But then, hadn't I already?

3 years, 8 months, 25 days and 9 hours after that day in the office, I was at home, looking for a certain type of ceiling feature.

I've said this already, but Oreskios, as the name would suggest, was once an Inotian colony - of Illykrios, specifically, which is why it's the only state in the Dai League with a purely democratic government. They lost control of it to the Arcanocracy before the Tricenturial War even started (because the only thing Inotians are worse at than humility is trying to win even a single battle that isn't at sea) and since then it's only become more and more Saoic, even after being liberated. But the population and overall culture is still close to 50/50. You have amphitheaters next to diàns, grilled souvlaki being sold alongside fried noodle and soy dishes. It's a mix that doesn't really exist anywhere else in the world, which brings in a lot of tourism.

But back then, I was feeling pretty frustrated about it.

Like everything else, the style of architecture for housing in Oreskios is a mix of the two cultures... But obviously, that's not true at the level of individual streets. Whole chunks of the city were built up at once by housing companies or the city council in a uniform style, and age is a big determiner, too - as you'd expect, the older parts tend to be Inotian, while the newer ones are Saoic. And the bougier neighborhoods, up in the hills surrounding the pass the city was built to protect, are largely from the former category.

Since my family is pretty wealthy, that's where we lived. Which meant our house was Inotian, as well - a restored building from the Second Resurrection. And here's the thing: Because Inotians love putting pillars everywhere and consider rain to be a largely theoretical concept, their homes tend to have flat roofs. And the thing about a house with a flat roof is that, no matter how big it is and how long you spend looking, you're not going to find a single suspension beam on the ceiling.

In retrospect, it was stupid of me to have not realized this earlier. It was one of those things you saw so often in media that you just assumed reality would be compliant, like being able to easily climb into a sewer. I tried to get into the sewers once when I was a child, and it's actually almost impossible. Often you can't even open the hatches without specialized equipment.

In fact, even though I'd been ready for nearly two hours, I couldn't find anything suitable, especially nothing next to a window, as I'd originally planned. Wall fixtures couldn't support the weight of a human body, and I wasn't confident about any of the chandelier chords, either. And even though the exterior of the house was Inotian, and interior had been redone in Saoic style, so the folding doors were all thin and fragile - easy to break even when you weren't putting them under exceptional pressure.

The worst thing that could happen would be to fail, but end up wrecking part of the house in the process. My parents weren't due to be back from their holiday for nearly a week, so I could clean up anything superficial, but more serious damage could require someone to come in. I didn't want that. I didn't want to trouble anyone.

...no, that makes me sound more selfless than I really am. Rather, I didn't want to be in the situation where I could be held accountable for causing trouble.

I mentioned a while ago that my mother loves gardening. And sure enough, we had a beautiful garden, the nicest on the street. Rows of carefully curated flowers of all colors were elegantly arranged in lines and spirals on either side, with a large pond in the middle that you used a little bridge to cross over. At the far end was a more open area where guests were sometimes entertained or children could play, with an old maple tree at the center, two stories tall... Tall enough that, though the garden was walled off, you could see it from outside the property.

For that reason, I waited until very late at night once I realized it was the only option. Until then, I sat on the stairs in silence and waited for the hours to pass.

Why did I wait, like that, instead of going back to my room? To be truthful, I'm not really sure.

I suppose it didn't feel... Right, somehow, to busy myself with some shallow fun on my logic engine or with a book. Or to lie in bed, or else somewhere comfortable. It felt like that could make me lose my nerve, and in that moment, that was unacceptable to me. I wanted to hold on the sense of rawness in my breast, the sense of finality that felt like the only thing I possessed which yet carried meaning.

It was the final days of summer, so it was a while until it was completely dark, and then a while more still until the lights of the city faded and the world felt like it was truly asleep. I waited a little longer than even that, until just after 1AM.

Then, I went outside. I walked across the garden - it would've been hard to see where I was going normally, but I knew it so well I didn't need a light. Soon enough, I came to the tree. I peered up at the silhouette. The lowest branches didn't look very sturdy, but there one just a bit higher that was nearly twice as thick as my arms.

Yes. It would be suitable.

A gentle smile appeared on my lips, like someone who had been lost, but had finally found their way home.

Why had I chosen hanging?

When people think about suicide, there are two easily understandable factors which influence their choices: Fear and hope. Now, I should make it clear that 'fear' doesn't refer to fearing death, because if someone felt that way, they wouldn't even be considering it seriously to begin with. Rather, it's the fear of pain, of things going wrong, or being forced to experience something horrific in their final moments or even being cursed to live on in a ruined body, now deprived of the agency to finish what they started.

On the other hand, hope is how much someone is holding on, somewhere in their heart, to the prospect that they might yet be 'saved'. That things could change if the right person noticed, understood...

