RAN

First thing, I withdrew my camera, which for some reason I'd still been carrying around, and took a picture, the flash barely even noticeable with what was in front of us. Nobody tried to stop me. If I was going to have to deal with whatever the fuck this was gonna end up being about, I figured I at least deserved something I could show to my friends back in the city.

"Oh... My goodness..." Ophelia said, holding a hand to her mouth.

"What is this?" Kam asked. She was so starry-eyed that I bet you could pick out a constellation.

It looked like Hamilcar was about to explain himself, but before he got the chance, Neferuaten stepped in and cut him off, speaking in a real university professor-y tone. "This chamber comprises the remnants of an observation facility created by the Ironworkers to study thermodynamic phenomena, while this--" she indicated the huge web of interlocking metal structures "--might be considered the 'roots' of the Nittaimalaru, which some of you may have seen overhead already. It is an extension of the same goal, piggybacking off some of the same engineering, designed to accomplish explicitly what it does inwardly. Which is to say, to create an environment isolated from entropic forces."

You made a weird face, adjusting your glasses, but I only had half an idea of what the hell she was talking about. I'd heard the Everblossom mentioned incidentally, and wouldn't see it until later in the night, so I had no context for any of this crap other than the conversation she'd had with us.

"You didn't say anything about this before, when we saw it the first time..." You said, frowning.

Neferuaten gave another of her shitty smiles. "That is because it is not the same project, even if the two may be connected. This is a more recent addition, with a more practical purpose... and a little more of a success, if I do say so myself."

"It's huge," Ptolema said, gaping in all directions. "It's gotta be the size of a skyscraper! Or bigger!"

"It is the product of a century of heartfelt labor, miss Rheeds," Neferuaten said, strangely wistfully. "So it is fitting for you to be impressed."

"Why's it glowing? Seth asked, staring himself.

"That would be the eris currently being produced by the negation furnace some distance beneath us," she told him. "Because of the complexity of its design and the need for constant and complex self-maintenance, the machine cannot be shut down completely without being dismantled outright, so maintaining a flow of energy at all times is a requirement. It is less intensive than it appears, however-- The reason that this space is so humid and bright at present is less an inherent function, and more a product of it currently being in an inactive state. When there is too much energy, after all, the excess must be vented."

"Incredible..." Kam said, her head rapidly going back and forth from Neferuaten and the scene in front of us. "How... How could you possibly have kept something created by the Ironworkers a secret from the outside world? And on this scale no less-- No," she said, shaking her head in enchanted disbelief. "At this point, I shouldn't be surprised by anything." She shook her head. "Still, the scope of it all, it's... Incredible..."

I was still stuck on her having said 'negation furnace'. Having a private convention furnace for a place like this, which we'd heard about earlier, was one thing. But a negation furnace produces enough eris for a small city, or the entire Empyrean Bastion. It's not even legal to build one for private enterprise in most countries.

Excess or no excess, whatever this thing was doing was taking an insane amount of energy. The gigantic, mostly-empty chamber had to be ten times the size of the entire rest of the sanctuary, and the air was still thick with enough heat that I was wishing I'd dressed for midsummer.

The elevator was starting to approach the aurora, which glistened vividly around us, warping our view of the monstrosity and making it appear like it was writhing around like a living being. Looking below, I could see that there was some sort of structure we were approaching - a metal edifice with absolutely no shits paid to aesthetics. It looked like a series of boxes stuck to one another, suspended in its location by bronze poles rising from very, very far below, along with a small segment suspended by a stone pillar.

"Forgive me," Bardiya said, having a more low-key reaction than some of the others. "But I don't believe I fully understood what was stated a moment ago, so I must ask for clarification. You said the purpose of this construction was to create an environment isolated from entropy?"

"Yes, that was the purpose of this project," Hamilcar said, re-taking control of the conversation. "To be more specific, the goal was to create a meta-dimensional space in which information, energy, and matter may exist in a completely stable state."

I noticed he seemed to be talking in the past tense, for some reason.

Bardiya perked up an eyebrow. "Is that not already possible, utilizing Entropic Thanatomancy?"

