“These beings are creatures of liquid. If they step out of their shells on this cold world, they will freeze. If they step out of those bunkers on that hot world, they will burn. Of all the kinetic spectrum, they exist entirely in the smallest window—the tiniest fraction of places in the universe. So they must be small and dream big. They must be able to make the small the everything.”

So said the Sorceress at the beginning. And who was that sorceress but my younger sister Pyrrha. Of all the possibilities in the universe, surely I couldn’t have predicted that. She was always in trouble with her section chief, but I never could have predicted that she’d become both a dissident and a sorceress. This life of ours is strange, even on a cold, lifeless planet like Nestrada.

The first time I got called down to speak with her was no less than a month after her coming of age. She was shirking her mandatory service detail in the arbor division. Nobody knew what to do about it because no one had ever done it before, not like Pyrrha, consistently refusing, over weeks, to show up for duty and do her work. And nobody knew where she disappeared to, which was some trick in any minor barrow on Nestrada, but especially ours, a small Ag group, specifically dedicated to forestry. We had nothing but labs and residences, and we weren’t even two thousand people strong. There wasn’t a person in Gantry we all didn’t recognize from fifty meters by their shape and how they moved, nor was there a square centimeter in Gantry we didn’t know. Somehow Pyrrha had found a way to disappear without going out the airlock.

Gahn told me he couldn’t find her. We didn’t believe in surveilling ourselves as some of the other barrows did, not in the residences and recreation spaces at least, and we didn’t have a citywide AI monitoring our movements. The freedom to reject such intrusions was one reason our grandparents’ generation had struck out from Hellenia.

Gahn asked me to find her. He didn’t even care to know where she was going or what she was doing, just that I convince her to show up for work. So I tagged her favorite bracelet and waited for her to skip work again. I couldn’t have believed the lengths she was going to avoid her lab duties.

According to the telemetry, she was in the exterior wall somehow. I didn’t even know, but the barrow walls themselves were a prefabricated modular shell—hollow cubes welded together by automated bot labor, one barrow after another. There were two layers of these hollow walls that insulated us from the cold outside. Pyrrha was sneaking somehow into that external wall where the temperatures were below freezing. I couldn’t find a way inside myself, so I programmed a hummingbird I’d built to follow the tag and watch Pyrrha from a distance at her next scheduled work detail.

My bot followed her to an exterior wall panel on the upper concourse in the residences, one level above our parents’ flat where she was still living. I have no idea how she’d engineered that trap door, but the design was ingenious—some kind of combination of springs and magnets, and if you pressed in the right spot, the panel would tilt out from the bottom, and you could crawl inside the wall. That interior wall was a buffer between the outer wall, a half a meter wide or so and cool—very cool, but Pyrrha wasn’t in sight when I shined a light around. I realized that she must be in the outer wall, but I was shivering already, so I decided I should go back out, return to my flat and get my dermal layer. I figured that she was doubtless wearing hers. Otherwise, she’d have frozen to death by then.

At the wall panel, before stepping back out, I could hear voices and footsteps. I don’t know why, but I decided I didn’t want them seeing me climbing out of the walls. So I waited for whoever it was to pass, waited some more, and then stepped out into the upper concourse unobserved. Then, after I’d donned my exterior dermal layer, under my clothes to avoid attracting any attention on my walk through the residences, I crawled back into the walls figuring it might take me some time to discover how Pyrrha was getting outside into that exterior wall layer.

It took me very little time to locate my tag’s signal on the other side of the wall, but I couldn’t find the opening to that outer layer. After searching for nearly a half hour, I got so frustrated I went right back to the source of the signal—Pyrrha herself, presumably, right on the other side of that thin boundary, and I knocked on it with my bare fist. At first, there was no response. So I kept knocking. And then, after a few more persistent raps on the wall, a knock came back from the other side, and I saw the tag begin to move on the other side of the wall. I followed along, till finally, she poked her head out from the other side of the wall, her face was slightly glowing, lit by the eyewear she was using.

“Pyrrha, what are you doing in there?” I asked her.

“Dante? What are you doing in here?”

“I followed you.”

“Did you tag my eyewear?”

“Gahn asked me to figure out what you were doing while you should be working in the arbor lab.”

“You do Gahn’s bidding, brother?”

“I do my own bidding. It seemed a sensible thing. I thought you might appreciate my coming to find you rather than him—a friendly face to consider your side of the story, rather than your supervisor.”

“Are you going to tell him where you found me?”

“That depends. You’ve been skipping out on your work detail, which is not my business. That’s between you and Gahn and your section chief. I am curious, though. What are you doing in there?”

She sighed. “I’m creating the world we’re going to live in. Myself and my people. Writing the construct. The program will create the rest.”

“Your people? What people? What world? What are you talking about?”

She shook her head. “Go home, Dante. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have known this would be too much for you.”

“I’m just asking questions.”

“Not now. I’m busy. I’ll come see you when I’ve got some time. For now, please, just let it go. If Gahn asks, tell him you couldn’t find me, or better yet, tell him to come find me himself.”

“You’re going to catch cold out there,” I said.

“I haven’t yet,” she replied. “Besides, I have a lot to prepare for. I’ll need to get my body used to the cold.”

And she unceremoniously popped her head back into that outer wall, shut the little hatch she’d squeezed herself through to get out there, and slapped the panel shut behind her.

Creating a world? I thought. Writing her world, I think she’d said. That was an unfathomable thought for me at that time, but so too was the thought of my sister as a sorceress, or The Sorceress, as she would come to be. That was my first sign of it, Pyrrha disappearing into the walls.

It was nearly a week before she finally came to me. Gahn was impatient, even as I told him exactly what she’d told me. She’d found some way of avoiding him, perhaps the walls. Our parents seemed to have no idea any of this was going on.

I was alone in my little flat on the dormitory wing over the atrium—for the unmarried adults. Pyrrha should have been moving in soon as well, but without Gahn’s approval, it was not a forthcoming move. I told her as much when she knocked. She pushed past me into my dorm room, gesturing for me to shut the door behind her.

“A kingdom like this? I’d be a fool to pass that up, wouldn’t I, brother?”

“When you have an entire world at your disposal, I suppose not,” I joked.

