Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

Some time had passed. I was sitting on a leather sofa in Ptolema's living room, though I wouldn't have described it as such before she'd used the term herself - it was the most packed part of the entire building, with boxes and cabinets occupying so much of the floor space that the few pieces of recreational furniture felt like islands in an ocean of junk. Right now I was alone, Ptolema having left me with my thoughts to rifle through a different set of boxes in her bedroom.

Before running off to find whatever it was she wanted to show me, she'd finished explaining the rest of the basics of how this world operated-- I'd begun to refer to it as 'Dilmun' within my own mind, remembering the conversation about a deathless prelapsarian reality that had occurred close to the end of the loop, which remained at the forefront of my thoughts for obvious reasons.

Though none of the figures could be confirmed absolutely, it was believed that Dilmun had a permanent, immortal population of 1,800,000 people, divided equally between 900,000 Primaries and 900,000 Secondaries. Each Primary controlled 177,777 metric tons of prop, while each secondary controlled 44,444. That meant the total prop came to 200,000,000,000 metric tons; about as much as a couple of the largest mountains in the Mimikos. In addition, there was an unclear amount of a third category referred to as 'Tertiaries' or 'Echoes', which were what the panther had alluded to earlier - people imported, so to speak, from the outside world.

Because anything could be created here, it was theoretically a trivial matter to travel to the Reflection, analyze any given person's physical body with the Power, then simply recreate it in Dilmun with one's prop. However, there was some kind of restriction in place where this wouldn't work if you tried to treat them like any other object under your dominion - any human created flippantly would just drop dead on the spot, their consciousness prevented from forming.

But there was an exception. Another rule of Dilmun, apparently, was that people could create sort of metaphysical contracts to irrevocably loan their prop to someone else, though only up to a maximum of 9999 years. And if you loaned someone enough prop to at least comprise their body at the same time as creating them, they'd not only survive but become a free agent in their own right, able to travel between Domains and do the same matter-shaping stuff as everyone else, at least until the contract - plus any others they managed to forge - expired.

Ptolema talked around it, but I got the impression this was some sort of socially controversial topic.

The other major thing I'd learned, though I suppose I'd guessed it already, was that unlike the Mimikos, the physics of this world were a perfect replica of the old world. Iron existed normally, and there was no such thing as Seeds or prosognostic events. Further, light traveled at a constant speed, so electromagnetic computing was once more possible. Apparently there had been logic engines everywhere and I hadn't even noticed because they were so small.

The only abnormality it had in common was that children could also not be naturally born here. You could of course import them or create them wholesale, but they were subject to the same rules as people manifested artificially. It was a closed system. No new prop ever came into existence, and the 1,800,000 were and would always be the only true immortals.

I... still wasn't really sure what I thought about all this.

As you've heard me say several times already, I'd always taken it as a given that immortality, in the full sense of the world, was physically impossible. Hell, it was physically impossible - the fact that it seemed to exist right in front of my eyes at the moment didn't change that. The idea of something like being even possible remained ridiculous.

Nevertheless, it apparently existed, and in persisting so validated that argument Kamrusepa had made against me: that in focusing on whether or not immortality was possible, I'd been implicitly avoiding the question of whether it was desirable.

Hearing it all laid out, there were parts that came across as utopian, and others that were unsettling. On the one hand, this seemed like a place in which the normal frictions of life simply did not exist. Everyone was safe and had near-absolute agency at all times, with seemingly their every desire able to be fulfilled on a whim. Even 44,444 tons was enough matter to construct a palace so spectacular as to rival the Rhunbardic royal court, so there could be no such thing as poverty. Even at a baseline level, precarity was a physical impossibility.

But, on the other hand, 1.8 million was a pretty small number of people - not on a personal level, perhaps, but certainly for a soft total. Compared to the amount of people in the outside world, it was a grain of sand beside a boulder; minuscule. And the fact that death was not just infinitely delayable, but impossible, well...

