Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

  "Is that really you?" she asked, her tone one of happy disbelief.

  "Uh, yeah," I told her. I spread my arms out a little and inclined my hand inwards, as if to say 'see for yourself'. "It's me."

  Ptolema, however, seemed to misinterpret this gesture. She stood up from her position in the mud, trod over, and embraced my open arms in an enthusiastic hug. I tensed in surprise before hugging her back hesitantly, worried how much dirt was getting on my clothes.

  "It's so good to see you!" she said, squeezing me tightly. "I thought we'd... gods, I can't even remember how long it's been! This is crazy!"

  "I-It's good to see you too, Ptolema," I said, halfheartedly returning the hug and blushing slightly at the unexpected physical contact. "But... you're kinda hurting my chest..."

  "Oh! Sorry, my bad." She swiftly let go, backing up a step. She was beaming, and she looked up and down at me again, a wistful look in her eyes. "Wow. There you are, huh. Man."

  I scratched my head awkwardly. "It's not that big a deal," I said, only realizing after the fact that I had so little context that I couldn't possibly assess how big a deal it, in fact, was.

  Her gaze shifted slightly, a note of confusion in her eyes, before her smile brightened once again. "So, where the heck have you--" She cut herself off suddenly, clicking her tongue. "Geez, I'm so excited I'm gettin' ahead of myself! Why don't you come inside? Lemme make you some coffee or tea or whatever!" She gestured towards the back door as she started striding that way herself, a skip in her step. "Or booze, even! I've got some pretty good stuff lying around somewhere."

  "Don't you need to finish taking care of your pigs...?" I asked, glancing around. "I feel like I showed up in the middle of something."

  "Nah, I was basically done." She made a dismissive gesture. "I already fed 'em and cleaned the pens up, and I was just playin' around with Ash for a bit after I fixed up a cut on his leg. They'll be fine until tonight."

  I glanced at the pig she'd been tending to. It was brown, with some white spots. "Are you... raising them for slaughter, or just as a hobby?"

  "Just a hobby!" she said, then hesitated slightly. "Well, I guess not even my hobby, technically. They're not actually mine-- Just been taking care of 'em for a couple years while their real mom's busy with something."

  "Must be pretty time-consuming," I said, briefly forgetting that this was a reality where people could apparently use the Power as easily as breathing and conjure anything they wanted with a snap of their fingers. "I usually hear people do birds for that sorta thing, since at least you get some eggs out of it, too."

  "I like pigs," she said casually, as she opened the door. "They're really smart, you know? Even smarter than dogs. You really get a sense that they're picking up on what you're thinking, sometimes."

  "I'll, uh, have to take your word for it," I said, stepping inside.

  The interior of the cabin was... well, suffice it to say, it wasn't quite up to the standard of artistry I'd come to expect during my brief time in this world. It wasn't that it was ugly or dirty - the construction of the building itself was elegant and closer to what you'd expect from an old aristocratic lodge than a dinky little structure like this, and most of the furniture was quite nice - but rather that it was just overflowing with such a sheer abundance of stuff that it would have looked like a mess no matter what. Every room was filled from corner to corner with packed shelves, cabinets, and boxes, filled with countless different sorts of junk. There were antiques, books, clothes, artwork, machines and devices, crystals like the ones I'd seen people using earlier, disassembled furniture...

  It was kinda the opposite of what came to mind when I imagined where Ptolema would live. I'd never been to her apartment when we'd been in school together, but since she was such a straightforward person and not particularly girly, I'd always pictured it being spartan. Maybe there'd be some exercise equipment, tunics left lying around the floor, a fancy setup for watching dramas... Maybe a desk she never used...

  Wow, I thought to myself. I really am a judgemental asshole.

  She showed me into the kitchen, which was the least cluttered of the rooms, and gestured to a little round table with three chairs. "Have a seat!"

  "Sure," I said. "Thanks."

  "What do you wanna drink?" she asked, stepping over to the sink. "I could fix a snack for you too, if you're hungry. I don't have anything good in, but I could conjure something."

  "It's okay, I just ate earlier," I told her. Even though my stomach still ached a little from stuffing myself near to bursting earlier, thinking back to the laganon already made me crave more of it. "I'll have a mocha, I suppose. If it's not too much trouble."

  She nodded. "Sounds good! And I'll have some lemon tea." She glanced back over at me. "You want milk or sugar?"

  "No," I replied, sitting down. "I'm good."

  Ptolema nodded, then set to work while I waited quietly in my seat for a couple of minutes, awkwardly fidgeting my fingers together. She didn't use the Power during the preparation process save for conjuring some water, boiling a kettle and even retrieving the beans from a set of jars and grinding them down with a small press, humming to herself a little as she worked. Finally, she poured the powder into a white mug along with the water, stirred, then repeated the process for her own drink, going so far as to slice a lemon and squeeze in some fresh juice.

  "Sorry about that," she said, as she approached. "I like doing this stuff the old fashioned way. Makes the flavor better, y'know?"

  "Y-Yeah," I said mutely.

  She passed me the cup, still looking cheerful, and sat down herself. I sipped from the drink. It had a pretty good bittersweet flavor - the beans were clearly high quality, at least - but was nothing special. However, I barely processed it either way. My mind was overflowing with even more questions.

  What was Ptolema, of all people, doing in an impossible place like this?

  Mirrors. The panther spoke of that, didn't he? People who existed both here, and in the 'Reflection'. But then...

  "So, how have you been?" she asked expectantly.

  It was such a banal, ordinary question, yet made almost unanswered by its juxtaposition with the bizarre nature of the situation. Still, all I could think to do was to reply as if things were normal.

  "I've been... okay, relatively speaking." I looked down at my coffee. "It's been scary how things have been going in the Mimikos lately - what with the war and everything - so I moved to Deshur to get a job as a researcher there. But it kind of fell apart, so I've just been giving university lectures every so often while I try and figure things out." I snorted. "Well, mostly avoiding giving university lectures, to be honest."

  "Ohh." Ptolema sucked her lip in a bit, nodding. "The war? With the Triumvirate, you mean?"

  "Yeah," I said, nodding. If she had any real connection to the outside world, she wouldn't need to ask. But at the same time, she does know about it.