Both of these make people act counterintuitively to their stated goal of dying, though in different ways. Someone with a lot of fear is more prone to avoid methods with grave consequences in the event of failure or that involve a lot of pain, like overdosing or cutting ones arteries. They might also not be comfortable with things that feel too extreme or harrowing, like jumping off a tall building or stepping in front of a tram.

Inversely, someone with lingering hopes probably won't employ methods with a great deal of immediate lethality, such as using a firearm or some means of asphyxiation. And obviously they wouldn't jump off a building, either. ...Thinking about it that way, it's sort of surprising that jumping off buildings is so popular to begin with. Maybe it's just because it doesn't require a budget.

Anyway, I wasn't really afraid. If anything, it felt like it would be appropriate to be in a bit of pain before I died, so long as it wasn't something which would leave my body in too upsetting a state for whoever found it. And even though I was sure that lots of people would come and try and support me if they knew what I was about to do, it didn't make me feel hopeful. In fact, it was specifically in trying to avoid that that I'd been so careful in my planning.

After all, it wasn't something other people could help with. (Not that they'd want to, if they really understood.) It wasn't about 'my' feelings. It wasn't something which could washed away with gentle words, or even love.

But there's a third factor which is more difficult to pin down. I'm not even sure what to call it; the best words might be 'dignity' or maybe 'nobility', but those don't quite carry the right connotations. It's more like... An urge to instill beauty in ones life, even in at its terminus. To have it be the ending to a story, even a sad one, instead of just... A sudden stop.

Because the mind cannot conceptualize its own non-existence, human beings are unable to escape from the delusion that something of them will remain after their death. Even ostensible rationalists who scorn the idea of an afterlife still cannot let go of the sentiment at the core of their thought processes. We instinctively picture the events that will play out after we're gone as if they're our concern, hope that people will mourn, or feel regret, or remember us-- As if any of that will matter to us once the biochemical processes that urge us to inspire certain types of social feedback have ceased. We concern ourselves with our place in some greater history - of our families, nations, civilizations - as if all humanity, all life which evolved on earth, is chronologically anything but a speck of dust in contrast to the amount of time in which we won't exist.

The truth is that death is annihilation. Something that removes you utterly from all context, all relationships - however close - all space and time. To die is to become absolutely nothing. Forever. Imagine the phrase 'for a billion years", where instead of the X, I wrote the word 'billion' again an infinite amount of times. That's how long you'll be dead.

And when you consider that reality, the raw, mathematical nature of it, stripped away from all sentiment... Then the only logical conclusion is that, when viewed from retrospect, nothing in a human life is significant.

But at the time, none of that occurred to me. In fact, the story of my death, the narrative I was crafting in my head around it, was all I thought of. I was filled with a desire not just to escape from my suffering, but to create a scenario that set things right. That felt appropriate, ­just.

I was only just beginning my optional education, back then, but I was already an arcanist. I had a training scepter. Even though I couldn't have done anything complicated like the Life-Slaying Arcana, it wouldn't have been difficult to do something simpler and more decisive than this, like blast my head off with a controlled backlash. But I didn't want to die in a way that would debase my body; leave it a bloody mess. I didn't want to die in a way where it wouldn't be found for weeks, leaving it grotesquely decayed. I didn't want to imagine my parents having to see it, having to choke back the smell.

And I didn't want to do something which felt too simple, too indulgent. Like I'd flippantly decided to die because things weren't going the way I wanted.

I collected a small stepladder from our shed, and climbed up the tree, pulling myself up to the branch. This was a lot harder than I'd expected, and I strained my calf muscle and grazed myself in the process, scuffing the plain-looking dress I was wearing. I could have just flung the rope over and then tied it up from below, but I'd read in a novel that death was much less painful and more likely to happen if you broke your neck from the initial fall instead of having to be suffocated. So I wanted to maximize the extent of the drop by trying to stand up and jump instead of just falling.

However, making plans while lying on your bed and thinking is a lot different to actually executing those plans in the realm of the physical. Now that I was sitting there, my legs flopping on either side like an idiot, it was obvious I wasn't limber or strong enough to pull myself upright again without falling. I tried to shove my body upward with my hands enough to draw my legs towards my chest, but all I managed to do was hurt my palms and wirsts.

Maybe I could go back down, try and climb it again in a way that would be easier. But I didn't have any idea how that would work. I didn't have a taller ladder. What could I do differently, realistically?

I guess this height will have to do, I thought.

I flung the coil of rope I'd bought a few days earlier around the branch, and started tying the knot. ...but this ended up being harder than I expected, too. The rope was thick, and strangely inflexible when I tried to bend it too much - either because it was brand new, or I'd somehow got the wrong kind. Were there different types of rope, for different situations? I didn't know; I hadn't looked into it. But regardless, it wouldn't fit right, and it was too dark to really understand how I was screwing it up. It was so irritating that it almost made me want to laugh. I couldn't even do something like this properly.