The idea of it made my head spin. What would that do to people, on a long enough timescale? To their minds, to their societies? To me?

The concept brought to mind a fantasy book I'd read a long time ago, though I suppose the premise was more akin to something you'd find in a sci-fi novel. It was about a group of adventurers traveling to a lost city that was (appropriately enough, considering the circumstances) deep underwater. The backstory was that long ago, a meteor had crashed into earth and caused a massive tidal wave that threatened to swallow the city whole. In response, the king had appealed to a master wizard, who had cast a spell to seal it outside of time until the waters retreated once more. However, the spell went further than he'd intended, and the city became a static place where nothing could truly be altered. No one aged or died, and their desires for things like food disappeared. And because the meteor shattered the continent itself, so the conditions to end the spell were never fulfilled.

The heroes, arriving in the city countless millennia later, discovered the people living in almost trance-like state, repeating the same motions day after day, unable to even process that they were there at first. When they finally managed to draw attention to themselves, the population broke into two groups. Half of them begged for death, for an end to the purgatorial state they'd been trapped in eons, while the other were terribly afraid of a disruption to their eternal existence and wanted the party dead on the spot.

I couldn't recall how it ended, but that was how a lot of depictions of immortal societies tended to go: Leaning into the curse of it, the madness, the same answer I'd given Kamrusepa when she'd forced a response to the issue out of me while we'd sat around the hole we'd dug in the yard of the inner sanctum.

But this place didn't seem to match that stereotype. Again, if anything, it seemed strangely domestic. But was there more I wasn't seeing?

And of course, I couldn't help but continue to think about how the Order had actually pulled this shit off.

It was one thing to say 'something to do with the Apega', but this was well beyond even what Zeno had described it as capable of doing. The mastery and time and space was something he'd defined as a distant possibility, not an immediate prospect. Had my grandfather - and possibly Neferuaten - been holding such a spectacular card close to their chest all along?

"Phew, found 'em!" Ptolema declared, stomping back into the room triumphantly with a heavy-looking wooden box. "Ended up in the loft somehow. Must've mistook them for something else back when I was movin' stuff around." She grinned. "Photographic memory ain't much good if you're too dumb to use it, huh?"

"Ptolema, can I ask you something that came up earlier?" I inquired, before she had a chance to sit down and show me whatever she'd planned on. In retrospect this was a little rude, but my mind was still drifting all over the place.

"Sure!" she said, taking it in stride as she moved to sit beside me on the sofa, dumping the box onto the coffee table in front of us. "Go nuts."

"You mentioned before that the stuff the panther told me - about this world being the real one, and the versions of us in reality being 'mirrors' rather than the original - was part of the culture here, right?" I frowned. "But how can they actually believe that? Based on what you've told me, the evidence that this all originated with the sanctuary seems pretty definitive... There are literally immutable structures sitting around with the Order's symbology on them. It should be obvious even if they don't know anything about the time loop, shouldn't it?"

I hadn't really processed it earlier, but it really was a relief to be able to talk about it so openly after all this time. It felt like indulgently rubbing an itch I'd avoided scratching for decades.

She squished out her cheeks thoughtfully. "Hmm, you'd think so. But like I said, a lot of the people here have kinda a funky way of looking at things."

I raised an eyebrow. "How do you mean, 'funky'?"

"Well, it's not like they don't know the sanctuary existed, or that there's some kinda connection," she explained. "They're not dumb. They can observe it like any other place. But this world exists above normal time, right? Where everything that ever happens, at least in the sense of 3D space, all just exists as one big simultaneous thing." She grabbed a hardback tome lying on the coffee table, holding it up. "Like, take this novel. Even if the first page is the start of the story and the last page is the end of the story, you wouldn't say that you're actually traveling through time while you're reading it. Or, uh, that what happened on the first page actually led to what happens on the last page, since the whole thing is made up it's all just ink anyways. Heck, the entire book was probably replicated at once, so the first pages aren't even physically older. Unless it was printed?" She squinted. "I can't actually remember where I got this."

