Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

  I remembered what Balthazar had said to me, all those years ago, at the very end of the loop. Before he shot my chest to pieces.

  'We'll be going somewhere different altogether.'

  'That woman seemed to hope it would be like paradise. But it could also be hell.'

  'We'. As in, the versions of us trapped inside. The version of me who I'd spoken to who had echoed the same concept: 'I will never be able to return to the outside world.'

  The premise of the whole thing was so fantastical that it felt a little hard to accept, but having heard all this, it wasn't hard to take the final steps in understanding the situation (or at least, what I was being told it was) myself.

  During the conclave 200 years ago, something had happened to entrap everyone at the sanctuary within a sort of alternate reality, one where the events of the weekend repeated over and over - beyond a million times, if the version of myself I remembered meeting back then had the right of it. The loop I remembered had been the last time this had happened, when a 'compromise', whatever that meant, had been reached.

  When that had happened, we'd... split. One version of all of us had gone on in the real world, while the other had somehow ended up here. Divorced from time, and somehow ascended through the planes in such a way that we would have effectively always been here, our mundane selves looking in retrospect like lesser echoes, if only from a perspective of pure physics.

  And then time - or what passed for it, here - had passed. And passed, and passed, and passed, until the scope dwarfed what the human mind was capable of comprehending and the very concept itself lost all meaning.

  When we'd spoken, the other me had implied it was a struggle for her to recall the start of the loops. For her, that would have been roughly 10,000 years ago: The same time span Ptolema had just reported as when her memory began to fade definitively. Which meant...

  "...how does it work?" I asked Ptolema, after more than 10 seconds of silence. I was still leaning against the tree, now looking deeper into the woods at nothing in particular.

  She raised her eyebrows. "How does what work?"

  "Uh, sorry," I said, blinking. "Went off into my own head and got a few steps ahead." I looked to her. "The 'Dreaming' the panther mentioned before."

  "Oh." She considered the question for a moment, sucking in her lip. "There's not much to it beyond what you heard already. If somebody cuts off all their senses and Spectates for long enough, eventually their mind will just kinda... stop thinking about anything. Drift." She frowned to herself. "Once you're like that - if you're not somewhere where somebody can snap you outta it, or if you do it for so long your body wastes away and all that's really left is your mind on the Stage - it can take a really long time for somethin' to snap you out of it. And since we can't die here, time just-- Well, it keeps going by."

  "For thousands and thousands of years?" I asked, frowning. "You can be stuck in a trance for multiple lifetimes?"

  "We're not... like regular humans, here, Su," Ptolema spoke hesitantly, taking another bite from her sandwich. "I mean-- We are when we're like this, but when our minds aren't doin' the stuff with our bodies that they normally would, they can shift around in funky ways. Like they talk about what happened to the Iron Princes, only, well, even more."

  "But not permanently."

  "Well, nothing is 'permanently' here," she reminded me. "Eventually something's gonna snap you outta it, even if that's so long going by that you stumble back on your 3D body and go 'hey, what's this?'" She swallowed. "It's easier for Primaries, though, since we can't forget what it's like to be a regular human. Secondaries sometimes have to learn it all again on their own."

  I tried to wrap my head around it, tried to search the depths of my memory for anything anomalous. But there was nothing. Other than not having a faint headache and general sense of malaise for maybe the first time a couple decades, I felt like myself.

  "It's... been a long time since I've seen you, Su," Ptolema filled the silence. "I have some notes about you, but I can't remember meeting you since the conclave at all. That's not to say you've been like that the whole time, but..." She looked down, kicking her feet. "With autospective Dreaming, you can get kind of stuck too. Going over the same memories over and over until you're not even thinking yourself any more. Just havin' the same stuff fed to you over and over, until it's all there is."

  "So the letter Neferuaten left for me-- That was, what, all just a coincidence? About something unrelated to all this?"

  She shrugged. "I dunno. I guess."

  We fell silent for a while. A heavy gust blew, and fallen leaves scattered between us.

  "I don't know what to say," I said distantly.

  Ptolema nodded sympathetically, remaining quiet.

  "When I met the other version of me after the loop, she had it all just... so together," I mused, looking at nothing. "The idea that I'm her and not myself, it's-- I feel like I can't accept it."

  "Mm, that, and the thing about your mirror being able to remember what happened in your loop, are the two things about all this I can't really explain." She frowned for a moment. "I mean, all this stuff I'm saying right now is just me inferring, obviously. Maybe you're special, and really did come from out there, somehow."

  I flattered my brow. "But you doubt it."

  "Well, yeah." She scratched her cheek. "I mean, you're not the only person in the class with a little anomaly like that. Ophelia used to say she could remember little snippets of other versions of the weekend, which is how I knew that it had repeated before you told me. Instead of, I dunno, us all having just been shunted into different parallel universes or something." She laughed. "I'm kinda jealous, honestly. Especially the part about gettin' to talk to the you who'd gone through it all. I wonder a lot about what I felt back then."