...Sorry. This is sort of sad, isn't it?

I'm trying to make it all sound so quaint.

Eventually, I did get manage to get the knot sorted out. Then I pulled up the rope and tied the noose itself, which was easier. Hesitantly, I slipped my head into it.

And then... There was nothing left to do.

I sat like that for a while, resting my back against the trunk. Listening to the near-silence of the night.

I didn't really know why I was stalling. It wasn't as though I felt scared, or lacked conviction. It still felt like the only thing I could do, no matter how I thought about it. But something felt missing from the moment. Incomplete. Like there was something I needed to do or think about first, but couldn't remember what.

...maybe I was scared, or at least lacking in will. And just didn't know how to process those feelings.

A few minutes passed. At first, I wasn't really looking at anything, but slowly my eyes settled on my house, and the couple of lights I'd apparently left on by accident after getting frustrated with my earlier search. I could see just a little bit of the kitchen, and some of the room next to mine - once my little brother's, before he'd moved to a bigger one downstairs, and then moved away outright for school last year. Now it was mostly a storage room, filled with expensive but tacky furniture my dad had bought but couldn't figure out what to do with. There was a tightly rolled hand-stitched rug that was so garishly-colored that it didn't go with anything, an antique grandfather clock that I was pretty sure was a fake...

Slowly, my chest started to ache, like a weight was being pressed down upon it.

I lowered my head a bit, and my glasses fell off, tumbling down to the grass. Turning the immediate world into blurry mess.

It hurts.

I hate this.

Because I didn't belong here. Every day, I had to lie to people constantly-- So much that I'd forgotten what it even felt like to be sincere. I talked to people about things that were perverse of me to even know, accepted hugs and kisses under the most repugnant of false pretenses. I stole constantly, and not just in terms of physical objects. I stole kindness that wasn't meant for me, success I didn't deserve. My entire existence was theft. Just existing in this state was violence.

But I wished, in a manner so deep and painful that it felt like a crack in the foundation of my soul, that I did belong here. That my life had been normal and happy. That I'd been able to enjoy ordinary things. Spending time with family. Making lots of friends. Developing fun or even stupid hobbies. Going out to do new things every day. Growing closer to others. Falling in love. Being cared for, and caring in turn. Becoming someone with a beautiful existence.

Living as a human. Instead of something with a vulgar nature, who could only achieve anything through envy and deceit.

Why couldn't... It have been like that...?

Why was I made to exist, only to constantly see things I wasn't able to have?

It wasn't fair. The world I'd been born into was wrong.

I started to cry. I muffled the sound, afraid it might alert someone, so it came out as choked, throaty gasps. The branch creaked as my body heaved slowly up and down...

Oh, I see, something in me realized. This is what you were waiting to realize.

This moment isn't really about you atoning at all, is it? About restoring the dignity of the person you murdered.

No. It's about you. About your suffering, like always.

You really are,

Disgustingly selfish.

I bit down on my lip so hard that it started to bleed. It felt like my whole body was overcome with an awful, overwhelming tension that had no means of escape. Like I could explode at any moment, scattering viscera all over the garden. I wanted to scream, to howl at the awfulness, the profane wrongness of reality for having allowed any of this to happen. To demand a better justice than this, against the world, against myself...

And then I slipped, and for a moment, felt a strange sense of relief.

Then the branch snapped.

𒊹

Some time later, I awoke in an unfamiliar bed with a brace around my neck and the sense that I probably would be in a lot of pain if I weren't heavily drugged. It was a modest, sparely-decorated room in pale colors with what was obviously medical equipment; a hospital.

I looked to the side, to something in the periphery of my vision. Ran was sitting next to me. For once, she wasn't reading anything. She looked more tired than I'd ever seen her, since we'd met that day nearly four years ago.

"You," she said, her voice slower than normal and with an uncharacteristic tremble, "are a real idiot."

𒊹

Inner Sanctum Exterior | 5:00 PM | Second Day

I was pretty sure it was going to be longer than 30 minutes, but I didn't feel like checking a clock.

After we'd been suddenly rushed out, everyone had stood around the lounge for a bit. But after Kamrusepa got into a bit of a rant about what had happened and a couple of the other noisy people in our class had joined in, Ran and I had broken off to go somewhere more quiet. Ptolema, who also seemed kind of unsettled by what'd taken place, joined us.

We ended up leaving through the third and final exit of the manor, near the staircase past the security center. Funnily enough, this put us right up against the glass barrier at the edge of the sanctuary. For the novelty of leaning against a barrier that was all that separated us from being crushed by trillions of liters of water, and because it was strangely warm, we'd decided to sit there.

We weren't saying much, either about the bizarre threatening message or the strange and sudden interruption to the conclave that had happened. There was probably an unspoken understanding that we were overwhelmed enough already and just wanted to calm down.

We were talking a little, though.

