Morinapol’s array station was likely the largest in Gnoste, but that wasn’t saying much. Of the station’s seven available destinations, most were in the east: only two lead westwards to Shattradan and Sere. From there, travelers would take connections to other cities.

Ian’s margarita ball cap shaded his face, while a short beard sharpened his jaw. He wore a plain gray sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. Holding his arm was an alluring woman in a sun hat, silk shirt, and tan pants, her eyes covered by a pair of sunglasses.

As they approached the array station’s schedule–it was a projection that took up an entire wall–Ian felt self-conscious, his Beginning and Remorse making him hyper aware of everyone around him. He tried to stay out of people’s minds, but they were all unprotected: People practically shouted their thoughts at him. His Beginning jumped at the chance to process everything he heard, refusing to ignore the noise.

Ian had consulted Red Griffith on balancing regular people’s privacy and self-defense. Red had ultimately convinced him that when it came to reading surface thoughts, the short-term invasion of privacy was worth the situational awareness.

That assumed, of course, that Ian could process thousands of surface thoughts.

I wish people wouldn’t stare, Ian remarked.

Are they staring? Maria asked, giving him a coy expression.

Clearly.

Maria tilted her head. They just think we’re affluent foreigners. If they recognized us, they’d be giving us a very different reaction.

He rolled his eyes and gripped her arm a little tighter. Something tells me you like the attention.

It’s a novel experience, being noticed but not recognized.

Ian knew what she meant. Sure, in Eternity, nobody had known who they were, but that was different. Now they were home. Ian had lived most of his life as an unremarkable regular, but Maria had always been the Sezakuin’s daughter and the expected future despot of Selejo. Euryphel had dealt with similar struggles, but his skill with disguises allowed him to hide his identity whenever he snuck out. As far as Ian knew, Maria had never shied away from her identity and status–perhaps because she spent much of her early years proving herself capable of filling her mother’s shoes.

Eventually, the transport array activated. Ian and Maria followed the crowd single file, appearing on the other side without incident. They left the array station and boarded a small hovergloss headed north, through Belloco and into Illuet. It was the most direct way to the Selejo Imperial Federation.

How is your soul? Maria asked. She stared out the window at the dry, windswept grasslands. The sun turned the withered, winter yellow to molten gold.

It’s fine, Ian replied. Hasn’t gotten worse.

Not better?

Not better. Ian could live with the current state of his soul indefinitely–it wouldn’t kill him, at least as far as he knew. But aside from mild, perpetual discomfort, his weakened soul reduced the strength of his necromancy. That meant he’d be weakened in a confrontation with Achemiss.

After what Ian had done to Achemiss, he reckoned the necromancer would be weakened, too–but to what extent?

Ian joined Maria in staring at Sere’s countryside. He’d never been to this part of the subcontinent, though he was deeply familiar with the eastern shores where Menocht Bay sat upon the coast of Illuet province. Or at least, he was familiar with a facsimile of the real place.

He cleared his throat. “Have you ever been to Menocht Bay?” In the flesh? he added mentally.

Maria didn’t look away from the window. “No.”

He nodded. “It’s one of the stops along the route.”

She finally glanced over. “We could stop for dinner there.”

Neither of them really needed to eat–Ian could sustain himself with his practice, while Maria needed no sustenance at all. But it was a convenient excuse, a justification.

“We’ll see,” Ian murmured. Growing bored of the pastoral view, he grabbed his glossY and scrolled through the news. A day ago, while en route to Gnoste, he’d started poring through news articles starting from around the time he ascended. His Beginning affinity allowed him to devour paragraphs at a glance, so he was only limited by how fast he could find relevant articles.

Some had been unpleasant to read–such as articles denigrating Euryphel and the Federation, calling them the heralds of a new reign of tyranny in the West. Many more articles attacked Maria, lambasting her decisions in the final days of the war. Some called her incompetent for her loss, neglecting to mention the role that insurrectionist traitors had played in disrupting her plans to defend Cunabulus.

There were plenty of articles about himself, too–speculating about how strong he had been and how he had compared to other half-step ascendants. Many wondered why his trial had been different. Why had the Skai’aren’s descendant failed to destroy Pardin? Had he summoned the massive green lizard hand that had blocked the descendant’s initial hammer strike?

But more interesting were the articles that speculated about what happened at the very end of the fight between Ian, Euryphel, Maria, Maria’s second Kaiwen Chowicz, and Ari. Most “experts” seemed convinced that the descendant had survived and taken the Skai’aren to Eternity. Very few claimed that the descendant had perished in the fight, and Ian got the sense that those claims were viewed as conspiracy theories.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Ian knew someone had stolen Ascendant Ari’s body. He’d asked Euryphel about it before and confirmed that her corpse wasn’t in the Federation’s hands. But Ian hadn’t realized that her death had been completely covered up. Euryphel and Chowicz were the only eyewitnesses who survived direct confrontation with the descendant. They wouldn’t have lied about the ascendant’s death… would they?

While Ian mulled over such questions and continued to read on his glossY, the hovergloss crossed into Illuet. When the sun was just beginning to set, it pulled into Menocht Bay.

Ian felt intense disquiet as the car cruised closer to the city proper, his knuckles tightening as he clenched his hands.

He’d never been back to Menocht since the loop. Even though he’d had time to heal and come to terms with his torturous ordeal, being back in the city put him on edge. He hated that he felt that way. He had come so far since the Menocht Loop. He’d grown in more ways than he ever thought possible, both with respect to his practice and on a personal level. He liked who he was today better than who he had been, in those dark, despair-filled years.