"Ptolema," I said slowly, "that's a cookbook."

She looked at the cover. It depicted a bowl of heavily spiced chicken, and the text read 'Curry Companion - 30 Simple Viraaki Dishes You Can Make Yourself In Under 30 Minutes'.

"Whatever," she said, tossing it to the side. "The point is, people here don't really view causality in, uh, quite the normal way." She looked up at the ceiling thoughtfully. "Like, insofar as anythin' has an age, this place is as old as it gets. Us waking up here was the dawn of time, and since we exist in the highest number of dimensions, we're by definition more real than anything that ain't that. So... who's to say that the Remaining World actually came first, and isn't just some kinda screwed up-- Well, reflection of what we have here?"

"But if everyone's original memories stop directly on the day of the conclave, and there's clear, physical evidence of the sanctuary spread about--"

"You're not gettin' it," she said, shaking her head. "You gotta throw out everything you'd normally think about time. Like, the only reason we experience time moving forward instead of backwards, or not moving at all, is 'cause our brains interpret it that way. But that doesn't mean it's how it is." She scratched the side of her head. "Maybe whatever happened on that weekend didn't create this place, but created all of regular human history around it. Or maybe it being some kinda link is just a thing that is, and there's nothing more to it than that."

"That's stupid," I stated flatly. "Obviously things happen for reasons, even if those reasons are themselves part of an atemporal cosmological model. You can't just abstract it all away with physics."

Why does it feel like Ptolema and I have reversed roles in this conversation...?

"Hey, I'm just sayin' what people think. I gave up on worrying about this kinda thing a long time ago." She puffed out a sigh through pursed lips. "There's other stuff that muddies the waters a bit, too. Even if people can go look at the sanctuary, there's another rule here that means you can't observe the mirrors of Primaries too closely. If you try, everything gets kinda strange and fuzzy. I guess the idea is to preserve people's privacy?"

I frowned. "I really wonder who decided all these rules."

"Probably whoever that spooky voice I told you about, I guess," she said. She digressed, perking up a bit. "So, you wanna see the paintings?"

"Alright," I said, with a small nod. "Sorry, I didn't mean to derail you."

"Nah, it's okay," she said, leaning over and popping open the box. Inside were 10 small canvases, the first of which she pulled out right away.

I recognized the scene it depicted at once. It was the conclave - as in, the specific event itself, not the weekend - viewed from the girl's side of the stands, apparently during Ophelia's presentation. I could see her standing at the table set in the middle of the main hall, displaying her weird liver to the assembled council members, their various bemused and intrigued expressions portrayed perhaps a little more dramatically than reality. In the foreground I could see what I presumed to be the side of Lilith's head, while in the background the rough shapes of the boy's group and Fang had been sketched, the latter leaning over the railing as they regarded Ophelia's efforts enthusiastically. The vague shapes of the audience towered at the upper edge of the canvas.

"These first five are the ones I did," Ptolema said, smiling with a hint of pride. "Though I kinda didn't really know what to draw, so it's just stuff you'd either remember yourself or that I talked about later." She set the first painting down on my lap and withdrew the next, which this time depicted the argument during the guest house dinner, though in this version of events Hamilcar seemed to be in attendance as well, sitting ominously at the end of the table. "Ophelia's are a lot better, which I guess figures since it was her idea in the first place."

"You painted this?" I asked, peering down at it.

"Yeah!" She chuckled. "You surprised?"

"I mean, it's really good," I replied, mildly stunned. "I can't see any faults in the composition or brushwork, and the actual style is nearly photorealistic. It reminds me of the genre paintings that were popular early in the Second Resurrection, before photography came back into vogue."

"Eheh, well, I did practice a whole lot," she said bashfully. "Though I think it lookin' realistic might be more about me not having a head for creative stuff than anything else. At first I tried following her lead, but when that didn't work, figured I'd just keep slamming my head into the wall with the instruction books until I was basically a human camera, y'know?"