"If you guys had to be a fish..." Ptolema mused, staring upward at the water as she lay on the grass "What kinda fish would you want to be?"

"Manta ray," Ran answered, almost instantly.

Ptolema blinked. "That was fast."

"Manta rays are pretty," Ran explained, but offered no further elaboration.

She looked to me. "What about you, Su?"

I thought about for a few moments. "Well... I guess I wouldn't want to lose too much of my brain, so I suppose a dolphin, or maybe an octopus." I hesitated. "But I guess neither of those are technically fish, now that I think about it? Maybe it would be better to just embrace being really stupid."

"You always overthink stuff like this, Su," Ptolema said critically.

I shrugged. "I don't like giving lazy answers." I twisted my lip around, looking upward. "I think anglerfish are interesting, but I wouldn't want to be one. Maybe an axolotl... No, wait, those are lizards--"

"I think I'd wanna be one of those freaky fish that eat the tongues of other fish and then replace them," Ptolema interrupted, giving up on me."That's a pretty easy life, y'know? You just sit there and steal food from whatever chump let you in their mouth." She grinned mischievously. "Plus, if a fisherman ever found you, you'd really freak them out."

"Those aren't anything close to fish," I pointed out. "They're isopods. Giant lice."

"Pfft". She made a derisive snort.

We fell back into silence for a few moments. Ran turned a page in her novel. Ptolema shifted her position on the ground a bit, leaning more in our direction.

"Hey, Su," she said. "Tell one of your jokes!"

I blinked, then slowly scratched my head. "I'm not sure I'm in the right mood..."

"Come oooonnn," she said. "It doesn't have to be any good."

I contemplated.

"Two fish go up to the surface of the water," I eventually said. "The first fish says, 'Are you sure this is safe? We can't breathe up here!' but the other says, 'Are you kidding? There's so much food, it's like a non-stop feast! Look, right over there!' The first fish sees the food the second is pointing out and rushes over to get it, but it turns out to be bait and it gets caught. Later, the fisherman is giving the second fish some spare bait for helping him out, and he says, 'You must be pretty heartless, betraying your own kind like this,' but the fish says, 'Nah, I'm always gill-ty about it.'"

A few seconds passed.

"Gill-ty," I repeated, for emphasis.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, I get it."

"You did say it didn't have to be any good," I reminded her.

"No, no, it wasn't too bad!" she said, holding up a hand.

"Thanks," I said flatly, "I made it up just now."

Another few minutes passed in silence. Ran yawned, and I decided to pull my hair free, letting it flop down over my shoulders. I didn't feel like I had the will to redo the higher-effort-than-normal braids I'd ruined a little earlier, but at least this way it wouldn't look like total shit when we went back inside.

If we went back inside, at this point.

The doorway slid open, and someone stepped out. It was Neferuaten, wearing a thoughtful expression. I noticed she seemed to be smoking a cigarette as she approached us. She held it rather gracelessly under her thumb, in contrast to Sacnicte's sophisticate-style inter-finger grip.

"Ah, good," she said, approaching. "I was wondering where you all were." I saw Ran's eyes flicker up at her curiously for a moment before returning to her novel, while Ptolema, who knew her less well, sat up in a half-hearted gesture of respect.

"I didn't know you smoked, grandmaster," I said, eyeing the object.

"Utsushikome, at my age, I've tried just about every vice conceived by man that doesn't necessitate a serial killing," she said cheerfully. She took a drag, as if reminded by me that it was there. "It's been a while since I've done this one, though. I only picked this--" she twirled the object around, "up on impulse, when I ran into Sacnicte on my way here." She shook her head. "That girl always looks so frustrated whenever someone asks her a favor. It's sort of endearing."

"Why'd you do it, though?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Aim to have an experience that surprises you every day, and you'll be forever young at heart."

"Kinda would've thought this day's been surprising enough already," Ptolema said.

Neferuaten took a second drag, this time deeper and drawn out, closing her eyes in the process. It looked like she was really savoring the moment.

I remembered a story I'd been told once by the class coordinator. Long ago, before humanity had developed the microorganisms which constantly purged the body of weaker toxic materials that were common in the present day, tobacco had been an incredibly lethal habit. Smoking regularly for just a decade or two was enough to practically destroy the lungs, and it even severely damaged the throat and mouth.

Once people had become aware of this, they'd focused a huge amount of societal energy on the problem. Creating substitutes to wean people away from the addiction, campaigns to raise awareness of the danger, rules that governed how you were even allowed to talk or write about it... Until finally, after a huge amount of effort, the problem was basically fixed. Removed from contemporary culture.

But then, once ways to largely avoid those original problems had been found, people went back to consuming tobacco almost immediately. Like nothing had really changed on an essential level. Humanity hadn't matured in any special way, even if they acted like they had; they hadn't truly risen above something base and unhygenic. Rather, they'd just painfully learned to suppress a desire that, on a day of liberation, could finally be fulfilled once again.

