

“Yes boss,” I said as the Lomb Inspector disconnected the call.

“Guiding you to the perfect future, is going to suck,” Dawn murmured. “I don’t know what’s best for you anymore.”

“Welcome to being a clueless beanie like me,” I winked at her. “On the plus side, you can now guide yourself forward… forge a brilliant future for your pretty-self, right?”

“Right,” Dawn looked at her starlight-woven hands and then back at me. “Thanks for freeing me… I suppose.”

“You’re welcome,” I smiled. “Now… how can I level up without stabbing at garbage all night long? Any ideas?”

“You… could try killing the local Astral Phantoms,” the painted girl offered. “They should net more experience than garbage. I was going to suggest it earlier, before you went on your junk-murder spree.”

“Hold up, don’t the local towers keep them away?” I raised an eyebrow at her.

“The local beacons are very poorly maintained. The Undertown repelling field is imperfect, leaving much to be desired. The nearest one is like an old fishing net riddled with minute holes,” Dawn shook her head. “There’s a lot more death down here too, far more than in Illatius. Little, hungry phantoms get through to nibble on the dead.”

"Right," I nodded. "Lets try to catch us some fish."