“Rosalind’s the best.”

“Hey.”

“Hi to you too. What’s your name?”

“Liam. And yours?”

***

Ashen light eclipses the summit of the colossal dome. Panes of glass stretch beyond any sane imagination, wrap around trunks of metal thicker than buildings, catch the light, and refract it into a band of colors. Ripples simmer in the ceiling, wisps of colors suspended within the arching carapace of metal, wood, and stone.

To Cora’s metaphysical senses, the dome had felt like an eggshell, fragile beneath the touch of a power no mortal should possess. She expected the structure to be thin, wafer-like.

Not the sight that steals her breath away. The vastness of the interior ceiling spans from horizon to horizon, impossibly large. Each section of glass must be bigger than a house. Hundreds wrap around a core of metal on the ceiling, where the arches converge, and between where the colorful wisps hover.

Too bad parts of the dome cracked under the weight of her observation. A few panes are fractured, and the refracted colors blur into a vague mist. The walls at the far end are cracked. Rifts opened up on the floor, branching away from the crater.

All of this Cora takes in as she writhes on the platform, surrounded by several of the governor’s best healers. Their tendrils trail over her skin and impart a tickling sensation that seals her wounds and soothes her muscles. Her internal pangs cease to exist. Her head clears. She can breathe again. She feels over her body and touches bruises that are rapidly fading.

Wait. She bends her left wrist. Apart from a few faint crackles, the movement is effortless. She rotates her hand and splays her fingers, rotates her wrist, and flops it back and forth.

“Oh my God,” Cora gasps, touching her bone. She circles her fingers around her wrist and bends it. “I…” She wants to hate the governor and his workers. They trapped and tested her inside that wretched corridor. “Thank you.”

A healer offers a friendly writhing of her tendrils. “The fragments were set. All they needed was encouragement.”

“You did a good job following the hospital’s directives,” another healer says. “Not many do.”

“Enough. The governor is waiting for you.” The source of the husky voice, a massive Cenarian built like a tree, points their arm at the lone room in the middle of the dome, an ugly box that offers nothing beyond a nondescript door.

“You’re a jerk,” Cora says. She can’t stop touching her wrist, still shocked at how light and free it feels, though she glares at the guard when she passes by.

“I’m just following orders.”

She closes the gap between herself and the room. Pausing before the dark door, she gnaws on her lip. What is she going to say? She wants to scream at the governor for trapping her. She wants to question him. She wants to go home.

Find Mari. Go home. Those are the only things she needs, and everything else is optional. Whatever may come, in whatever shape or form, she won’t hesitate. Gone is the Cora that fought Mari and doomed them to another world.

A month of nurturing, of self-care, of kindness and safety, has shown Cora that reality is not cruel and uncaring.

Mari. Home.

Cora opens the door and comes face-to-face with a sprawling new world.

A castle floats far above a sparkling blue lake. Rolling plains of bright green stretch off toward infinity. Barely more than smudges against a palette of blues and muted greens, several fortresses hover miles above the land. They gently rotate, and colorful light coruscates from a translucent curtain draped over this world, fluttering with the swaying of the fortresses, producing chains of color that burst like fireworks across the sky.

She glances back at the dome, the crater she blew into the foundations, and the healers and soldiers looking at her expectantly.

“What is this?” she asks.

“The Marlus-Cenari node, intra-Muschia network,” the nearest soldier says. “Marlus is the governor’s residence.”

“I thought this was the governor’s residence.” Cora sweeps her arms. “Everything. This place is huge. And you’re telling me that’s not enough?”

“It is, but Marlus was necessary.”

Of course. The prolonged war against the Empire, which the soldiers back at the hospital made it seem dragged into a bloody stalemate for decades, each side delivering glancing blows on Uklut.

“So what do I do? Do I just… go?”

“Yes. Don’t forget to hold on to the railings. The wind may throw you around.”

Railings? Then she notices the long series of interlocked hexagons leading from the doorway toward the castle. Railings stick out of the outer hexagon edges, zig-zagging toward the castle as well. Hundreds of floating rocks drift around the castle in a lazy orbit. A few approach the bridge, but suddenly change course and drift away.

“There’s no way this is real.” Cora takes a step back, then another, until the doorway looks like it had wallpaper plastered over it. “No way. This place doesn’t feel real. Nothing makes sense. How is that there? Why is there only one elevator that goes here? Where are the stairs? Why is everything so big and empty?”