  "I remember seeing the Uana ships coming down on Irenca when the barrier ruptured," she spoke pensively, looking down into the steam emanating from her lemon tea. "The way their gravity beams smashed the buildings together like a kid knockin' over a sandcastle." She shook her head. "My grandma always said we were better than anybody else at picking the winner whenever there was a stupid slap fight on the mainland, but I guess times changed."

  "You were there?" I asked. "In the breach of 1605?"

  "Uh-- Well, no," she replied awkwardly. "Not exactly."

  I bit my lip.

  "So," she digressed. "Deshur, huh?"

  "Yep."

  "How is it out there?" she asked.

  "It's... not too bad," I told her. "There's not a lot to do to keep yourself busy, but it's peaceful, at least. Really empty."

  "I still can't really believe they built a whole other planet. It's so wild," she said, sipping from her cup. "I know we and Mekhi always had our stuff together better than the dopes running things from the Mmenomic, but even pulling it off feels like it's gotta have been a big waste of resources. They could have just built some artificial islands out in the Circle Sea, or something."

  "I mean, that would have messed with the water level," I pointed out. "And only really solved the overpopulation issue in the short term."

  "I dunno," she said. "Maybe I'm not really being rational or whatever, but I just remember thinkin' it was all really over the top." Her eyes brightened slightly. "Still, it's gotta be kinda cool! Living out on the wild frontier."

  "I suppose."

  "I never would've figured you for the type, though. You always liked your creature comforts too much." She giggled a little. "I remember that time we were out in... what was it, the Zythic Exarchate, to visit that one research lab? And you spent the whole night after our trip moaning because you couldn't find a place that would deliver you food."

  I laughed, then bit my lip. "Well, some stuff happened... I had to get over some of my old hangups." I looked up at her. "What about you? You've been living out here in the, uh, countryside?"

  "Oh, yeah!" she replied, seeming to shift gears. "I've just been taking it easy for a while. I was actually working in the Keep doing research a few years back, but the friends I'd been staying with for a while had a big falling out, and everything got really complicated. I kinda wanted to just clear my head and live the simple life for a while, y'know? Mill around, take walks in the woods, get to know some new neighbors. That sorta stuff." She snorted. "'course, once I got here, I ended up gettin' wrapped up in new stuff anyway."

  Once again, the answer felt almost absurdly banal. Were it not for the wider context, I would have thought she was having some kind of mid-life crisis. "Y-Yeah," I said. "I get you."

  "People keep thinkin' I'm depressed when they come over and see how much of a dump this place is, but it's not like that or anything," she told me cheerfully. "I've just been feeling sentimental lately, so I've wanted to keep stuff around instead of just dumping it all in my Domain."

  "No, I understand," I said, giving a small smile back. "My place is even worse these days, so it's not like I can judge."

  She nodded, and the two of us fell into a strange silence for what must have been almost a minute as I searched for my resolve to forcefully drop the other shoe. Finally, I took a second, deeper sip from the mug, then regarded her with a more serious expression.

  "Ptolema..." I said uneasily, "you don't live here."

  I expected her to say something like 'what are you talking about?' or at least to look a little confused, but instead she just stared at me, her brow slowly furrowing.

  "We haven't talked in a really long time... I think the last time was when we were both at that organ repair fundraiser in Nad-Ilad, back when the redesign project was ending." My face grew furtive. "But I've still looked into how you're doing every so often, out of curiosity. Last I'd heard, you'd retired from working in surgery to become one of the directors of your family's company in Irenca. And that you were married to some politician and had two kids."

  "Ohh," she said. She frowned strangely. "Yeah, I guess that rings a bell."

  "Your personality changed a lot, too, over the years," I went on. "I don't know what happened, but you got a lot more serious and professional than you used to be. That last time we met, you didn't come across like you do right now at all." I squinted a little. "So... even though we're talking like this, it feels like you're not the Ptolema I know at all."

  In fact, I added to myself, you're more like if the Ptolema I'd known from the Exemplary Acolyte's Class had never changed.

  She was quiet for a few moments. She took a slurp from her teacup, the lemon odor wafting across the table. "...how did you find me out here, Su?"

  "Uh, well." I scratched the back of my neck. "I was at the guardhouse at a town called Raurica a few miles away after some misunderstanding, and a guy who was supposed to be their captain led me out here," I told her. "He wouldn't even talk to me, though. And he was wearing a bag on his head."

  She looked genuinely confused by this. "A bag."

  "Yeah, like kind of a gunny sack," I confirmed, nodding. "My best guess would be that he realized we had a connection from something I'd said, but didn't want to reveal his own identity for some reason. ...I don't know why he'd hide it in such a silly way, though."

  "Huh." She scratched the side of her head. "I only know a few people from Raurica, and they're not with the Waywatch, so I dunno. Weird." She peered at me. "But, uh, I kinda meant that more broadly. Like, how did you get here? Do you know where you are?"

  I looked at my cup. "Not really, honestly. I mean, a couple people back at the guardhouse tried to explain, but I... So, yesterday I was at the Empyrean Bastion, and I retraced the steps we took to get to the sanctuary when we were visiting the Order of the Universal Panacea all those years ago, and I... well, I was following this note that Neferuaten had given me on the day they all died, and I..."

  My words faltered. I looked up at Ptolema's face, at the puzzlement in her eyes as I tried to wrangle my situation into a coherent explanation for a second time. As I did, I felt a sting of doubt. I didn't have any reason to feel trust towards this person, who based on all evidence had to be some sort of imposter, whether through some metaphysical explanation or in a much more straightforward way. Judging by the way she was talking, she was clearly a resident of this obscene reality, and clearly not a bystander who'd been somehow swept in as I was.

  But... she hadn't given me any reason to distrust her, either. And sitting here, in this house that was even more ordinary than the room I'd been left over the night, with a person who at least on the surface looked like someone I knew - who just a moment ago I'd been having an ordinary conversation about life and current events with - I felt strangely relaxed.