"Well, it worked," I said earnestly. "You're definitely better than me, and I tried to do this for a living for a while."

"Aw, don't say that." She made a dismissive gesture. "Honestly, I'm probably so rusty by now that I couldn't even draw a decent portrait, let alone anything this complicated." She held a finger to her lips. "We did these... I wanna say about two--"

"Don't say it," I cut in. "I'm not prepared to conceptualize how ridiculously old you are right now compared to me."

She curled her lip. "I mean, I'm not actually older than--"

"I'm not prepared to contemplate that either," I said firmly, looking sharply at her and then away again. I brushed a length of hair - fallen over my face while craned over at the first painting - out of my eyes. "Why'd you draw this scene, anyway? I thought you said that in the version of the murders you remember, the conclave never actually happened."

"Oh, right." Something in her smile turned bittersweet. "Well, back when I was last hearin' about the stuff everybody else remembered from the loops, I realized that the one I remembered ended way earlier than all the rest. So outta curiosity, when I was looking around the Remaining World one time, I went to see what my mirror saw in the normal version of the weekend. And in this one moment, something suddenly lined up with vague feelings from the other loops I'd retained, like it was special for some reason." She regarded the painting with a complicated expression. "So I decided I'd include it, to make up for the fact that mine didn't have as many moments of us just all gettin' to hang out."

I looked at her curiously. "You do the autospective dreaming thing yourself sometimes, then?"

Her eyes flickered. "Of course. I knew about the stuff with Deshur, didn't I?" She glanced away for a moment. "Probably hard to find a Primary who doesn't do it from time to time. You don't call it 'Dreaming' unless you get lost in it, though, just autospective."

Stolen story; please report.

I nodded hesitantly, then turned to the second painting, which was still in her hands. "Hamilcar didn't come to dinner on the first night I remember. I only saw him twice - at the conclave, and then again underground while we thought he was the culprit."

"Huh," she said, and shrugged. "Yeah, I dunno. In mine, I think he said something about wanting to see Lilith?"

I squinted. "Maybe, assuming the Order was also faking their deaths in your loop and was just moving on an accelerated schedule, he'd known he wouldn't be able to see otherwise, since the conclave wouldn't be happening." I bit a fingernail thoughtfully. "Though it could just as easily have been an excuse, I guess."

Ptolema showed me the rest of her paintings, which indeed lined up with the scenario she'd described earlier. Honestly, the fact that she'd based one on something that happened outside of the loop seemed pretty understandable - there wasn't a lot to it, all things considered. From what I could tell, she only ever even saw one dead body, with the corpses of the Order never having even appeared. There was a painting of everyone arguing with letters in their hands in the guest lounge, another of her and Seth discovering Ezekiel's frankly overly-accurately depicted corpse shredded to pieces and draped all over the second story railing in the main hall, and finally one of a simple flash of light in a dark, stony corridor.

"That's the last thing I remember seeing," she explained.

"You don't even know who killed you?"

"Nope!" She snickered. "Shoulda brought a stronger lantern, huh?"

"Was the Power disabled underground in your version of events?" I asked. "Well, and a day early too, I guess. I'd assumed that sort of thing would be the same across all loops, since the sanctuary defenses were based around scripting that was set up years in advance." I hesitated. "Unless the Order was lying about that. Though that could be risky, since anybody else could have looked over their shoulder at the data in the administrative core."

"Oh, it was disabled everywhere as soon as things started gettin' spooky," she explained. "We never figured out why, though. I convinced Seth we should check out the security center to see if the defenses were doing it - I think Bard brought it up? - but we ended up hearin' a weird sound down below and checking it out while we were in there. That's how we ended up getting killed."

"What kind of weird sound?"

She shrugged again. "Dunno. I thought it was Mehit screaming at the time, but now I'm not so sure. In retrospect, lettin' ourselves be lured out into a tight space like that was really dumb." She chuckled. "Anyway, you wanna see Ophelia's now?"

"Yeah," I said. "Show me."