He didn’t know what he’d hoped to experience as the hovergloss passed through. Perhaps… indifference? Maybe a sense that Menocht was nothing, just a small stain on his past.

Ian knew that was a ridiculous hope. He remembered with clarity the visions that Cayeun Suncloud had shown him during the celebration of mirrors. She’d shown him his greatest triumphs and his greatest failures, and much had been centered on his time in the Infinity Loop.

“Arriving in Menocht Bay,” the hovergloss speakers announced. The doors slid open, revealing the platform.

Ian sat, frozen. He didn’t want to go. There was no point in him getting off–it was just a detour.

Suddenly, a gentle hand tugged at his shirt. His gaze snapped up, beholding Maria’s backside as she walked to the door. She turned to look back over her shoulder. Sun hat held in hand, her hair looked pink in the harsh backlight of the sun coming through the hovergloss window.

Ian knew that Maria understood his reticence. She’d spent time in the Infinity Loop. She’d seen his loop recordings. And of course, she’d spent the last few years with him as his closest confidante. She knew what this place was to him. It was a nightmare–a shadow on his heart.

And yet here she stood, a quiet smile on her lips, her eyes beckoning. For a moment, just standing there, looking at her, Ian felt their age difference.

“Coming?” Maria finally asked as the doors threatened to close.

In that moment, all Ian wanted was to hug her and hide away, out of the public eye. Just embrace and be silent. Instead, he stood and shook off his apprehension, following her off the hovergloss. The platform was mostly deserted, with only a few loiterers–unsurprising given that the platform was for long distance hovergloss rides. Though it was the golden hour, the moon shone overhead, a thin sliver opposite the descending sun.

“Where to?” Maria asked, smiling. She gave his hand a squeeze when he didn’t answer and tugged him along. “We’re not in a rush–not tonight. Let’s just see where fate takes us.”

Maria hadn’t spent as much time in Menocht as Ian, but she had a general familiarity with the city. They didn’t stand out. Clothing that was conspicuous in Gnoste was typical in the shimmering coastal town. They walked easily, tirelessly, passing through neighborhood after neighborhood. They never stopped.

When they at last reached the Flower District, the part of the city dominated by beautiful gardens and rows of local businesses, the sun had set, painting everything in shades of violet dusk. Overhead lights illuminated the entire district–not the iconic colored lanterns that floated above Zukal’iss, but garlands of lights that hung between trees and buildings. Some strings of lights had been coiled into sculptures of animals. Unattached to any buildings or plants, they strode across the sky, providing an enchanting light show.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Ian said, smiling. “I was never in Menocht for the lunar festival season.”

Between reading surface and his Beginning affinity, Ian quickly learned that Menocht Bay was midway through a month of festivities celebrating the end of winter. He thought it was ironic since Menocht Bay remained temperate all year round, but if the tourist city wanted to use it as an excuse to further boost the number of visitors to the coast, good for them.

The festivities revealed a different side of Menocht than he was used to. Even the lower tier of the Flower District had been cleaned up. When they took a lift down, rather than being surrounded by seedy establishments and shady individuals, they were surrounded on all sides by garlands of lights that made the space even brighter than the surface. Countless pop-up business had sprouted all along the interior. Both locals and vacationers were out in full force, the sounds of human existence dominating everything and making it necessary to shout to be heard.

Ian didn’t like these kinds of places–normally.

But seeing the Flower District’s underground–a place that in the loop was the source of the ginger outbreak–transformed into something so different…

It made the loop feel like the illusion it was, like the nightmare was fake.

Of course, Ian wasn’t ignorant to the truth. He couldn’t be, not when he had peerless vital perception, Beginning, and Remorse. The festivities painted a wonderful veneer over a place that was normally rife with crime. He saw beneath them–detected numerous people skulking in dens of depravity outside the public view. Many more were among the crowd, taking advantage of the chaotic atmosphere to steal.

One person even approached Ian and Maria. The perpetrator’s hand got to within a half-foot of Ian’s belt when the necromancer froze her body in place. He spoke into her mind: “Wrong target.”

She looked at him like he was the bogeyman.

Ian tried food from some of the stalls, taking an odd pleasure in waiting in long lines just like everyone else. It was so normal. In Eternity, even in cities dominated by non-ascendants, he had always felt out of place. Everything was at best slightly strange, unfamiliar.

Ian and Maria escaped the throng, taking the lift back to the surface and strolling toward the coast. The tentative excuse of getting dinner fell away as they proceeded onto the beach, moonlight the only source of illumination. They weren’t the only ones, but Ian could tell that no one else was a practitioner.

They walked hand-in-hand along the length of the shore. Eventually, the coast went no further, obstructed by rocks and greenery. Ian pulled Maria to himself, his hands resting on the small of her back, her arms wrapping around him.

As they embraced, bones and shells slowly streamed out of the water, forming a thin, circular platform. Ian led Maria over and they stepped onto the simple circle. Ian kept walking with Maria’s arm in his; as he did, another platform appeared, then another, like stepping stones. He made as small a use of his practice as possible, looking to avoid notice.

Far from the shore, Ian and Maria came to a stop and stared at the stars. They didn’t exchange any words–they didn’t need to. They had crossed an unfathomable distance to enter Eternity and the same distance to come back. They had seen what endless planes had to offer, had seen people with power dwarfing anything they had witnessed before.

Eternity was, in many ways, amazing… but nothing there was quite like home.

We’re going to protect this place from the Infinity Loop, before it’s too late, she said, as though speaking a promise straight into his heart.

Ian held her tighter. Yeah. We are. He just hoped that their efforts would be enough. He couldn’t afford to fall short a second time.