  ...no, that's not quite true. It wasn't just the circumstances. Somehow, the longer I spent in whatever this realm was... the more I felt somehow at ease. It was weird that I wasn't still freaking out, but somehow, it felt like a pressure on me had lifted. Something in my gut told me that, aside from that ominous hourglass, it was okay to let my guard down.

  So, perhaps it would be better to just not beat around the bush.

  "Ptolema," I said, after a moment. "Would you mind if I just explained, well, everything?" I hesitated. "It might take a while, and everything seems so deranged right now I honestly have no idea how you'll respond to it. But if there's even a chance you can make sense of what's happening to me right now, then I'd sort of like to give it a shot."

  Her expression remained more neutral than I'd expected, like my attitude made perfect sense to her. "Sure!" she agreed. "I don't really have any plans for today, anyway. Take as much time as you need."

  I sighed. "Okay, then." I thrummed my fingers against my mug, then lifted it up and took another sip.

  And then... Well, as I'd said, I told her everything.

  Well, not everything everything, obviously, but everything that felt even remotely pertinent to the current situation. First, omitting only matters personal to me, I gave her a complete account of my recollection of the weekend of the 28th of April, 1409-- Or rather, both of my recollections. First, the peaceful one where, other than a few strange and foreboding occurrences, nothing of note had happened. Where I'd spent the second half sitting around in a daze.

  And then the other weekend, the one which had been implanted in my mind during my second night at the sanctuary. Where everything had gone to madness.

  Once I started talking about it - for the first time ever, I realized - I found myself going into far more detail than I'd meant to, covering essentially everything I could recall. I talked about the strange deja vu I'd been experiencing intermittently over the course of the first two days, the boy's suspicious behavior, the discovery of the corpse under the armory, and my period of lost time after I saw the monster behind the glass. Then I spoke of the murders, and all the strange twists and turns as they'd played out, of Lilith and Hamilcar and the various ambiguous explanations I'd been given about the Order's project to dominate entropy. And then the ultimate truths: The secret bioenclosure, the true purpose of the conclave as a means to falsify the Inner Circle's murder, Theo's ultimate betrayal... and, even though I hesitated to say it, what Balthazar had ultimately confessed before my own death.

  The one thing I thought would be difficult to explain would be my knowledge of Samium's book, so I fudged over it by claiming I'd simply found it in his room, having had the details explained to me by Neferuaten the day previous. Through it all, Ptolema listened quietly and attentively, only occasionally interjecting when I'd phrased something confusingly. She didn't seem surprised by any of it.

  Then I spoke of what had happened afterwards, and how my perspective had been influenced by the experience. I recounted as much of the conversation with my other self that I could remember, my speculation that the Apega had been involved in causing the experience... and of course, the Inner Circle's subsequent visit and deaths, even though she presumably knew that part already.

  Finally, I talked a little more about my own life. I didn't go into any detail, but I explained that I'd been in kind of a slump. I told her about my diagnosis, and how together with that, I'd fallen into a desperate mindset, and been driven to irrationally follow the superficial instructions on Neferuaten's letter. After that, I basically stopped bothering formatting what I was saying as a story, and it devolved into a mess of questions about the events of the past few hours.

  I want to say that I talked for nearly an hour myself. By this point, my mug had long been emptied.

  "...and the panther said I wasn't even from the real world, and was just some kinda duplicate convinced I was sharing memories. But I know that can't be true, because I saw the Abbey out there!" I ranted. "And the weird space I crossed to get here - the Stage, or whatever its called - was just like back then! I mean-- It doesn't make any sense, right?"

  Ptolema didn't reply for a little while, her expression having long grown conflicted, even as she still made a visible effort to smile. "...yeah," she eventually said, with a stiff laugh. "It doesn't, really."

  "Thank you!" I practically shouted, relieved. "So, could you tell me what's really going on? Who are you? Is any of this real? And is it possible to leave?"

  Once again, she was silent for a period. Even though her mug must have been empty too, she stared down into it, seeming to be avoiding eye contact. Her face reminded me of the one my father used to make when struggling with a really difficult crossword puzzle, like he was thinking so hard he was trying to tune out the entire world. It seemed somehow unfitting on her face.

  "...Ptolema?"

  "Sorry," she said. "Just... tryin' to work out what I wanna say."

  I gave her a disconcerted look, then glanced to the side myself. "If you put it like that, it sounds like whatever the truth is must be really bad."

  She twisted her lip in a complicated expression, then looked up at me.

  "Hey," she said, "why don't we take a walk for a bit?"

  ??

  The countryside of the Valley was just as pleasant on foot as it was from the air above, and as I spent more time in it, I realized the extent to which it, too, was subtly more idyllic than reality. It was even more difficult to put into words than things had been in the town, but there seemed to be a certain grace to the way that different features of the landscape were arranged. Hills always had vistas that were in some way remarkable. Fields of flowers always had colors that contrasted with their environment. And though it didn't feel over-the-top, there was more of a variety of flora than you'd normally see in one place, giving the sense that one was always seeing something new, or transitioning between subtle biomes.

  To be honest, though, I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't already been on the lookout. Even living out in the middle of nowhere myself, I'm still a city person at my core. I don't really get the appeal of hiking or being immersed in nature.

  We walked for about 10 minutes, over the field to the right of Ptolema's cabin and up a small hill with a single birch tree at the top, where down below I could see what looked like a village center clustered around a slightly more defined dirt road. Ptolema made intermittent small talk about how the stretch of land we'd just traveled was technically hers, but she didn't have any good ideas about what to do with it. I suggested, somewhat lazily, that she could open a proper animal shelter or ranch if she was enjoying taking care of the pigs so much, but she just laughed this off.

  "God, it really is good to see you again, Su," she said. "After all this time, I'd kinda thought that you weren't... well, it doesn't matter."

  Next, she started telling me about the village up ahead - apparently named 'Aimos' - but after a couple more vague remarks along the same lines, I lost patience.

  "Ptolema, I don't want to be difficult, but... are you actually going to explain what's going on?" I asked, frowning. "You're kind of dragging this out."

  "No, I'm gonna explain!" she insisted quickly, though an uncertainty returned to her face as soon as I broached the subject. "I just thought I might go get some breakfast first, since I haven't eaten yet. It's, uh, tough to talk about big stuff on an empty stomach, you know?"

