Let’s speed things up a bit, shall we? Yystrix continued after a particularly long breath into the silence. I made those special pieces for him and they were very well received. Many praised him for his vision in commissioning them. This was where most of the support for Elhume becoming the next historian began. People said he combined the best of a First and Last. He understood tradition and could innovate. Plus, he had been taught by the current historian. It was as though he was born for the role.

The memory shifted and that horrible image of destruction associated with Elhume was pushed back. It howled at the edges of the new memory, whirling around the current oasis like a grudge-holding sandstorm. Elhume and Yystrix were sitting on a high column of orange rock, watching the plateau below. Elhume was talking and Yystrix was just listening to his blurry words.

Elhume pursued me for a long time before I could trust him. Even then, I could see the… violence of his emotions. Especially when it involved the Nether. But in the end… I truly did love him. Because for every bit of rage he would use to lash out at the Nether, he would turn double back on himself. For being too weak. For being so helpless in the face of the problems plaguing our people.

He was determined to be the one who would lead us back to Eden. It was the home our people deserved, he would say. It was stolen from us, he would insist. The people of Nether had the key to returning and they kept it from us.

Yet even he admitted that as far as we could tell from the records of our bitter war with them… neither side had an advantage. Our combat strength was equal, despite our innovations to the wargames that we played. Aether defended the tower, Nether defended the Sinkhole. Suddenly, Randidly could sense a smile in Yystrix’s voice. Which, in my heart, only served to prove how useless these games we were so obsessed with were…

The memory shifted again to an open-air amphitheater. With long strides, surrounded by blurry figures bright with color, Elhume with dense cords of black light in his chest ascended to the stage. The crowd began to cheer. To the surprise of no one, Elhume became our historian. Yet rather than being happy, his depression grew. To suit his new role, the standards to which he held themselves were hoisted beyond the realm of possibility. Almost overnight, he transformed into a man possessed.

The historians, I suspect now, had a bit of extra information about the true situation of my people. Being faced with that truth broke Elhume in a very vital way, just as it had with most other historians in the past.

Toward the end, in that brief happy time after I brought my son back for his help, Elhume showed me some of his father’s musings, although not the records that led his father to create such strange and ominous ramblings. In essence, the former historian believed that the Aether people had never left the promised land. The dead land in which we now lived was the very Eden we always dreamt about.

The memory shifted again. Yystrix was standing at a window high in the Tower to Heaven, looking out over the surrounding area. She glanced upward, seeing that the maroon clouds were very close above her. She was now on the 399th floor. Soon her view from her window would be completely obstructed.

To describe the historian Elhume as moody would be an understatement. He was more natural force than a living being, always shouting or swearing or crying or preaching. There was only one place where he could be silent; on those game boards. He even made several variations to wargames in the wake of skirmishes with Nether forces, perhaps to alleviate his sense of responsibility by increasing our combat ability.

None of it made a difference. Our people were evenly matched with the Nether. But for all the raw emotion coursing through his being, my spouse was extremely practical. And interacting with me… I believe I gave him the last bit of inspiration he needed to develop a very desperate plan.

If he couldn’t make our people stronger, the only way to improve our military strength was for there to be more of us. Of course, life energy was constant. An increase in our population was impossible without extreme methods.

Yet one day a ‘miracle’ occurred, its sudden arrival like a bolt of lightning splitting the tallest tree in the forest. We, the animals, came out of our secret living spaces and were aghast. But our historian… proclaimed it was a cause for celebration. His vehement words whipped up a grand jubilation to mark the event. A couple had given birth to three children. Within a few months, such miracles began commonplace. Elhume became our prophet, proudly declaring that the time had come for us to return to Eden with our newfound strength.

Do you want to know how he managed it? Yystrix asked softly. But Randidly didn’t need much of an explanation. The memories had gotten so sharp that he could see how diminished these new beings were; their inner light was dim and muted. Randidly couldn’t just intuit the method, but he remembered the mad experiments of Thomas Karmin on Earth.

Something spiritual had been cut out of the original Aether being and placed into another body. The wound had healed as well as it could, but what had grown in the stolen soul’s place was more than slightly wrong, Randidly could sense.

The window in front of Randidly blurred and vanished. Then Randidly felt a sense of immense speed as the world slowly came back into focus. He was rushing forward over orange highlands. Although Yystrix didn’t turn to look, Randidly could sense that the Tower to Heaven was behind him. The further than Yystrix proceeded, the denser and lower the maroon clouds became.