When I'd thought about that, I'd started to wonder if that was the nature of all growth. That people didn't really change. They just learned to suppress things they'd learned were harmful, praying somewhere deep in their hearts that the world would one day change and they could set their true self free once again.

"How are you all feeling?" Neferuaten asked, after a moment had passed.

"Not bad, I suppose," I answered. "Confused."

"Mm," she nodded. "You and everyone else."

"I'm really confused, but it's the kinda 'confused' where I'm not sure knowin' any more stuff would actually help," Ptolema said. "Is the conference still on, or what?"

"It's still up in the air," Neferuaten said. "Right now, we're taking a recess ourselves to clear our heads. Once that's over, a decision will be made."

"Whole thing is starting to feel kind of cursed, at this point," I said, with a small smile.

She chuckled. "If there's a curse that ruins vacuous publicity events, I should think I'd like to learn it myself."

I laughed a little, looking towards the ground.

"Miss Amat," Ran said suddenly, in a serious tone.

I glanced over to her in surprise. Ran almost never initiated conversations with teachers or older arcanists out of nowhere - she was a reactive person by nature, and especially so when it came to authority figures. But seeing her, she was unquestionably curious about something. She'd even put her book down.

Neferuaten raised her brows. "What is it, miss Hoa-Trinh?"

"I want to ask you something," she said, in the tone of someone who had finally come to a resolution.

"Go on," she said.

"What's really being done here, exactly?" she asked, focusing her gaze. "At this facility."

Neferuaten tilted her head slightly, expression curious. "That's something of an overly-broad question, don't you think?"

"Linos told us that this place was built at the bottom of the sea when we first arrived, in the Atelikos," she said, "but though he answered a lot of questions, like why you had the land in the first place, he never explained why a location like that would have been chosen. Why a normal arcane refuge wouldn't have been preferable."

"Hm," she said, nodding very slightly. "No one asked about it, then?"

"No, Su did," she said, inclining her head towards me. I furrowed my brow, confused about where this was going. "But he didn't give a full answer. All he said was that it was chosen because the 'bare bones structure already belonged to one of the members'."

Neferuaten chuckled. "My goodness, he's always one to say too much..." She sighed to herself, tucking a length of black hair which had fallen loose behind her ear with the same hand that held the cigarette. "It's true enough, though. It was chosen for exactly that reason."

"But on the surface, that contradicts something you yourself said," Ran said, holding the knuckles of a hand up to her mouth.

I blinked. What?

"Oh?" The older woman asked, a playful smirk forming at the corners of her mouth.

"I heard the story from Theodoros last night, before dinner," she said. "He told me that Su guessed why this place is designed the way it is, during the tour last night. That it's meant as a recreation of your previous headquarters. And that you confirmed that was the case yourself."

She asked Theo about all that...?

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. She could be strangely protective, especially when I was in moods like this.

"That's not a contradiction," Neferuaten said, in the gentle tone a primary school teacher might use to correct a spelling error. "The bare bones structure being here doesn't mean that we couldn't have just filled it in with the reconstructed elements. These are all open spaces, after all-- Not exactly economically planned."

Ran pointed upward. The three of us followed her finger - including Ptolema, who seemed to be following enough to have developed an uncertain frown - to the very top of the bell tower, which reached almost to the glass ceiling.

Almost to the ceiling... Like it had been built to stop at that very point.

"Oh, come on," Neferuaten said, making a dismissive gesture. "That could easily be coincidence."

Ran said nothing, but kept her eyes focused on her.

I started to feel anxious. I didn't like where this was going, especially with the two of them on either side.

"Wait, uh... Sorry, hold on a sec," Ptolema said, rubbing an eye as she obviously tried to process what was unfolding. "You're saying Linos was lying? Or she was?" She hesitated, looking to Neferuaten. "Uh, sorry, miss Amat. I don't mean to accuse you of anything-- No offense."

"None taken, miss Rheeds," Neferuaten said softly, taking another drag as she stared beyond the walls into the dark water.

"No, I don't think anyone was necessarily lying about that," Ran said, shaking her head. "There's a way that both statements can be unambiguously true. Which if the 'barebones structure' Linos brought up wasn't what's out here - the big glass domes and everything - but..." She pointed towards the ground. "Down there. In the tunnel network."

This time, Neferuaten was the one to say nothing, her expression thoughtful and hard to read.

"I do think Linos might've told a couple of lies, though," she went on, her tone measured. "Firstly, the thing about why the order was allowed to build here I mentioned earlier... And secondly, the way we were brought here to begin with."

"What do you mean?" I asked her, frowning.

Come on, don't pretend you haven't noticed, too, I thought. Don't play stupid just because you want to act the part of the sycophantic defender.

