Omnius was leading me through a dark corridor. Being called upon by a teacher at 2 in the morning would have normally caused me to call for disciplinary action. Even though we had agreed to this meeting, I was tempted. Well, not that tempted, I had bigger fish to fry. The respect of my woman and my sexual future were on the line.

I NEEDED to get into that bed again. Nothing was more important than to fulfil the agreement and witness what 1 week of semi-lesbian, pent-up sexual energy did to two submissives. A lowly reason to do anything? No, as far as I am concerned, seeing two women I love grind against each other for my viewing pleasure was just about the highest reason to do anything. The only thing that was more important than that was the same scenario playing out with more and more participants. A harem that loved itself was the greatest motivation any red-blooded man could have.

“You are wondering if this could have waited until tomorrow,” Omnius called out.

“I wasn’t going to say it,” I yawned. It had taken everything in my body to will myself awake. I was a terribly deep sleeper. Even putting my Ashod at full blast had nearly failed to stir me from my dreams. “I’m thankful for the help. I can rest when I’m in my own bed.”

Omnius chuckled knowingly. “What classical punishment – or perhaps an agreement to help you concentrate?”

“The latter.”

“Quite common, still,” Omnius said and shook the lantern. It rang like a chime and became a little bright, casting the flickers of its flame onto the distant walls. “Do you know what the Forlorn Stone is?”

“No,” I answered honestly. “My knowledge is still limited to what I learn in this life… it’s just that I understand a few things quicker than is reasonable. However, were I the estimating sort, then I would direct my mind towards its name. A stone of forlorn nature, to be used to ward off the excesses of the Astral Sea and the Veil?” I hummed theatrically. “Yes, certainly, I would believe that the purpose of this object is to isolate a place in the Veil from everything else. To make it difficult to reach or seem abandoned to those who would peer at it.”

“An apt guess. Indeed the Forlorn Stone makes Welldark appear deserted to unknowing eyes. Arustius does not like to use it and I understand why.”

“Those who are newly awakened to the Dimensional Truth won’t be able to find this place by accident,” I guessed. “For as long as the stone remains in place, the bells will not be heard.”

“Indeed. There are enough Cosmic Universities that I do not worry about one of us going silent for three years. The Headmaster does have a point however that this is unorthodox. It brings me no joy to keep this from him.”

“You didn’t tell him anything?” I asked.

“I did tell him that it had to do with you.” Omnius turned his head to look at me. His eyes glowed more intensely than the lantern. Two golden spheres of solar radiance in the darkness. “Arustius is a capable thinker, he would have surmised correctly in due time. He trusts me to know what I am doing. You trust me to keep a secret. I will prove both of you right. Trust is more valuable than anything.”

“I fully agree.” Even love was built on trust. To love without trust was to grow mad. Nothing was worse. It was akin to having the desperate wish of sleeping in a box of vipers. “Anyway, why did you bring up the Forlorn Stone?”

“You must wonder about the construction of the Magic Branch of Welldark.” Omnius gestured at a sign above us. It described the name of a classroom – the room I regularly had my Gravity Magic lessons in. We passed by it. The wall right next to it, a wall that I had passed not five hours ago, was as smooth as polished glass and as black as the void. I touched it and watched it ripple like the surface of a pond. “The truth is that this building does not exist.”

“It’s a shadow,” I mumbled, finally realizing how everything could constantly shift.

“Rather, I should say the building no longer exists. The generations have steeped the walls in so much Astral Capacity that the original walls no longer matter. They penetrate the Veil - the Greater Veil. It is indeed a shadow, a shadow of many things above us in the hierarchy of dimensions.”

“You want me to project myself up?” I wondered, fear sneaking into my voice.

“I want you to remember yourself down,” Omnius stated and led the way. “I have control over the shadows cast on this place and so its form is malleable to me. I believe, where the heart is, you can connect to yourself.”

I was not convinced this was possible. Separating me from what he mentioned were 21 years and an entirely different mode of understanding. Still, I followed, for I had nothing else to try.

Omnius led me down a staircase that had never been there before, to a door that only was created when we stepped up to it, into a room that was too large to fit where it was. Geometric shapes pulsed around the walls. They were constellations of many colours that I had never seen before. Just beholding them made my eyes hurt. My ears and nostrils quickly followed. “Concentrate on the light,” the Master of Magic said and raised the lantern.

I did and the pain diminished. The light banished that which my eyes could not decipher, put it through the filter of simple illumination. I tried not to think too hard about the ground under my feet or what would happen if I lost my shoes. Distinctly, I realized when I was standing on stone again.

“Meditate here,” Omnius directed me.

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“Alright,” I said and sat down. Legs crossed, I closed my eyes and swiftly fell into the trance. To drop into my mind was easy. I had done it an infinite amount of times before.

Then I fell deeper.

Almost, I snapped out of my trance, a twinge of panic making my muscles seize up. There should have been no deeper than the end of me, yet there was. I relaxed my jaw. ‘This is exactly why he brought you here, isn’t it, Karitas?’ I reminded myself and let myself fall further.

Water rushed around my ears, dull and yet loud. It was like sails rapidly moving in the gusts. Mortar shell reverberated in my ears and my skull. My flesh was shaken by nearby firestoms. Heat and cold were the same, frostburns ravaged every part of me. Behind my closed eyelids played out a kaleidoscope, a distant view of planets. I was floating in the cosmos. I was part of a page depicting the cosmos. I was a dot.