Gradually, she rushed forward into a land of shadow. The Badlands, home of the Nether.

I stated previously that I ran away from Elhume. And that was true. But I was also purposefully looking for something. Maybe even what I was looking for was a clean death. Because there is no way to describe my methods but foolish.

Periodically, Elhume would travel into the wastes to scout out the area. IT quickly became a point of pride amongst my people that our historian was a powerful warrior. Yet I watched him every day; how could I miss that every time he returned from that place, more miracle births would follow?

As you can see, those Births created individuals that were… dull is the term that seemed to fit. It was all too easy to miss at first, however. Because of the overwhelming joy of the miracle, several of the elders gave up their lives to have multiple children. All at once, the grand and bright lights of our people dimmed.

But our numbers soon swelled to a little under a thousand. Elhume’s hatred was a beast that could now stalk openly through the halls of the Tower to Heaven. He practically leaked emotion with his every brutal action. All of Hallohm revered that beast and praised it endlessly. He was transforming right before my eyes.

The stones transformed from orange to black as she continued to run forward. The sky, too, was completely black. It was a lightless place, illuminated only by the light from Yystrix’s own body. She rushed forward while ignoring the changes. I arranged for an accident. It detained Elhume and I rushed into the wastes in his place. I had hoped… I don’t know. I had hoped for an answer.

And in that darkness, I met an agent of Nether. He was wounded and desperate, or else he might have detected that I wasn’t my husband. As it was… by the time he realized his mistake, it was too late.

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Amongst the rocks that were thoroughly soaked in shadow, a figure gradually emerged in front of Yystrix. He was large, larger than any of her people and possessed two sets of thickly muscled arms. The Nether man was hunched over and a portion of his substance seemed to be gradually seeping into the surrounding air. Great wounds covered his torso and his essence made use of them to waft off of his skin in thick waves.

“You…” The Nether being seemed troubled as he looked at Yystrix. “Who are you…? You… how...

“Stunning.”

Then the memory froze, leaving Randidly staring at the strange innocence in the eyes of the Nether being in front of him. I’m sure you have questions about what I am telling you. But… just believe that this is true. I… do not wish to share my talks with this Nether King. Suffice to say that I learned much, including the fact that the Nether were just as pathetic a people as the Aether ones were.

And I also learned that Elhume had been meeting with this man to appropriate Nether methods to mutilate our people and subdivide them into more bodies. He was a butcher of the soul, justifying any amount of suffering in order to appease his hatred.

The frozen memory shifted. In the next scene, the Nether being was more hunched. His essence that was wafting off his body had thickened even though the wounds that covered him had vanished. Memory snapshot after memory snapshot flashed in front of Randidly’s eyes, showing the gradual transformation of the being of Nether.

We continued meeting secretly after I discovered this extremely confusing relationship of my husband’s. The fact that he, a constant font of vitriol and propaganda that painted the Nether as uneducated savages, would somehow meet and work out a deal with a Nether King even now doesn’t make much sense to me.

But it does prove one thing; necessity always guided Elhume’s hand. He would do anything to achieve his goals.

As Hallohm became increasingly frenzied in his preaching, I would sneak away and meet the Nether King. We would spend our time just talking. I learned much about the problems amongst the Nether people… but those aren’t my secrets to share. Nor is it really relevant. But it was… incredibly nice to know someone who would listen to my troubles without judgment. It was a much-needed release valve that kept me sane. Because as I ascended the Tower to Heaven, the pressure was mounting for me to give myself to the children.

Elhume was not the principal source of this pressure, of course. Even then, I think I was special to him. Yet all of his dim followers didn’t view me in such a favorable manner. I was the wife of the historian, using Elhume’s influence to avoid my duty. And in a way, they weren’t wrong.

But I was so inexplicably afraid. Afraid that my three or four children would be dim and brief things, within the cold grasp of Elhume’s hatred. And after that being of Nether called me stunning… I couldn’t bear the thought of becoming anything else.

Eventually, Elhume and I argued. This was when I ran for real. It wasn’t a time for my secret meeting with the Nether King, but I just… went anyway. I was selfish.

Then suddenly the frozen memories were gone and Yystrix was radiating palpable fear. A cracking twisted figure hidden in the deep shadows of the wastes slowly straightened. It was a being of Nether with a segmented body like an ant, twisting and clicking as it sensed Yystrix. Then it twitched and struck.

I encountered a Nether patrol and was grievously wounded. Heh, the great irony was that I was incredibly weak. After reading so many reports about skirmishes with Nether, I was well aware of what I should be capable of. As I fled, I couldn’t help but wonder if the war games actually served a purpose after all.