"Uh, no," you spoke up, shaking your head. "I mean-- Sort of. You can simulate an environment in which entropy doesn't exist if you use a complicated enough variant of the Entropy-Denying Arcana, but it's still just the Power holding things together. It can't change the fundamental nature of physics, just like Aetheromancy can't get rid of gravity, just suppress it or change how it's expressed..."

"I see," he replied, with a nod. "Forgive me, then; I should not have spoken in ignorance." He faced Hamilcar again. "That being the case, I would pivot to other questions, namely: How, and why?"

Neferuaten chuckled to herself. I thought I noticed Zeno roll his eyes. For whatever reason, something in my gut was telling me that neither of those gestures were directed at Bardiya.

I swear, something is fucking up with all these people. It feels like they're all in on ten big inside jokes at once, and half of them are at our expense. ...but never mind that.

"As Grandmaster Amat noted, the secret of this sanctuary - and the one in which I am entrusting you all with - is that it was constructed upon the remnants of an installation of the Ironworkers, one of many through which they used the iron of the Tower of Asphodel to reconstruct our world. Here, it is possible to both view, and create, unorthodox planar makeup within the specific context of entropic phenomena."

"Do you mean here as in the whole place, or here as in this big underground room?" I asked him. This sounded like a hell of a lot more than what Neferuaten had tried to sell it as back when we were out in the garden. "Is there any unorthodox planar makeup going on right now?"

It took Hamilcar a second to answer this, which meant the answer was probably, as Linos would've put it, complicated. "You misunderstand my statement, miss Hoa-Trinh. I do not mean that it is possible to alter the reality we already inhabit... Neither here, nor in the sanctuary above us... But rather that one can create new, limited 'realities', partially-independent of our own. The Ironworkers used such powers to conduct tests in their reconstruction of mundane physics, before finalizing their work in the Tower of Asphodel proper." He took a breath, the machine which sustained him seeming to get strained for a sec. "But for all their power, they were from an age in which mankind's understanding of inter-planar physics was less sophisticated than our own, and thus their tools were limited in scope. What you see here is an attempt to augment and modernize them to make a radical departure from conventional reality, of the nature Grandmaster Amat described, possible."

He put it so dryly that it managed to come across as boring and academic, but it really is difficult to explain in worlds just how much of a fucking Tower of Babel vibe everything about this was giving. You can find over-the-top architecture made possible by the Power in basically any modern city, but looking at this thing and the sheer volume of enchanting that had to have gone into it... Combined with its spiral looking more like one of those perspective-trick paintings than a real, physical object... And you could basically feel reality squirming with this things ass pressed on its neck.

And that was without even discussing the objective he'd just stated, which was completely insane.

"Is this, uh... Legal...?" Ptolema asked, her voice quiet.

"Pretty sure it's not," I said.

Kam, however, was a lot less preoccupied with those kind of concerns. "Modernize the tools of the Ironworkers..." she said, her eyes still filled with wonder like a kid. "That's-- Such a thing has never been done! Without iron, we're constrained within the frameworks they created. It should be impossible, surely!"

She gestured excitedly with her arms as she spoke, accidentally hitting the side of Mehit's chest with her back of her hand in the crowded environment of the elevator. Kam didn't seem to notice, while the older woman simply closed her eyes, taking a long breath.

Hamilcar, on the other hand, seemed a lot less hyped. "Indeed. It is," he said hesitantly.

Kam blinked. This response threw her off, and her excitement turned to puzzlement.

"As for the why," he kept going, "that is a fairly simple question. All students of the Power know that, at the most fundamental level, it has only two functions: The rearrangement of particles, and the collection of information. But our culture is far more advanced in the science of the former than the latter. Divination only reliably offers snapshots of the present moment, falling apart as it ventures even marginally into the future or the past."

...as the Divination student present, I couldn't help but kinda wanna tell him to piss off for being reductive, since you could make massive inferences with the modern discipline that could predict things decades into the future in select circumstances. But you know I'm not really the type to cut in unless there's actually something worth getting out of it.

