Perhaps if I'd been willing to face what I'd done properly back then, things could have been different. If I'd embraced the truth, accepted the disgust I felt for my old self completely, I feel like I could have disappeared. Well, not completely-- My memories would still be there, obviously, but I could have overcome the way Samium had rewired my mind and have destroyed that identity. Or at least have sidelined it, which would have been better than nothing.

Instead, even though I adopted Utsushikome's life and behavior on the surface, I never even came close to letting go of the truth beneath. I despised myself, but my ego was bloated with bitter resentment at the world. I wanted my life to have meant something, even if that 'something' would only have been to serve as a lead-in to the new, brighter life I had now. That determined belief in the story of my salvation persisted, just pushed deeper into the depths of my soul.

I wanted to feel happy. I wanted to be saved. I didn't want to be a girl who got her brain molested.

Still, things might yet have been somewhat different were it not for the other half of my bargain with Samium. Maybe if I'd remained 'in-character' non-stop for that first year, I would have just settled into a groove where my innermost self held on to the role it was playing so tightly and for so long that, with enough decades, they'd fuse together into something that was no longer performative. And the crime I'd committed would just become a weird childhood memory I'd abstract into oblivion.

Would that have been better? Would it still have been murder if I deluded myself into becoming such a perfect doppelganger, I'd cease to even be self-aware about it? I'm not sure - like I said, I'm not much of a philosopher. But I'd still be filtering out all of the real Utsushikome's feelings about the situation which were inconvenient to me, so probably.

But I'll never know, because of course I had a second role I also needed to play.

True to his word, Samium contacted me a few days later, though not over my logic bridge as I'd expected, but with just a regular letter addressed to my new name. He wrote it as if there was nothing special going on, too, with it just talking about having set up a meeting with my grandfather like 'we'd talked about'. The whole thing was set up in a way where there'd be nothing which would be suspicious to my parents if they happened to find out; I could just tell them I'd wanted to get to know him a little before he passed away, since I was planning on being an arcanist too (and they weren't aware he was practically a total fraud in that respect).

Not that it would have been a total non-issue, of course. I only found out about this later, but about a year prior to this point, he'd been visiting my mother, and in a fit of confused anger, had crudely used the Power to break down a door while screaming at my father, and then had thrown a vase at his head. Even if that represented the limits of his capabilities, assault with the Power could still get you in serious legal trouble - as a general rule, any crime one commits as an arcanist is judged thrice as harshly as one performed through mundane means as part of the Censors policy on preventing uninitiated-arcanist hostility. Presumably he'd only got away with it on account of his connections.

The event had scared my mother out of her mind, and she'd tried to have him placed in care, only for the gulf in their wealth and social power to render that impossible; his lawyers had intervened and kicked up enough of a fuss that the state wouldn't dare touch it. After that, she'd settled for cutting him off completely, and grieving for him like he was already dead.

So Samium had moved him into the spare apartment he had in the city, and that was mostly where I saw him, except for a handful of times we went out to shop or eat. We met maybe once twice or a month on average for a little over a year. As for Samium, I only met him four more times - the initial meeting where he did a short checkup on me and re-explained how exactly I needed to talk to my grandfather, two lunches with him where we barely spoke personally at all, and then that final day. After that, I never saw him again.

I'm... still not going to talk about everything, because it's not relevant to what I did, and certainly not to anything about this scenario. Suffice it to say, the plan worked. I pretended to be Wen, and despite probably doing a piss-poor job of it in most regards, it was sufficient to convince him. (He'd obviously forgotten, or at least in his confusion and joy set aside, his decision to let the matter go.)

But obviously, this was uncomfortable for me, because it was an unwelcome reminder that I wasn't Utsushikome. That I was obliged to break character in this way periodically to satisfy the terms of my new existence. I wasn't allowed to lose myself in the fantasy that my old life had been nothing but an idle fantasy.

