This is an absolutely horrible idea, my rational inner voice, which honestly must have been either the best sport in the world or a masochist to have not shut down years ago, reminded me. There is no scenario where viscerally reminding yourself of all the awful things that happened to you, let alone what you did yourself, is going to help you 'let go' of anything. It only works that way in dramas and books. This will make things exponentially worse for no reason.

I didn't listen to it. Partially because I didn't want to believe it was right, since this idea felt like the last piece of flotsam left to cling to in the ocean in which my sense of self was stranded, and partially because I was already on the airship, and the only way I could abort the plan at this stage was by parachute. I hadn't even brought my scepter, since that would have added extra paperwork and costs to what had already been an excessive amount of debt to make this booking just a day in advance.

I still couldn't believe I'd done it. I hadn't even really been able to explain myself to my parents. I'd made up some ridiculous story about a friend who'd been horrifically injured that I intended to visit, but of course my mother had asked if it was someone she knew and I'd had to fabricate the details of a person (female, not from school, met at a scripting contest, got closer over the logic sea after we met) wholesale. Why couldn't I have just told her I was feeling sentimental, or that I didn't want to talk about it? Why was my first impulse always to lie in the stupidest way possible?

I stared out the window next to my seating compartment, watching the clouds pass by while trying not to dwell on how completely fucked every part of my psyche was.

Under better circumstances, I might have enjoyed the novelty of the journey, since it was the first time I'd rode an airship in my adult life. They were a dying form of transportation. Most modern international transit - at least for humans - was done via a network of 'hybrid tunnels', extremely long and straight pipes with the air drained completely out of them, creating an artificial vacuum. They hosted lines for trains, and the word 'hybrid' was used because they could function, albeit with differing efficiency, whether the Power was available or not. When the line was running at high-speed, an arcanist would cast the World-Bending Arcana to transport the trains from tunnel to tunnel in the same vein as the Aetherbridge, while when they weren't, the lack of air resistance would still allow for movement at supersonic velocity. The only problem was the curvature of the Mimikos, which meant the pipes had to be built on stands significantly above ground and broken into segments intermittently to keep the line straight.

The other popular option, generally for journeys that would otherwise cross the entire continent, was taking a voidship out of the atmosphere and straight to ones destination at a ridiculous speed. I'd avoided doing this for my entire life because it sounded extremely unpleasant. I mean, why the hell would people even invent a method of transportation that would require physically feeling the pressure of leaving the atmosphere, instead of finding a way to circumvent it? Fuck that.

In contrast, airships were an archaic and simple technology. Modern ones were made of artificed wood that was ridiculously light and had biomancy-based engines which were so quiet that you'd think the vessel was being levitated through the air using the Power, but ultimately the design had changed little since the New Kingdoms era. They were oblong, pointed tubes with wide, unflapping wings largely made out of an extremely taut and tough filament of silk. In terms of traveling through the open air of an atmospherically enclosed environment, mankind had never come upon a better idea than just imitating a bird.

The only foundational development had been the invention of an artificed hydrogen variant that was unflammable and even more weightless than normal, which was incorporated into the upper part of the vessel to grant it a degree of natural lift, making landings and ascensions far more graceful. (A few hundred years ago there'd even been ones that pumped it throughout, resulting in a far higher passenger capacity, but this also made everyone's voices sound silly, so they'd fallen out of favor.)

The only reason I was taking one to Itan was because it was such a backwater that it didn't even have a hybrid tunnel. It'd been this or spend days on a regular boat, assuming there were any that even took passengers.

My flight had been early, at 7 in the morning, and it was about 9:30 when the island finally came into view on the horizon, clear against the blue sea and sky. It seemed so small and flat from up in the air that it felt like it shouldn't have been able to rise from the ocean at all, and with the weather being so nice, it looked deceptively like a pleasant place to live. Long, sandy beaches that reached far inland, open fields, spatters of marsh and forest. Somewhere you'd want to build a vacation resort, not somewhere that normally had the color palette of a soil composition chart.

Yet even so, just seeing it again was enough to fill me with a very particular sense of unease. There was an overpowering, almost physical sense that I was doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing, like the feeling when you stick your finger really hard into your belly button. Like I was violating some sort of geass, turning something inside out.