She did. Ptolema had spoken true-- The paintings drawn by Ophelia, though probably showing less technical skill, were striking in a way that hers were simply not, toying with impressionism and surreal abstraction. Some of them even frightened me a little to look at.

Like with Ptolema's, the first two depicted scenes from before the massacre began, though even these were far more conspicuous in comparison. The first of the two showed the Apega, though I might not have known it if not for the context. It was presented starkly over a near-black background, a jagged thing of cutting, angry red that looked like an open wound, the paint splattered at the edges like the brush had been stabbed into the canvas. The Everblossom - in a departure from what had been actually visible to us in reality - was depicted as explicitly above it, its own glow and strangeness meek in comparison, like a flower growing on the head of a great beast. Only one figure was present in the image: Neferuaten, shown from behind, pointing at the structure with an outstretched finger.

The second was another depiction of the conference hall, but this one had one significant difference to Ptolema's: There were no people. The stands and the Order's long table were still in place, but had been seemingly abandoned, with a few left-behind objects scattered around; bags, pens, paperwork. It looked like it was evening, the lighting having switched to the setting the sanctuary used for dusk and dawn, and the shadows were hard.

Even though the scene was mundane, there was something quite unsettling about it, even threatening. However, it was nothing compared to the next two.

Both depicted scenes of grotesque murders, one set in the courtyard around the statue of Phui, while the other was in some unspecified, dark chamber. In the former case, bodies - their faces destroyed to the point of being unrecognizable - were strewn, savaged, over the limbs of the statue, which seemed to glow with an ominous light. The only corpse of which the identity was discernible was the one hanging from the arm adjacent to the disfigured, furious face of the goddess, the robes in clear enough view that it was apparent it was Theodoros.

The latter was the most haunting of them all, depicting only a single figure against a black background. It was the monster, humanoid but hunched over strangely, staring straight ahead with ravenous, inhumanly large and yellow eyes. It stood atop Mehit's corpse - her face gazing vacantly upwards with her sole visible eye grey and lifeless, her guts torn open and strewn about - while Lilith's smaller form hung from its beak, her skull seemingly crushed by the immense strength of its jaw. Copious blood and grime dripped down from its maw to seep into its black feathers, yet its six arms held the girl's lower body almost affectionately, like a sleeping child.

Something about that paradox inherent in that imagery transformed it from merely grotesque to genuinely kind of revolting. It made me uncomfortable to even look at it.

"These are, uh..." I ran my tongue over my dry lips. "They're something." I hesitated. "Hey, can I maybe get a glass of water?"

"Sure, I'll get the pitcher," Ptolema said, rising from her seat but continuing to talk as she walked over to the kitchen. "And yeah, it's been a while, but Ophelia kinda went through a lot with the stuff she remembered from her loop. I think that's part of why she suggested it in the first place-- To kinda get it off her chest."

"What happened in the one she remembers?" I asked.

"Eh, well, again, it's kinda been a while," Ptolema repeated. I hear her open some kind of container, and a moment later the clinking of glass. "But it sounded more like yours than mine, but still sorta different. I remember she said they never got a message from the culprit or even anybody claiming to be them. People just kept dying and nobody could figure who or what was doing it, and it happened in big groups instead of everybody being picked off one-by-one, like it was for you. She said that by the time she died, she thought she was the only one left."

"Whatever happened, it must've been terrifying," I half-muttered. "I mean, I get the impression these images aren't supposed to be totally literal, but still..."

"I think there was some stuff about the sanctuary having weird traps around, too. And she was convinced there really was a monster, which, uh, you can see there." She nodded at the final painting as she returned, setting the jug on the table and pouring me a glass. "Dunno how that squares with what you found out in your loop, though. Guess you'd have to ask her yourself."

"Is that an option...?" I said, then took the glass as she passed it to me. "And, uh, sorry for making you wait on me."

She smirked. "Still the type to say 'sorry' rather than 'thanks', huh?"