  I paused for a moment, then nodded cautiously. Come to think of it, since the normal state of society orienting around the night and day obviously prevailed here in spite of everything, I'd probably shown up not long after she'd got out of bed. When I thought about it that way, I suddenly felt a little selfish for blathering at her for so long.

  "Where are we going, then?" I asked.

  "Just a little bakery up ahead," she explained. "I know the guy who runs it, so I go there most mornings." She smiled cheerfully. "It's really good! You should try a little bit even if you're full up!"

  We headed down the slope, and soon arrived at the village, which was made up of mostly Inotian architecture - stark white, flat-roofed buildings with colorful doors. The bakery was the only exception, having a partially open-faced design where you could walk right up to the ovens. There was a small crowd gathered around it, probably larger than could have actually lived in the village-- And no wonder, because the smell of the fresh bread was absolutely incredible, hitting my nose like a savory hammer as soon as we reached the bottom of the hill. I started salivating, and ended up following Ptolema inside.

  She chatted with the owner, who was a blonde-haired Rhunbardic man who, I noticed, also looked quite handsome. ...In fact, everyone I'd encountered since I'd left the Magilum thus far seemed strangely good-looking. Even Ptolema's face seemed somehow fresher and maybe more symmetrical.

  Was that a property of this place, too? It seemed kind of strange, but I guess it wasn't impossible.

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  Ptolema ordered a large beef and tomato baguette sandwich, while I picked up a much smaller sausage roll. It was easily equal to the dish I'd consumed earlier in quality, though was somewhat less to my taste. The pork had a sublime flavor and texture, nutty and spicy and juicy and soft, and the bread had a perfectly balanced creamy interior and crunchy exterior. Ptolema didn't seem to pay any money or go into any luxury debt for it, and after wolfing it down quickly, I almost wished I'd asked for something larger despite the fervent protests from my gut.

  After we left, she walked us down the road and into the nearby woods that seemed to encompass much of the landscape approaching the mountains. The trees, though tall, weren't too tightly packed, so overall it wasn't much more difficult than just roaming around the field. I looked idly up at the canopy as we strolled. Though it was early summer in the real world, here it seemed closer to autumn, and I could see some of the leaves starting to brown. The sun was still rising, breaking through the slowly-dispersing clouds in the east.

  "Did you like it?" Ptolema asked me, a minute or two after I'd finished eating.

  "Yeah," I said. "You were right. It was really good."

  "Heheh, I thought you would. Kyril is really gifted at this sort of stuff. Has a secret recipe for the dough, too, unless he's just messing with me." She took a large bite of her sandwich, licking her lips happily. "Sorry for dragging you along. I'm not tryin' to mess you around, just... it's good to appreciate the small stuff, you know?"

  "Mm," I hummed. "Hey, is it a social convention to have a really short name here, or something? I feel like everyone I've run into so far has been like that. And I got a funny reaction from the sergeant at the guardhouse when I told him my full one."

  "It's kinda like that," she said, chewing as she spoke. "I mean-- It's not like it's some hardline rule or whatever, but there's not much point in family names here, so people just stopped using 'em. And since there's not that many folk around, it's rare that you'll run into somebody with the same first name, even if it's short. So a lot of people with longer ones ended up just going by nicknames."

  "Do you have one?" I asked her curiously.

  "Nah." She shook her head. "Ptolema's too short. Well, I guess some people still call me Ema, but only sometimes."

  I nodded. "And how do you mean, there aren't that many..." I trailed off, biting my lip. "Sorry, I shouldn't ask you any big questions before you're ready to just talk."

  "Pfft, are you sure you weren't hungry?" Ptolema asked teasingly. "You seem more patient about all this now that you've eaten something."

  I gave her a flat look for a moment, then relented, sighing as I stepped over a small root. "Whatever this place is, I'll at least admit the food seems good enough to almost make me not care."

  She laughed goofily. "It grows on you pretty fast, huh? Like you suddenly realized you've been eating dog food your whole life."

  "That's one way to put it," I said, thinking back to some of the fantasies about meals I used to have as a kid.

  "Anyway," she said, turning to face forward as she swallowed. "There's no need to say sorry. I should quit beatin' around the bush."

  We walked for another minute or so, Ptolema taking a couple more bites of her sandwich as her expression grew thoughtful again. The wind blew softly against the side of my head, and I heard birds chirping from what must have been a nearby nest.

  "...you started your story back on the day we first went to the conclave," she finally began, "so that's where I'll start too." She gave a smaller, more bittersweet smile this time. "Sound good?"

  "Sure," I said. So there is a connection, then. "If that's what you think is best."

  "Okay, then." She wrinkled her brow, then took another small bite of just the bread, seeming to be savoring the last bit of the sandwich left. "The first part of how I remember that weekend is basically the same as you. I remember us all meetin' up for that dumb assembly the headmaster did, the trip to the Aetherbridge and the weird mural, the argument over dinner... and then on the second day, that mess with Ophelia, us all giving out presentations, and then going underground with Fang. All that junk."

  "So, you are Ptolema, then?" I asked her, frowning inquisitively. "Or at least, you have the same memories?"

  "Well, uh, lemme finish," she said. "That goes as far as the second night. I remember hanging out with Seth in the lounge, going upstairs to my room, climbing into bed while thinkin' about the nasty stuff Professor Zeno said about my project..." She looked down at her feet. "Then I guess it's kinda like what you said."

  "How do you mean...?"

  "I mean that I remember another version of the weekend that kinda overlaps with the first," she clarified. "Though mine was, uh, a lot shorter than yours. In mine, Fang didn't show up at all, and instead of getting a scary message on Kam's logic engine, we all found letters at the start of the second day outside our doors sayin' that the Inner Circle was already dead. And that they were gonna call us out of the abbey in pairs to be 'tested', and that if we screwed up we'd all be killed too." She looked over at me. "They were signed as coming from, uh, your grandpa, Su."

  "Is... that right..." I said, my brow inclined. I was surprised enough that Ptolema apparently remembered a completely different version of the weekend turning to tragedy, but even more confused by the fact that it sounded like the entire scenario of the murders had been completely different, even down to the framing device. How would that have helped the Order to fake their deaths...?