"As healers, this limitation is more visible to us than any other arcane vocation," he continued. "Almost all disciplines in which healing features are fixated on merely modifying or augmenting the body. Most focus on adding to it that which is helpful, while one, Thanatomancy, focuses on destroying that which does harm. I myself have believed in the former approach for most of my years..." His gaze ran down his own body. "...but even a child could tell you that all of this is fundamentally misguided. To 'heal' is to attempt to restore the body to a state of prior functionality, but rather than revert its state directly, we simply change it in an awkward attempt to recreate that which once was. However, there is one obvious exception."

"Chronomancy," Kamrusepa said, nodding with self-satisfaction. "It reverses the body to an earlier state directly - through temporal reversal."

"Indeed, acolyte." He nodded. "But tell me. Since you have interjected, why is it that we do not use Chronomancy, when it is so effective?"

"Because of the lack of information available," she said quickly and smoothly, like a kid who'd been called up to the front of the class, knowing they'd already memorized the textbook. "The Divination component of Chronomancy becomes exponentially more costly in terms of eris as time passes, before eventually reaching a singularity of complexity after around thirty minutes, at which temporal reversal transitions from unfeasible to physical impossibility."

"Eloquently put," Hamilcar said, with a nod. "Yes. Because our world is one in which information is constantly subject to decay - the inherent randomness of reality, that which we call 'entropy', making it increasingly difficult to infer the past from the present - we are unable to follow what should be the easy path, and simply restore our bodies to an earlier state." He turned back to Bardiya. "But, were that information retained, then matters would, of course, be different."

We were getting pretty close to the structure now. The colors were getting so bright that half of our group seemed to have tuned out the conversation outright, just staring at the swirling ripples of blue and green, and the increasingly distorted metal webwork.

Bard thought about this for a little while. "I believe I understand what you are getting at," he said, after a bit. "Indeed, if Chronomancy did not have such a limitation, it would be possible to restore an infirm individual back to their state of youth, so long as the brain was omitted." He frowned. "But I fail to see how the creation of a space in which entropy was absent would allow for this. A human would not be able to subsist in such a location, let alone spend their entire life there."

Neferuaten chuckled suddenly, getting both of their attention. "I'm afraid Hamilcar has a bit of a nasty habit of burying the lede in cases like these, Bardiya," she said smugly. "As I said, this facility has a specific role in observing and comprehending entropy - and not just entropy as we experience it, but as it exists in the Higher Planes and even to its root in the Timeless Realm itself. What if, in isolating and mastering it, information could be plucked not just from the present, but the past? What if we could create a miracle where time surrendered to us in utterance, and the states of the body... Or even the environments in which we inhabit... Were linear no longer, but navigable - as simple as flipping through the pages of a novel?"

Again, this was insane. I tried to consider it in the context of what she'd told us earlier about entropy being alive, and that just raised even more questions.

"It can't just be that," I heard you mumble in that stupid way you're always doing. "Zeno said it was about more than immortality..."

I looked to you. "What was that?" I asked. As a courtesy, I mean. I always hear everything whenever you do that shit.

You glanced away. "Uh, sorry. Just thinking about something I heard earlier," you said, presumably in reference to your conversation with Zeno. Presumably in reference to whatever he'd already told you to expect down here, which you hadn't shared for some reason or another.

Really, I'm not stupid, Su.

Meanwhile, Bardiya's face had shifted to a more hesitant look. It appeared that he was about to ask another question, but before he had the chance, Kam spoke up instead. "C-Could that truly be possible? Have you-- Have you really accomplished it?"

"No," Hamilcar said. "We have not."

Once again, her mood deflated faster than a balloon hit by an airship. "I-I don't understand, Grandmaster." she said.

"It is because, in spite of the considerable effort expended by its creator and his supporters, this project has not - and has never - worked," he said, suddenly seeming tired. "It has not, nor has it ever been, functional."

I looked at you, a little surprised your prediction from earlier had been so absolutely on the money. ...In retrospect, I guess that is pretty weird, huh...

"Wait," Seth said, as Kam, in the background, looked devastated. "So this whole thing... This whole giant contraption you built your whole base around... It doesn't even work?"

"It would be mistaken to say that we 'built our base around it.' It was more that this sanctuary was chosen to take advantage of the observational facility, and this component was added at a later date," Hamilcar said. "...however, you are otherwise correct. Despite the importance we once placed upon it, it is a failed endeavor, both in execution and, arguably, concept."