"I'm fifty-fifty on if this first one is a lie, but it's still weird either way," she said. "Linos said that they got away with keeping this place despite the anti-colonization legislation that exists nowadays because it was grandfathered in - something was already built here before the end of the Great Interplanar war. But remember when we saw that creature, swimming overhead? I said it at the time-- Something like that wouldn't even be able to move, let alone survive, at this depth normally. Which means we'd have to be close to the rim, where the gravity is much lower." She narrowed her eyes. "At surface-level, that's far too low for humans to reasonably inhabit. So this whole place would need to have been deliberately built thousands of miles away from even the basic infrastructure set up on this plane during the Colonization period... That is, assuming we are on the Atelikos, at all."

I scratched my head. "You don't think we are?"

"We could be," she said. "Or maybe not."

"I don't understand," I said, and glanced anxiously at Neferuaten, starting to hope she'd intervene. "What are you trying to get at, Ran?"

"It's to do with the second point I brought up," she said. She started to tap her book against one of her knees in a steady rhythm, like a marching drum. "And this one I'm certain was a lie-- In fact, it's such a blatant one that I'm kinda shocked no one else seems to have noticed. Linos told us that the reason we had to take that whole long route up the Aetherbridge was to take advantage of a rare window where the Mimikos and the Atelikos were aligned properly, so that the transposition chamber we were in would correspond with the location of this sanctuary... Since the two planes are constantly shifting in relation to each other." She looked back to Neferuaten. "I'm not an interplanar physicist, so I can't say if that's true or not. But there's an old saying I know, which came to mind when I thought back to Seth meeting us as the entrance."

Lightning doesn't strike twice.

"Lightning doesn't strike twice," Ran said firmly. "Especially not to separate girls and boys by the same exact 15 minute interval they set off at."

At this, Neferuaten suddenly burst into soft laughter, snorting smoke out of her nose as she was forced to lower the cigarette.

"Woah, what the hell," Ptolema muttered, squinting. "You're right! I heard Kam going on about some of this stuff, but when you put it that way, it sounds totally fake!"

"It does, doesn't it?" Neferuaten said, slowly starting to calm down. "Goodness, people always say him and his son are so alike, but now having met them both, they're almost opposites. Theo seems like such a reserved boy, but Linos can never resist showing off. Of course he'd try to awkwardly fill in the blanks with some overwrought explanation instead of just finding a way to dismiss the question." She looked to Ran. "You noticed this at the time?"

"Yes, ma'am," she said sternly.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Neferuaten asked. She craned her neck forward a bit, looking down on her position.

"I hadn't expected an organization like yours to be open about everything to begin with, so it didn't seem that important," she explained. "And besides, all calling attention to it would do is embarrass him."

"Is that so?" She smiled warmly, slowly raising her arm back up. "I'd taken you for the blunter type, not the cordial one."

"It would have also made it clear really early that I didn't trust you," she added, lowering her brow slowly.

Neferuaten laughed a little more to herself, closing her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, the curiosity was gone, replaced with something a little sharper. "Tell me," she digressed. "With that explanation ruled out, why do you think we made you go all the way out to the Empyrean Bastion? It's not as though setting up the trip was inexpensive, I assure you."

"There's a cheap trick people sometimes use in story-writing, when they're trying to get people to not think about something," Ran responded, her tone flat. "Basically, they misdirect your attention."

"You mean it was a red herring."

"No," Ran quickly corrected her, shaking her head. "A red herring is when the author deliberately complicates a mystery they want you to solve by pointing you towards a wrong answer. I'm talking about overwhelming someone with questions and spectacle to hide the fact that the story itself doesn't make sense."

Neferuaten snorted. "You think we did all that, just to stop you from thinking too hard about why it was set up that way? Again, it'd be rather uneconomical. Not to mention the fact it clearly hasn't worked."

"Not all of it. Parts, maybe-- I can't see how the carriage ride and the strange directions added anything to your security. But if we're going to start talking about expenses, then nothing here makes sense," Ran transitioned. "I can buy that a lot of the excessive parts of the design is because it's meant to be a faithful re-creation of another place, or because you're worried about security and wanted to survive under siege if it came to it. But that only goes so far. Why are there so many recreational facilities and so much empty 'outdoor' space? Why are there these giant bedrooms for a place people are only going to visit a few times a year? Why is there a huge garden outside a guesthouse that, before us, was supposed to only be used for applicants? None of it adds up for the stated purpose."

"You're starting to get quite far afield from my question, miss Hoa-Trinh," Neferuaten said.

"I'm getting to it," she said. "When something is happening that you don't understand, the easiest way to try and get it is to throw away the original premise and turn the question on its head. It's not, 'why would a research facility be built this way', it's 'what sort of purpose does it look like this was built for'. It's not 'why did you make us come in through the Empyrean Bastion', it's 'why didn't you bring us here through somewhere else'. ...When you combine those questions, you can start to make some interesting theories."