My face flushed a little. "Ahah. Yeah, I guess." I took a deep sip.

"And, uh, probably?" she answered. "To be honest, we kinda fall in and out of keepin' in touch. I've seen her a few times since I moved out here, so I figure she's living somewhere in the Crossroads, but I only really see her up in town or at the festivals from time to time. Not sure how you'd find her beyond askin' around."

I was about to ask a followup question, but Ptolema reached for the final painting, which I'd forgot about for a moment. To my surprise, it was completely different to all the others. It was set at the base of the Aetherbridge, at the spot we'd met up for the trip, and everything about it was bright, cheerful and colorful. Everyone in our class was there, chatting happily with one another, brilliant smiles on our faces. Even Ezekiel looked in relatively good spirits, talking with Bardiya about something while wearing a low smirk. Ran and I were there, too-- Fang's arm was wrapped around my neck and they declared something confidently to me, and I was laughing nervously, with Ran looking amused by the whole ordeal. The only person missing was Ophelia herself.

The image made me want to smile myself, a bittersweet feeling rising in my chest, but then I blinked.

"This one is nice, right?" Ptolema remarked. "I almost wanted to stick it on my wall when she said she didn't wanna keep any of hers, but I decided it'd bring back weird memories when I might not want 'em." She hummed wistfully. "Still, we did have some fun back in those days, huh?"

"Why are the boy's group and Fang here?" I asked. "I thought they always traveled to the sanctuary separately."

Ptolema scratched her head. "Dunno," she said. "Guess that just wasn't how it was for her."

I squinted, adjusting my glasses. The travel arrangements for the boys were announced early in the morning, and Fang should have departed even earlier than that, at least based on the note we discovered. So it's not just the events in the sanctuary that differ between loops, but even the background circumstances?

It was difficult to draw any hard conclusions. There was still a lot of ambiguity about how the others had even traveled to the sanctuary, especially Fang. One detail that had started bothering me months after the conclave was over was that the two 'confessions' given regarding how they arrived - the first to Kam and I on the way to look at the mural, the second in their note we discovered - subtly differed. Though in both cases they gave the same story about being smuggled in by Neferuaten as part of her scheme, in main hall they'd still affirmed to have been led in on the second day, while in the second they'd claimed to have arrived at 'the crack of dawn' on the first.

Assuming the latter was the real truth, why would they have lied about something so petty in the former case, when they were already confessing so much already? If it was about trying to conceal their knowledge of the loops, I couldn't see how what time they arrived would make any difference.

Speaking of which, there another thing that bothered me about Fang's big confession. They'd told us that they'd learned about the time loop occurring through notes they'd left for themself in the pantry, and that had explained a lot of their strange behavior up to that point. ...at least, on the surface of it.

But there was something that nagged me about it.

It was that moment back when Hamilcar had been engaged with his fight with Zeno, and we'd just discovered Seth's body in the control room. Fang had picked up Seth's scepter, I remembered, and started casting one of his custom incantations as if they'd done it a million times before. Fang was a genius, but there were limits to what a person could do without any practice whatsoever. How had they known his runes so fluently?

Somehow, I doubted that was something you could pass down with a note. Suffice it to say, something about the explanation we'd been given stunk. But it was amidst so many other things that also remained unexplained, it was hard to tell if it even mattered.

"It's nice to be able to talk to somebody about this stuff again," Ptolema mused. "Been a long time. Most of the others don't really wanna talk about it much whenever we catch up-- Even Ophelia, lately."

I nodded distantly, then hesitated for several moments before saying what I did next. I still didn't feel quite ready for it, but...

"Everyone else is... here too, right?" I asked. "From the sanctuary, I mean."

Ptolema looked puzzled. "I mean, yeah. I kinda thought you'd figured that already."

"Well, that is--" I cut myself off, biting my lip as I considered my wording. I didn't want to say too much. "Is there anyone else like me? People you don't remember seeing since your loop?"