She nodded as though it was so. Not a joke at all. She sat on the stool at the foot of my bed. I sat down across from her on my one chair. She turned to look at me sideways, her hands clasped together in her lap.

“Because people accept the society they were given, they don’t reject their roles,” she began. “To some degree that’s wise. One must be at least slightly arrogant to reject the society that raised them wholesale, but I don’t do it lightly.”

“You’re rejecting society? What do you mean? Rejecting the barrow? Nestrada as a whole?

She shook her head. “No, no. It’s bigger than that. The entire premise. Our foundations. Back to Charris. Back to the Columns. Everyone has simply accepted that we have a human destiny and that this human destiny must take a certain shape. I simply reject that shape outright. If it means I spend the rest of my life making frozen tree clippings for some future generation to plant a hundred years from now so some future future generation can breathe the oxygen those trees expire a thousand years after we’re dead, I reject that plan.”

“You have a different plan?” I asked her.

“I’ve had a different plan for ages now—since we were young. I just didn’t know how to do it. I spent a lot of time formulating. I need time to put it into practice. There are others in other barrows who are joining me. There will be more off world once word gets out.”

“What are you doing, Pyrrha?”

“I’m creating a virtual universe, Dante, something more beautiful than this dead rock, this hideous shoebox of a structure. This life. Our ancestors didn’t struggle so we’d have to live like this. We might as well be slaves.”

“That’s … that’s an extreme position,” I said. “Who is oppressing us? Our parents love us. We have friends who care about us. If you feel so strongly about it, you can petition the Chief for resettlement—Hellenia, maybe even Iophos or Athos. No one is keeping you here.”

“They imprison us here,” she said, gesturing to her forehead. “Here. The problem is the body—prison for our consciousness. We are higher beings than this vessel can hope to express.”

“That sure is a claim,” I stated. “A very large claim for someone fresh onto her first occupational pairing.”

“Clipping plants is not my occupation. I aim to free minds, Dante. I would free yours if you gave me a chance, brother.”

“Pyrrha, you know how much I love you, and I would indulge you in almost anything—”

“Except this,” she interrupted. “This, though, you haven’t even begun to understand. I’ve thought this through far more than you know. Would you try?”

I shrugged.

“You cannot tell anyone. It is critical that I’m able to design the construct and complete it before anyone finds out. They’ll do anything to stop me.”

“Who will?” I asked her.

“Everyone. Every society in the Battery depends on us still. They’ve set it up that way. Human labor. If people begin to reject their roles, and they will, then everything falls apart. This is the most dangerous idea in the galaxy.”

She handed me a file key and instructed me to never open it on a networked device. She made me promise.

“Read it. Really read it, Dante. Open your mind and think it through, don’t reject it outright because it sounds heretical. We’ve been programmed to worship this flesh, and we’ve imprisoned ourselves in boxes like this barrow for that one foolish supposition. I implore you to try.”

“I’ll read it, Pyrrha. And I’ll do my best to think it through. But you need to talk to Gahn. I’ve run out of excuses to cover for you.”

She nodded and got up. And I swear the way she moved was different. Maybe it had been for some time, but I hadn’t noticed it until then—something regal in her bearing. Maybe it was just that she’d made something different and new possible in her own mind. Maybe she was free. I couldn’t see it then.

I read through her writings eagerly, hoping to find a way to understand whatever it was that was driving that divergent instinct. And that’s what it did feel like to me—that some deeper force inside her was driving her mind, almost a compulsion. Her writings did show that. She scarcely seemed to fully understand what was driving her. Pyrrha certainly couldn’t articulate it in any coherent way. It was almost an impressionistic manifesto, where she’d hit on a point—a clear idea—yet it would seem disconnected from any unifying strategy beyond the one: escape. There were other avenues for that, though. And, to my mind, she was desiring to escape us—her people—just as much as she longed to escape Nestrada or the work we were doing here.

As I was reading, we met and talked often about our long vision, our roles building a society that would endure of the eons, not being so short-sighted as the peoples of old. It seemed selfish, Pyrrha’s manifesto. I tried. I genuinely tried.

I did find parts of her writings intriguing, though. It was very clear that she’d been captured by her imagination from an early age. I knew this about her, of course, but I never would have guessed the extent of it. She’d always been obsessed with role-playing games, especially the ones incorporating the fantastic elements of fictional stories from Earth—dragons, goblins, wizards, elves, knights, kings and queens. I remember how difficult it was to explain to Pyrrha when she was a child that an elephant and a tiger were real creatures but that dragons and orcs were not, for they all seemed equally magical to a people living in a sealed container on a barren, lifeless rock like Nestrada. Even the idea of stepping out into a countryside was a magic only VR could provide us.

She used her headset too much. That was always the consensus, from our parents, from our teachers, from her friends. That was the last part of her manifesto.

Pyrrha was building a VR world—or at least she was trying to—a world where magic was as real as the horses and dragons and goblins and orcs. Of course, my instinct was to recoil, to be skeptical, to resist. Her actions went against everything we believed in, most importantly that humility demanded we accept the universe and our existence as it was, boundless, infinite, and beyond our control. Even as she placed rules, chance, and guiding principles derived from natural laws at the center of her world’s design, it was still a human design. Yet she intended for it to be an alternative life, not a mere game to play for a handful of hours to put away when it grew tiresome. I was troubled, and I told her so directly.

“Come with me, Dante,” she asked. “You’re such a great writer. You can help me to think of the pitfalls, to anticipate the problems before they arise. We have such a smart group, but you’d make us unstoppable.”

“What if I want to stop you, Pyrrha?”

“Understand us first. What we’re doing is so deep. I feel like you need to understand that first.”

She offered to take me to a writing session. The only time that worked for us both was at night. A late Saturday. So I agreed to go with her, out into the cold outer wall. I promised to try and learn before exposing Pyrrha’s plan.

She met me late at night at my flat, dressed innocuously on the outside, but under her clothes was her dermal layer. She was fully prepped for many hours in the frigid air.

“Bring your eyewear,” she instructed.

I got myself similarly dressed, and then she led the way to her secret door in the outer wall.

“Why come in here?” I whispered as we crawled through the inner layer to the panel that opened to the cold outer wall.

“You’ll see, Dante,” she answered.