So, how did I cope with this cognitive dissonance? Well, I decided to lose myself in her grandfather's fantasy, too. I let myself believe that this really was all some kind of fairy tale. That I was this girl he loved reborn. I listened enthusiastically to his stories on the good days, and tried my best to care for him on the bad. I let him cry on my shoulder. When he bemoaned about the order or that his 'Great Work' had all come to nothing, I soothed him and told him that he'd done his best, despite having no idea what the fuck he was talking about.

Then some unpleasant things happened. After that, I didn't want to think about him at all. I wished he would just hurry up and die so I could stop and move on with my life.

Then, about a month later, he did.

"Oh, gods, what was that?!"

"Was that a--"

"Back this way, Anthios! Back to the station!"

My grandfather looked confused, his dull eyes darting back and forth. "W-Wen, what's happening?"

"It's alright," Samium said, before I could reply. "It's just a rowdy protest down the street. Let's just hurry into one of the shops in case--"

"I'm scared, Wen," he interrupted anxiously.

"I-It's okay," I said. "It's alright."

"Hey, watch it!" someone shouted.

"The horse..."

"No, ugh--"

"I heard another shot!"

"Careful," Samium said, as a man pushed into me.

"I'm okay, we're just--Oof!"

What exactly happened, in that moment?

Even if you have a good memory, if you think about something enough, it starts to slip away from you. That old trope about how you overwrite a memory every time you remember it isn't wholly true, but the experience of recalling it does slowly form new connections. Events become mixed with similar ones, fantasy blends with reality, feelings in the present are impressed upon records of the past, in future recollections feeling like they were part of the moment. The message lingers; the meaning is lost.

I remember a horse acting up and someone getting knocked aside. I remember the gunshot, and then a second one a few moments after the fact. I remember holding his hand tightly, though I'm not sure how tightly. And I remember thinking he was going to catch himself.

But did the horse - one of the carriage breeds designed to be as stoic as monks - actually act up, or did someone just bump it and force it to move, with me blending it with some other memory later? And was there really a second gunshot, or did I just hear people shouting about something they took for one, with it getting inserted into the narrative later?

And was I really holding his hand so tight?

Sometimes I wonder.

Maybe I wanted him to die, in that moment. Maybe it wasn't that I thought he was fine, but that I hoped he wasn't. Because he was an inconvenience to me. One more obstacle standing between me and Shiko. Maybe I let go of him and allowed him to fall.

Maybe the presence I sensed with me in that moment, that creature that might have been a bird or might have been a spider, wasn't death in the physical sense, but the embodiment of my epiphany. That in the end, everything is arbitrary. That meaning, even down to the lives of the people we love the most, is something we choose to invent every day, in each moment that we exist.

Empty. Profane. Individual.

Utsushikome's grandfather had lived his entire life devoted to the memory of one person who he loved more than anyone else in the world, to pursuing a dream of them being reunited and spending eternity together. But in the end, that story had ended with him spending his final days with a cheap imposter who didn't give so much as a single shit about him. His last thought, the culmination of all those years, was probably to wonder why his beloved didn't even seem to care as his skull tumbled to the ground.

In him, I saw a mirror of my own relentless magical thinking, and in the flippancy with which my heart responded, I saw my own essential self-centeredness. And I realized there was nothing mystical about what I had done. We hadn't been one person born separately. It hadn't been my destiny. My old life hadn't just been a dream.

The world was as it appeared. There was only me, and the choices I'd made. No stories, just things that happened.

I'd killed my best friend. There had never been anything more to it than that.

I couldn't accept it.

I spent a few days after it happened in a strange reverie, everything feeling derealized. No one blamed me for him dying; my parents barely even asked questions. My mother held a funeral for him at the fancy cemetery in the mountains behind the city, at the big temple to the Dying Gods, and cried about how she wished she'd rebuilt bridges with him before he'd died but was glad that at least I'd gone out of my way to make a connection. My little brother, who had basically never met him, kept trying to leave the reception to run around in the garden, and I had to fetch him three times.

I couldn't look any of them in the eye. I couldn't pretend to be the person they loved, knowing that I was her murderer. Knowing that my relationships with them were things I'd desired and stolen.