The phrase you're looking for is 'returning to the scene of the crime', the rational voice chimed in again, dryly.

But this was good. It was correct that I should feel this way.

I held on to my identity as my old self - in spite of feeling like many early memories of Shiko's childhood were my own, and in spite of the life which I now lived - because there was a clear separation, a before and after that defined my existence. It was like two separate worlds. I had been that person in Itan. Then I had taken a step through a kind of portal and become who I was now. A clean, unchallenged transformation of my reality.

Going back there, seeing all those old places again through my current eyes would surely shatter that illusion, and force me to conceptualize myself as a new person. I would feel different, and that dissonance would free me.

Yes. That was what was going to happen.

It's not what's going to happen, my rational self repeated. When you get off the airship, it should be possible for you to buy another ticket without actually going to any of the lobby areas your old self ever visited. Get the first one you can, stay at the docks, and leave.

Then go back to school and never think about this again. That's the best thing you can do. Just never think about it again.

Once again, I didn't listen to it.

The airship slowed to a crawl as it entered the skies above the coast, then slowly descended over the course of about 10 minutes, touching down gently in one of the water-filled, U-shaped stone docks. When the bell from the captain's cabin tolled, I rose from my tackily-colored cushioned seat, slid open the door of the compartment, and - after politely letting the elderly Rhunbardic man I'd shared it with (who based on his age and the still proudly-adorned military honors on his cloak was probably some kind of war criminal) go first - grabbed my shoulder bag's worth of luggage and left, traversing the fresco-walled central walkway until I arrived at one of the open doors with a set of sprung steps leading down to the dock's surface. (Almost all airships were decorated with frescoes of homely, ground-level locations, supposedly because it helped people with a fear of heights, though I was skeptical that this actually worked and wasn't just a meaningless tradition.)

After that, I had my documentation stamped at the custom's office, and quickly noticed that part of the port weren't as I... or, well, specifically Shiko... recalled them.

Specifically, it looked like there'd been some effort in the intervening years to expand them by adding two extra docks, and this has required demolishing and rebuilding part of the structure, expanding it over what had previously been open ocean rather than the peninsula the port was built on. There was an entirely new Departures & Arrivals area that felt very modern, with a rounded, two-floor open area and a bunch of new shops.

I felt a bit of a sense of anticlimax at this, but fortunately ('fortunately' as in, 'fortunately for my ability to hurt myself'), this was only true for the rear of the port. The front, where anyone could wander into, was more or less unchanged. This was the first stop I'd planned to make, if probably the least important. A nice bucket of cold water to get me started.

It only took a few minutes to find it. The seating - filled with bored-looking people for whom this was just an ugly waiting lounge of no particular significance - was as I remembered it. The long window parallel overlooking the beach was as I remembered it, filling the room with pleasant morning light.

It was the last place we'd ever met. Where I'd found Shiko in my last desperate, misguided bid to convince her to be my friend.

I looked to the seat she'd sat on, three places from the end up the row facing the rear of the building. Though there was a snotty looking teenage boy reading some sort of military-themed novel two seats down, it was fortunately not occupied. I sat in it.

This is how I expected it to go: I'd see the scene, and be overcome with emotion as it all came back to me, more vividly than since I'd ceased to be my old self. I'd remember the crushing sense of hopelessness and despair as the one person who I cared about in the entire world, the one person who made me dare to hope for a happy future, severed all ties for me, leaving me feeling like a despicable broken insect for whom being cared for by someone so radiant was nothing but a pathetic delusion, etc.

I would let myself feel that pain again... But then I would consider that I was sitting where she'd sat, and remind myself of that side of the story, too. I'd consider the big picture. None of those hyperbolic feelings had been grounded in reality. It had just been two kids doing stupid kid shit. Like I'd always said to myself in retrospect.

I'd look at myself. I'd force myself to understand that I wasn't that person. And then I'd go to one of the shitty little stores and eat a burrito or something so I had a new memory of this spot to override the old one.

That was what I expected to happen.

That wasn't what happened. Perhaps I was in the wrong mindset, feeling too nervous and deliberate in my thinking-- Making too much of it all. Perhaps just being there was overstimulating. I did feel strange, even if it was a strangeness I couldn't quite put into words.