Her gift had given her a glimpse of the structure. Hollow, empty within, little more than a vast cavern supported by the dome’s hardened materials. Unlike the base, packed with details too rich for her to read, the dome was just that–a dome.

Her eyes fall on the coruscating lights, the glass panels, the intricate carvings on the ceiling, and the sprawling vastness of the floor, with the crater punched off to the side, and the single room and the doorway that apparently leads elsewhere.

It’s surreal. It’s unreal. If the Cenarians worried about Transia, why create this? A superstructure that serves no purpose. A single doorway that leads to the governor’s residence. Where are the guards, the reinforced barriers, the sniper nests, the people?

“It was the will of Arcego,” a guard says, shuffling forward. “And our ancestors followed his divine plan.”

Arcego. One of the founding members of the Empire. The peaceful one, Callista said, the one everyone trusted before that thing called the Unbinding happened and he died and the worlds fractured, leaving behind an intact, colossal structure of power Marpei easily commanded.

“How long ago was this place built?”

“We don’t know.”

So maybe there was a point to shaping the palace into this weird, paradoxical structure. Cora glances back at the doorway and bites her lip. “Hold on to the railway.”

“Yes.” Another guard flourishes his tendrils and removes a wrinkly, black fruit from within his armor plates. “Here. For the nausea.”

“Nausea?” But she takes the fruit, surprised at how squishy it is under her grip. Her left hand grips it. Without pain. She can’t get over finally using her dominant hand again.

“And the vertigo. You are not the first to speak to the governor. We’ve made improvements. Good luck, Cora.”

And with that, the guards and healers watch. It feels like standing in front of a cult, their beady eyes set deep behind wrinkled faces. She rolls the fruit around before turning and marching toward the doorway.

Its seams brighten at her approach. The image shifts downward toward an outcrop jutting out the side of a steep, striated cliff. Two massive metal poles stab through the outcrop, and from the edge the bridge begins, off toward the floating castle.

It reminds her too much of her final moments in the void, barrelling into the square that held a blurry image of the forest. She gulps, inches from crossing the threshold.

Is it safe? The Cenarians seem nonchalant about it.

Here I go.

Static crackles along Cora’s skin. Something wet and slimy pushes her back with malformed hands, desperate to keep her where she belongs, to maintain a semblance of order when everything else has slipped into insanity.

Cora pushes back. The slimy wetness gives under her direct intent and flees, leaving behind a sticky residue that silences the static electricity and leaves her feeling cold.

Oh.

The doorway failed to give perspective to just how big and how deep this part of the world goes. The cliff drops at a near-vertical angle. Its surface is pockmarked with holes and scratches, plunging into the bottom of the world. The bottom is distant and hazy, just a few unidentifiable shapes swimming in a soup of murky fog.

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The bridge itself sways gently, while wind gusts whip at her face and blow grit into her eyes. She blinks furiously, reaching with one hand to shield her eyes, the other to rub out the particles.

Hundreds of yards separate her from the castle. There’s no way she can make it across. She turns back toward the doorway, but it’s gone. A rectangle etched into the gray stone is all that remains.

Crossing it is, then.

Cora tests her foot on the first hexagonal panel. It holds firm. She stomps on it, and a faint shudder runs across the bridge. She grabs the railing and it holds, too. Against the yawning chasm, the bridge looks so pitifully small, like a second-grade construction project built with matchsticks and Elmer’s glue.

This is what the governor and his entrusted Cenarians take? Her stomach flutters as she takes the second step and entrusts her life to the bridge.

Luckily, it doesn’t snap and fling her into the abyss.

She sets off at a slow walk, trailing her hands along the railings, pausing when wind gusts blow into the side of the bridge and it sways, resuming after the wind dies down and the bridge feels like rock.

Once she’s certain she won’t plummet to her certain doom, she looks around. She’s right at the center of the field of floating rocks, and witnessing them personally is something no movie or TV show could ever hope to capture. Forget the panoramic shots of fantasy and sci-fi worlds. The base of her neck prickles, and a pleasurable tingle travels down her spine, while she breathes in the actual, real fantasy world she’s a part of.

She feels free. Released from the chains binding her to her worldly problems. Out here, beneath the watchful eye of the Muschian sun, blessed by a soothing warmth that protects her against the vicious gusts of wind, she feels happy.

Cora could stay here forever, suspended in paradise.

But reality awaits. Clouds seal the sun away, the rocks drift behind the castle, and the wind gusts worsen, pummeling at her, rocking the bridge. She’s forced to move on, though she remembers how magical that moment felt. It’s something she should’ve shared with Mari.

