You already know the rest of the story, if it can even be called a story at all. We left the shop after about another hour of largely aimless wandering, and walked my grandfather back to his apartment. Samium left part-way to return to his lodgings and then attend a meeting with some city official, while the two of us continued on what should have been about a ten minute journey to the tram station. There was no poignant final conversation; my grandfather was in no state for that. The last things he said to me in his life were that there were too many new buildings in the area lately (there weren't), and that he wanted to buy some fresh coffee beans because the stuff he'd been drinking lately was awful. That was about 40 seconds before he got a concussion and died.

I could talk more about the moment it happened, and maybe I will later... When this is all over. But for now... I'll tell a different story. This one happened a long time ago, when I was a very young child.

I said before that what happened to my grandfather was the first time I really encountered death, but that was only true in an emotional sense, not in a strictly technical one. My mother... or rather the mother of the person I remember being... died in an accident when I was still an infant. I can't remember anything about her; I only saw her face in photographs and never even heard a recording of her voice. There's literally nothing I could say about her as a person other than that she had brown hair but otherwise looked almost nothing like me, since my family couldn't afford a pre-natal distinction treatment, and my foster family didn't bother with the cheaper, later-in-life ones.

My first memory pertaining to my mother comes from when I must have been about four or five years old. After some playground exchange about the subject, I asked my dad (about two years before he had a breakdown, got involved with a pseudo-revolutionary nationalist movement, and effectively abandoned me) why I didn't have a mother. He got upset, but ultimately said the predictable sort of things that anyone would say to a child in my situation.

He told me that I did have a mother, even if I couldn't remember her. He told me that she'd sadly been taken from us, but had loved me dearly. And he told me she would always be with me, and that I shouldn't be ashamed.

I consider myself an extremely sentimental person, but I'm also self-aware enough to understand that sentimentality is broadly a learned behavior rather than a natural one. Grief, the raw agony of loss, is natural. But sentimentality, the ritualized and often abstracted bittersweet longing for lost things, is like grief minced up in a factory and sold to you in a tin. It's the product of a million sad stories, songs, cultural acts of reverent remembrance; it's something we learn to feel in order to soften ourselves, an active suppression of the the numbing and forgetting that is our animal character.

So when I heard that as a kid, I wasn't as sentimental as I am now. And so was completely baffled as to what my dad even fucking meant.

Like, what the hell does it mean for someone who you don't even remember to 'always be with you'? It was so obvious to me, even then, that it was a comforting platitude of the emptiest, shallowest sort. Under normal circumstances, one can interpret that sort of phrase as meaning that you'll always have the memory of the person to bring you comfort and immerse you in tangible fantasy, but I didn't even have that.

Why do humans love one another? When you allow yourself to sound like an absolute creep, it's not as though the answer is complicated: We love people because they have utility to us, either explicitly or abstractly. Setting aside sexual desire, people fall in romantic love because they sense interpersonal compatibility for a long-term relationship of mutual material and psychological support, including a degree of emotional openness that is not normally socially acceptable. The same parts of the brain fire when you fall in love as when you find a new source of water in an inhospitable environment; it feels very good because you have acquired a scarce resource.

Close friendships are the same but with diminished commitment, while non-immediate family are the same with diminished levels of support. Parent-child relationships are the most complicated, with the character of the utility shifting dynamically over the course of decades, first wholly abstractly psychological for the parent and material for the child, then ultimately balancing or even swinging in the other direction. There's also an element of return on investment.

...okay, I did say that would make me sound like a creep, but it was maybe a little much.

My point is, human relationships are founded on the fulfillment of needs. Without that, the word 'relationship' has no meaning.

The fact was, my mother was dead. ...no, even the word 'dead' is a kind of illusion, an attempt at appealing to history to impart a greater sense of realness to a phantom of the mind. Rather, my mother did not exist. Other children's mothers gave them things because the flesh of their brains contained a will that loved them. If I'd dug up my mothers grave, the ashes which had once constituted her mind would do nothing but sit there. If I put them in my mouth, I would choke on them. All telling me she was 'with me' did was make me think about what I didn't have.