In her bag, she had magnetic clips, which she hung to three belts she had for both of us, six total, one each for the ankles, waist, and shoulders and head, so we could lie there, suspended almost weightless, horizontally in that inner space. Lying there like that, I felt cold for some time, shivering for a while, but Pyrrha directed me to control my breathing, calm my mind, focus on the space in front of me. And before me then was the world of the construct—the simulation for the writing program Pyrrha was running. It was mostly a blank white world with floatscreens surrounding us in all directions. They were divided into sectors. They had titles like: Place & Setting, Physical Laws, Evolutionary Principles, Biological Life, Rules of Human Action, Magical Violations, Boundaries & Limitations, Scientific Progress, Philosophical Underpinnings, Contrary Schools of Thought, Religious Beliefs, The Cosmic Depths. I soon realized that she’d pulled these categories from thousands of role-playing life simulations as old as the gaming genre itself—a synthesis of stunning proportions.

“Welcome to my dreamscape, Dante. This is what I’ve been doing—and not by myself, mind you.”

She opened the dialogue box, and I was able to see the twelve other pool participants on the construct at that moment. Pyrrha introduced me to all of them and spoke about their specialties. I was half expecting them all to be young, inexperienced dreamers like Pyrrha, but most of them were ten years older than I was—engineers, division leaders, scientists with acclaim and gravitas. Yet they all deferred to Pyrrha, the creative force: “The Sorceress” they called her.

We’d gone through introductions and begun to speak of the universe they were building in general terms, and suddenly I noticed I wasn’t cold anymore. I wasn’t even on Nestrada anymore. I was here, in the moment, in the construct, not even in the simulation yet.

“Where do you think your skills might advance the project, Dante?” Pyrrha asked me.

“More than anything, I love the natural world,” I told her. “Most especially animals.”

“We have a deep database,” she replied. “I’d love to see what types of animals you could come up with Dante—creatures no one has ever seen before.”

It almost needn’t be said that I was worlds more impressed by this showing than by Pyrrha’s manifesto. I even wondered why she’d shown me such a disjointed bit of philosophy to justify her actions in the real world before showing me the fruits of it in the artificial one. But I began to understand so much faster than I would have otherwise. By the end of that first night, my own imagination had come alive as it seldom had in all my life. I was creating in a way I never could have imagined on Nestrada. And I hadn’t even seen a single one of my creations spring to life yet.

Pyrrha walked with me back to my flat in the early morning hours so no one would see us out in the concourse, sneaking around at that hour. I couldn’t help but ask her when, if ever, I might see some of our work instead of the construct that was building it.

“Soon enough, Dante. That’s the plan and the goal. We’re building a world as real as our own, only we won’t be limited to a life in a shoebox like this. We’ll have a real world to inhabit.”

Suddenly all those incomplete thoughts and impressionistic insights from her manifesto formed a picture in my mind. Of course. It was all so coherent—a philosophy, as well as a concrete project, as well as a way of being. We were worldbuilding, and when we were finished, we would find a way to go live in that world we’d built.

That part I didn’t fully understand yet. I didn’t know about the mechanics of it—how we would live, where, what would happen to our bodies. But I was sufficiently convinced by Pyrrha’s team that I believed those were surmountable problems. We could be there on Nestrada and elsewhere as well. I was convinced.

I still showed up to my work detail in he Ag corner, managing the algal growth and hormone balances in the hydroponic solutions. The whole time I was thinking of different types of animals, real and imagined—chimaeras, evolutionary ancestors, starting points, branches, game-theory algorithms I could run to diversify species from a template. My mind was so far off that I could hardly remember I was in the corner lab in the present. I’d sunk fully into my sister’s other world. I was utterly captivated. By the end of that first week, she brought me back and told me that I could never work on the construct inside our barrow, as we couldn’t risk someone in Gantry discovering the project. After I’d promised this—absolute secrecy inside the walls—she initiated me into her order. They ordained me The Horsemaster, which I much preferred to the option they’d initially discussed—Dragonmaster—which I found to be a little too fantastical for my taste.

So began my journey, either a descent into a virtual wasteland or an ascent to a higher plane of creative awareness. It all depended on the perspective of the judge. I chose to think of it as a great adventure—an illicit and secretive one at that. I’d never felt so alive.

So there we were, Pyrrha and I, secret agents of a secret world we were building, each day, a little at a time, sneaking off in our minds and with our bodies, whenever we could, to build a new, beautiful, exciting frontier. The closest I came to getting caught was when my supervisor saw me browsing through animal inventories on the jumpscreen before I’d had a chance to load them on my glasses. He didn’t care. As long as my work didn’t suffer, he told me to indulge my hobbies all I wanted.

“Animals,” he remarked, “are a bit of a childish pastime.”

But I didn’t care how it looked. I wanted to populate Pyrrha’s world with the most fascinating collection of fauna in the history of the universe—which would be some feat for a being whose ancestors came from Earth, planet of lightning bugs, wooly mammoths, cuttlefish, flamingoes, and silverback gorillas—to say nothing of the dinosaurs, mega-insects, and sea monsters of primordial times.

I worked tirelessly to create, and when I wasn’t creating, I was editing—filling in holes in Pyrrha’s manifesto, breaking with millennia of materialist thinking. We could be more than we were in our physical reality. We could, in fact, transcend what we were in this world by bringing our spiritual selves into a plane where we could grow beyond our environment, into a boundless space limited only by our imaginations and the construct interacting with us, which we were designing to be fluid and adaptable—a worthy dance partner that moved to our lead.

Pyrrha, too, was growing. She expanded, not just in the scope of her work building her world, but she grew in esteem—the way she brought the group together, a natural leader. The Sorceress was coming into her own before us. All she needed was the time to complete her blueprints, and then we’d need to build the infrastructure to support her universe, somehow, without anyone on Nestrada finding out what our plan was. It was heretical—the rejection of the colony, denying our duty to terraform the real by forming an entirely new universe on a digital world within.

Of course, that world would need a computational substrate. And that substrate had to be situated somewhere on Nestrada. We knew this. We also knew it needed a tremendous amount of computing power, an AI that could run the root commands of the universe we were building, and we needed to find a way to plug our minds into this sub-universe, and, if we wanted to last for more than a day, we would have to figure out how to build the infrastructure that could support our bodies while we were whisked away—functionally catatonic in this world. These were substantial challenges.