Mari.

Cora refuses to cry. It’s only going to hurt, but the pressure builds, her eyes itching as wetness overcomes them. The box. You’re gonna talk to the governor, calm down! She sniffles and releases her iron-clad grip on the railings.

Miraculously, she manages the rest of the journey more or less intact, save for her stomach swooping and throat tightening as she shoves down her nausea. The fruit helps, pleasantly sweet. Or maybe it’s a placebo effect, but it doesn’t matter, because then she crosses the castle’s main gate and a different type of dread settles over her head.

Unlike the mushroom-shaped building back at Cenari, the castle is bustling with activity. Dozens of Cenarians patrol the castle walls. Several peek out oval windows set into the stone, before vanishing back into lightless corridors. She crosses the threshold from the pitch black expanse of metal supporting the castle into a hallway that puts most castles to shame.

Endless carpet cushions her feet. Busts and statues of Cenarians pose within alcoves, glittering under sconces set into the walls. Rich burgundy drapery swoops down and hides deeper corridors. Crowds of people cross or linger in the hallway, chatting and twirling tendrils and posing before artists rapidly sketching their profiles.

All of them, however, pause and stare at her. Cora gulps. She offers a timid wave, shrinking beneath their suspicious stares. “Hi?” Why are there so many people? How are there so many? There’s no way everybody took that bridge. “I came here because the governor wants to talk with me.”

“Say no more,” a Cenarian clad in green robes says. “Follow me.”

She can feel their stares burning into the back of her neck. She resists the urge to glance backward, even after they enter a new corridor and the chatter resumes. A short walk away, the corridor ends at what she can only call a throne room. Just like the rest of the palace, it’s richly decorated, though there are no crowns or banners or scepters. Just the crescent and double line symbol set above the throne, inlaid with gold, and glittering between two sconces.

The throne itself is a squat and ugly metal frame, a misshapen thing that looks like it got partially melted and then had an amateur attempt to repair an armrest and part of a leg before giving up.

The governor is seated on top, draped from neck to feet in that red garment. His eyes are dull black this time, though they glow the faintest green when the escort leaves and shuts the double doors behind them.

“Cora,” he acknowledges, making no move at all.

“Governor,” she responds. She glares at him, and he gazes back impassively, with not a single tendril betraying any emotion. “I’m still angry at you for what you did.”

“It was necessary. I explained to you why.”

“Maybe it was, but it was still wrong!”

“A small crime to protect a bigger good is not wrong.” The governor finally shifts a few tendrils, and they wrap around the remaining armrest. His garment slithers around his neck. “Do you not agree?”

That’s the argument the utilitarians use, don’t they? Cora is about to lay waste to the governor, before an old bit of knowledge surfaces. Different cultures mean different morals. Alien cultures mean alien morals. If utilitarianism is their way of thinking, and all these years they’ve survived the Empire’s crushing forces, does that mean maybe the governor is justified in his point of view?

The thinking hurts. It brings back whispers of a not-so-distant past where she once excelled at school, being the type of student to raise her hand every class and score at the top of every test.

She needs those brains if she wants answers. The governor is not my enemy. But there’s no forgetting how it felt being crushed to paste within rock, even if they were illusions. The governor might do worse. Much worse.

“The box,” Cora says, and the governor tilts his head and waves a few tendrils.

“Yes, the box. I suppose you still have it?”

“It’s back at Cenari somewhere. I don’t know exactly.” Callista had told her to say that. The Cenarians may be kind, but somebody is working with the Transient.

“I see.” The governor’s garment flows around his torso. Folds ripple and snap backward into themselves. He trails several tendrils along the rustling fabric. “You worry about the entity, don’t you? If it had possessed you already, we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.”

“Tell me everything you know.”

“Ah, of course, it’s why you’re here. I don’t have much to say, really.”

He has a lot to say. Cora might not be the most socially adept, but even she can read him feigning ignorance. Cenarian body language isn’t too different from a human’s. “Where did the box come from?”

The governor’s eyes twinkle. “A better question you should ask is why it exists.”

“Where does it come from, and why does it exist?”

He reaches into the whirling living fabric and produces a thin book. Its edges are eaten away, the bindings peeling off, the title letters faded into obscurity. Cora can’t read what’s left of it, anyway. His tendrils lift the book, flip the pages, and slip between them, acting like temporary bookmarks.