This isn't the story I wanted to tell, just a prelude to it. Because my dad had put that idea in my head, I wondered again and again over the course of the next few years how my life might have been better if I did have a mother, and channeled those feelings into reality in various ways. When I moved to the foster home and came to pretty much hate my dad, I started fantasizing a lot about their having my mother suddenly show up out of the blue one day to get me, with her death having been some big misunderstanding. When I got too old to believe that was remotely plausible, I instead had fantasies about having a mother more generally; about being adopted, and that missing part of my life being filled up. I'd think about what we'd do together, what words she would speak to me. How I'd get all the things I'd missed out on, how the world would be corrected.

But if you know anything about adoption, you probably already know that once you're past about age four, you're essentially past your 'expiration date'. Almost no one wants a child who isn't an impressionable infant, and the few who do are generally going to go for the cute overachievers. I was not a cute overachiever. And even if I had been a cute overachiever, having a parent still floating around who occasionally flirted with the idea of trying to be a father again was a death sentence.

So eventually, I had to accept it was never going to happen, and give up trying to attract the few prospective parents who occasionally came to have a look at us. I grieved, and did my best to suck it up. I took the bitterness that had taken root in my heart on the day I'd heard that vacuous platitude and used it to harden my heart. I submitted to the apathy of the cosmos and accepted injustice.

Of course, I was hardly unique in any of this - probably every kid around me was going through a similar emotional journey as they grew older. People talked about it in the way that, funnily enough, people generally talk about death. It is inevitable. No help is coming. Let it go.

But then, one day, something odd happened. Another child - I didn't know him well, just that he had a reputation of being 'the funny one' around the building and really liked collecting posters and pamphlets for live theatrical productions - had my original fantasy literally play out. Despite thinking his mom was dead, she just showed up. They had a tearful reunion, and a few weeks later, he was gone.

At the time, I felt sick. It was like a pillar had fallen out of the world.

Should I never have given up hope? And if not, what made my hope false, and his reasonable?

Once I started to think about it, I realized the world was contradictory. Everywhere, you found people telling others that things they wanted were foolish and impossible, and they needed to accept reality. And then you found stories where those very things had happened. 'Your condition means you'll never live past 40.' 'They'll never take you back; you need to move on.' 'You'll never find work as a musician, stop living in a fantasy.' 'Everyone in the field agrees it's scientifically impossible.' 'Don't buy a lottery ticket, it's a waste of luxury debt.' Again and again.

Kamrusepa was sort of an idiot, but sometimes she brought up insightful things, even if it was usually an accident. Why was living forever - or at least, an obscenely long time - not out of the question for us, but for the people who wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh, even a little life extension was such an absurd proposition it was worthy of a parable to warn people away? It was all in the context. The slippery, ever-shifting context. We expected to live to 500. But tomorrow that could change, and that expectation could become insane; morbidly pessimistic, or delusionally optimistic.

People need narratives, boundaries of conceivable reality, to function. But they're towers built on quicksand. The world's true form - its true­ form - is a wasteland of precarity, where your dearly-held wisdom can turn to self-destructive poison at a moment's notice. Nothing is certain. Not even death.

The old world was annihilated for an arbitrary reason. And it was reborn in an arbitrary way. So to it was for my own birth. Everything is profane.

So how are you supposed to live? How do you know whether or not a cause is doomed until it's spent you? When is it right to let things go, and if some things, why not everything?

Maybe I was just immature, and failed to accept the mathematics of circumstantial choice that defined being a human being. But everywhere I looked, the world was dissonant. I stood outside stores and watched other people buy things I desperately wanted, but couldn't afford. People surrounded by loved ones they had attained by default, while I hadn't. And I felt angry, but more then that, I felt confused. All of it felt unjust, but which was genuinely unjust, and which only felt that way because of my own delusional entitlement? What did 'entitlement' even mean?