Samium didn't come to the funeral, though I did hear from him one last time in the form of a piece of registered mail I had to pick up from the post office. It was a simple and straightforward note discussing some business stocks my grandfather had apparently wanted me to inherit discreetly (he also left me the apartment he'd been living in, though I gifted it to my brother since the memories I had of the place were too offputting to ever imagine actually living there, and also because I'd hate to become a landlord) that only had a few lines of personal address. They read:

'For the sake of my family, I must humbly ask you to never speak of our relationship over the past year, now or after my death. Despite this ending so soon, I hope you are able to put this behind you and live happily, as I'm sure your grandfather would want even had he known the truth.'

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The kindness in those words, the lack of judgement, felt like poison. A part of me had expected Samium to expose me after my grandfather's death. But now I knew that would never happen, and that if I threw this letter away, I could just live out my whole life without the truth ever being revealed.

My head felt the clearest it ever had in my entire existence, and every action I thought of taking was so obvious its implications that it was as if the world was made out of fragile glass. I remember sitting in my room, holding that letter and being so afraid. So overwhelmed by the shame I felt that it was like staring into the sun. So terrified in knowing that I would just continue to live that it felt like I was a step away from the vacuum of space.

I felt the weight of it. Of being nothing but a human being in an empty, uncaring world. Where there was nothing - no concept, no feeling, no law of gods or men or the heart - that could not be violated on a whim.

But above all else, now that I understood this, I could simply walk away. I could take what I had stolen, knowing I had stolen it with no veil of justification to the contrary, and choose not to care. To commit any sin, and choose not to care. To feel nothing.

A life without innocence. Without stories. A world of objects bumping into one another.

And that... Felt unbearable. Even more than having been my old self.

So, I chose one more story for myself. A story of redemption, where I would chase with everything I had the slim hope of setting things right. Where I would reverse fate, and bring Utsushikome, the girl who had saved me and shown me a brighter - if only for a few fleeting years - back from the dead, so she could smile as she had once again.

A story where I would die.

𒊹

PLAYWRIGHT: There. Patched together well enough, don't you think?

DIRECTOR: ...I suppose.

PLAYWRIGHT: You suppose? Are you upset I had to use content from a prior scenario? It's fine! The continuity is almost flawless, and now there's enough stability restored to take us to the terminus. You should be praising me as a miracle worker--

DIRECTOR: No, pardon me. I'm not angry with you. It's... Fine.

PLAYWRIGHT: Oh.

DIRECTOR: It's coherent. You did a fine job. It's just... Well, it is what it is.

PLAYWRIGHT: I see. I see what you mean.

DIRECTOR: It's just a shame.

PLAYWRIGHT: ...yes. A pity.

DIRECTOR: I wish we could have pleased them, if only a little bit.

PLAYWRIGHT: Well! A finale is still a finale no matter what, hm, big brother? Let's get it done so we can all go home.

DIRECTOR: Mm. We're professionals. We'll see it through to the very end.

U𒊹bi𒊹ici𒊹n 𒊹io𒊹nclo𒊹u𒊹e | 7:06 PM | 𒊹5,535th Day

I awoke to the sound of a distant bang, and a violent, painful cough. Blood filled my mouth along with a bit of puke, and this quickly became a nostalgic moment after I realized that virtually everything in my body hurt so badly it was almost inconceivable. My chest ached like it had been smacked in with a hammer, and my legs and waist area were nothing but omnipresent stinging, sharp agony. I wanted to scream, but it felt like this would destroy my lungs.

I was trapped under something-- Everything was dark, and I could feel heavy weight crushing my shattered lower body. My upper body was mostly mobile, though there were still pieces of debris scattered upon it. And there was something on my face in particular that was strangely light.

I grabbed it - for some reason, it turned out to be an open book - and flung it to the side. Now I had a better sense of what was going on. My view was still obscured, but not completely. It looked like a building had collapsed on me, and the debris was responsible for my present state. A chunk of what seemed to be stone walling lay shattered below my waist, while two other slabs balanced against one another over my head. Light fell on my face around the edges and where they met unevenly in the center.