“The first entry,” he says, flipping it open. The writing is ancient and faded. Surprisingly, the chapter had been printed, though the ink is smudged in some areas and the paper is curled and yellow. “The first appearance of the Transient gateway. Two hundred fifty-three years after the Unbinding. Year 198 post founding of the Empire. The gateway is deployed on the Transient homeworld to punch paths into the grid, circumventing the need for nodes. However, due to user error and the rejection of reality, the first user, a certain character called Maronet, is eventually driven to insanity and torches three Transient cities before Marpei’s elite soldiers kill him.”

Printed boldly beneath the floral text is a faded image of a Transient wearing a complete set of armor. An obsidian oval mask covers his features. Flames wreathe his figure and travel down his arms like snakes. Beside him is a nondescript box, lid yawning open, and waves of light flooding the vicinity.

“After Maronet was put down, the gateway disappeared for a few centuries.” The governor flips to the next page. Most of it is charred, bits flaking off despite his gentle hold.

“Year 455 post founding of the Empire. The gateway reappeared in one of the Transient core worlds, Duelium. Not much is known. The user, unnamed, split a continental plate in half before Marpei’s elite soldiers subdued them. Rumored to have escaped before dying under the influence of another.”

The picture is nearly gone. Half of a leg remains, covered in baggy clothing. He flips to the next entry. The page is glossy, the letters embellished, and has a picture of a bird-like person levitating globs of water.

“Year 712 post founding of the Empire. The gateway reappeared somewhere on a recently conquered world, Esse. The user, Arlo, evaporated Esse’s oceans and successfully fought off Marpei’s elite soldiers before he was betrayed by a close ally.”

“Wow. What the fuck,” Cora breathes out, looking down at her own hands. Is that what she’s fated to become? The parasite’s puppet, committing unspeakable acts of horror, wielding the power to end entire civilizations?

“I hope you forgive us for our precautions,” the governor says, and for once, he actually sounds sorry.

Burn cities? Split continents? Evaporate the fucking ocean? The Cenarians’ test was laughably small compared to what could’ve happened. Tame, even. Then again, they worked under the belief she lost her gift somehow, and wanted to push her buttons to see if she’d been lying.

But they’d come so close to dying. Everyone. She can’t imagine the disaster that would’ve happened if she clenched her metaphorical fist and cracked the dome under her grip. Not to mention the node, trapped inside. If she’d broken into the node’s room, what would’ve happened?

“So the box is an old Transient weapon that went wrong and caused a bunch of disasters,” Cora says.

“That is the basic summary, yes. There are a few more entries of worlds devastated by people who interacted with the gateway box. The last event happened over three hundred years ago. Ever since, no record has been found.” The governor stares at her. “Until now.”

“I wasn’t expecting that.” Cora feels queasy. There’s no way she’d do something that horrible. Those people were monsters, but maybe they’d been like her once, not knowing any better until the parasite–or other parasites–tricked them into giving up control of their bodies.

“Trust me, I wish it was a different truth.”

“What about the parasite? Where does that come into play? How does the box work? Can it be destroyed?”

The governor closes the book and slips it back into the rustling fabric. It swallows it and flows up his back. “I don’t know how the gateway works, and I don’t know if the box itself can be destroyed. If you bring it to us, we may figure out a way to put an end to the cycle. The entity, though, I believe we can extract it and kill it.”

Kill it.

Cora clenches her hands. “And why am I supposed to trust anything you say?”

“There is nothing to lie to you about, for one thing,” the governor responds. “You have an entity inside your head that has historically devastated worlds. If we were the Transients, we would’ve killed you the moment we learned about your interaction with the gateway. But I want to do this the proper way, by learning with you. I know you’re suffering. We know you’re suffering. Let us help you.”

Cora wrings her hands. She bites her bottom lip and curls her toes. The parasite hasn’t bothered her recently. In fact, all it’s been is an uncomfortable weight lodged in her mind, something she’s conscious over and constantly picking at, but otherwise harmless.

But she still remembers the slow, grinding horror of being dragged between realities. Her pain receptors constantly activating, her body broken as she channeled energies no mortal should possess. And on the other side, the governor ordered her to be crushed between the stones, even if it was just an illusion.

Pick your poison.

That thought was not her own.

Cora snarls and unclenches her hands. “Fine,” she says, offering her hand. The governor stares at it, puzzled, then slowly grasps her hand with a few tendrils. “Can you get rid of it?”

“I believe we can, while maintaining the proper barriers in case the worst comes to happen. There are similar procedures for Transients that hijack our soldiers.”

She hates herself for putting her trust in the man who left her nearly dead. “I’ll do it. Let’s get rid of it, then.”