  "Yeah," she said. "A, uh, lot of people suspected you, actually. Kam managed to convince everybody to lock you and Ran in your rooms until you were called up."

  My mouth hung open for a moment before I remembered to close it. "I... guess I shouldn't find that surprising." I tipped my glasses down, rubbing my eyes. "So what happened, in the end?"

  "Well, I got called out with Seth to the main hall, and I'm pretty sure somebody shot a fireball at the back of my head and it exploded." She delivered this like it was an amusing anecdote. "So I died."

  I looked at her with a deadpan face.

  "But yeah," she digressed. "Best guess was that that was another of the 'loops' you mentioned. After that, things get fuzzy, and then..." She scratched her cheek. "I remember standing on the Stage with everybody else who was at the conclave, at the very end of something that felt really, really tiring. I remember somebody asking me to bow, and then a big booming voice coming down from up above." She looked upwards. "It said--"

  THIS IS A DISAPPOINTING ENDING. YET, EVEN SO, YOU HAVE DONE WELL.

  AS A REWARD, I SHALL SUSPEND THIS EXPERIMENT AND FULFILL YOUR REQUESTED DESIRE. AT LEAST, FOR THE TIME BEING. YET, DO NOT PRESUME THIS MEANS OUR BUSINESS IS FINISHED.

  SO LONG AS THE PROMISED CRITERIA REMAINS UNREACHED, THE CIRCLE MAY NOT BE FULLY CLOSED. I SHALL LEAVE BEHIND TWO PATHS TO A RESOLUTION. FOR ALL THOSE MARKED, A LOW PATH, CARVED THROUGH MY HEART. AND FOR YOU WHO HAVE WITNESSED THIS, A HIGH PATH, CARVED THROUGH MY REGRETS.

  I WILL AWAIT YOUR ANSWER. UNTIL THEN, MAY YOU ENJOY YOUR IMMORTALITY.

  "--and then everything goes fuzzy again," she continued. "There's also some stuff I know without really knowing how I know it. I remember that we repeated that weekend a lot of times, and that we were stuck in it tryin' to do... something. Again, like you said you found out from talking to, um, yourself, with all that junk about a 'victory condition' or whatever." Her eyes flickered slightly. "And I remember that it was all Neferuaten's fault."

  I blinked. "The grandmaster's fault?"

  "Oh yeah," she affirmed, nodding vigorously. "I dunno exactly what she did, but I definitely remember it was her screwup that caused the whole thing. 100%."

  I scratched the side of my head nervously. When you considered how I'd got here in the first place, that felt pretty ominous.

  "Anyway, after that, it's kinda hard to say," she went on. "But, well... from that point on, I've been here."

  I looked at her with curious anxiety. "What do you mean, it's 'hard to say'? Don't you remember what happened?"

  She made a face that evoked suffering from indigestion, which then slowly softened as she continued to peer up at the canopy.

  "I'm gonna try and explain where we are," Ptolema said. "But... it might be a little scary or hard to accept."

  "Qualifying it like that makes it way worse," I told her.

  "Sorry. You know how I am with, like, gettin' stuff across." She cleared her throat. "If I skip over anythin' by accident or say something that sounds dumb or hard to understand, tell me, okay? The last thing I wanna do is make something messy even messier."

  "I get it, Ptolema."

  "Right, right. Just saying." The landscape bent down a little bit towards a small stream, which Ptolema hopped over with the casual practicedness of someone who'd walked this route a thousand times before. "You asked a bit ago about the stuff the guy at the guardhouse told you."

  I nodded. "When he said that this place is the real world, and that the Remaining World is some kind of illusion I was just looking at." I frowned slightly, getting the hem of my skirt slightly wet as I hopped over the stream more clumsily. "You agreed that explanation was ridiculous."

  "...well, I said the idea that this place was around before the conclave didn't really make sense, cause, yeah. This place is connected to it. Even the story I just told you is enough to make that really obvious." She sucked in her lip. "But, ehh..."

  "...but, ehh?" I asked, mimicking her trailing-off sound.

  "It's..." She made a furtive hum. "You ever read about type-IV assimilation failures, Su?"

  I blinked, thrown off for a moment by the sudden topic shift. "Yeah," I told her hesitantly. "I learned about them all before my Induction."

  Type-I. The patient gains the memories of the donor pneuma, but with minimal self-association, resulting in them largely maintaining their original identity. The least disruptive and most common.

  Type-II. The patient gains the memories of the donor pneuma, and the mind attempts to integrate them directly without any form of compartmentalization. Can lead to the formation of a new, truly gestalt identity, or psychosis. (Usually psychosis.)

  Type-III. A reverse of type-I, where the memories of the donor pneuma supersede those native to the body, which in turn become the subject of dissociation. My own 'condition'... if you can call it that, considering the circumstances.

  Type-IV. The most extreme form, where the donor memories overwhelm the mind so completely that the patient develops amnesia - ranging from partial and temporary to total and permanent - of their previous identity. The most feared, even though in my opinion type-III is a lot more insidious.

  Finally, type-V. An usual form of compartmentalization where the two sets of memories result in the formation of two discrete personalities. The least common, and increasingly discredited in the pneumenology community.

  Obviously, I'd lied to Ptolema, and learned about them after my Induction for obvious reasons. But even if this place existed well beyond the authority of the Old Yru Convention - as seemed increasingly obvious - my instinct was to keep as tight-lipped about the matter as possible. There'd been a breach in the veil of secrecy surrounding the condition and the nature of Induction some 50 years ago, and the Idealists in power had embraced the panic about the issue as fresh meat for their populist policy making. Now acclimation clinics were a thing of the past, and if you had any form, you kept it to yourself.

  "There's a case I remember readin' about, when they'd first let me in on the secret," she told me, stepping over a large root. It was strange how casually she was flouting the taboo, even by the standards of the old days. "A guy in Gulhae, I think, who had it worse than almost anybody else. Couldn't even remember what his name was supposed to be in the Remaining World, but his whole life in the old one was clear as day, right down to what he'd had for breakfast on the day before he had his brains scooped out."