Pyrrha’s team had talented minds who’d given those serious matters the serious thought required to solve them. Nestrada was littered with lava caves, many of which had been mapped from orbit and by drone when the planet was being surveyed for habitation. In fact, each of the burrows where Pyrrha had collaborators also had nearby cave systems that were suitable to adapt for habitation. So our engineers began plotting those adaptations. Others refined illicit neurotech derived from ancient nanites that the humans of Earth had designed to interact directly with the brain. Where they’d found that tech was beyond me.

My part in the plot to leave the barrows was to adapt hydrochemical nutritional units of earlier design—from the era of sleep-stasis on interstellar voyages. We would not be entering stasis, exactly, more like a quasi-torpid hibernation. We would need to leave the cold-pods every fifty hours or so to stabilize our body temperature, eat, tend to our hygiene, and sleep before returning to our virtual worldscape. This would allow us to keep our systems in a very slow progression—near four heartbeats a minute—yet we would experience a much greater duration of time and heightened consciousness in the simulation. Our two-day dives into the virtual world would seem like years to us, and our ten-hour recovery periods would find us outside that world for months of their time. If nothing, it was an ingenious form of life-extension. Experientially, we would live lifetimes in a single year, and in our simulated world, we would see eons pass by during our natural lives. Pyrrha, The Sorceress, would seem so for real in that new world. We would all be wizards, lesser gods, the immortals of myths in human eras long since passed.

Pyrrha and I began to fabricate equipment and hide it away in the walls. We had our cave system targeted and scouted. I was stunned at how easy it was. People in the barrow were even helpful, freely giving their time and allowing us to use equipment. They surely would have refused any help if they knew what we were up to, but what Pyrrha and I were doing was so unthinkable, it didn’t even occur to anyone that we were doing anything they would have considered wrong. Even Gahn, who had largely given up on Pyrrha ever being a productive citizen, just viewed her as a harmless heel-dragger—a daydreamer who would rather be playing games than doing work. He couldn’t shift his mind to even envision Pyrrha as productive, much less a literal worldbuilder. And here she was plotting the most audacious coup imaginable, complete with an entire alternate universe and the infrastructure on Nestrada to support it.

In his defense, if I didn’t know, I’d never in a million years have thought this was possible. Not the true shape of things.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

It was just Pyrrha and I the first time we went out. We touted our expedition as an adventure challenge—a brother sister bonding experience. We retrieved our stashed gear from the wall and crept out in the dead of night. The walk was long and cold. I couldn’t help, though, thinking how beautiful the desolation of the frigid landscape was. When the sun was up and only slightly above the horizon, the snow, dry and light, blew over the icy surface of Nestrada in waves that seemed to dance together—symmetry that could only be randomly generated by either wind or mathematical algorithm. Those same winds cut through our outer layer, down through our dermals, through our own skin to our bones. We shivered and shook. If it hadn’t been for the heaters in our boots and gloves, we’d both have lost our fingers and toes to the frost. It took us three days to walk it, but we got there with enough power remaining to put up a drone to map the inner cave walls. It was more than sufficient for us to build our own little barrow—a troglodyte civilization of demi-gods. All we had to do was seal it off, set up our equipment and float-tanks, and we would be set to transport our consciousnesses to our preferred plane of existence.

Even when slowed, the body, seat of consciousness, required a tremendous number of accommodations. The technology of stasis suddenly became more shockingly apparent: all cell function, quintillions of chemical reactions, had to be slowed, stunted, placed on hold. All we were doing was extending the body in a hypothermic state while the mind ran on the combination of brain plus nanotech interface. Still, we needed heat, food supply, power, environmental filtering, air scrubbers, hygienic water filtration, and a dozen other complex systems, as well as the processing power and AI to balance them all. This was to say nothing of the physical hardware.

Pyrrha decided all this was too much for the two of us to manage. So she devised a recruiting scheme, starting a recreational gaming group within the barrow, a tactic she directed our co-conspirators in other barrows to adopt. It was doubly clever, as it gave our AI a chance to secretly run and troubleshoot versions of the epochs, working out major wrinkles in the gameworld that could be repaired before migrating the low-resolution alternative universe into the actual program.

We ran these gaming groups for months, secretly recruiting. From our group of ten in the Gantry barrow we brought two into our confidence, Isbel and Olseth Ruth, a brother and sister, slightly older in age than us, but both were still unattached to families and similarly disaffected by our manner of life here on Nestrada. And when we showed them the deeper version of the game—the full universe construct—they were so captivated by the idea there was hardly a moment in their lives that wasn’t consumed by bringing Pyrrha’s virtual universe into being.

We ran tests on all the gear—computational, bodily, environmental. And then, nearly four years after I’d first crawled into the walls with Pyrrha, it was time for us to go.

Four of us disappeared one night, into the dark of Nestrada, fully intending never to return again. Pyrrha’s world was now our world. And there, hidden in the obscurity of that cavern system, the four of us built our small portal to our distant universe. Four years of planning turned into two weeks of assembly.

Pyrrha, appropriately, was the first to go in.

We all agreed that the first trip into the new world should be a brief one—four hours for myself and the Ruths to test and monitor the life support systems while Pyrrha was inside, four hours for her to explore the earliest human ages of her world. And we waited breathlessly while her body, accustomed to the cold as it was, floated in a gentle state of catatonia in the frigid water, the soft pulse of the respirator humming repetitively over the minutes we watched her inert body for the slightest sign of trouble.

Exactly four hours to the second from the moment she drew her first submerged breath, Pyrrha gasped, twitched through her whole body, and pulled herself up to the surface of the water shivering profoundly, wide-eyed, looking around the room as though she was struggling to orient herself. It took us some time to help Pyrrha settle her mind again. When she’d warmed up enough to finally talk, she didn’t have much to say.

“There are no words for what we’ve done, Dante. Rossa is so indescribably beautiful nothing can make it known to you until you experience it for yourself.”

We couldn’t go with her, though, until we were certain the re-acclimation process was safe, and returning here so hypothermic that she could hardly stand was not safe. We had to assume there would be no help so that each of us could safely get out of the tanks on our own, so we programmed the tanks to restore our normal body temperature at the end of each cycle. We sent Pyrrha in another four times before we were satisfied that we’d honed the process adequately. Then it was time for more of us to join Pyrrha in our new world.