  "It's not like I got a lot of useful information," I told her. "I only sort of remember the conversation, and she was pretty vague. Said that there was some sort of agreement on how much she could let me take back to reality."

  "Huh." She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Yeah, no idea what that could have meant."

  "Anyway, why would she... why would I have done something like that?" I asked her, even knowing that she probably didn't have an answer. "Chose to brainwash myself?"

  "I mean, there's all sorts of reasons." She stuck her hands in her pockets. "Sometimes people end up Dreaming completely by accident, just 'cause they're really focused on something and don't take enough breaks. Others, well, if you manage to really screw up your reputation here to the point that the big Domains won't take you, the only real way to get a clean slate is to wait a really long time for everybody to forget about it, and Dreaming is great for that." She hesitated. "Uh, not sayin' that's what happened to you, of course. Just, y'know, listing examples."

  I shook my head. "This all feels like a fever dream." I looked to her. "Again, I don't understand how we went from whatever the time loop was to this. Back then, Balthazar said that Neferuaten thought we'd be going to 'paradise', and you said that you remember this all being her fault, so that makes it sound like she was responsible." I squinted. "But how could she know? How could it have happened?"

  Ptolema nodded pensively, then put her sandwich away again, gesturing uphill. "Why don't we keep going? There was something I wanted to show you that might help a bit."

  I blinked, pushing myself off the tree. "Wait, we were going somewhere?"

  She raised her eyebrows. "Uh, yeah."

  "I thought we were just, well, walking."

  "Oh." A pause. "Sorry, I shoulda' been clearer."

  We resumed our climb uphill largely in silence for a few minutes. After a while, the ground evened as we reached the summit, and the wood abruptly thinned as we entered a small grove.

  There was a structure here-- A temple, I could tell, but one in ruins. The design was closer to a Rhunbardic cathedral than the Saoic and Ysaran designs I was used to in my personal life - the roof arched and pointed, and so tall it surprised me I hadn't spotted it from further downhill. While the architecture was beautiful, limestone shaved down to perfect smoothness and engraved with a complex pattern of spirals, it had obviously not been maintained for a long time. Parts of the roof had caved in, and the stained glass windows were long-shattered, no remnant of their presence save for indents in the frames and a few gleams protruding from the nearby soil. Even the door was gone, the metal components lying half-buried, the wood long having turned to dust.

  "So you asked why people believe the stuff about this being the 'real' world instead of the Mimikos, even though it seems really obvious this all happened because of the conclave, and how we got from there to here in the first place," Ptolema said. "And I guess this place is my best answer to both of those questions."

  "I'm surprised you even have religion here," I told her, furrowing my brow as I looked over the structure. "That is what this is, right?"

  She raised an eyebrow. "Because people don't die, you mean?"

  I nodded, though somehow became preoccupied by the phrase 'don't die' in a way that temporarily removed my mind from the conversation. Of course it was information that had already been well-established over the past 20 minutes, and Ptolema had said 'can't die' twice already. But that made it sound like people here were cursed; undead. Don't die had different connotations.

  That was what had been meant by 'YOUR REQUESTED DESIRE,' wasn't it? This place was essentially a complete fulfillment of the Order's goal. A world where humanity was freed from death. It would make sense for its creation not just to be in tandem with the conclave, but by explicit design.

  (In the back of my mind, voices dissented against this conclusion: Had Linos not had that argument with Kamrusepa about whether people should have a right to die, out by the graveyard? Had Neferuaten not elaborated on that whole 'let us be the last' philosophy they were supposed to have extensively? If everyone from the conclave was somehow here, it didn't quite line up for her to be responsible. However, these thoughts didn't get too far because:)

  Appropriately, at that moment, I noticed a familiar sigil over the building's door. It wasn't quite the same, simplified into a more abstract, geometric shape, but still the intent was obvious. A serpent coiled around a staff. A serpent eating its own tail.

  The seal of the Order.

  "Why is that on there?" I asked, interrupting Ptolema, who was in the process of launching into some conceptually upsetting but poorly-conveyed explanation of the nihilism fostered by being physically unable to die.

  "Eh? Oh." She looked up at it too. "Well, that's what I was gonna get to." She sucked in her lip. "So the thing is, people here do know about the conclave. Most Primaries are from our time - uh, or I guess 200 years ago, from how you're lookin' at it - so a lot of them even knew about the Order specifically. And I dunno about the others, but it's not like I'm keeping what happened back then a secret myself."

  "Okay," I said. "I mean. I'd kind of assumed they'd have to, since there are pieces of the sanctuary just around somehow." I squinted. "But that just makes it even more confusing why anyone would think this was the original world. Shouldn't it just be a matter of history, that the two are linked?"

