Randidly felt it, pressing against him entirely the opposite way as the powerful image of Elhume had when he needed to face that fist. That fist had wanted to crush and break him, releasing a grating pressure that sought to impose itself upon him. Devick’s rusty chains were similar. They overwhelmed everything in their path.

He slowed his descent. What remained of Pine was very different. It pressed against him, but in an embrace. As though it would accept anything and everything, a wide and guileless affirmation to all nearby forces.

Which, Randidly supposed, was why significance began to pool here.

From Randidly’s talks with Yystrix and also later the Patrons, he knew roughly the situation in the Nexus. Pine was a child that Yystrix had with some Nether being, a throwback to the Shallah, the original pure beings of myth that lived in an Eden lost to history. Due to various circumstances, Yystrix had brought Pine back to Elhume, her husband, who was an Aether-based being like her.

Elhume had a particular role in the Aether society, one that put him in a position of power. In Pine, he saw providence and opportunity. Yet all was not well; every moment that Pine spent in the exposed universe, the light of his life grew dimmer. He might truly be one of the Shallah; however, outside of Eden, his only fate was to die.

Yystrix and Elhume didn’t understand the timeline, but they understood how this was going to end if they did not act.

So Elhume mortgaged the entirety of the Aether population in order to create an adequate environment for Pine. He relied on the perfection of the child Yystrix had brought to reach the ‘Pinnacle’ and create the Nexus from nothing. However, it soon became clear that the Nexus was only a temporary solution. It stalled out Pine’s degeneration, but couldn’t heal the wounds that had already occurred. Therefore, Elhume mobilized the Nexus to try and bridge the gap to that lost Eden, so Pine could recover and thrive.

Randidly floated down through the thick air. Out of the darkness of the Shaft, the first hints of Pine emerged. A stadium-sized sphere waited below, slurping up all the significance that floated down here and remaining thirsty for more. It looked like the inversion of the Stillborn Phoenix: the darkness seemed to intensify around the edges of the sphere, becoming thick and impenetrable. Out of the corner of your eye, you could see nothing but the abyss there. But when you looked at it directly, a bright world unfolded before you.

It looked full, but that embrace sang of emptiness.

Randidly couldn’t make out any detail of this world, because the fuzzy lines of mountain and sky and greenery were rubbed away at the edges by the gleaming, sun-touched spell that covered all of it. The golden light refracted into blinding kaleidoscopes that beckoned. Looking directly at it, Randidly felt a deep tug on him to join that world. Even with his own Nether Core, this existence was strong.

Hollow as it might be, some substance existed there.

Randidly turned away with an effort of will, shattering the growing connection of significance between himself and that world. Only out of the corner of your eye, when that brilliant dream faded to darkness, could you see the tumbling details that he had heard from Roy.

In that darkness, several limbs twisted mid-air. Randidly saw a single, featherless wing, folded neatly. A bloodshot eye stared around sightlessly as it tumbled. A luminously pale skull released a misty of glittering blue motes. A fleshy pink stomach engorged itself on the significance, absorbing more and more.

The ugly and swollen organ couldn’t be seen if you looked for it, but lurked like the whisper of doom when refused to be pulled into the dream.

The strange dream around Pine’s body already has such a frightful pull. Randidly frowned and looked away entirely from this strange base. How dense must the significance in his stomach be? And why can’t I feel it? The significance that flows into him just seems to disappear.

The problem with Randidly’s knowledge of Pine was that something clearly changed around that chaotic transition between the Second and Third Cohorts. Elhume’s attitude changed, flipping almost entirely. And Randidly could see that shift evidenced when he examined the surroundings more closely.

There wasn’t truly a floor; the shaft appeared to extend even deeper beyond this corpse or suspension chamber for Pine, whatever it might be. A glossy black divide sat immediately below the dream, however. Beyond that divide were strange shapes and whirling patterns that shifted too quickly for even the high-Stated Randidly to follow. One part of him was intrigued; he felt like if he watched for a while, he could understand a lot about Nether.

Another part of him felt a sticky dread: beyond that barrier was likely where the Nexus dead went, the ideas and images gathered and ground down to their raw pieces to be reused.

“Helen,” Randidly whispered. Then he pressed his eyes shut. Just like the Nether Prince, what may or may not be down there was no longer the Helen he knew. But he couldn’t help but picture a metaphysical butter knife taking the jelly that was Helen’s personality and generously lathering it down below, spread out so the lurking monsters could lick it up.

Randidly forcefully distracted himself by examining the Grand Array around Pine and the divide. The flows of energy were almost blinding and appeared similar to the massive sphere. When he looked at the lines directly, they flared to life. They faded as his gaze moved. And he quickly had a headache just trying to parse apart what he saw. The working here was a hundred times more complex than the whole of Yystrix’s tomb. Making the understanding even more difficult was the fact that several arrays had been layered on top of each other, modifying the previous efforts to new ends.

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Randidly could barely make out portions that gathered and used the energy that Pine released, but it was difficult to intuit what exactly that energy was supposed to do. He could see that there was a rather recent addition, siphoning off a significant portion of energy to some location, but when Randidly tried to follow that current, he was quickly stopped by the System: it proceeded to the Tier III Citizenship layer.