"Then why are we going down here?" Seth asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Because!" Zeno said as he looked to both Hamilcar and Neferuaten, one after the other, with a childish smirk at odds with his face in every sense. "It seems that may no longer be the case, doesn't it?"

Durvasa groaned and rubbed his eyes. Whatever was going on, he, at least, seemed pretty pissed off about it. Linos looked wary, too, though I couldn't see Anna under her hood to know what her reaction was.

"...yes, there may have been a change," Hamilcar said, cautious. "Though it remains to be seen if that is so."

"You sound almost frightened of the possibility, Hamilcar," Zeno said, practically teasing. "Did you not tell me once yourself: Those who fear the future will rot on the inside long before their bodies grow old?"

Hamilcar didn't react to this at all, but once again, the activity of his machine seemed to pick up a bit.

"As I stated," he eventually said, though not in address to Zeno. "I believed it is important for all of us to witness what transpires down here together, for good or ill. This was always to be a pivotal weekend, but it seems that something with far more wide-reaching consequences may occur, consequences that may ultimately prove beyond the capacity of any one individual to contain. Just as an oath gains greater weight when it is witnessed, I believe this, too, will benefit from such recognition and mutual understanding."

"This will be a spectacular day for us all," Zeno said, looking practically chipper. "We should all be glad to be here, in this moment. Don't you agree, Neferuaten?"

She just smiled and nodded, her gaze lost in the light.

I shuddered subtly. Obviously, it was looking increasingly like your assumption about Fang's role here and the change of the staus-quo had been right, regardless of what Neferuaten had said, but that vibe of this all being some kind of ritual we were expected to witness was getting stronger and stronger.

A few moments later, the elevator finally arrived at the bottom, dropping into the open roof of one of the metal rooms. The interior was less utilitarian, but not by much. The walls had more of an obsidian sheen to them, and there was some basic furniture - a table, a few cabinets, some charts with what looked like complicated data recordings next to a logic bridge - but it was still a sharp contrast to the old rich asshole-chic the rest of the sanctuary had going on.

There were windows too. Shaded, but not enough, so the whole place was still illuminated by the blinding light from the rest of the area. And boy, the word 'blinding' barely covrers it. At this point, it was more like staring into a second Great Lamp that also happened to be a piece of experimental art.

The metal bars slid open with a grinding sound as the elevator clunked into place, and Hamilcar started moving without missing a beat. "Come, children, everyone. Let us not linger."

We all followed after him, a spring practically in both Kam and Zeno's step as we went.

"What's up with those lights, anyway...? It's starting to give me a headache." Ptolema said, her eyes narrow.

"Ptolema, don't be silly!" Kam chided. "You're supposed to be a scholar, you should know that phenomena like the aurora are caused by particles of energy striking a magnetic field. Producing one must be part of how this machine operates. Really now, this is something you learn in secondary school."

Ptolema looked a little hurt, and pouted. "I k-kinda know that," she said, crossing her arms. "Don't be pretentious, Kam. Not everybody is gonna perfectly remember weirdly specific about electromagnetism or whatever that they heard when they were like, 16."

"Mm-hmmmmmm," she said, condescendingly. "Hands up anyone here who was confused by the magnetic field."

I put my hand up to piss her off. So did Seth, you, Bardiya and, inexplicably, Zeno, who I was starting to have to reconsider my initial perceptions of...

Ptolema grinned, looking very pleased, while Kam looked away, face flushed with irritated embarrassment.

"I, um..." Ophelia said, "Is it safe to be so close? Isn't there a danger of radiation poisoning?"

"There is no need to worry on that count, miss..." Hamilcar hesitated. "Pardon. I know that your birthplace name does not lend itself to it, but do you have a name you prefer to be used in formality?"

Neferuaten chuckled. "You really do have your weaknesses, Hamil."

"Um, it's alright..." Ophelia adjusted her hood a little, seeming surprised by the question. "I sometimes use 'Fields' as shorthand when talking in Ysaran, if you'd like..."

Hamilcar nodded. "Very well. As I was saying, you do not need to be concerned, miss Fields. For whatever flaws there may be in the design of this place, there is a well-tested field that repels anything that harm us in a vertical line centered around this small observation station. It is, by any standard, quite safe."