But the feelings just didn't come, even after I sat there, my hands in my lap and with probably a stupid expression on my face, for upwards for 30 minutes.

Instead, when I thought about how awful it had been - the moment I saw her disappear forever behind the alcove to my right - what I ended up feeling, in the end, was almost a sort of relief. Having just got off an airship myself, I saw the rest of the story play out in a way I normally didn't. How she, I, got held up at the custom's desk because of my dual Kutuyan/Oreskios citizenship. How I couldn't find a bathroom, and was flustered because I was still upset by what happened. The book I read on the airship. My father when he greeted me the port in the city.

And I... I felt...

I slapped myself on the side of the cheek. The snotty looking boy, who had been distracted from his book, by an Inotian woman with large breasts sitting against the window, side-eyed me.

No.

This isn't what you're supposed to feel right now.

Forget this. Let's just get moving.

I stood sharply up, and made for the exit from the port.

𒊹

When I'd first met Samium, he'd talked about how the reason he'd come to Itan was to negotiate the terms for a stimulus pack from the Old Yru Convention. I have to be honest, at the time, neither of my past selves had any fucking clue whatsoever what a 'stimulus pack' was. Shiko, at least, had managed to infer it was probably some sort of economic infusion, but the only observation my old self had to offer was that it sounded like a power-up from an echo game.

By the time I 'left' Itan, I had enough of a surface-level understanding of libertine economics to realize in retrospect that Samium's group had been essentially offering the local government a bribe in return for legislative alignment to the Grand Alliance norm. Itan was not a democracy, largely even ostensibly. In a strict sense all power was still vested in the Kutuyan-appointed viceroy, but in practice the island's rulers were his administrative council, the 'colonial development committee', who recommended who Kutuy should appoint and wrote the laws he rubber-stamped. The majority of this group was appointed by the viceroy at its own behest (creating what Ran had called, when I'd laid this all out for her at one point, a 'snake-eating-its-own-ass government') while about 40% was 'elected' by the general public through a system of meritocratic sortition modeled after how the Arcanocracy did things, where you had to pass an exam to even be allowed to run.

But none of this actually mattered, because in practice-practice, the island was just run by a cartel of the wealthiest and most influential families, who functionally decided every single appointment and also owned basically everything that wasn't controlled by foreign investors. Geopolitically, Itan was just not a real enough place to have a serious government. It was a fief. A playground for wealthy mainlanders and their bottom-feeders, and a few fishermen holdovers from the colonial era too destitute to leave.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Anyway, I'd never really looked into what became of what became of Samium's venture; Itan hadn't changed much over my last few years on the island, so I'd supposed the whole thing had just fallen into some diplomatic black hole or else - like my grandma had suggested - the assets had simply been swallowed whole by some faction of the island's elite.

So I was surprised when I stepped out into the busy part of the coast outside the port, at the base of the road that ultimately became what passed for 'downtown' Itan city, and saw that things had visibly changed.

The Itan of my youth had been a low-rise city in the way that mold is a low-rise plant, with anything over two stories tall constituting a remarkable landmark. That was no longer the case. Right off the bat, I could see new offices, businesses and apartments scattered everywhere that were 5 or more stories tall, and though they paled in comparison to the ones in Old Yru or even Oreskios, 3 which one could reasonably call skyscrapers. There was one spire at the heart of the city which was still under construction, but already had to be at least 50 stories tall. Even the streets themselves were different, the cobblestone laid down by the Empire replaced with sleek concrete.

I don't want to give the impression that things looked strictly better. There were still decaying old buildings all over the place, and the slums were just as slum-like as they always had been. But there was no longer the sense of palpable nowhere-ness in the air, where it felt like everyone could be wiped out by an epidemic and no one in the outside world would even notice until the third missed shipment of shitty seafood. It felt conceivable to me that some small percentage of young people could grow up here without planning, upon reaching adulthood, to immediately leave.

It was a surreal, dissonant feeling, one that complimented the one I was experiencing myself. Despite having lived here in both my pasts, my memories as my old self burned so much more ferociously, actually standing here. I didn't think it was just because of the way Samium had engineered my Induction, either-- Again, there were memories of Shiko's early childhood in Oreskios that I felt incredibly viscerally, even emotionally. But the sheer depth of feeling here... The hope, the longing, the desperation. Feeling almost swallowed by those memories, yet at the same time being what I was now, it felt...