"Interesting theories, hm..." Neferuaten nodded a few times, first seemingly to herself, then in overt approval. "I'm starting to understand why you and Su are such close friends."

Let's apply Occam's Razor to both of those, an analytical part of my brain said, moving by itself. If we take everything we've seen here at face value, it's sort like a cross between a resort and a testing ground for new technology... But that doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know. As for the second part, the obvious answer is they didn't send us anywhere else because they couldn't send us anywhere else.

But why not?

"Ran..." I asked, starting to become anxious. It wasn't like I was hurt that we'd been lied to a little bit, exactly, but it was making me pretty disquieted to have it all laid out. "What are you trying to say? What do you think this place is, really?"

"There's a specific term I have in mind. Two words, starts with a 'D'," she said, not turning to face me. "But it's not like I can pretend to know the full picture-- Ultimately, I just want to know if we've signed up for something that's more than we bargained for. Shit, I was planning to just keep all this stuff to myself, but after seeing everything get thrown out the window just because Fang might've had something Hamilcar was worried about, I feel less and less comfortable with so much going over our heads."

Gods. I'm the one getting prophecies, and yet she's put this much together...

Honestly, I was feeling pretty stupid in comparison to her. My mind had been elsewhere, but I hadn't thought deeply about anything to do with the sanctuary itself, just the minutia of the stuff I'd seen inside or what'd been going on in my own head. Samium, the pantry, the body, my newly-developing psychic powers. Hell, Zeno had practically spelled out the fact that its purpose wasn't as advertised a few hours ago, and I'd still more or less brushed it off.

It was tunnel vision. Or, well, at least being stuck not seeing the bigger picture.

"Well, if it's okay to go back a bit, I still feel pretty weird about not knowing where we are," Ptolema said, crossing her legs and giving Neferuaten what was, by her standards, a pretty serious look. "I mean, it's like you were saying a minute ago, Ran. if we couldn't have been transpositioned in the way they said we were transpositioned, is this actually the Atelikos? Or some place else?"

"That's a good point," I said. "You weren't there when we talked about it with Linos, were you, Ptolema?"

"Uh, I think I caught some of it," she said, scratching behind her ear. "I mostly heard about it from Kam later, though."

I nodded, looking downward. "He also gave an explanation for why we had that strange moment of altered consciousness, saying it was a side-effect of moving across planes... But knowing this, that seems a lot less certain. I mean-- We're all younger than the colonization ban. It would've been easy for him to lie about it."

"It wasn't a lie," Neferuaten said, her tone calm in spite of the accusations now becoming quite heavy. "That symptom is real - planar adjustment fugue is the proper term. If you doubt it, I'm certain we have some books which would cover the topic around."

"So we are on another plane, or not?" Ran inquired.

Neferuaten was silent for a long time. She took another drag from the cigarette, the deepest so far, and let the smoke slowly roll out of her mouth in a lazy plume. She looked towards the heavens for a moment, then lazily pinched the end of the roll with her finger, before slipping it into a pocket.

"It's somewhat complicated," she said.

"Complicated as in the answer is difficult to explain," Ran said, peering at her, "or that you're not allowed to say?"

"In a way, you're giving me credit by even forming the question in those terms." She wandered over to the side, moving to lean against the glass barrier with the rest of us. "The subject isn't a secret unto itself, but there are matters I'd have to discuss that would invite more inquiry merely to explain it. That's why we made the decision to give a half-truth if anyone asked, since there's so much press interest in the subject that the chance of a leak would be high. Of course, some people are naturally overeager storytellers."

"Why bother giving any answer, if it's like that?" Ptolema asked, frowning.

"A flame dies swifter when fed soil than fed air," Neferuaten said, looking displeased. "Or so goes Hamilcar's venerable interpretation of public relations, at least."

"What did you mean a moment ago, about her giving you credit with the question?" I asked, curious.

Neferuaten exhaled, a dry smile on her lips. "Goodness, I can't slip even an idle remark by. The two of you... I dare say you're too perceptive for your own good" She was quiet for a moment, twisting her lip. "The truth is, I don't fully know myself where we are, per-se. Not exactly."

For all Ran's forethought, this seemed to take her a little off guard. "You don't know."

"As I said, it's somewhat complicated." She tapped her foot against the ground. "I'll tell you what. There's only so much I really ought to say, but with things having gone as they have, it's probably alright to be a little more open So I'll give you... Somewhere around half an answer to both of your questions. Will that be enough to reassure you, do you think?"

"That could mean anything," Ran said. "So it depends on the actual content."

Neferuaten's smile became a smirk again. "You really are quite ruthless, miss Hoa-Trinh."

"Well... I guess if the alternative is getting nothing, then half is probably better," I said my expression a little dejected. I didn't like it when Neferuaten was keeping things explicitly secret.

She turned to look at me, giving a flat smile. "Don't look at me like that, Utsushikome. You're a bright girl. Perhaps you'll be able to figure out the rest on your own." She folded her arms casually. "Gods, how to begin with something like this..."