"Oh," she said, still seeming wary. "Well, if you're sure."

We were led out to that room and on to another of the metal chambers, which in turn led to a railed bridge connecting to a third-- All of which were more or less filled with the same sort of crap. Tables, cabinets, incredibly sparse decor. It was clear no one ever spent, or was expected it spend, much time down here.

After this, though, we came to a long set of stairs that ultimately led to a heavy stone doorway bearing a metal sign reading 'CONTACT CHAMBER'. It was constructed in a very different style to the rest - kinda reminiscent of one which had led us into the portal room in the Empyrean Bastion.

Actually, that's more apt comparison than I intended, because both ended up leading into eerie circular rooms with a big hole in the floor at the middle. That's about as far as the similarities went, though. Said hole, while still like, five meters across, was much smaller relative to the circular walkway that surrounded it, and there was nothing fancy or artistic like the mural in sight. Like the entryway, the place was a departure from the rest of the place, the walls wrought out of stone, albeit freakishly smooth, uniform stone. It was probably part of the original structure left by the Ironworkers, assuming any of that shit was true.

That was about the only thing striking in terms of visuals. If what we'd passed through so far had been kind of like the world's barest office building, this was more like a warehouse... At least, at first glance. There were mechanical parts of various kinds strewn around, some obviously busted components of the monstrosity surrounding us, while others were less specific. Folds from vents, water tanks, and a hell of a lot of pipes.

The room wasn't dusty or in disrepair, but it was still pretty clear that all of this junk had been here for a long time. Some of it was even rusted. Whatever this place was for, they'd lost interest in it at some point a decade or two ago, and were now just keeping the lights on.

The only thing else was a control panel next to the one part of the pit which wasn't railed off. This was what Hamilcar headed towards the second we stepped in.

"I'm surprised you still remember how to work the controls," Linos said. He giving the room a long, hard look, like he was hoping it wouldn't be down here somehow.

"I am not lost to dementia yet," Hamilcar replied, the metal of his fingers clicking and scraping against the dials. "Everyone, if you would please wait a few moments. This should not take long."

Zeno hummed. "I just pray the mechanism is still functioning correctly after all this time. It was always finnicky..." He looked at Saci. "Girl, have you been keeping tabs on the maintenance golems for this area?"

"Yes, sir," she answered. "There haven't been any irregularities."

"Hm, well, I suppose we'll see for ourselves, won't we?" He stepped closer, angling for a better view of what Hamilcar was doing. Maybe he was afraid he'd sabotage it for some reason.

I glanced down the pit myself, and taking a look at the mechanisms within, it seemed like another elevator shaft, with what looked like a complicated, multi-jointed bronze crane at the bottom. By this stage it was pretty clear to me what all this was for, at least in rough terms, but Kam voiced the question anyway.

"What is this place's purpose, grandmasters?" She asked.

Neferuaten answered. "This component of the facility is used for swapping out certain elements of the project remotely. It exists largely for the sake of convenience, though to some extent safety as well - using the Power in close proximity to the magnetic field can produce erratic results, so levitation and telekinesis might not be entirely safe, and barriers to protect against the radiation might fail."

"And what exactly is being swapped out?" Bardiya asked.

She tapped the point of her nose, smiling at him suggestively. You wandered over to the window, looking worried.

Hamilcar flicked a switch to trigger whatever it was he was trying to do, and the crane beneath us started to pilot, along with a loud clunking sound - something being unsealed or detached - coming from the lower structure of the nightmare itself. The process took almost five minutes, but eventually the arm extended and retrieved something out of sight from the midsection of the machine, then brought it back to the elevator, which rose up to our level.

You wouldn't have figured from the atmosphere among the conclave members, but what came up didn't really seem that substantial... at least, not at first. The bulk of it was a titanium pillar maybe a meter long, with a stand obviously designed to hook into something larger, but this obviously wasn't the focal point. At the tip of it was a much smaller object, a bronze rod that looked almost like a scepter.

It didn't look like anything special at a glance, but looking at it closely, I realized it was covered in incredibly tiny runes at an incredible density, and looked like it was lined with veins of False Iron. Further, there were what had to be thousands of subtle, vertical seams in the metal, suggesting that rather than being a solid object, it had been assembled by hand, piece-by-delicate-piece.