...well, it felt incredibly strange, to say the least.

'Strange'. Versatile word.

Before I could do anything, I needed to head to my grandmother's house, where I'd be staying for the two nights of this trip. It wasn't much time, but I'd planned this to be quick; rip off the plaster and then move on, before the atmosphere had time to seep into me. It was a long walk from the airship dock without a carriage or even a bicycle, but I headed east along the coast until I eventually came to the, uh, gates of her now-gated community, which was a weird development that I'd been informed of in advance. I confirmed my identity at a logic bridge and the guard, another old Rhunbardic man, waved me through.

This part of the town, at least, was almost completely unchanged. The same understated-but-still-bougie houses; the same white beach. I stared at it and the ocean uneasily, remembering the countless times Shiko and I had wandered down it together, gazing at the opposite rim of the Mimikos. I forgot who I was and felt nostalgic, missing her and my dream of escape from the island for a moment, then reminded myself that was ridiculous. There was nothing to miss.

I felt that feeling from a little earlier again - relief - and then a twinge of anger, resentment, disgust. I looked away from the coast, turning my eyes towards the stone path.

You wanted to see the world with me, Kuroka, I forced saying to myself.

And you did. And now it's time to disappear.

To fade into nothingness, in the place you wanted to be.

I let out a long sigh, shaking my head softly.

My grandmother's house was unchanged; same thatched roof, same wide wooden porch, same woods in the background. I knocked, she answered, dressed in a tan shirt with pink longskirt and looking the same as ever. She'd had my father relatively young - it'd probably be another few decades at least before she started to show any of the major signs of aging.

"Shiko!" she said cheerfully, and reached out her arms in a hug. "It's great to see you!"

I embraced her back. "It's good to see you too, grandma."

Though this was the first time I'd been back to Itan since my Induction, it wasn't the first time we'd seen each other, since she tended to visit Oreskios once a year or so since my dad hated the island possibly even more than I did, and refused to go back. It was a small blessing. The first time it had been... Uncomfortable, and being here was uncomfortable enough to begin with.

Other than Shiko, she was maybe the main person who had shown my old self kindness, after all. That made spending time with her pretending nothing had happened somehow even more perverse.

She pulled back, looking at me affectionately while still holding my shoulders. "Look at you! Officially one of the smartest kids on the planet, and you still haven't changed a bit." She flicked one of my braids, giving me a mischievous smirk. "Still doing your hair up like a little girl."

I gave her a flat frown. "You're the second person to say something weird about my braids lately."

A snort. "I mean, it's a little funny at this point, don't you think?" She tilted her head analytically "Not that you can't still pull it off, but..."

"I think they're cute," I said, with awkward defensiveness.

"Alright, alright," she said, holding up her hands and taking a step back. "Anyway, come in. See what I've done with the place." She spoke dryly.

The joke was, of course, that she hadn't done anything with the place. I stepped inside, and other than a few superficial details - moved and refitted furniture, new paintings, a segment of the kitchen that'd been repainted - I might as well have gone fifteen years back in time. There was still nothing almost different about the old house that I'd called home for nearly six years of my life. The open plan of the floor meant I could see most everything off the bat; the kitchen where we'd prepared meals every day, the living room and logic bridge, the closet where I'd hid on that fucking night. It was all just there.

Come to think of it, it was the first time I'd been there since that night I'd put my plan into motion. The existence I was now was in many senses born here. In a way it was a mythological place, but it looked as mundane as anything.

No, it was mundane. It was a place my grandma lived. A place of no particular significance.

I had to let go of all of that. I had to.

"I cleaned up your room, so you can dump your stuff in there if you want," she said casually. "How've you been doing?"

"Not bad, I guess," I said. I had a maybe-hallucination maybe-parallel-universe-trip where I saw two dozen horrific murders, then had all my hopes of the past 12 years violently crushed, how about you? "School's still really hard, but I'm getting through it, I guess."

"I can't even imagine," she said, shaking her head as she stepped into the open-plan kitchen. "I nearly dropped out when I was getting my first doctorate, and that was just an anthropology course. I know you're clever, but I don't know how you manage doing something as complicated as high-level arcanist training with the public and god-knows-who-else breathing down your neck." She gestured firmly. "I mean, I don't spend a lot of time on the logic sea, but even just following along a bit I can see they treat you guys like fish in a tank. I don't know why you bother with it!"