She wrinkled her lip, slowly biting it as she thought. The rest of us looked to her expectantly.

"When Ubar of Kane founded the order," she eventually began, "he took many understudies, from all sorts of professions. One of those was a woman named Saahdia ibnat Addad. She wasn't an arcanist, but rather a natural philosopher - a physicist."

"I thought you told us that non-arcanists couldn't join the order, back then," Ran said.

"She wasn't a full member," Neferuaten explained. "Just an affiliate who he happened to interact with often in a personal capacity. Her vocation was an unusual one for this era. Astronomy."

I blinked. That was an unusual field.

When the Ironworkers had preserved humanity in the Tower of Asphodel, it'd proven impossible to create a stable new plane for humanity so long as the previous one, now altered beyond recognition by the transformed physics of the collapse, still remained. As a result, they'd simply placed themselves in stasis along with everything else within and waited.

Waited for a very, very long time. Stars, especially the ones of lower energy density than had been possible while the plane was still habitable by humans, took a very long time to die. Black holes took exponentially longer. But without cognition taking place to observe it, any amount of years is just a number, so from the perspective of human history, it was a footnote - a mere instant which passed with the flick of a switch.

But those years hadn't gone completely unobserved. The Ironworkers had set up cross-planar probes to monitor the outside world, just on the off chance that, over that impossible stretch of time, an otherworldly civilization might emerge in the altered universe and somehow discover mankind's refuge in its extra-dimensional knot. That never happened (most contemporary scholars speculated that the far more depressed matter had been simply incapable of forming the building blocks of life) but the probes had possessed a secondary function to simply collect astronomical data. After all, mankind being on the brink of extinction was no excuse to pass up the chance for the longest-running exercise of natural observation in... Well, that would ever conceivably happen.

When the Ironworkers awoke, they had amassed a quantity of information so vast that it eclipsed all data ever produced in human civilization by a factor of several hundred. Naturally, they had no idea what to do with it. There were planetariums where they used the information to show how the galaxy would have evolved from the perspective of the Solar System and a lot of book and documentaries that obsessed over data some believed showed evidence of nonhuman civilization, but those were the only places it had found ground outside of niche physics.

Today, 'astronomer', when used in a professional capacity, referred to the small number of people who would devote their careers to the sisyphean task of reading and interpreting the data, hoping to find something interesting or insightful. It wasn't hard to understand why this was unpopular.

"You're probably wondering why someone in that sphere would have anything to do with the order, since it's nothing even tangential to medicine," Neferuaten went on. "I'm sure the story has been romanticized severely by this point, even though it's only been passed around a small clique, but Saahdia supposedly devoted her life to studying the death of the universe on a macro-scale. The birth, decay, and eventual end of ordered systems of star clusters, galaxies, even the great filaments that bound them together. How they flowed, fed into one another." She glanced downwards. "Most people would dismiss such work as a fools errand. After all, though individual phenomena can be remarkable, at a sufficient scale the universe is mechanical... Predictable."

"I'm guessing something didn't turn out so predictable," I said. "...though, I have to admit, I have no idea how this is going to feed into what this sanctuary is for."

"What she discovered," she said, the words coming slow, "were extraordinarily minor deviations in patterns of decay, visible only when comparing instances of extremely similar stellar makeup. Nothing happened which was impossible - after all, as a results of the uncertainty principle, two sets of phenomena will not behave identically even if placed in identical circumstances. But what was strange was that these events seemed to follow certain habits, ones which couldn't be explained by any understood natural law. For example, a specific type of star might begin expanding at a slightly faster rate all across a region of space. Or circumstances would conspire to form certain types of nebulae most often. But then those same trends would suddenly halt, as if the cosmos had grown bored of them."

Ran's eyes tightened. "You're not suggesting--"

"Of course, I'm simplifying something very complex. One thing I hope you've learned by this point is that, in all forms of scholarly inquiry, nothing is ever clear cut. There were many false positives, and natural occurrences mistaken for something more. But the further she invesigated, the more she found anomalies which could not be easily explained. And the more those anomalies, too, began to form a recognizable pattern." She smiled distantly. "Just not one you usually see in interstellar physics. And then she reported that to Ubar, who ordered an investigation of the corresponding interplanar data--"

"Uh, sorry... I know I'm dumb about this kinda stuff, but this is starting to go over my head a bit," Ptolema interjected, with a nervous laugh. "Could you repeat that last part? I don't want to slow things down, but it seems like Ran and Su are getting it already."

"Ah, no, forgive me, miss Rheeds," Neferuaten said, shaking her head. "I'm being too pretentious. I'll get to the point."

Ptolema nodded. "Well, okay."

"What she started to suspect," Neferuaten explained. "was that, though in a form impossibly alien to human beings, entropy is conscious."