Isbel volunteered to sit out the first cycle, while Olseth, myself, and Pyrrha went back to Rossa—the world our Sorceress named for the ruby color of the sun as it rose and set each day.

And it was true. Words did the experience no justice.

I felt, genuinely, the first time I appeared in the countryside, that my entire life had been lived fraudulently. I instantly knew that this environment, artificial as it still was, was an actual human environment. Having grown up on Nestrada in the barrow was like having grown up in an entirely fake setting. A horizon—when I came to a clearing and could see across the landscape—just that visage was a miracle, as awe-inspiring as any cosmic vista. The green of the woods, so rich, pulled my eyes in every direction. And there were smells. Dirt, leaves, flowers, bark. I had no idea if those smells were accurate, but they felt real to my bones. The singing birds sounded as they did from recordings and from bots, yet here, there was no question whether they were real, even though I’d designed them myself.

On my first day walking, I encountered one of my creations—a wood fairy. She was a glowing yellow sprite with the wings of a dragonfly and the face of a tiny little person. She could not speak to me, but she followed. She was intelligent, I could see. She showed me the way to a village where my sister had first arrived in these lands several years before. There, I was greeted by dwarves who spoke an odd form of our language. They were cheerful and welcoming. They sang songs around a fire into the evening as the sun went down, a piercing red that spoke right to my soul.

All this was what we’d been building. It was a cascade of miracles.

I wandered for months through the villages in the countryside, looking for signs of Pyrrha. I asked for her by name, leaving my own name wherever I went. It took me nearly a year before I heard of a mysterious sorceress living in a keep along a mountain pass to the north. All these places, these new names. I wondered how the people here kept all of them straight in their minds. The world was so expansive. It took me days to ride to the foot of those mountains.

I finally found Pyrrha’s castle. Inside, she was hatching dragons from eggs which she kept warm by placing beside stones heated in her hearth fires. She was ever so careful.

“Magic,” she told me, “begins in the mind. It takes discipline and practice. You have it in you too, brother.”

Most of the people then were still cave dwellers. Simple villages were only just beginning to pop up in the countryside.

“The age of dragons is beginning now,” Pyrrha said. “It will be thousands of years before the wars begin.”

“I’d like to see this world before anything happens to it. I want to see every last animal in its natural habitat.”

“Be a wandering wizard who talks to the animals, Dante. That would suit you.”

I was nearly a month into my first journey when I woke for the first time back in that tank in our cave on Nestrada. I wasn’t overly cold. I was able to stand, remove the respirator, eat, take care of my hygiene, sleep, and prep my body for another two days in the water. I was alone all that time. All seemed well. Possible. Our world was just opening to us, and I couldn’t wait to go back to Rossa.

As soon as I did, I wandered far and wide, looking for signs wherever I went for our kind—the wizards, demigods, elven lords, sorceresses. And, of course, I documented every meaningful encounter I had with my animals.

It didn’t feel like a game. It felt like a life, an epic life, an adventure, a struggle, a joy no one on Nestrada had ever known.

In my first decade wandering the countryside, I crossed paths with Isbel and Olseth Ruth, both of whom were learning magic—different kinds of sorcery, transmutation, flight, healing energy, manipulation of time and space. Isbel offered to tutor me. I politely declined and continued on my way westward, into the dryer flatlands. I wanted to meet my desert creatures and test my will against the heat of Rossa’s red sun.

In the desert, I met the first of our fellow travelers from another barrow—Miam Kern, a desert gin and holy woman of the dryland nomads. She walked with me for months, showing me the animals in her domain—my animals in their proper setting. There were snakes and scorpions and dry dragons. There was even a sand hydra out in the looser dunes. It would burrow its way into the dunes and lie dormant for days, ambushing passing camels and even careless villagers. Where there was water, there were flowers.

At first, I didn’t want to leave Miam. At the very least I was infatuated with her. In truth, I thought there was much more.

“Go on, Dante, Horsemaster of Rossa,” Miam told me. “We will be here in this place through the ages. There is so much to explore.”

“Perhaps some day we can explore some of it together,” I said as we parted.

“I’d like that very much,” she told me.

I knew her from the working group before Rossa, yet neither of us ever referred to that prior life beyond our names. To her, I was the master of animals. To me, she was the green gin of the desert, just as she was to her people.

In my third awakening, I crossed with Isbel. I’d never seen her so invigorated. It seemed to us as though ages had passed on Rossa, yet we had hardly been a week in the water.

“I feel I understand humanity,” she told me. “I feel as though I am becoming something wiser. I cannot say.”

“I feel it too,” I told her. “I cannot wait to return.”

I spent decades wandering. The others, I suspect, were playing at some game, consolidating strength in the tribes of humans and dwarves and elves, building alliances, raising dragons, learning magic. I merely wanted to bear witness. That was far more than enough for me. That, and my visits with Miam, green gin of the desert. She walked now with a phalanx of stone guards—statues that would spring to life when she was in the mood to threaten or terrify visiting dignitaries or uppity villagers.

Miam made the mistake once, during one of my sister’s visits to see me, of bringing two of her guards to life as a show of her power. Pyrrha turned down her nose at Miam, as if to ask whether there was any question about her own power, and she blew them away with a single puff from her pursed lips, like a child blowing out a candle on a cake—two magnificent stone soldiers became sand in the wind, hardly a dusting on a dune.

They played at things like this while I marveled at the evolution of our creations.

In there, Pyrrha was invincible. I suppose we all were.

That was the first hint of unreality in Rossa for me. It was a faint hint in the back of my mind. Still everything else was so blindingly miraculous, I couldn’t see doing anything but carrying on. Miam and I continued to spend months together out in the desert. Then I would go on long journeys, sometimes to the glacial icelands of the poles, sometimes to the faraway islands. I would travel sometimes by ship, other times by horse, occasionally even by balloon, high above the clouds, Rossa’s red sun illuminating our brilliant world beneath me. Every now and again, a dragon would poke its head above the clouds curiously, trying to climb to investigate me, circling for a time before deciding the odd round object was too high, too far into the upper atmosphere for its bulk to ride those thin winds. These early decades were the times.

