A door, closed in its frame, stood alone in the midst of a great clearing, grass-like crystals growing in thickets, cobbles of a long-abandoned road askew; whether once a great pavilion, or a confluence of the many roads leading here, was indeterminate. It was a dark, nearly black wood, painted over with peeling and faded white paint.
Before the door sat a young woman, no longer a girl, in a circle of dead and dying plants. Her head was shaved, dark skin glinting in the sunlight, darker tattoos in geometric patterns adorning her scalp.
Madelaine's eyes were Open, as she studied the door, a frown forming and fading by intervals. The door wasn't necromancy, exactly, but it wasn't not necromancy, either; it was formed of the same kind of not-quite-fractal patterns, but different. Like a different language of fractal patterns; a different magic, perhaps, but she had now seen every school known to the planes, and this was none of them.
Necromancy was the closest, however, and she pondered the nature of necromancy, so different from the fractals of viviomancy; the magic of life was, at least, well-named, but as she had become increasingly proficient in the magic of death, she had gradually come to realize it had little to do with death at all, but was rather simply a kind of organization that was antithetical to life, not by nature, but simply because the patterns were different. Viviomancy created something like a tree, with purpose flowing from something like a mind, all self-reinforcing at every level, the smallest part both identical to the whole, and yet distinct. Necromancy created something less continuous, and in its ideal form, entirely separable; cut the hand off an ideal zombie, and the hand would continue attacking.
This door was something like that, but different; antithetical to the machinery of necromantic magic, antithetical to the machinery of viviomantic magic, by virtue of being organized differently. But organized more like necromancy than viviomancy, yet somehow more … comprehensive. She did not understand this door, in this long-abandoned place. But she had come here seeking it.
It was a puzzle piece; stories told of this door, which was not always a door. It was a passage to the Foundation, itself a puzzle, created by an insane necromancer in a time long, long past. Or at least the stories said, and she saw little reason to deny them, for they had brought her here, after years of study, years of talking to madmen and scholars and those who straddled the thin line between. Madelaine did not know what the Foundation was; she had suspicions only, unconfirmed by the arrogant certainty with which proclamations were spoken. It was the bedrock of reality, or at least a bedrock; if there was something more fundamental, there was no evidence of it, and such talk was considered strictly metaphorical. But then, the Foundation itself had been considered strictly metaphorical at one point, until a madman created this door into it, in the process crafting the magic used to later enter the astral, and become petty gods of petty concepts. And now the grand work of the door laid abandoned, in an abandoned plane; a place that anybody could find, and which nobody did. The last three planes she had traversed to come here had been devoid of any life, and the two prior, little enough. The proximity to the Foundation, unmediated by the astral, was … antithetical.
Only those who, like her, no longer strictly qualified as living could even approach; the Foundation was antithetical to life, which depended on things like chemical bonds to exist; chemical bonds were a part of reality, not a part of the Foundation upon which reality sat. She had spent the last year preparing herself in that regard, and was now something more like machinery than biology, machinery which operated on its own internal logic, rather than relying on the logic of reality. You could not protect yourself against the laws of the universe with a mere suit of armor; you could only ensure you brought your own laws with you.
And few cared to enter in the first place, for what was there was that which wasn't anything here, or at least nothing could be brought back, save a fraying of sanity she was no longer certain she possessed. The written descriptions she could find varied; the nature of the Foundation was, as far as Madelaine could discern, in a fundamental sense metaphorical, where the metaphors were those you brought with you; one author, the last survivor of a team who had somehow stumbled into the Foundation by what was claimed to be an accident, had described the Foundation as an endless series of rooms, each of which was a challenge, each of which with many doors, but where the key used to open the door mattered more than the door which was opened; the keys had not survived the exit. Another author had described the Foundation as an endless featureless fog with impossible geometries, full of intangible threats and meaningless voices. A third author wrote about tunnels; a fourth, floating islands connected by bridges.
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The only common element to all of their stories were the goats, who spoke in human voices, who spoke words of madness. The goats were why she had come. Because the thing-that-had-been-Thomas, before Arias killed it, spoke of the goats. It had spoken in Thomas' voice, speaking words of madness.
Arias had known, Madelaine was sure. She had reacted, when he had spoken of goats, she had stopped seeing him as Thomas but as the-thing-that-had-been-Thomas, and then the mute girl had revealed her capacities, and spoken her own words of madness, and Madelaine's head still rung with it, a headache that never quite faded, no matter how many years had passed.
And now she sat before this door, trying to understand what it did. For Thomas, who could not have known, had, in his final moments past knowing, known something that could not be known. And she suspected, she thought – she hoped – that the answers she sought would be through this door, and the boy, now surely a man.
For Elijah had been among the people who had never been allowed to leave, and she would find him. Maybe even Thomas, or whatever was left of him. The unanchored plane had not dissipated, but had crashed, somewhere in the Foundation. And had persisted even then; the damned sages, who had refused to speak to her of her plans, had at least given her that much. Madelaine tried to take in a breath – but this body needed no air, and had no capacity for it. Hands of a metal that was more concept than reality clenched, the latent magic of the air seeping into and then out of them, both magnified and depleted by the transition.
She would puzzle out how to open this door, first. Perhaps she should try – her attention focused on the doorknob, which she was quite certain had not been there before, although her memory said it had been. Memory couldn't be trusted, however – not here. Madelaine rose, her body too thin and too tall, looking around the hellscape that surrounded her.
Her skeletons hadn't survived, their magic dissolving the faster the closer they had gotten. That had been expected, for it was the very method she had employed to find the door, more than a year previous. And the first attempted approach had shown the truth of the old stories, and also the lies of those who claimed their entry to be mere accident; she, at the height of the power available to her through mere dedication, had barely survived the abortive approach, and the past year had been spent remaking herself, using materials whose existence themselves had been secrets to discover.
She barked out a humorless laugh, or what passed for one out of the framework that let her speak. Examining the doorknob still, she thought back on how the inquisitor and her flunkies had died; many of the secrets had come from the woman herself, using the very means that the inquisitor had once sought to recruit her for. The death had been necessary; Madelaine had made a promise to herself, and it was important to keep your promises. The secrets had just been a pleasant surprise – this metal, and the other, which had been a dead-end for her purposes. The forbidden magics, to move herself into this body, and remake her mind. The existence of the door itself, or at least a rumor setting her down this path, a chance mention of the goats that grazed in the space beneath reality. A chance that became certainty, with enough pressure.
Although, really, she would have been interested regardless, for the details of the madman who had created this door was its own secret, and a strange one, for it touched upon the holes in her memory where Home had once been. He was folklore, in her Home; a story to frighten young children, a necromancer, or something worse, who would offer you temptation, make you a bargain, if you went to the right place at the right time. The precise details escaped her, yet the implication that he had traveled to her own Home was not lost on her. Nor the means by which he must have accomplished it; the Foundation, the Substrate as the silly sages insisted calling it in contradiction to the learned of University, connected them.
She wouldn't go Home; it was Home no longer, just a childhood she had long since left behind. But if the Foundation connected the two, perhaps it would also connect to the fallen plane. Madelaine smiled, a curved split forming in the sparkling surface that was her face. It felt wrong. It felt right. She opened the door, and stepped through – trying to gasp, and failing, as what she thought of as reality gently fell apart around her, like a sheet of water broken by a grasping hand, revealing what lay behind.