Luckily, my Nether King found me and nurtured me back to health in a secret cave hidden in the badlands. That was when we mixed… and the process of making my son occurred. Pine, a genuine Shallah, a being that was pure, raw energy. I was scared and confused and at that very time, the Nether King had to go distract his fellow beings so I wouldn’t be found… and as soon as Pine was born, my son of pure energy began to die.

As I looked at Pine, I knew what my Nether King had seen when he had first seen me. This was what it meant to be stunning. He was so radiant and I stood frozen for several minutes and watched him die before the urgency hit me. I was so desperate that my colors began to change.

Randidly saw another memory. Yystrix’s hands were outstretched, holding an orb of light the size of a beachball. But that light was rapidly dimming as the light flowed outward into the surrounding shadows. It was like the world around them was hungrily devouring that light as quickly as it was being produced.

But you know this part, don’t you? I told you this before. I returned to Elhume. Our fight was about having a child anyway, and this was me having a child. He immediately used his understanding of runes to stall the baby’s disintegration. For a little while, I was happy.

Yet this was the beginning of the end for me; as always, I was instrumental in my own doom. Elhume’s rhetoric regarding this being the time of miracles became even more vehement. The dull youth of my people followed him without question. And those that had noticed the same changes that I did finally had their fears allayed by the arrival of Pine.

If Elhume was really diminishing us, where did this brilliant baby come from? So those few that had resisted finally gave in to Elhume’s pressure. Within a few months, I lived in the 512th floor of the Tower to Heaven. From that height, you can see nothing but thick clouds that are so dense they seem like complete darkness at all times of the day.

Elhume had a grand plan, a plan to finally overwhelm the Nether. Inspired by his successes in splitting the Aether people, Elhume wondered if he could somehow harvest energy from the flesh beings in the wider world. With the power source that was Pine, determined to see this through to the end… he created the System.

And on the eve of his greatest success… I ran and hid in the wide universe.

Then the memories vanished. Yystrix, wearing the modified version of Lyra’s face, was standing in front of Randidly. She smiled sadly. “You must have questions.”

Randidly slowly began to stir. After being immersed in the protective cocoon of Yystrix’s memories for so long, he almost had to dethaw before he could form coherent thoughts. “...why take the time to show me these things? After seeing them-”

“You just have more questions right? There wasn’t really a strong central message.” Yystrix revealed a familiar, very playful smile. At that moment, she reminded Randidly so very much of Lyra. “Because… well, for two reasons. First, because I owed it to you. Because even if you don’t see it yet, you are walking upstream toward the Nexus and it will probably kill you. But the second reason… if you somehow manage to survive, if you actually can live through the dangers of that place… look for the Tower to Heaven. Find the land of orange stone and wargames, Hallohm.

“There is a subbasement below that tower that I was never allowed to enter; the historian’s personal quarters. If you can go there… I believe you can find the old records that Elhume used as inspiration to design the System. With the knowledge I left to Neveah and those records, she can reverse engineer the Aether constructs. And then hopefully… you can free my son from this torture.”

Randidly frowned. “If that’s such an important room… located in his homeland, I doubt that Elhume left it unguarded. By finding it, I would need enough strength to defeat Elhume anyway. So-”

“You would believe so, but as far as I can tell… the current Elhume no longer cares about our homeland. He is now obsessed with either locating Eden or creating it for himself…” Yystrix released a low exhale. “In addition, that world of energy beings is… special, as I referenced earlier. We had to leave Hallohm to protect Pine and create the System. But after you have left Eden, it is very difficult to find your way back.”

Randidly sensed Yystrix’s memories folding in on themselves. He could see the Aether constructs tucking away from him the things she didn’t want him to see, but Randidly also knew that he wasn’t near skilled enough with Aether to take such defenses apart. So the movie blurred and reset with the sound of someone taking a deep breath. It sat waiting for him to go through it again.

“The resources that the Nexus has access to are extremely abundant,” Yystrix whispered. “But only if you know how to use them, Randidly Ghosthound. Never forget that your beginning was the middle of someone else’s story…”

And then she was gone, leaving him alone in darkness.

After hearing about the strange genesis of the System, Randidly wasn’t in the mood to go through it again immediately. He exited Yystrix’s memories and stood up on his misty island. The sun was rising. Today would be the day of the duo’s tournament.

Randidly’s gaze turned up toward the sky with a dark expression. Soon… I’ll be going to the Nexus…