I didn't understand. I didn't know what battles to fight. I couldn't tell which kinds of pain I should accept, and which were my enemy.

...I'm sorry. I don't mean to rant. I just don't know how to put it into words.

My 'motive'.

I think it was in despair at that confusion that, for the few years between then and when my grandfather died, I started to believe in fate. That life, or at least my life, had to operate on some kind of storybook logic. That there was inherent meaning in any struggle I took up. That there would be a happy ending.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

There is no force that can exist in the human heart more terrifying than genuine belief.

Even now I don't know all the specifics, but the rough details are certain. My grandfather was utterly unwilling to accept the person he loved having died. It drove him to dedicate his entire life to a field in which he had little natural talent, to accomplish feats of arcane science that few could imagine... And to commit murder, and exploit some of the people who trusted him the most.

Still, the world bent. He must have believed, too.

I've told this story - not this part in particular, this entire narrative of my past - selfishly, in a way where I know I'll have come across more sympathetically than I deserve. Sometimes, like when I spoke about when I first met Cheng Gue, it's bordered on outright deceit. I've done this because, even though I espouse guilt and self-loathing, the truth is that part of me still wants to believe that I'm a good person.

But that's enough.

13 years, 93 days, and 17 hours prior to the present, under no illusions about the details of what was to happen, I committed murder.

And... This has been my confession.

...

It's enough for me say that. ...isn't it?

𒊹

U𒊹bi𒊹ici𒊹n 𒊹io𒊹nclo𒊹u𒊹e | 5:38 PM | 𒊹5,535th Day

Fang differed from the others in that we'd heard an account already, albeit a bit of a rushed one, when they'd found us in Samium's room. But this one - which began at the point that they and Ptolema parted - diverted from what they'd told us in subtle ways almost immediately. The first point of contradiction was a little ambiguous; Fang had told us that they heard Ptolema shout 'something about' having heard Seth, but made it sound like they hadn't heard it themselves. Meanwhile, this account was the inverse. They explicitly said they heard him scream 'like a baby' (which caused him to wrinkle his nose in embarrassment).

Somewhat less ambiguous was their reasoning for going to the armory. Not to hide, but rather to obtain explosives as part of an escape plan. While it wasn't out of the question they'd gloss over something like that, the differences seemed increasingly strange.

That said, the most obvious contradiction didn't come from the account itself, but rather in comparing it to the one authored by 'Ptolema'. In that retelling, she - and presumably Seth - had reported spotting Fang heading into one of the bedrooms when ascending to the second floor. ...but in what we were reading, no such thing had happened. They and Anna had headed directly to the third floor.

"Just to confirm," Kamrusepa said, "Ptolema, Seth. When you said that your experiences matched that in these accounts, that included this supposed sighting of Fang, yes?"

"T-That's right, yeah," Ptolema said, scratching their head. Seth nodded along - seeming to be focused on reading - as she continued. "Or at least, I was pretty sure it was Fang. I mean, their clothes and hair matched." She frowned. "This is really weird, though. Like, we're one thing, but how the heck would they have an account from Fang? The only person who'd know that was Anna, and like, Anna's dead! Double dead!"

"You've got it backwards, Ema," Seth said, shaking his head at the absurdity of it all. "Again, how do they know any of this? I mean, with Fang, it's at least hypothetically possible that like, I dunno-- That whoever we thought was Anna was one of the real culprits all along, and they faked their death from the contact paradox somehow. Since they'd been with them, they'd have known what happened, right?"

He'd thrown that suggestion out incidentally, but it was a very interesting thought.

"So I can see that just being a tactic to spook us," he continued. "But knowing me and Theo's thoughts, like literal thoughts-- That's fucked. I mean, there's no way, unless it really is--"

"Don't be stupid," Ezekiel cut in, his tone increasingly terse, even for him. "The one from 'me' was already a lie, and this one has the distinct advantage of no one who can confirm or deny it even being alive. They're probably pulling it out of their ass." He grimaced at Seth. "If anything, the fact the two of you are putting this forward makes you suspicious."