"Ohh, I get what you mean now." She considered the question. "Honestly, the only ones I don't remember seeing at all are some of the council. I see Neferuaten and Theo's dad every so often, and I remember hearin' about Zeno at one point, so they're definitely around as, like, a group. But the other three..." She scratched the side of her cheek, her eyes wandering. "Well, it might just be 'cause of how old they were, I guess."

"What do you... oh." I nodded to myself, understanding. "You mean because of how their bodies would have changed here."

"Yeah," Ptolema confirmed. "Primaries here nearly always just look like how they did in the Reflection on their best day by default, and obviously Hamilcar's 'best day' wouldn't have been him when he was some screwed-up half golem guy. He probably just looks like himself when he was 20 or whatever. So there's a good chance I wouldn't even recognize him if we ran into each other."

A thought suddenly came to mind that probably should have occurred much earlier. "Uh, while we're on the topic, what exactly do I look like right now, Ptolema?"

"You haven't checked?" She looked surprised.

"No. There wasn't a mirror in the room at the guardhouse, and I haven't used the bathroom yet."

"Huh." She looked at me. "Honestly, you look basically the same as I remember you."

"Oh." I exhaled. "That's a relief." With what she said about it being influenced by your 'self image', I wondered... well, never mind that.

She squinted. "Maybe a tiny bit younger? It's kinda hard to tell without your braids." She grabbed a few strands of my hair, then let them drop again, discontented. "Actually, I didn't wanna say anything, but seein' you without 'em has kinda been freaking me out. It's like you're naked."

"I don't know how to respond to that." I said flatly.

"Sorry."

"So, you've seen everyone else?" I digressed. "Aside from the inner circle."

"Yeah," she said, "though some of them were so long ago that I barely even remember. And others, well..." She looked disquieted for a moment, twisting her lip and brow. "I dunno how much I should say."

"What do you mean?" I asked bluntly.

"Uh, well, you saw that panther guy," she explained. "Reinventing yourself in weird ways is kinda commonplace here, even for Primaries. I don't really do that sorta stuff myself, but with so much time, a lotta people get kinda sick of always bein' seen the same way, or just get really bored with their identities."

I wonder if Zeno managed to accomplish his dream of becoming a dinosaur, I thought to myself, amused by my own dry wit.

I'm not sure what it says about my personality, much less the convoluted ways in which I've rewired my own brain, that this was the topic to which my mind went upon someone bringing up the idea of a radical shift in ones identity.

"So a couple of our class are around," Ptolema continued, her tone reserved, "but, uh, maybe not in ways you'd ever recognize 'em. And since these are kinda just hunches, or stuff that maybe they'd think is embarrassing, well, uh--"

"You don't feel it's your place to say," I finished for her.

"E-Ehh, I dunno if I'd put it in a high-minded way like that." She gave a stiff smile. "It's more like I just don't wanna stir the pot."

"Well, who do you see somewhat regularly that you can talk about, then?"

"Lemme think," she said. She took the final painting and set it on the table, probably assuming we were done with it, and twiddled her thumbs together on her lap. "Well, I talked about Ophelia already. Bard's probably who I see the most of these days - my favorite restaurant is right next to this book club he runs, so we run into each other a lot. Fang runs this really high-profile research program in the Keep, so we keep in touch from when I used to live there, though usually just with mail. Yantho has his own restaurant in the City, so I know he's around even though we don't talk, and Ran lives in a fringe domain but visits every couple years, so usually we catch up then. And I see Balthazar and Mehit at festivals and stuff too, once in a blue moon." She paused, holding a fist to her mouth. "Think that's it."

I nodded, distantly. A feeling rose in my chest, and I stared towards the window.

It looked like it was probably around noon-- Now about 12 hours since my existing world had gone out the window. My mind kept getting stuck in that same place. Everything here defied the way reality was supposed to work, how I'd accepted it had worked my entire life. Like my grandfather had always said, you were supposed to go through life losing stuff. The places and artifacts of your youth, your family, your friends, and yes-- Eventually, your own life. That was natural. It was the lesson everyone was forced to learn; that I'd been forced to learn, even if I'd been in denial about it.