"Aren't grandparents supposed to be encouraging about this kinda stuff?" I asked her, half-sardonically, as I set my single bag down on the sofa.

"For their grandkids working themselves half to death chasing success?"

"Yeah."

"I mean, I'm proud of you, obviously. It's amazing." She smiled at me from the other side of the room as she set to washing some dishes, which was presumably what she'd been doing before I arrived. "I just, y'know, trying to live that way can end up biting you in the ass. It's one thing to get a good degree from a good school, but getting so many eyes on you, so many expectations... I ever tell you I had a friend of mine who became a famous singer?"

"No kidding," I said, following after her.

"Yep," she nodded. "Yukou of Hathrast. Ever heard of her?"

"Nope," I shook my head. "Sounds local, though, with the mix of Rhunbardic and Saoic."

"That's right, another lucky Itanite," she said with a smirk. "I guess it was too far before your time, but she got really, really popular 'round the late 12th century. I knew her when we were both in secondary school. She had a tough time growing up, was always angry and restless, like she wanted something from the world and was dying without it." Her face became wistful. "She went really far. Her group leveled out at about #6 in the charts, I think? For the league, at least."

"What happened to her?" I asked.

"It's a little dark," she told me, with an almost dissonantly playful 'yikes' expression and a short, grim laugh. "But I'll always remember the last time we talked. We hadn't spoken in years,not since she got super big, but she called me one night at a real stupid hour. Didn't even want to talk about anything serious. Just spent the whole time bringing up old stuff from when we were kids, at least until the last ten minutes."

"And then...?" I asked, as she seemed to hope to prompt, as I leaned against the bronze kitchen counter.

My grandmother looked down at the plate she was scrubbing. "She got kinda weird slowly, getting more and more sentimental about random crap. Then she got really quiet for a bit, and I asked her if she was okay." She bit her lip. "Then she asked me, getting kinda choked up... 'Hey, Taha, do I still seem like the same person as I did, back then? I'm still me, right? It's like when we were kids, isn't it?' ...she kept saying stuff like that, up until she said she had to go."

I furrowed my brow sadly, not entirely sure what to make of the strange story. "I'm sorry," I eventually replied listlessly. "That you, uh... I mean..."

"It's fine," she looked at me warmly for a moment, batting her hand dismissively. "Like I said, it was a long time ago." She turned back towards the sink, seeming to be finishing up. "Anyway, moral of the story is, don't push yourself too hard for an audience."

"I mean, academia is a pretty different thing to the entertainment industry," I retorted.

"I mean, it is and it isn't," she replied. "Sooner or later, you kinda start to see universal things about the junk people do. And one of those is that if you become a big enough deal, chase something too hard, you end up becoming a performer. Not like, literally in the way she was, but... Y'know. Makes it easy to lose track of the stuff you really care about." She sighed, smiling to herself. "But your dad would just say that's one of my excuses for taking it easy all the time. You want anything to eat after I'm done with this, by the way? I know you had an early flight."

I blinked, thrown off a little by the sudden digression. "N-Not right now. I have to go somewhere pretty soon."

She nodded sympathetically, shutting off the faucet. "Your friend, right?"

Fuck. I'd been hoping my mother hadn't passed that on. It was going to be a pain to have to lie about to someone who actually lived here. "Y-Yeah, and a couple other things."

She nodded, understanding. "Well, could I at least make you some coffee? You've got bags under your eyes like grain sacks."

I was about to say no, but honestly, it was slowly dawning on me that I was a little exhausted. With my flight having been so early and with all this on my mind, I'd only had a few hours sleep. And travel was tiring. I felt spent to the point I kind of wanted a nap.

But I had thing to do during working hours. It could wait until then.

"Yeah," I said. "I mean, if you don't mind..."

"No trouble at all," my grandmother said cheerfully.

I sat at the dining table while she boiled the kettle and ground some beans, twiddling my fingers idly. It was only after a minute or so that I noticed something funny. Without even really thinking about it, I'd sat in the chair Shiko always sat in when she'd lived here, the one next to the window. Across from me, the one where my old self had tended to sit lay empty. I'd done it with even thinking.