Seth looked at the other boy with an expression that bordered on hopelesness for a moment, flicking rapidly between confusion, anger and anxiety. Kam was doing her best to keep a close eye on the both of them.

"There's no point in bothering with this shit," Ezekiel went on. "They're trying to manipulate us into killing each other. Fuck this!"

"Your opinion is noted, Ezekiel," Kam intoned. "But authenticity aside, I think we're a level-headed enough bunch to see this through to the end."

Ran made a grunt that conveyed skepticism on that point better than I could've with words.

In the account, Fang began questioning Anna on the way to the armory; asking about the 'monster' which had jumped them and had, based on what we'd witnessed, actually been some kind of prop all along. With that context and how things had ultimately turned out, the conversation seemed plausible. Fang had obviously possessed an extremely confident suspicion about the whole affair when they'd led us to the bedroom where we'd found Seth, Ptolema, and Ezekiel tied up.

Actually, let's revisit that whole situation for a second. Seth, Ezekiel and to a lesser extent Theo and Ptolema were all acting suspicious. The situation we'd found them in had obviously been a setup; the webbing was artificial, and the spider-bird-thing on the ceiling had clearly been only engineered to frighten anyone stepping through the door, with little attempt to have the illusion hold under close scrutiny. (Like, it was a good prop by theater standards, but if whoever had put it there had been seriously accounting for the possibility we'd actually shoot at it, they'd at least have used Biomancy to give it the rough impression of having been an actual living being.)

I'd already suspected as much in a more scattered way, but when you laid it out like that, the conclusion to draw regarding what was really going on felt incredibly obvious: They'd faked the whole thing. There'd been no monster attack, and they'd never been ensnared at all.

If you accepted this, three questions followed. The first - and probably least important - was 'were Theo and Ptolema accomplices'?

Theo had run off at the first sign of trouble and had reported feeling disoriented and confused, struggling to recall the specifics of the monsters attack, and only having a vague impression of something leaping up the stairs along with flame. Similarly, Ptolema had reported having blurry memories of her capture, merely having said that she recalled something having 'jumped' her, and then dragged her down the hall while she was semi-conscious. She'd also been in a visibly different state to Ezekiel and Seth when we'd discovered, having been struggling to escape the webbing while the other two were - or feigned being - in some kind of groggy trance.

So, the obvious deduction to make was that they'd both been drugged, right?

Well, probably not 'drugged'. Ezekiel was a Neuromancer, and they'd just been underground with him where the Power still functioned prior to this happening. It wouldn't have been impossible for him - while they were distracted by whatever illusion, mundane or transmundane, had conjured the monster attack - to have taken down their arcane resistances and administered some kind of agent into their bodies that would leave them confused and susceptible to suggestion at around the right time. Maybe?

Though that felt like it'd be incredibly easy to discover - all we'd have to do would be to go back and use the Anomaly-Divining Arcana in the underground, and we'd have ourselves a closed case. So...

Occam's Razor, the logical part of my brain said. It doesn't have to be as complicated or messy as to involve the Power. Ptolema said she remembered being sprayed with something right as the attack happened. That could have been a low-level anesthetic.

That's not Occam's Razor, my inner skeptic objected. Occam's Razor is that they're just somewhat better liars and are trying to cover their bases. Like, seriously, 'spraying a low-level anesthetic'? How would you even do that without risking them just passing out and ruining the whole thing? Or getting brain damage? I swear, it's like you never even had medical training.

I bit my lip. This was difficult.

Anyway, the second and more pertinent question was, why the hell would they even do that?

Before I could formulate an attempt at an answer to that question, Ran flipped to the next page. Fang continued to question 'Anna', seeming to be implying she'd been complicit in Durvasa's death, or that Durvasa's death had been faked altogether... But at the same time, that this most recent development had been something unexpected. That they were 'rattled'.