You weren't supposed to just get things back. It felt stupid, even.

Humans depend on narratives, and when one is shattered - even for the better - the experience is disturbing. I knew that better than anyone. And this was a big narrative to have simply up and disappeared. Bigger than when mankind had learned the secret of flight, or when Menes of Tem, the very first arcanist, really had turned lead into gold.

"You okay, Su?" Ptolema asked, frowning.

I blinked. "Uh. Yeah, sorry." I adjusted my glasses again. "Just thinking about something." I looked to her. "Hey, I know I've imposed on you a lot today already, but, uh... could you show me around this place a little more? The Domain, I mean?"

"Sure! I'll do anything you think would help out," she said happily. "And don't worry about it. Like I said, it's not like I've got much going on right now anyways, you know?"

𒀭

As soon as we'd made a decision about our destination and stepped back into the front yard, Ptolema floated into the air like it was nothing, looking down at me expectantly.

"How are you doing that, anyway?" I asked.

She frowned quizzically. "Uh, flying? With the Power." Her eyes widened with alarm. "You used to do it all the time back at the academy. Didn't you? Oh god, if I said all that stuff and it turns out you really did come here from a parallel universe or something--"

"No, Ptolema. I meant how are you doing it without incanting or tracing," I clarified flatly. "I asked the Sergeant about it back at the guardhouse, but he gave kind of a vague answer."

"Oh," she said. "Everybody just mental casts here."

"Mental casting?" I quirked my brow. "Only a handful of the best grandmasters in history have been able to do that."

Ptolema shrugged. "Turns out if you have unlimited time to practice something that you're basically doing constantly, most people figure it out, I guess. I don't even remember how I learned at this point." She looked upwards. "Anyway, c'mon. I'm gettin' kinda hungry again."

I sighed, then traced the Form-Levitating Arcana for the second time today. I was starting to feel like a tone-deaf person in a society of musicians.

I floated after her, and we both ascended into the air, heading to the west. We went higher than I'd gone following the bag-headed man, then higher still, until the artifice of the sky and the land itself started to become visible. I saw where the land suddenly stopped beyond the tall mountains that enclosed the landscape - tapering off into a completely flat plain before giving way to a circular, too-perfect-for-nature rim - and the sun began to look strange and flat as we passed through the clouds.

Then, so abruptly that it kind of freaked me out, we were suddenly inside the sky's blueness. Ptolema disappeared and was replaced by blue void. My body disappeared and was replaced by blue void.

"Don't panic!" Ptolema reassured me. "This part only lasts a second!"

"If you say so," I replied warily.

Fortunately, she spoke the truth, and a moment later we were outside the Valley altogether. From the exterior, it looked like a gigantic blue sphere, the landscape within visible only dimly as a vague silhouette. Once again, we were surrounded by the stark orange sky that seemed to be the default in this reality.

"Phew." She huffed a small sigh, then pointed to west.

My eyes followed her finger. I'd known where we were going, but I wasn't prepared for what it was going to look like.

Floating off in the distance - about twenty kilometers away, to take a stab in the dark - was a structure unlike anything I'd ever seen. In some ways it resembled a void installation like the Empyrean Bastion, while in others it was closer to an arcology, though either of those comparisons felt like equating a coal fire to a convention furnace. It looked like a structure from an entire epoch in the future; everything about it was so seamless and advanced-looking, it folded back to coming across as ancient, like it'd been built by some forgotten precursor civilization.

The basic structure was a rounded tower wrought from some manner of pure white stone, but it was almost invisible with everything built out of and around it. Glass spirals that had to be habitats, immense skyscrapers, strange cubes that seemed to slot into one another and the other structures modularly. More habitats cascading along the rim, framing it like the laurels of a crown. And all in brazen defiance of any sort of consistent gravity.

"There it is," Ptolema said, not seeming to lend the moment much grandeur. "The City."