  "I know the story you mean," I told her.

  She raised her brow in surprise. "Really?"

  "I mean, we're about the same age. They probably gave us the same book." Leaves crunched beneath my feet as we passed a lone ash tree which had already shed amidst the beeches that made up the majority of the forest. "I know where you're going with this. The world was so different and his situation so unfathomable to him that they didn't even know how to begin explaining it." I shook a leaf off one of my sandals. "Why he was in a different body. How people were moving stuff around by pointing rods. Why everyone around him was so upset and confused. Why the stars looked wrong. At a certain point, there's so little common ground you might as well be talking to an alien."

  'An ant trying to say hello to a tree its crawling on', I remembered Linos once putting it.

  She nodded, then sighed pensively. "I've always wondered if it turned out okay for him."

  "He probably wasn't even a real person," I suggested. "Just made up of a bunch of different stories mushed together. It would be too easy to research otherwise."

  "Oh. ...I guess that'd make sense, yeah."

  "If you're saying you're struggling because we're in a situation like that," I concluded, my tone growing airy, "then I, uh, get the feeling that my life as I knew it is probably over."

  Ptolema frowned uncomfortably, looking down at the dirt.

  "It's okay, really," I told her, cracking a forced smile. "It's not like there was much to lose, anyway. Even putting aside my own problems, the whole world felt more and more like a sick caricature of itself every day. Whatever this place is, it's almost a relief to be someplace far away." I looked to her. "Come on, just tell me."

  She hesitated for a moment, but then nodded. The trees were growing thicker; this seemed like an older part of the wood. "To be honest, Su... even if some of it was just his own beliefs, a lot of what that guy said to you was the truth."

  I frowned. "What, specifically?"

  "Well, for one thing, the place we're in right now - people usually just call it 'the world' - is sorta... more real, than the Remaining World. At least in terms of pure physics." She gestured up at the sky. "It might look normal, but right now, we're actually inside the Timeless Realm."

  I blinked. That was... well, by all understood science, it was completely impossible.Setting aside that humans barely knew how to interface with the Higher Planes to begin with outside of the Power, the whole idea of the Timeless Realm - the highest plane of all - was that it was less a place and more a state. The convergence of all dimensions, where everything ever existed in a single moment.

  Interacting with it was out of the question. The idea was equivalent to a shadow smothering the light that cast it, or a reflection of the moon jumping out of a pond and crashing into the real one.

  'Reflection'. Hm.

  "It sounds crazy, I know. But hear me out." She took another small bite from her sandwich, savoring it more now that it was almost gone. "So, the Timeless Realm is an 11-dimensional space, right? The 10 ordinary dimensions, plus the facet that would normally be experienced as time passage. That's where we are in an absolute sense, but obviously, you can't really, well, exist in a place where time doesn't exist, you're just there. So there's also a sort of 10-dimensional membrane where the same matter is instead expressed linearly, but in a way where it's forced to obey certain rules."

  My eyes boggled a bit. To say that it felt bizarre to hear Ptolema - not even the modern, adult Ptolema, but this Ptolema - launch into a physics explanation would be underselling it.

  "That place, that 10-dimensional membrane, is what people around here call the Stage. You said for you it looked like a beach, right? But if you tried, you could make it shift into something different?"

  "Y-Yeah," I said hesitantly. "I mean, unless I was somehow gaslighting myself. My mind felt... strange, there."

  "No, that's totally normal," she told me, shaking her head. "It's because the human mind doesn't really get what it's looking at. There's some kinda background system set up to frame it in terms we can understand, but even then, we're animals that are designed to only exist in 3 dimensions. It's like..." She twisted her lip thoughtfully. "You did flight training, right? When you first became an arcanist?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Then you know how even that never feels totally natural, no matter how much you do it. And even that's just expanding our conception of movement to the level of, like, a bird." She shook her head. "You can just forget about figuring how to move blorkways or shivelward or whatever. And even if we could, well, our bodies are obviously 3-dimensional too, so the best we can get is an interface that kinda simulates having a body." She wrapped the remainder of her sandwich up in its wrapping and stuffed it in one of her pockets, apparently deciding to save it for later. "That's why being there is so, well, funky."

  "I-- Sorry, I feel like we're skipping over something important, here," I interjected. "How can we possibly be in the Timeless Realm in any sense? How could it have happened?"

  "I'll... get into all that in a little bit." She looked to me. "We definitely are, though. This isn't just some theory I'm sayin' right now. Folks have tested this junk in a million different ways."

  Definitely going to have to look into this myself. It wasn't too difficult to verify the dimensional makeup of a plane using the Power, since building the 7 which made up the Remaining World was partly why it was created in the first place.

  "Anyway, obviously that's still not good enough for humans to live in, so there's a third layer to the whole thing," Ptolema went on. "By taking just the ordinary three dimensions of the matter that makes us up - and the other matter that's around, which I'll get into later - we can create little bits of ordinary reality for us to walk around in. The Stage facilitates that, too, along with the Power." She smiled at me hopefully. "So that's what's going on right now, more or less."

  "If this isn't the Remaining World, why does the Power even work here at all?" I asked, suppressing the thousand other questions this all raised. "We can't still be connected to our Indexes."

  "Well... we're higher-dimensional beings," she told me. "We don't need 'em. It's just ingrained into the parts of our bodies we can't see. That's why we don't need eris, either."

  "When you say 'we', are you including me in this?"

  She hesitated, her pace slowing slightly.

  "Ptolema," I began. "The part he told me about how everyone here has a 'mirror' in the Remaining World... was that true?"

  A slow nod. "Yeah, that was true," she spoke softly. "I can't say exactly what happened, but... to speak for myself, after the conclave, it seems like I basically split in two. One me here... and one me out there." She snorted out a few laughs. "Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of her. Gave up on surgery just to work in my grandparents company, even though I always said that was the last thing I wanted."

  "I was kind of surprised when I found out, yeah," I told her, trying to take this all in stride. "You always talked about wanting to make your own way and help people instead of just being taken care off. But... life changes people, I guess."

