"I told you," Topher sighed, "not to look." He stepped up to Hana's side, hands gripping his own arms; even with all the protections against magical temperature his equipment and spells gave him, this wasn't a chill they could protect against.

To his left, Hana raised a hand, unbelieving, to the golden frame of the painting; within, shimmering and delicately luminescent, was an image of a young girl. From Topher's guess, she was about the same age as Haruko had been, or maybe a little older; she was pudgy, but had begun to sprout slightly, and her hair was cut in a shoulder-length bob that he felt wasn't the best fit for her face. She was frozen in mid-step, walking along a sunlit sidewalk in the company of two other girls and an older boy; a butterfly was in the act of alighting on her fingertip as she laughed with visible pleasure. But none of those things were the problem.

The problem, Topher thought grimly, was that the structure of the face was entirely too familiar; it was a face that, given about ten years of time and a lot of expensive diet and skincare products, would look identical to the face of the woman next to him. Struggling against his natural inclination otherwise, he put a hand heavily on her shoulder. "Ignore it. He's just fucking with us again."

"Bailey-sama," Hana moaned in despair. "Bailey-sama, you don't understand." She pointed at the picture, her hand trembling slightly. "That's... that's a high-school uniform. I was about to graduate middle school."

"Huh?" Topher blinked and tilted his head, but couldn't see what difference it made. "So what?"

"And look." Now trembling more than slightly, she pointed at the butterfly's wings; at first, it seemed like the entire scene was frozen, but after a moment he could see that the wings were moving, extremely slowly, a fraction of an inch over the course of long seconds. "Sixty to one, remember?"

"Wait." Abruptly, a cold sweat popped out all over Topher's body; his mouth had gone very dry. "Wait. You're saying this isn't from our past? It's from our future?"

"Not our future." Hana's expression was bleak; it looked like she was about to collapse, held upright only by resignation and intransigence. "Their present. We're copies."

Topher's guts sank like he'd been hollowed out, the Magic Stone in his belly ripped out by the assertion; and, surely enough, he could see the truth in the next painting over. Another Christopher Bailey sat, slouched and flabby, in front of a computer and listlessly began the multi-minute process of scrolling his mousewheel; red-eyed and unshaven, he clearly hadn't showered in days, and his nails were long and yellow with nicotine stains. Christ, I'm a mess, Topher couldn't stop himself from thinking.

But almost immediately, the quick fire of outrage kindled within him; grabbing Hana roughly by the arm, he pulled her away. "I said ignore it, damn it!" Trying not to cringe at the sight of her furious expression, he gestured helplessly at the line of paintings descending into the darkness. "This is the kind of shit I could make with Minor Illusion! There's no reason to believe it's true -- just more crap to fuck with our heads! And even if it was, it doesn't change shit; whether I'm Topher Bailey 2.0 or Original Recipe, it doesn't make a goddamn difference to Zanasha. Or anybody else we're fighting to save." He pushed her back, gently but firmly, and looked into her eyes. "Or do you wanna give up now? You okay with this guy winning just because he showed you magic fanfiction about how your life back on Earth might have gone?"

"Fuck that," Hana growled, but Topher could see she was shaken. "I just... I..." She ran down, turning back to the painting, and gently touched the frame again. "That's my brother. Walking me to school." She choked back a sob. "I'll never... I..."

"Hana." Topher sighed, then turned to look at his own painting again; he tried to summon up any kind of similar feeling for his old life, but the only emotions that filled him were sadness and disgust. "This is what he wants. Do you get me? This is here to break your heart, because he can't break your will. The only question is whether you're gonna let him."

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Hana squeezed her eyes shut; she let out a small, keening cry, then sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then, as though tearing herself bodily out of someone else's grasp, she spun away and began to descend the staircase; Topher, caught off-guard, had to hustle to keep up with her.

As they descended, he kept looking at the other paintings; there were hundreds, way more than he'd ever expected. He caught glimpses of some people he knew -- Hotaka, Suzume, and other kids he'd seen in the castle -- and also many others he didn't, which he guessed were other kids from the previous Summoning (a theory strengthened when he saw Rudo, looking much the same but decidedly more morose on the back of a golf cart). But the pictures kept going; other kids, other strangers, many more than he'd been expecting. He frowned. "I thought they only did three Summonings? Why are there so many?"

"Three that we knew of," Hana reminded him dully. "If Vashyarl and the other Immortal Beasts were Summoned from our world, there must have been others. Clearly a great many others." They kept descending, and Topher felt his disbelief and outrage continue to grow; each additional portrait on the wall was another child soldier, another stolen life to serve the purposes of whoever had planned all this. And let's not pretend we don't know who planned this, he grumbled to himself sourly.

Finally, however, the staircase came to an end; a steel door, blacker than black, was accompanied by six final portraits. Topher didn't recognize four of them, but the fifth he could identify as Vashyarl; however, the man in the portrait was old, even older than Topher himself. Yeah. If this is supposed to be Vashyarl as he would be today, that would have been thousands of years ago here; so I guess it makes sense he'd be pretty old back home. If any of this is real, which it probably isn't. But the last painting was an anomaly; it showed a windswept graveyard, incongruously cheerful in autumn, with vibrant yellow and orange leaves above and around the crumbling gray headstones. An adult figure sat on a low fence, with its back to the portrait's perspective; they wore a heavy coat and a knit cap, and Topher couldn't tell if the figure was was fat or thin, man or woman, young or old, tall or short. He studied the painting for a moment, then shrugged. Could be anything. Waste of time anyway.

Approaching the final door, he could see it would not be trivial to bypass; it radiated its own personal antimagic field, and there was no handle or hinge that he could see. The words TURN BACK were emblazoned on its surface in bright white letters, but Topher ignored them; instead, he dropped into a Metaphrasty trance and scoured the air once more. The spells were even thicker here than they'd been above, almost blinding him with their ubiquity; he couldn't even pick out individual runes anymore. A headache seized him as he shut his eyes and shook his head, his trance collapsing; "Shit. I'm not gonna be any help here."

"Seriously?" Hana looked back at him, surprised, then put her chin in her hand and contemplated the door for a moment. "I wonder..."

Then, a mischievous expression crept across her face, and she moved slightly to the right of the door; the wall was not quite flush with the sides of the frame, and she jammed her Flux Blade into the stone roughly a foot to the right of the door. The gleaming, white-hued steel blade sank up to its hilt in the cold dark stone, and she twisted her wrist sharply; Topher winced, expecting the blade to snap, but instead the wall shattered like glass and crumbled away to reveal a dark hallway beyond.

"That's the way to do it," Topher commented approvingly, following her as she ducked through the jagged opening; the space beyond was resoundingly vast, but pitch-black, and neither of them could see a thing. "Ehn Ehf Zefekk Zoff Neifod," he intoned, trying to hold onto his confidence; a staticky gray orb of brilliance formed between his fingers, and he let it rise up above them as it revealed the terrain before them.

It was a great hall, hundreds of feet on a side; innumerable tunnels and passageways honeycombed the walls to either side, but the opposite wall had only one exit. A great arch, nearly fifty feet tall and twice that across, led into a shadowed hallway; the words "ABANDON ALL HOPE" were etched so deeply into the stone above it that they seemed to swallow the light entirely. Topher tried not to gulp audibly. "Okay. Uh, I think this is it."

His voice echoed creepily through the silent, empty expanse; he started to make his way across the hall, but stopped short when Hana's arm abruptly barred his path. "Hold, Bailey-sama. We're not alone in here."