I grasped around instinctively, and found my scepter lying on the rock next to me, surrounded by something sharp and pointy that made me briefly recoil; the creepy frozen grass, I inferred. This was a positive development insofar as I meant I probably wasn't about to die (or at least not yet), but also a negative one insofar as it meant I was not seconds away from being released from this unbelievable anguish by the sweet release of death.

My mind, though mostly preoccupied by the aforementioned and the fact that I was still coughing up blood, tried to piece together the situation. What the fuck happened? We were all in the air, up in a circle... I'd just worked out Kam was about to accuse Theodoros. And then something... Something...

There'd been a very bright light, I could vaguely recall. What the hell had that been? A bomb, some kind of stunning incantation? Was my head injured? It didn't feel like it.

Let's stay alive first. Part one: Get this shit the hell off me. I raised my scepter and cast the Object-Manipulating Arcana, and fortunately did not die instantly from backlash or draining my own life force due to my scepter not having enough eris. I hauled the stuff off my legs first, which produced less of a feeling of relief than I'd hoped on account of them being completely fucked,then carefully moved both the ones intersecting above my head at once.

The light from the bioenclosure ceiling struck my eyes, and I squinted for a moment-- But something strangely-shaped tumbled off one of them and landed beside me before I could focus on my surroundings. Part of it sticking out almost smacked me in the face, but I quickly caught it by tracing out the command to repeat my last incantation.

Then I realized what it was, and almost wished I hadn't.

Oh.

It's Ezekiel's body.

He was staring down at me from his position a couple meters in the air, vacant-eyed, with a massive, cauterized hole through the side of his chest, the fabric of his fancy robes falling apart. One of his legs was clearly broken and his hands were all cut up, like he'd been crawling along the ground.

It wasn't like I was that torn up about the guy after everything that had happened, but still, it shocked the hell out of me. The body was fresh, the color still in his cheeks. I hadn't been out long, that was certain.

But... If he's dead...

I cursed to myself, flinging his remains to the side. I incanted the Death-Sensing and Flesh-Animating­ Arcana, and as I'd expected, it was bad. Both my legs were broken messily - in five places between them - and my right hip was seriously fractured, too, with internal bleeding everywhere. On top of that, my ribs were bruised and one outright shattered, the edge piercing slightly into my left lung, which explained the blood.

There was a limit to what I could do to patch myself back together. I animated countless dead cells to halt the internal bleeding and pull back together torn muscle, but bones in a state this dire were a job for a Osteobiomancer, not a Thanatomancer. I could piece them back together manually and hold them in place with the Entropy-Denying Arcana, but I'd be constantly draining eris, and I'd never be able to manipulate the cells enough to repair the damage in the time I'd have-- Maybe a few hours, assuming I still had most of my eris and optimized the incantation to the best of my ability.

And these were my legs. Once that time was up, I'd be going nowhere.

But that felt like the least of my concerns right now. I did it anyway, with the process taking several minutes and being a lot more complicated than I'd imagined. I had to conjure water to keep myself from passing out. It wasn't like I could replace my lost blood, either.

Finally, I felt in a state where I could conceivably stand. I gritted my teeth and used the Power to levitate to my feet; not the most efficient use of eris, but I didn't want to test my math by putting too much pressure on the wrong places.

I looked around and, with a surprisingly muted feeling in my heart, assessed the situation.

Everyone was dead.

The not-abbey had almost completely collapsed. The entire front wall had given way and shattered around the grounds, and all three floors had collapsed on top of one another. An incalculable heap of books from the third floor laid atop a huge pile of rubble, encircled by the three remaining walls and about half of the roof. Multiple logic engines lay shattered and in pieces, their tiny gears everywhere.A bell from one of them hung off a pile of rock, tinkling every time the stone shifted further downwards.

Linos's body was the closest, though as was already established, it might not have been right to call him 'dead' to begin with. He was lying right in front of me, sprawled out dead in the center of what was the path leading to the front door of the building, back when it still had doors. The upper part of his head was missing, exposing the logic bridge 'spine' that had also been present on Zeno's puppet body.