  She scoffed. "C'mon, Su. You can't just handwave somethin' like that away with some cliche line." She closed her eyes, shaking her head. "I copped out! Became a total stereotype. 'Rich girl says she's gonna do something noble and ambitious with her life, gives up the second she hits 50'. I feel mad every time I think about it. Can't believe I was such a flake!"

  It was funny, but the situation was too strange to feel like laughing, so I just smiled strangely. "I can't judge. I dropped out of medicine for decades to try and become an illustrator."

  "An illustrator?" She furrowed her brow in surprise. "Were you any good?"

  "Not really," I told her. "The culture was nice, though. Sometimes I wish I'd stuck with it for that reason alone." I sighed through my nose. "It feels kind of like I've died."

  "Died?"

  "Yeah, and I'm already thinking about my life in retrospect. Like this is the afterlife, or whatever," I went on, sticking my hands in the pouch at the front of my robe. "Could have easily happened that way. I was in such a weird state of mind yesterday I wouldn't have put it past myself to screw up my oxygen while I was crawling around the bastion."

  She pursed her lips. She'd shifted our course slightly, and now we were headed uphill. "Well, I can say for a fact you're not dead."

  "I mean, obviously," I replied. "Death isn't really like that. If I were dead, there'd just be nothing."

  "That's, uh, not quite what I meant," she told me.

  A silence hung in the air for a few moments while I waited for Ptolema to elaborate.

  "There's one big thing to know about how things work here compared to what you're used to," she eventually continued. There's kind of two sides to it. A good side, and a... well..."

  "A bad side," I finished, groaning softly as I shifted my posture for more of a hike.

  "A weird side," she said instead. "Weird if you're not used to it." She looked down at me, her eyes cautious. "You might have worked this out already just from hearin' the stuff about the Timeless Realm, but the thing is... death doesn't exist here."

  I stopped in my tracks. Ptolema kept going for a moment, not having realized, then looked back, curling her lip.

  "What do you mean," I said slowly, "that death doesn't exist?"

  She inhaled. "I mean that people here can't die. Or-- Well, at least not most people. What that guy called 'Primaries' and 'Secondaries'."

  My mouth ran aground for a moment at this information. In the corner of my vision, a squirrel stopped for a moment to look at us curiously, then scurried up a tree.

  "...in what way?" I eventually managed. "You said that people's bodies here are still ultimately 3-dimensional, didn't you? Do people not get dementia, eventually, or even just grow old?"

  "No, that can still happen," she said, shaking her head. "At least, if you really go out of your way to let it." She narrowed her eyes. "But you saw what happened when they tried to off you in the Magilum Domain, right? Your mind just went to the Stage, and then put your body back together when you got here. And even if somethin' happens to your mind, the 'you' that's completely stored in the Timeless Realm just gets used to fix it."

  "Wait, so that wasn't some kind of illusion?" I asked. "I really did die?"

  "Physically, yeah," she clarified. "But like I was saying, you got over it. 'cause that's how it works here."

  I blinked a few times, trying to process this.

  "Look, I'll show you what it looks like from the outside." She took a seat on a nearby rock and stuck out her arm. "I'm gonna cut off my hand."

  "Don't cut off your hand, Ptolema," I instructed quickly. "The last thing I need right now is more dismemberment."

  "It's cool! It's just gonna be for a second."

  "Ptolema--"

  But there was no avoiding it. She raised a finger on her right hand to her left wrist and, without incanting, made a slicing motion. Sure enough, the hand fell as if it'd been immaculately cut by a perfectly-forged sword. It tumbled a couple of feet downhill before coming to a stop against a fallen branch.

  "Anue above," I cursed, staring wide-eyed the bleeding stump.

  "It's cool, it's cool!" she reassured me. "I'm a surgeon, Su. Even back in the day, I did stuff like this all the time."

  "Self-amputations?"

  "Don't be weird about this," she chided me, waving the stump in my direction in an accusatory fashion and spilling a little blood on the grass. "Now, I just need to let my mind go halfway into the Stage for a sec - that state where you said it was like time stopped - and..."

  Suddenly, her whole body flickered a bit. Her clothes tidied themselves up, the sweat vanished from her skin, and her hair snapped into a tidier shape. The hand reappeared, seemingly unharmed. She waved it at the one which still remained on the ground, which promptly vanished.

  "See?" She wiggled her fingers, smiling. "Easy peasy."

  "I..." I trailed off, staring at her for a moment, then looking down at my own hands. "How did you do that?"

  "So quickly, you mean?" She stood back up, dusting herself off. "Another way this world is set up is that it generated a kinda a 'default' body for everybody who's a Primary." She stretched her arms into the air, like she'd just woken up from a long sleep. "Nobody knows quite how it worked, but the rule seems to be that unless you really wanted to look different, it took your body in the Remaining World at your idea of its best day." She glanced downward. "Plus your favorite clothes, I guess."

  I glanced down, too. A small shiver ran through my lower back.

  "Anyway, that's how it is," she digressed. "You can blow your head off, throw yourself into convention furnace, slam into a wall of bronze at the speed of light, even erase your body down to its elementary particles with the Power." Her smile grew a little warier, for a moment. "But nothin' will kill you. So in terms of that, you don't have anything to worry."

  Suddenly a lot of things I'd seen in the town were starting to click into place. The absurdly advanced technology. The artisanry on display for seemingly everything.

  I looked out into the forest. "I don't know if I ought to be happy or in a state of existential horror."

  Ptolema just laughed.

  "I'm not going to be able to go back home," I concluded, though in truth that had been obvious for some time. "Am I?"

  She considered the question. "...that guy wasn't lyin' when he said you could bring a lot of the stuff you cared about from the Remaining World here. I'll tell you about all that in a bit." Her smile faded slightly. "But... no. Everything that's here in this plane stays here. Only information gets in, and nothing gets out."

  I nodded distantly. If this place stemmed directly from the Timeless Realm, then again, that was only logical. 10-dimensional space was definitionally 'complete'. Just as a shadow couldn't touch a person, a person couldn't touch a shadow.

  "I see," I said mutedly.

  "You're taking this better than I expected," Ptolema commented.