I began to lose track of how long we’d been in our new world. So I began, during my bodily maintenance hours, to scratch out a notch in the rock for each time I came back. That way we could see, in solid stone, how long we’d been away from Nestrada while we passed the decades and eventually the centuries on Rossa. Every bit of it seemed as ideal as Pyrrha had envisioned. So as the ages progressed, none of us demigods protested or complained. We continued to play in the world as we each saw fit.

For most of our fellow travelers, the affairs of the people—in which category I include the dwarves and elves and such creatures as took on the many attributes of humans—these were the happenings that captured the interest of my fellow demigods. They invested their energies in the kingdoms and empires, their rising and falling. Some took an active part, immortal pharaohs, deified within a pantheon of imaginary beings beside them. The Ruths and their spouses were the godheads of an immensely powerful empire in the north. That empire waxed and waned as Isbel and Olseth gained and lost interest in being glorified by their subjects. Pyrrha, of course, reigned in legend over all, Goddess Sorceress of Rossa, mother of order and chaos, the wind that came down from on high.

When I could persuade Miam to venture out of her beloved dry desert to visit my sister in the mountains, we would discuss the movements of the peoples, how the waves of civilizations were washing over one another on that particular day. For hundreds and hundreds of years it went on like this before the conversations began to echo and rhyme.

Then came the cataclysm. Volcanic ash in the sky, blotting out Rossa’s sun for a winter of ages. I saw many of my beloved creations perish, unicorns and dragons suffocating and falling under the gray earth. These were sad times—dark times.

And then it was spring again. By then, the elves were only legend. The little creatures of the forest were the thing of stories and children’s tales. Dragons only held power in the hearts of the people who believed they were once here with us. Even the gods retreated into the quiet landscape while the humans grew in power and industry.

I saw Pyrrha then, back in our cave on Nestrada. She was naked. Her ribs exposed. She confessed to me that she was too fatigued to dress herself sometimes in these days between. Her mind, though, was not fragile. It was ancient. I helped her back to the tank after she’d slept and eaten and bathed. I caught her looking at my wall, covered in scratches now.

“My calendar,” I stated.

“I figured that was you, Dante. I never asked about it in the mountains,” she said. “Curious we never speak of this place in that. Has it been so long?”

“Several years now.”

“I suppose if they were ever going to come for us, they would’ve come by now,” Pyrrha said, smiling. “I don’t suppose Gantry needs a sorceress and a horsemaster all that badly.”

“Someone else can clip your trees,” I told her. “In a million years this world will never hold a forest as beautiful as the most mundane patch of Rossa.”

“Such a declaration, brother. Give it time.”

Time seemed something we could give in abundance.

Yet it slips away still. It slips away.

I helped her back into the water and waited for the droning hum of the respirator to indicate Pyrrha’s body was safely sleeping. Then, I walked to the wall to mark out a place for this interlude—almost too many to count now. My mind was cloudy. I picked up the stone, and I found myself struggling to lift it. I had to wonder—had it grown heavy? It was the same small stone. Was it that the marks were growing higher and higher on the wall? No. The obvious was true. I tried to reach without the stone, and I found that my very arm—a much heavier object than the stone—my own arm was difficult for me to lift. I was nearly breathless. I knew we were fading. I would have to think of ways to accommodate for this decline in the next few months on Rossa. We were all declining.

I did return. And I discussed our weakening mortal selves back on Rossa with Miam. She didn’t want to talk about it. She told me I was smart enough to solve the problem by myself and instructed me to do so and be quiet about it. She didn’t like to think of that place.

More nutrient concentration in our food—not so appetizing to begin with, but I could vouch for myself that I was eating it and still declining. I had ways to boost the density. And there were ways to boost the function of the nanotech in our bloodstream that would help improve our muscle tone, averting further atrophy. Yet it should have been doing so already. That was a puzzle.

I pondered this as I walked, all the way to Dorrena, where Enzo Russell sat as Sovereign Dominus of the Haí-Gûgh, a hard human clan turned empire that sat on the border of dark lands that used to be orc territory in distant times. He enjoyed dark theatrics. He was also the most knowledgeable partner we had in the mechanics of medical nanotech.

He was almost in denial. “The nutrients, Horsemaster,” he told me. “That is all that will be necessary to restore us. If you tend to your business, we will be fine. That is all I have to say about it.”

I’d walked for months just to see him, and he dismissed me like that without so much as offering this wandering traveler a meal. So I decided to return to Miam in the desert, walking mostly, though occasionally I did call a horse. And through all that time, thinking of our very real problem in that real world, the one outside Rossa, it put the lie to the notion of the trees and birds, the sun and stars, and the people here, with all their wars and tribulations and joys and sufferings. For the first time, they rung hollow.

When I returned to Nestrada, I made my adjustments, checked on my sister and the Ruths, making sure that all was well in their tanks before submerging my body and my consciousness again. Yet again it was difficult to make my mark on the cavern wall.

When I returned to Rossa, I tried to forget Nestrada. But I found I couldn’t help but think about the problem. And the longer I thought about it, for years on Rossa, I found the problem I was thinking about wasn’t the problem I thought I was thinking about. Nutrients? Atrophy? No.

I couldn’t help but notice the world around me wasn’t real. The dangers weren’t dangers. The wonders then no longer seemed so wondrous. I walked among the non-peoples of the countryside with the wisdom of ages. They looked at me as a god. But if they weren’t real, what was I but a fraud? If you cannot learn that in millennia, you can learn nothing: the truth is the only real thing.

It ate away at me. And when I saw the others, I saw it in them too. Quietly. Beneath the skin. In the passing of the eyes.

Miam possessed a certain sadness about her. And she would lie to me and tell me it was the tides of time—the sadness of seeing her desert peoples pass by, one generation over another. The joys were never quite as joyous.

It went on like this for years—decades maybe. So long I’d almost forgotten again.

We knew each other well by then, of course. So when something on Rossa surprised us, it came as a shock. The Witch of the Woodlands, who lived in the forest valley along the southern foothills of our Sorceress’s mountains, was a steady soul. She had dominion over the fairies and centaurs in the old days before volcanic ash had remade the landscape. She haunted the men of the plains who came to take too much of her forest without proper deference. So it came as a shock when my sister saw an entire strip of forest logged bare by the woodsmen. The towns of the northern vale began to grow at an alarming rate, and nothing was heard from the Witch.