All of my senses fell through the floor, dropped out of my mortal shell as if they were pulled like a silk sheet through a small hole. The torrent of sensations stopped. My logical faculties were done trying to make sense of what happened. The world around me was steeped in incomprehensibility. Eyeballs that received soft physical pressure could create false light signals. This was no different. At this point, the stimulation was simply so abundant that they had shut down.

I was a flat surface. A depiction that knew neither left nor right. I knew up and down, backwards and forwards. That was all I could know. My existence was as flat as a shadow. I was something I could still comprehend. A flat being in a flat world. Sight as I knew it could not exist anymore and so it didn’t.

I remembered this. Vaguely, I remembered this. Now that I was here, I recalled this existence. I recalled this existence many times. My mind scattered into the kaleidoscope. I swirled, reflections of myself, dissolved myself in the memories that no longer made entire sense. The importance of a triangle compared to a square, it was lost on me, and yet I almost wept when I realized that there was an important difference.

‘Deeper,’ I thought, struggling to pull my mind back together. The revolting parts of the kaleidoscope swirled down the page. At first it was gentle, my mind reassembling itself, then I was crushed. Crushed into a point of absolute relevance, all of my mind experiencing the point of losing the space between different segments of myself. There was no pride, no arrogance, no laziness, no respectfulness, no humour, there were no sides to me. I was only Karitas.

Because I was a dot.

Except I could not be a dot.

I was a singular spot, underneath a flat plain, underneath a cube. I was a mathematical description with only one measurement. I could have depth, I could have width, I could have height, but I could only ever have one of the three.

‘So this is what I was,’ I thought and tried to reach out. The world around me turned white. A pounding headache accompanied it, when I forced my eyes open and with them a fragment of my sense upon this plane.

The dot that was me was part of a vast network of hexagons. Each corner was me. Each side only existed because I willed it so. There was no line thin enough to exist without width. The infinitely narrow black strings that layered upon the first dimension did not exist. I peered down from the third and forced it to obey me. Like the human from the bacterium, I was too far removed to perceive it without the proper tools. Unlike the human and the bacterium, I was born with the tool to observe what was too far removed from me.

The headache became a deadly pulsing in my skull. Realities crushed down on the paths I drilled through them. Paths that I had forgotten existed sprawled out into space and time. The layers of the Greater Veil shredded at the edge of consciousness, as if to scream that I was not yet worthy of beholding this.

I was every dot, that was no dot, connected by lines, that were no lines. From some of these focal points of existence in the hexagonal grid, paths reached up. Surviving lineages that passed up to the second layer. I found myself within my own mind again, in a trance that I knew. Reality prowled at the edge of my being, warning me to stay maintained this time by surrounding me in the pain of sensory overload. For as long as the roar of a thousand glaciers melting dripped through my head, I peeked outwards. I followed all the dots that had become pages. I scouted far and wide for the lines that had seen dots, become pages, become cubes. I wished to follow all of them.

I found only the one directly beneath me.

I inhaled heavily, hoping the sound of my own breathing would banish the torment. I was sweaty, tasting iron. I reached up to my face and felt hot blood on my fingers. I tried to open my eyes, but a crusty layer glued them shut. I finally realized I could not hear, only feel my breath going in and out of my chest. Warm liquid dripped from my ears as much as the rest of me. I was grabbed, I was carried.

I found myself on my back in a bed. My child hands were holding a toy. “Karitas, why don’t you play with the other kids?” my mother asked me.

“Because they’ll forget me anyway. It’s fine,” I responded flippantly and turned the toy. Just how did it work? How would it bounce if I dropped it and let gravity take over?

“Even if they will, you won’t forget playing with them,” she had chastised me. “Go on, chew their ear off with your wise little tirades. You’re smart for a boy your age, I’m sure they’ll love to hear you talk.”

I looked up from the toy for but a moment, barely glancing at the woman that had given birth to me. “You don’t have to care, you’ll forget me too, mom.”

“I’ll never forget you!” she had been angry. She had always gotten angry when I suggested that. She had also been right. She did never forget me. That opportunity was taken from her, bestowing me with my greatest regret of all.

I found myself on my back in a bed, staring at a white ceiling. ‘They have those in Welldark?’ I thought. For a moment, I lingered on the bittersweet memories of my mother. I let them go when it started to hurt. Never did I quite realize that I would never see her again. I knew it, of course, but when I remembered her smile it did not manage to sink in that it no longer existed. No boy that searched Heaven and Hell could change that.

The sleep was rubbed from my eyes. I double checked, but it was just the typical, yellowish crystallizations. No signs of blood in there. The memories from yesterday were still with me and that I was in this place was proof that it hadn’t been one odd dream. Omnius was no longer around, but I found my Ashod on the nightstand. I unlocked it and read the message that popped up, A private one sent from the Master of Magic detailing what had happened after I passed out.

Apparently, he had watched as my body gradually degraded, fixed in intervals by my Astral Body. Shortly before I had been moved, the damage had overcome my Astral Capacity, and he had then decided to remove me from the area. After that he brought me to the hospital, where someone with a healing Artefact had patched me back together.

‘Wonder what explanation he gave the staff,’ I hummed and swung my legs out of the bed. I was stark naked, but a fresh uniform had been provided to me. As I put it on, I checked the time. Tuesday, 10 AM. I had basically slept eight hours. Whatever the Greater Veil had done to me in retaliation for my rude peeking at my lineage, it had not led to me passing out for an absurd amount of time. ‘Unless…?!’

I checked the date.