  "Well, I am a lot older than the last time we met," I said. "And since you said that thing about assimilation failure, I guess I'm in the mindset of just accepting everything you say, and choosing to think about it later." I stepped back, leaning against a nearby tree, watching the shadow of the canopy sway over her. "What's 'everything', then?"

  She raised an eyebrow. "Eh?"

  "Everything that's here in this plane," I quoted.

  "Ohh." She threw her arms out, looking around. "Plenty of stuff. Lots of Domains, lots of people... It's not as big as the Mimikos, but it's still a whole world." She gave a small smile. "It's not claustrophobic or boring, if that's what you're worried about."

  "When I was in the Stage, I saw..." I frowned, cutting myself off and shaking my head. "No, let's stay focused." I looked to her. "You avoided the question earlier, when I asked you why it's 'hard to say' what you remember after the conclave."

  She glanced away, opening her mouth in an 'ah' expression. "That's... kind of what I meant, when I said there was a 'weird' side to this, too."

  "How long have you been here, Ptolema?"

  She furrowed her brow. "What's the date, from your perspective, Su?"

  "It was the 14th when I was in the Bastion yesterday, so I guess it would be the 15th. Of June, 1608."

  "So almost 200 years on the dot since the conclave..." She nodded to herself, a troubled look briefly crossing her eyes before being swiftly banished. "By nature, this place kinda exists outside of time in the Remaining World... or, well, anywhere. That stuff about being able to see anything in the outside world is true, too-- No matter where or when."

  "'Spectating'," I remembered. "That's what one of the books in the guardhouse called it."

  "That's the term most people use, but it's... not quite right, when you think about it." She gestured outwardly. "'cause, like, in a way, everything out there has already 'happened'. It's more like viewing a recording than anything, y'know?"

  I nodded along. It was funny; just a few days ago I'd been musing to myself about the whole idea of the universe's ultimately causal nature as a pseudo-intellectual justification for wasting my life. To suddenly be faced with it in a far more practical, tangible sense felt like a bit of dark comedy on behalf of the universe.

  In any case, it made sense. From the absolute center of the universe, 'time' was nothing but a term for dimensional space in different states of energy. Of course we'd be able to see it all.

  As insane as it all was, I already knew where this was going.

  "Anyway, the reason it's hard to say is that, well, I don't remember." Her expression grew a little more serious. "There's a bit more to it, but basically, the word 'Primary' means somebody who remembers a life outside this place in the normal world. And those memories are different to regular ones." She turned her head uphill. "No matter what, you never forget 'em. Even now, it still feels like I was just at the conclave a few days ago."

  "I'm guessing," I said slowly, "...that it's been a lot longer than that."

  She was silent for a moment. Some birds cried in the distance.

  "My memory here," she eventually said, "is a lot better than it was in the Reflection. Maybe you can't tell the difference 'cause yours has always been so great, but it's that way for everybody." She looked back at me, her eyes somehow tired, fixed for a moment on something far away. "I can remember the past 1000 or so pretty much photographically, and could probably tell you roughly what happened every day for the past 10,000." Her gaze fell. "But after that, it gets fuzzier and fuzzier. Broken up moments, getting farther and farther apart."

  "What's the earliest you can remember?" I asked, my tone muted.

  "I wanna say... probably about 200,000 ago," she answered. "I'm at this lake that used to exist a dozen hegemonic Domains ago. It's night, and I'm with a friend... but I can't remember their name or face." She smiled, but it did not reach her eyes. "For me to still be holdin' onto it, it must have been an important moment, for who I was back then."

  I was at a loss for words. For the first time in the conversation, despite all the impossible things already spoken in passing, my mind struggled to conceive of what she was describing.

  A human being is an animal evolved to live about 70 years. I'd lived for barely 200, and already I had days where I felt unimaginably ancient. Lost in an ocean of my own bullshit.

  This, though... well...

  "I've got records older than that, though," she told me. "And records of records, and records of records of records." She looked to be considering something, then apparently changed her mind about putting the rest of her sandwich away for later, fishing it back out of her pocket and taking another small bite. "There's another big Domain called the Keep. They focus on studyin' stuff, and try to keep track of the history of this world as best they can. The oldest thing they have is some guy's journal."

  "How old?" I asked.

  "250 million years," she told me, looking down at the sandwich as she munched. As if the words she'd just spoken weren't the least bit shocking. "It talks about life in a Domain literally nobody else remembers... and some people, Primaries, that they do." She swallowed, licking her lips. "And it talks about even older times. Places and people the guy misses. Stories he's heard of half-forgotten places."

  "That's...."

  Terrifying, one third of me said.

  A relief, another third said.

  "...sad," I finished.

  "Yeah," she agreed, with an awkward laugh. "It is kinda sad, isn't it?"

  The wind blew over us as I thought to myself.

  "How have you..." I blinked, removing my glasses. "Sorry, trying to figure out how to word this."

  "C'mon, Su, I'm not delicate."

  "How have you lived that long and not lost your mind?" I asked, bluntly.

  She laughed a little, shrugging. "Harder than you'd think to go crazy, I guess." She folded her arms. "It's probably easier than you're thinking. 'cause nobody dies, nothing irreversible ever happens. So you just find new stuff to do. New hobbies, new friends, new projects." She gestured in roughly the direction we'd come from. "You saw how much junk I've got in my cabin."

  "I did."

  "Everyone's different, though." She looked at me strangely. "Some people find it tougher than others."

  I hesitated for a moment, exhaling through my nose.

  "So... to sum it up, you remember your life before the conclave, one version of it where everyone died, and then this place," I recounted, more to myself than her. "And I remember my life before the conclave, one version of it where everyone died... and then the one which really happened, and the rest of my life after it."

  "Yup," she said. "Sounds about right."

  "Did you know about the loop stuff, before I mentioned it? That there were more versions of the conclave than just the one you remember."

  "...yeah, I did," she said, scratching the side of her head. "I have some really old notes from myself, and... the others, they're here too. Everyone who was there that weekend." She avoided my eyes. "They're all the same way. Remembering one version, different for everybody."

  I nodded stiffly, biting my lip. "That's what I figured."

  The sun, or whatever it was, was sitting pretty high in the sky now. It was getting kind of hot.

  "Gods," I said. "It's true, isn't it?"