It... was only natural, in a sense. My physical memory had been drawn exclusively from her. My body remembered this was where it was supposed to sit, and indeed, I remembered eating at this spot far more times than Kuroka had ever even visited. It would have been strange to have sat somewhere else.

And yet, something about it was sinister. I remembered when I'd been here last, sneaking around in the dead night, an invader, searching for the means through which I could steal Shiko's life - the life I was still living in this moment. In a way, I was just as much of an intruder in the present as that night. But because I wore her face and spoke with her voice, I could walk in during broad daylight, have her grandmother hug me, even have a casual conversation with me in the same tones as the two of them always had when I was younger.

What face of horror and loathing would she make, if she knew the truth? If she knew it was me, the weird kid she'd taken pity on a handful of times over a decade ago, sitting in her granddaughters chair and having her bring me food and drink like some monstrous cuckoo bird?

It's that simple, I said to myself. You know it's not that simple. You're not that person. You're here to let go of them, remember? Focus on your memories here as Shiko. You have those memories and feelings, so you're not an imposter.

But was it really okay? No matter what mental framing I used.

Was it really okay to just go on living like this? Not as an interim measure, but... Forever?

"Here you go," she said, setting the mug down in front of me. "Milk, sugar, and a little honey, right?"

I smiled awkwardly. "Yep," I said, taking hold of the handle. "T-Thanks."

𒊹

Though I intended to let my heart guide me on the specifics, I had three primary destinations I intended to visit. The first, and probably the lowest-hanging fruit, was my old foster home - the Isiyahla's house on the western side of the city. It also happened to be the the furthest away from my grandma's house, and I wanted to get the majority of the physical exercise all this would entail done before I got completely worn down, so I decided to start there and work my way back.

Getting a carriage in Itan could mean waiting upwards of an hour, so instead I borrowed a bicycle from her and cut around the rear of the town, where it was mostly just grass and swamp. It was a route I'd taken a bunch of times when I was younger was mostly unchanged aside from the addition of some incredibly depressing office buildings.

I had been prepared for the possibility that something would go wrong, but wasn't prepared for what I actually found, when I arrived.

It was such a large structure with such an area of influence to it that I wondered, until I compared the positions of some surviving landmarks, whether I'd taken the wrong turn. It was the height of a four-or-five story building, but was wider than anything else on the island; a monolith of metal and stone with a concrete aura which replaced much of the fields around it. My foster home, and several other old houses which had been interspersed nearby, had been overwritten so completely that not even the terrain was unrecognizable, having been rendered uniformly flat in service of its purpose.

It was, based on the sign and the omnipresent smell of horses, a chariot racing arena. A hippodrome, as the Inotians called it, with a betting office and large set of stables attached to the front and rear respectively. A printed banner on the front advertised a selection of upcoming races, along with the players and teams in colorful, stylized print. Most of them were extremely low-level or even amateur. The Dherufabiji Lancers would be here on Sunday. That didn't even sound like a real place. Their logo was some sort of mongoose that had been set on fire, and was screaming while running really fast. It looked like it had been drawn by an idiot.

As I stared at it from the point that road terminated, I felt an intense sense of emptiness that bordered on nihilism. Eventually, this gave way to a sort of outrage. What had happened? What the fuck had happened? How could the place I grew up just be unceremoniously gone?

It was the same feeling I'd described to Ran at our lunch before the conclave, but a thousand times worse. It was a denial of catharsis so spectacular it felt like the universe was laughing in my face. Had I died? Was this hell?

I managed to get some answers from the local grocer, which was still standing. Apparently the some mainland company had decided to build the arena just under a decade ago, and - having been attracted to the sites proximity to services and the city center relative to its own development, and the amount of residential properties consolidated under just a few owners - had issued a generous buyout offer which the Isiyahlas had taken, deciding to move to the mainland now that their daughter was grown up. The children there had been taken back into the care system, and that was it.

That was just it!

How could they do something like that? How could they just leave? What about the children they were supposed to have been treating is their own? What about the old lady who was secretly the real owner of the house?!

It made me want to scream and tear my hair out. I'd never seen that place again, never reconcile it with my current existence. It was just gone! A gulf that could never be closed!

But this was just the start. The next stop was even worse.