Her sensorium was an ocean. She was swimming through the world. The city melted into a single, swirling maelstrom of ideas, no longer strictly separated by subjective walls. Beings poured out of the asphalt and the brick, some imagined, some had always been there. Structuralism had trapped them in order. Chaos had freed them to roam. It was easy to see how this was what man was meant to be. She watched the people following her, the way their inhibitions melted and their true selves came out.

Humans had done this to themselves. Bureaucracy, tradition, social etiquette, all structuralist ideas that have allowed millions of people to live in one place. They were safer together, at the cost of freedom.

Not that this was the reason she had done this; to have reason at all would betray the point of chaos. This had always been the true state of mankind. A chance encounter with the right kind of moss, berry, or sprouting cap unleashed her aspect among the ancient hunter-gatherers of human prehistory. Human beings had lost an important part of their psychological heritage by living in cities. Human beings were at their happiest in delirium.

She was Absinthe of the Delirium, and she had no idea what she was doing.

Lyssa awoke, washed up on the rocks. A crab sidestepped up to her face, leaving lines of sand behind it. It nipped her on the nose. She swatted it away and sprung upright. She looked at her surroundings, breathing heavily.

She was at a beach. Rocks and sand and saltwater. A cliff hung above, imposing a shadow on her. Behind it, a woodland. This was a familiar place. She had been here before. The fact that she was here now meant she was hallucinating.

She wanted to cry. Her mental condition had not gotten better at all. It should have been obvious that she could not pick and choose the parts of herself she liked like a girl before a wardrobe. Lyssa had tried anyway. And it had worked, for a time. It was like a schizophrenic choosing which delusions were useful and pretending not to see the others, then calling themselves cured.

She walked along the beach, eyes reddened, flicking stones with her feet. Towards the horizon where the waves came from, there were faint echoes of people marching and singing. She picked up a conch, brushed off the sand, and placed it close to her ear. She could hear the cacophony in the real world. It was an impromptu parade led by the Self she had thought—or desperately hoped—was constrained by simple rules. Absinthe wasn’t supposed to have power as long as Lyssa wasn’t inebriated. Lyssa was fine with lifelong sobriety after what had happened the last time her friends took her out to a pub.

She kept walking along this beach, frustrated, angry, sad, then finally nothing. The cliff passed behind her, then appeared in front. She had wrapped back around this memory. A crab walked up to the spot she had beached, then stalked away. With the feeling of defeat walked out of her system, she became curious. She looked up at the cliff.

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It was too tall for her to see what was up there. Lyssa began to climb. The rock was soft, made of more dirt than stone. It deformed wherever she gripped. She maintained her speed. This wasn’t her first time moving in metaphor. Fear that she might fall would lead her to fall.

So belief in her ability to fly ought to allow her to fly. Lyssa’s fingers tensed, imagining, preparing to jump, only to relax back to her hold. She decided not to test the rigidity of her own hallucinations and climbed all the way up.

The top of the cliff was home to a soothing breeze. It was a vertical barrier to a woodland that went nowhere. The memory ended beyond those identical branches and shrubs. Moments in marbles and events in snow globes. Humans did not remember their lives in continuity. Humans weren’t supposed to have others living in their own head either.

The new Self sat on the edge of the cliff. Chesed. Serene. At peace. She knew Lyssa was there, but did not pay her any mind, not until Lyssa sat down beside her.

“Hello, Primum.”

“Why don’t you help me?” Lyssa asked.

“What would be the point?”

Lyssa was arguing with herself. The situation made her angry, but it also made her laugh. If she didn’t have gifts she would be in straits, bouncing off padded walls.

“I don’t remember this,” Lyssa said.

“Grandfather took us here once,” Chesed said. “We retain the oddest moments.”

“We can’t have this if we don’t take control of our life.”

“She’s doing that right now.” Chesed pointed to the horizon. Reality leaked through the faint clouds, paled from distance.

Lyssa didn’t know what to do. Chesed and Absinthe were opposites. They could cancel each other out and bring everything back to normal. But it wasn’t in their nature.

“They won’t let us rampage through the streets,” Lyssa said. “They’ll capture us, lock us away.”

“I can get by.” Chesed raised a hand. It warbled with energy. “They can’t hurt me.”

“They’ll find a way. If we won’t work as a hero, they’ll study us, make us useful.”

The Self did not reply. She was a strange one. Her eyes were not glazed over with absence; Chesed was all there—this was what she wanted. To sit here overlooking a beach. Why? Lyssa couldn’t fuse with a Self she didn’t understand. She couldn’t even remember this place. If grandfather took her here, where was he?

She watched the waves roll in, the crabs walk along the shore, the winds blow. Then the memory would repeat, like they were in a time loop. Or this wasn’t a memory, but a realm. But there was something real about this place. It wasn’t a bed of metaphor like the other realms, save for one other.

When grandfather died, and Lyssa developed the first power she was aware of. Her younger Self obsessed over that moment. It replayed over and over. This beach was a memory. It repeated because this shard of Lyssa didn’t want to move. Chesed wanted to be here forever. What was so bad past this point?

Lyssa could rage and be combative, like she did with Bildungsroman, or she could try something new. She adopted the same position as Chesed, and together they watched the same waves roll in, and the changeless clouds drift.