As the lift came to a stop, clicking into place, Hamilcar let out a long sigh. Looking at him from the side, I could see a wistful look in his eyes. Bittersweet, almost.

There was something unsettling about it. He turned.

"The moment of truth, it seems," Neferuaten said, although she looked so fucking confident that it didn't seem like she considered it a moment of anything. You were looking real worked-up at this point, your eyes going back and forth between Fang and the object that had just pulled up in front of us.

"Indeed," Hamilcar said.

"Before you detach it, don't you think they might all be owed a bit of an explanation for what exactly they're seeing?" Zeno asked, waving his hand over our group. "We've gone to all the trouble of bringing them down here. It would be quite unfair of us to leave them standing about with these gormless expressions, don't you think?"

"Must you persist in this farce, boy," Anna stated. "There is little audience."

Something about her saying this caused what I guess I'd call a ripple in the room. Most of the inner circle gave her awkward looks, but I thought I even saw a couple of our classmates react, though I didn't have time to process who. Maybe Bardiya?

It was a weird moment.

"As usual, Anna," Zeno said, without even bothering to turn in her direction, "you have no sense of restraint, and are constantly eager to embrace hypocrisy on a spectacular scale." He folded his gloved hands together. "But even putting such things aside, I think we would all be well-served by a reminder of the stakes here. Don't you think, Hamilcar?"

"...yes, I suppose it is fitting," the other man said. "To explain, then..." He made a airy sound that I think was meant to be a sigh. "What you are seeing here is the 'tail' of the machine, the point of linkage between it and Ironworkers observational device some distance beneath us. It is one of the most vital components."

"Hey, sorry to interject," Seth said, "...but does this thing have, y'know, a name? It's getting kinda confusing to keep just calling it 'machine'."

"It does not have a name," Durvasa said, looking pissed off.

Neferuaten chuckled. "Oh, it does,"

"Nothing scientifically respectable, at the very least," he added.

"Geez," Seth said. "Forget I asked."

"As I was saying, this is a vital component of the artifice," Hamilcar continued. "...however, it has also been the cause of many of its developmental problems over the years. The Ironworkers, after all, used technology that was, at the fundamental level, disparate to our own. There is only so much that can be done using the Power..." He stopped for a second, looking like he wanted to say something, but then suddenly changed his mind. "But. It is possible that a solution has now emerged. Or rather, has been brought to us."

Well, that pretty much clinched what little ambiguity remained.

He looked to Fang. "Acolyte. Step forward, please."

They did a little salute. "Sure thing, boss." They moved over to where he was standing, next to the component.

After this, Hamilcar stood, basically motionless, for a good few moments. It dragged on for so long, and he was so still, that I wasn't sure what was happening-- If he was hesitating, or waiting for something, or what. But eventually, in a real soft voice, he spoke again.

"Take it out," he said.

And so, they did.

Out of the leather sheath we'd seen back in the conference room, they drew a narrow object similar in shape to a blunted sword. At first, it looked like it was just a weirdly-shaped glass tube in a funny green color. There was nothing crazy about it which caught the eye; no runes, no strange aura...

But then, I saw what was in the middle of that tube. Or rather, I didn't see it. Because it was the kind of thing where just the sight was nothing special - it looked like just a long, skinny needle made out of something vaguely metallic, glinting in the light, but not even much. I was expecting it to do something, that Fang would flip a switch and it'd start glowing or shooting out energy like a sparkler. But they just held it there, the other shoe never dropping.

I turned around, wondering if I was missing something. None of the council members looked surprised - they'd probably seen whatever this was during the time the conclave was interrupted, after all - but all the same, they were regarding it with incredibly intense expressions. Like whatever this was, was a really big deal.

So I looked again. And it was then that I noticed. The very, very subtle red color to the metal. And I remembered something I'd seen in a book, a long time ago.

Fang laughed nervously, scratching behind their neck. "Wow," they said. "I guess this is gonna take some explaining, huh?"

...but that was stupid. It was impossible for that to be it. Everybody knew that.

Still. Kamrusepa voiced the sentiment, her eyes wide.

"Is that... Iron...?"