We knew her first as Gabriella of the barrow Thorne. Yet we still preferred not to use her real name. The others from Thorne were spread over the continents of Rossa, and we were still some centuries from a genuine industrial age, so it would’ve taken months to contact them. I conferred with Pyrrha as to whether the use of magic was warranted in this advancing pre-industrial stage of Rossa’s development.

“She could have gone for a walk, brother,” Pyrrha insisted. “There’s probably nothing to worry about. When she returns, she will punish the men of the woodlands for their greed and arrogance, and that will be that.”

In her eyes, I could see the self-deception. Pyrrha didn’t believe it, and she didn’t believe that I believed it.

When I returned to the desert, I found Miam alone in the sands. She was despondent.

“What has happened, my love?” I asked her.

She seemed utterly unconcerned with Gabriella.

“Some of my people have forgotten their offerings.”

I had no people, just animals, so I never quite understood why this brought her any joy in the first place. These modest offerings were a tradition from the early days when she wielded magic, drifted on the wind, walked with stone monoliths as her guard, filtered her voice through the vibrating sands, called for monuments to be built in her name. Her people’s small sacrifices gave her peace, demonstrated their appreciation and love for her, displayed their gratitude as they passed their lives under her watchful eye. The heart of a lamb, a coconut, a wreath of jade flowers. These seemed insignificant to me. Now, their absence had brought Miam to tears. She was nearly inconsolable.

“What am I doing wrong, Dante?” she asked me. “I give everything I have to them.”

The obvious question became whether that was enough. But she was so distressed I didn’t say it. Whose lie is it when the speaker won’t utter a truth he knows you can’t bear to hear? Of all of them now it was Miam.

I knew it had gone too far. By then, though, it couldn’t be brought back.

There was talk among some of the traders—the nomads on the spice trail—they spoke of missing Hyreah, goddess of the upland plains. Their offerings went unclaimed, left to spoil on the altar. Those rumors brought talk of Algath, war god of the Ice Tribes, who was absent from their conclave at the break of the spring frost. For three years now they’d seen no signs.

I resolved to discuss it with my closest confidantes—the Ruths and my sister.

I found neither Isbel nor Olseth in their homes or in the countryside nearby. The peoples were afraid. I remember vividly meeting a family on the outskirts of Haas, a tiny hamlet on the dirt road leading up into my sisters’ mountains—their family was an ancient one. I’d seen their great grandparents playing in those same woods stretching back for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Even the children who’d never seen me before knew me by sight from the stories.

“Horsemaster!” one of the children exclaimed, running off to the cottage to tell his parents.

They all came out to see me. One of the old mothers began to weep at the sight of me.

“I saw you pass by twice as a child,” she told me. “I knew it was a lie! The Parson has had a breakdown. He has gone into the hills. He says that the gods have abandoned us. I knew it was not so.”

“I am going to see my sister now,” I told them. “All will be well, here and elsewhere.”

When I climbed farther into the mountains, I found Pyrrha’s keep abandoned. No people. Only a few chickens and geese roaming about the upper court. The fires had long since faded out. Dust lay thick on the windowpanes.

So I sat in Pyrrha’s castle meditating for months, waiting for her to return. And when she didn’t return, I awaited mine. I thought again of Nestrada, of our real world, wondering what I’d find when I was called back again.

Time had become a funny thing. Memory collapsed and expanded. Centuries and days. And suddenly, I was back in the water, cold, shivering, weak, and struggling to extricate my debilitated body from the water tank. I could taste the salt in my mouth. I rolled to my knees and swung my leg over the rim as I’d done hundreds, perhaps thousands of times before. I’d lost track, and counting all those lines on the wall no longer seemed possible. My mind was a haze.

But I saw clearly then. As I took the respirator from my mouth, hands shaking, I saw clearly.

Pyrrha was there, standing barefoot on the floor of the cavern, clutching Isbel by the shoulder. Isbel clung to the rim of her tank, barely strong enough to keep her head above the water, her eyes locked in sheer terror. How long those two had been there like that was impossible to know. It was a slow-motion life-or-death struggle that had been fixed in that position for years by Rossa’s time. I moved as quickly as I could to intervene.

With all the strength I had, we somehow managed to get Isbel out of the tank to the floor. From there, it was tragedy.

My singular focus was Isbel, who was beyond exhaustion, hardly breathing. I hadn’t seen her here in the cave in ages. She was waif-thin, gaunt, ashen—so near death that her eyes had widened to two great white, round jewels, shining and pure, fixed, statuesque. It was a shock when they did occasionally move, and for a moment, I could see a glint of recognition in her.

We tried for some time to get her to sit up, sip water, take a drink of nutrient fluid. Her heartrate was elevated, her pulse thready and weak.

I was so occupied with Isbel, so frail, that in my foggy state I hadn’t even considered Olseth, who had also gone missing on Rossa. Only then did I catch a glimpse of Isbel’s brother, still in the tank, his respirator off his head, his body submerged, fully drowned, lifeless. He was just as Isbel would have been if Pyrrha hadn’t come back when she did, somehow managing to cling to Isbel for hours, maybe days, until I finally returned and was able to assist.

Now, I could do nothing. I was no god here. I looked down at my emaciated hands and saw tendon, knuckle, and bone. The air I gasped for hardly settled in my lungs before I was expelling it. I was confused. Was it the air? Should I try to check our systems? Improve the atmosphere? No, I thought. This was beyond us now.

All I could think to do was call for help—to Gantry. Call and hope they could make it here in time for Isbel. Someone, too, had to take care of Olseth’s body, and in our state, Pyrrha and I together couldn’t have taken him from the water.

It was over now, Pyrrha’s dream.

We didn’t speak. We waited. Together, we waited.

Rossa was no more. All their gods had abandoned them.

I cannot vouch for Pyrrha in that moment. We said little then and have spoken little of those dark moments since. Was it hours? Days? It’s hard to say how long it took for them to rescue us. Time. Our wits. Nothing was reliable with the exception of the people of Gantry. Our people.

Out from the barrow they soldiered, into Nestrada’s barren wasteland, and they found three of their own, long presumed dead, unrecognizably emaciated. The scene was so far beyond their comprehension that we soon stopped trying to explain.