That... Didn't feel right.

"My, my," Kam said, narrowing her eyes sharply. "Fang really was putting it together, it seems." She glanced down to Linos, almost incidentally. "So was Durvasa's death something pre-ordained, mister Melanthos? Something the rest of the Order conspired to do?"

He faced downward, his features rigid. "No, miss Tuon," he said stiffly.

"Or maybe his death was faked? What did Fang say-- That this was 'theater'?" She shook her head. "That summoning circle."

He said nothing, his hands gripping the rest of his chair tightly.

"Seriously, we shouldn't just be throwing out accusations, Kam," Seth said. "That's really dangerous."

She scoffed, not with frustration, but indignance. Like he was being ridiculous.

Maybe I just had the wrong idea, or Fang had known they weren't talking to the real Anna, and there was a whole layer to the conversation that I wasn't picking up on.

But the answer to 'why the hell would they even do that' felt as though it had to be... Well, there was only really one possibility that I could imagine. One which had been lurking in the background unspoken for the past two hours, and which it felt like Kamrusepa had already arrived at herself.

Prior to everything going to hell, Linos had been urging us to let him go confront the monster, saying that it only wanted him-- Speculating that this had all genuinely been some supernatural bid for vengeance on behalf of the child killed in the Order's experiments. And as he'd pointed out and I think I'd observed too, that appeared to be in line with the facts at the time, since other than Bardiya, only members of the Order had been killed up until that point.

And so he'd urged us, repeatedly, to let him go confront the monster, asserting that it would free the people it had taken captive.

...but then Fang had insisted on their plan; that instead, we all go together. And this had left Linos in visible distress.

When considered in aggregate, it felt almost too obvious - that the entire setup, the whole sequence of events, had been a sham to have us leave Linos 'for dead' in that room as we made our escape from the sanctuary. That he was, bluntly speaking, trying to fake his death. Why was an altogether different question that seemed much harder to answer, but it didn't make the conclusion any less inescapable.

But when you considered that in concert with the observation Fang was making in this account, which was valid whether or not the whole account was made up... And especially with the understanding I'd reached earlier, that someone in the Order - if not the council in its totality, which would probably be a great deal simpler - had snuck in the boys early for some unknown purpose... Then one started to wonder.

Had there been more of the night which was a setup by the Order, with at least Seth and Ezekiel as accomplices?

And if so... How much? If one leaned towards the interpretation that Fang was saying that Durvasa's death was a sham, then that made two instances of a 'death'. But in most of the other cases, we'd seen actual bodies, and in the instance where we hadn't - the contact paradox - extremely strong secondary evidence in the symptoms we'd experienced, plus someone just having been killed right before our eyes. So someone was killing people.

Two groups of culprits. That's what I'd been speculating for a while now. But what if...

But no-- If that was true, then I struggled to see how what Fang was saying to 'Anna' in this account could make any sense whatsoever. Because obviously this Anna, fake or not, would need to have been complicit in such a plan anyway; Fang themselves was outlining that in terms of what happened to Durvasa. So why would they be acting like they'd experienced something unexpected?

I thought back to the way that 'Anna' had been acting in the last minutes of her life. She'd seemed different - almost resigned, like she just wanted things to be over. And in context that made total sense; if she knew that Fang had already figured things out, then of course she'd be defeated!

So... What did they think had surprised her?

The final part focused on something we already knew - their discovery of the gas having been fake all long. Nothing shocking there. And it cut off abruptly afterwards.

"That's it," Ran said, drawing the image back again.

"Huh," Ptolema said. "Kind of an anti-climax, I guess--"

But as soon as the last page had been visible for a moment, Kam suddenly sharply clapped her hands.

"Alright!" she proclaimed. "I think it's about time we dispensed with pretense, don't you think?"

DIRECTOR: Alright, I think this is it. Let's cue the lights--