So... It was a fake, I thought. For their plan to convince us they were dead? Where's the real one, then?

He said he thought the other members of the inner circle had really died. Was that a lie? And if not, how did he survive whatever managed to kill their real selves?

...no. This didn't matter anymore.

Most everyone else was somewhere to the right. Ptolema's body had been cut cleanly in half along the lower chest, the upper half laid face down and all but impaled on frozen grass, while the lower had been tossed almost ten meters towards the bioenclosure wall, mangled in ways beyond description. Seth's remains were close by, at the bottom of a shallow pit where a section of the ground seemed to have been torn open. It looked like his body had been mummified, the remains so shriveled they looked likely they were a stern kick away from crumbling into dust.

Finally, Kamrusepa's corpse was up against the ruins, everything but her head buried under an immense mass of rubble. The neck was snapped, and her face was staring dead upwards, the eyes wide with horror. Drool was falling from her open mouth, like she'd been screaming. Fighting with everything she had at the horror of her dream of eternal life being torn from her hands.

Dead. They were all... dead.

What had happened? Had someone attacked us? Had there been some kind of fight?

Why was I still alive?

I didn't even know how to think about it. My mind had fallen completely silent. Like it had nothing left to contribute.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my logic engine, checking the time. It had just passed 7 o'clock; I'd been unconscious for approximately an hour, meaning I'd well-missed the transposition window through which we'd intended to escape. Of course there were theoretically the others that Sekhmet had listed, but somehow, I couldn't feel a sense of hope or urgency at all.

It felt, in the back of my mind, as though it was a foregone conclusion. That I was about to die here too, no matter what I did.

As I was looking downward at the machine, I noticed something. The book that had been on my face, now lying on the ground with the same page open, was the same one I'd been reading over the course of the whole night - the weird never-ending Epic of Gilgamesh fanwork. The regular text wasn't big enough for me to make out, but there was something else there, scrawled much larger with a regular pencil.

'JUST STAY STILL UNTIL IT'S OVER. EVERYTHING IS FINE.'

It was written in my handwriting.

I stared vacantly at it for a few seconds, not sure what to do with the fact that it existed. I checked my bag. Sure enough, one of my pencils was missing from its usual spot. I blinked a few times.

I... wrote this...?

To myself?

Suddenly, I heard the first noise since managing to get my bearings. It was a muted thump-- Something heavy hitting something hard. It sounded like it came from around the left side of the building.

Suddenly, it hit me. Theo and Ran aren't here. Ran might still be alive.

The gears in my mind started turning again. No, she must be alive! She wouldn't have died here! Not after everything!

I rushed towards the origin of the noise, clambering over the rubble to avoid the grass so as to save eris. My animated legs jolted periodically with unexpected pain as I struggled up the mound of stone and, old tomes, and echo mazes. I passed one of the scrolls describing the creation of the Iron Princes half-buried under a shelf that had fractured down the middle. Sheaves of parchment wafted into the air as I stumbled past the summit.

I've got to get to her quickly. She might be hurt or stuck somewhere too.

I descended back down again, having to awkwardly catch myself to avoid falling as I dislodged a logic engine frame, causing some of the water to slosh out and trickle down to the stone below. The broken glass embedded itself in one of my sandals, but I scraped most of it off, not slowing down. I turned the corner to face the left wall, and--

And I saw two figures.

The first was Theodoros, still standing despite being obviously seriously wounded. His right arm was burned, the cloth of his chlamys fallen askew, and blood was running from a gash along his stomach. But his scepter was still in his hand, and a pistol in the other. As soon as I arrived, he turned sharply to look at me, his expression overwhelmed.

The other was Ran. She was slumped against the side of the building, her face turned away from me. Her bag had fallen open beside her, her tacky novels mixing with the priceless texts that surrounded us at all sides. She was still.

She'd been shot in the head. Blood still flowed from the fresh wound.