They stopped asking. There would be time for all that later, provided the three of us survived.

When I had my mind about me again, days later, I had my first genuine look at myself in a mirror. I looked no different than I had during all those returns, at least toward the end, those final scratches on the wall. And I saw now what I could not see then, because my mind was so infused with the memory of my self-conceived image from Rossa. I could see reality now. I was several days into recovery, and I was still a walking corpse. How long had I been like this? With my metabolism slowed to minimal function, as it had been, it’s possible I had been standing at death’s doorway for a year or more, so close I only just kept from knocking.

I remember sitting silently in the infirmary with Pyrrha when our parents came to see me. Not her. Just me. They were still suffering under the mistaken belief the peoples in the barrows held—that Pyrrha had been the leader of a vast and complex suicide pact. They had deduced this from the small pieces of her writings they found after we’d left. Our parents believed that I’d discovered the plot and set out after my beloved younger sister, perishing in the attempt to save her and the Ruths.

The truth, as it so often is, was a hard pill for them to swallow, but I told it as best I could.

Our vanishing, so foolish in hindsight, had been a tragedy across the barrows. They’d searched for months, hours upon hours of shifts poring over drone footage, scouring for traces in the dust that had long since blown off. It was the worst disaster in two generations on Nestrada. Now, our loved ones were forced to confront the real truth—that we’d grown so collectively mad with obsession by the time we left that we didn’t once consider what they thought. We didn’t, for a single moment, think about their grief.

It wasn’t exactly that our parents disowned us then, Pyrrha and me. It was more that they’d already long since mourned, made peace with our deaths. Seeing us again was almost like a strange alternative reality, especially in our emaciated states.

We were gone from the barrows nearly eight years. Forty-seven of us survived and nine perished. There was an inquest as soon as we were all well enough to travel. To the extent that there was a criminal justice system on Nestrada, there was nothing to prosecute. Everyone who left with us did so of their own free will. Pyrrha did not strong-arm or deceive anyone. And, as we finally came together in one place in the real world, I can say, of all the myriad emotions I saw expressed among us, regret was certainly not prominent. Sadness, grief for our lost friends? Certainly. But we did not regret the millennia we’d shared together on that world, wherever it was now.

It was there in the barrow Nestein where I first set eyes on my beloved Miam in the real world. She looked so frail and so different, but I knew immediately it was she by her eyes—the way they gazed back at me. Here was my wife of a thousand lifetimes spent in the sands of the desert together. I’d spent just as much time thinking about her while I wondered alone in the countryside. We kissed and cried and held each other, grieving our lost friends—those brother and sister gods we’d known through the eons who never would return again.

The people on Nestrada began to call us Rossans. I think they meant it derisively, but to us the term instilled a strong upwelling of nostalgia and camaraderie. Together, we were something no one else on Nestrada could ever be. Few in the barrow Nestein even approached us.

The chiefs asked one of us to speak at the inquest. Naturally, we turned to Pyrrha. The hearing was held behind closed doors. Even we Rossans had no idea what Pyrrha would say. Since our return, she’d been quiet, pensive. Still, though, we all had confidence in her to speak for us.

Pyrrha spoke for less than a minute, and when she was finished, no one had anything to add. Pyrrha had said what could be said.

“I, and none of us, consent to your judgement of us, even as we are grateful for your help and your concern,” Pyrrha began. “But you are incapable of judging us, for you cannot know anything of the lives we’ve lived. We are beyond your capacity to imagine, and therefore, to comprehend. One must understand something to judge it faithfully. I would only ask that you make arrangements for us to be removed from Nestrada as soon as possible. We cannot remain. No matter how hard we may strive to readjust, it would be impossible for us to be anything but a distraction at best; but, far more likely, we would become a strongly subversive force. Even in silence, our quiet presence would speak truths that cannot even be unspoken in a place like Nestrada. We Rossans will better serve humanity elsewhere.”

It seemed the chiefs of the barrows had been thinking the same. Within the day, word came to us that they had secured passage to Hellenia for all us Rossans.

It was an odd and muted goodbye—so many friends so familiar so long ago, family who mourned us yet again. For them, perhaps, it was far more difficult than for us, for we had all seen hundreds of generations of people we cherished recede into memory. This generation now was our first again, the one we’d selfishly bid farewell to eons before without ever saying our goodbyes. Now we said farewell to them forever.

In transit, there was some discussion among us Rossans as to our future. Again, we turned to Pyrrha, who quietly had been giving the matter considerable thought.

“With the wisdom of ages comes an understanding of the place of each small thing,” she told us. “And hard wisdom has taught us that here, we are now small things again. I can see myself today, a tiny speck against the backdrop of time. Still, though, I can ignore the chaos of the day and see the turning of the eons, as we all can. I have been thinking on what we all are, what we have all learned, lording it over an entire planet for millennia. We learned the horrors humans can inflict on each other, and we were all called upon countless times to heal the people in our lands. We know this art, even without any magic in our hands. Most of our magic was knowledge and anatomy anyway. We still have those. And people still have their tendency to treat each other as they always have, even our contemporaries, even in space. I suggest we dedicate ourselves to this. We must be humble people again, for we cannot be gods in our own galaxy.”

As we arrived, the backstory of how it all began might have been inconceivable to the billions there on Hellenia—how a small group of forty-seven impoverished refugees would come to operate the largest fleet of hospital ships the galaxy had ever known in a few short years, serving all sides in the expanding war without discrimination, with unflinching courage, and with no expectation of safety or reward. The story itself, though, was very brief.

My sister and I, with nothing but our name, went to the registrar in the capitol of Gracia and convinced the magistrate to waive the fee to incorporate a Hellenian charity. She asked us what we would call such a volunteer medical relief organization. I suggested Rossa to Pyrrha. She reminded me that we’d left that world behind. We were just humble people now.

A charity required two signatories on Hellenia. The registrar, reading both our names, mistook us for husband and wife. “Mr. and Mrs. Semmistrata? Why don’t we call your organization The Semmistrata Foundation as a placeholder until you settle on a permanent name.”

“That won’t do,” Pyrrha told her. “Semmistrata is plural. This will be a singular institution with a singular mission. We should be called the Semmistratum.”