Frowning, Randidly raised his gaze. His mind whirred as he tried to make sense of it all. The massive sphere that held the strange floating limbs of Pine. The constant undertow of significance. The layered iterations that fueled the Nexus, pulling energy away from this place.

“I’m here, but how am I supposed to find you?” Randidly muttered.

In response to his words, the atmosphere vibrated. A clear thread drew Randidly’s attention down to the base of that sphere holding Pine. Confused, he allowed himself to be pulled closer. His Nether Core had to whirl faster and faster to keep himself from being sucked into that alternatively blinding and abyss black dream, but it was still manageable.

Despite how it seemed from higher up, Pine’s sphere was not flush against the divide. There were about five meters of space between it and the ground. A dense and messy array sizzled with cramped conductivity, but a screen blocked Randidly from being able to observe the particular purpose. Besides, he was more stunned by what sat at the middle of that array underneath Pine: Randidly saw a bed, with a figure clearly sleeping and another figure standing at the foot of the quite out-of-place piece of furniture.

The pull of significance grew rapidly more powerful and Randidly slowed himself, not daring to go near. But the figure looked up at him and pointed down to the divide. It was a man, and he jabbed his finger down several times for emphasis.

Feeling vaguely suspicious for a whole host of legitimate reasons, Randidly hesitated. But he did trace the lines of Nether and was surprised to discover that a portion of the array calmed the pull of significance along the divide. Randidly supposed that made sense: if it did not, Pine would just rip up everything that waited below.

He wondered what would happen if Pine were allowed to run wild like that.

He tentatively pressed a foot against the divide and found that the current of significance vanished instantly. Without any apparent effort, he walked up to the edges of the dense and messy array around the bed.

“You…” Randidly stopped speaking, surprised by his own voice. Speaking here released a deep resonance that echoed up. His eyes narrowed; Pine’s sphere acted as an amplifier, sending a massive roar up through the shaft that would likely impact the first unfortunate fool to meet the word. Recognition dawned in his face and then he continued to talk by communication through Nether, rather than vibration. “You are the one that called me?”

“Indeed. Or rather, it was… the true me. Not just the unlucky bit of myself that remains conscious.” The man standing next to the bed gave a small smile. His cheekbones were sharp and his hair was slate grey. His eyes glittered with a purple so dark it was nearly black. But now that Randidly was closer, he could see that the figure in the bed and the standing figure wore the same face.

Abruptly, Randidly realized where he recognized the sharp features. “You are-”

“Solomon Rex,” The mysterious figure bowed to Randidly. He held the perfect bend of his bow for two seconds before he straightened. “At your service, Mr. Ghosthound. I’ve been waiting for someone like you for a long, long time.”

For several seconds, Randidly just stared at the man. His emotions twisted back and forth in his chest as he thought about the way that Neshamah, this man’s daughter, betrayed Claudette at the last second. Perhaps being under the sway of the Rex Family would have been the lesser of several evils, but it had seemed unnecessary.

But truthfully, he wasn’t even sure how close Solomon and Neshamah were-

Randidly’s gaze shifted to the sleeping form of Solomon. A small smile played across the man’s face, as though he wandered through a reassuring dream. Radndidly’s frown deepened at the strange circumstances. “I… I’m not sure what to say to you.”

“Nor I, you, honestly,” The mental projection of Solomon Rex reached up and rubbed the back of his head with a rueful smile. “I had always hoped someone like you would come along to threaten Elhume, but I didn’t have much hope.”

That certainly earned a sharp glance from Randidly. “You-”

Then he stopped short. Was he surprised that this mysterious figure slumbering beneath Pine knew he wanted to overthrow the Nexus? Compared to the other facts about this strange meeting, that seemed to be the most innocuous. Besides, being aware of Randidly’s own goal was something different than being aware of the group gathered with the intent to bring down Elhume.

Solomon just watched Randidly’s internal conflict with a knowing curl at the corner of his mouth.

Randidly breathed out a breath. There is too much strange about the situation. Let’s take one thing at a time.

“Why are you here?” Randidly asked. “Not the projection, but your true body. You are… sleeping?”

“Very deeply. But that’s the price I had to pay. To remain here.” Solomon Rex’s smile faded. “I’m guarding Pine against selfish and shortsighted fools. Even if our leader has forgotten the original goal of the Nexus, there is a group of us that has not. No matter what, we cannot give up now out of fear.”

Randidly absorbed that answer slowly. He wasn’t sure what Solomon meant by giving up out of fear. But rather than ask that question, he changed his focus but kept things simple. “And why have you been waiting for me? Or someone like me?”

“You are quite special. It didn’t have to be you, obviously.” Solomon scratched his beard, looking surprisingly mundane despite the environment. “The horrible truth is that the System is all about commodifying and stealing something precious in order to repurpose it for another aim. First to cut through the abyss and reach Eden and now… well. All the powerful individuals who have come before end up eventually empowering that man on top of this sick pyramid, one way or another. The reason I reached out to you… what you are making of yourself would be very, very difficult to copy. There are too many crucial pieces. And for that reason, you have a chance of being singular. A chance of reaching the Pinnacle based on your own power.”