  "Well, the thing is--" She cut herself off, glancing towards the entryway of the structure. "Y'know what? I'm really bad at explaining stuff. Let's just go in. You'll see."

  Ptolema stepped forward, and I followed curiously, stepping over the rotting door frame.

  The interior of the church was-- Well, it was an interior of a ruined church. A long, decrepit chamber with a sense of faded majesty, halfway to being swallowed by the surrounding woodland. The floor was suffocated by long-eroded detritus, and patches where the the stone flooring had broken or been wholly covered were overgrown with grass and weeds, with even a large bush growing in the corner. Branches leaned into the interior from the caved-in room, and area where the pews must have once sat, the wood long rotted to dust, was now buried by fallen leaves. At the far end stood a collapsed stone altar ahead of a vaguely-feminine statue, which also overlooked what appeared to be an underground passage. This was the only part of the building that appeared to have been maintained recently - the stonework was clean and the whole area encircled by a low metal fence.

  I turned to Ptolema to ask a question - probably about the Order's sigil and why it was at the door to what was definitely something religious - but she simply pointed to the left wall. My eyes followed, and I saw that for whatever reason mundane or arcane, it seemed to be the only part relatively unravaged by the passage of time, though it was still covered in mold in a few spots. What Ptolema obviously expected me to look at, though, was a series of frescoes that lined the entire chamber, all the way from the front to the back.

  Now content that my focus was where it needed to be, she began walking towards the other side of the hall at a leisurely stroll. I followed, adjusting my glasses as I examined the first.

  Though depicted in a high-detail, First Resurrection romantic realist style, the images portrayed were all quite simple in concept, as one would be like to expect from a temple. This initial one showed a bunch of naked figures on the grass, in varying poses of suffering, against a black background. One lay wrinkled and trembling in a fetal position, while another threw their hands into the air as blood flowed from an open wound on their gut. A woman sat on her knees weeping, while a man gnawed on the corpse of another which appeared already dead, his eyes ravenous. At the bottom, in deep red, was an annotation.

  AT THE ADVENT ALL WAS SUFFERING - TURMOIL AND FINITENESS, CONJURED OF VULGAR PROBABILITY - FLEETING LIFE BEREFT OF PURPOSE

  I frowned, already having a nasty feeling I knew where this was going. Ptolema had already moved ahead, so I looked to the next fresco.

  This one depicted a group that appeared to be monks - or at least, they wore black robes- traveling downwards through some great cavern, beyond which lay the open ocean. The monks all wore amulets, some of which depicted eyes and some of which depicted swords, and wore masks of various animal motifs; lion, fish, bird. The only exception was the lead monk, a man dressed in grey instead of black, who instead held a familiar staff encircled by a serpent. This one read:

  A PILGRIMAGE TO THE DEEP - HER FOLLOWERS DESCEND IN SUPPLICATION - TO IN COMMUNION BEG FOR DIVINE MERCY

  My mouth hung open. We moved to the next fresco. "Ptolema--"

  A third scene, seeming to take place in some manner of underwater stone structure. The monks, now also mostly naked (I never understood why religious art always had such sexual overtones) knelt in prostration on what appeared to be a mountain of bones and half-rotted corpses, while a blonde giantess in tyrian purple towered over them, wearing a kindly expression while pouring down liquid out of a large black jug. This expression was rendered contradictory by the fact that the fluid looked to be acidic; it burned through their flesh. The monks wore expressions that varied from agonized to theurgically serene.

  HER FOLLOWERS SUFFER IN ACCORD WIT MANKIND'S SIN - TORMENT FOR GENERATIONS COUNTLESS - TO PROVE THEY MIGHT BEAR THE WEIGHT OF IMMORTALITY

  "Ptolema," I spoke up again, more insistently, my feet scuffling to a stop.

  She turned. "Eh?"

  "What the-- What the hell am I looking at, right now?"

  She scratched the side of her head. "I mean. I thought it would be kind of obvious once you got in here."

  She's right, honestly. It is kind of obvious. You're actually not confused. You're just upset by how stupid it is.

  "Why..." I paused, my brow twitching for a moment on how to best pose the question, as if I could somehow sidestep the inherent silliness of what I was seeing. "Why has what happened during the time loop been turned into a religion?"

  Instead of answering the question, she laughed, her cheeks puffing out widely.

  "Did you bring me here just to laugh at my reaction?"

  "No, no!" she insisted. "It's just-- It's just so weird, after all this time, to be showin' this stuff to somebody from back then who doesn't know anything about it. And you just made, I dunno, a funny face." She managed to calm herself down a bit, though still wore a wide smile. "And I mean. It is funny, isn't it?"

  "It's some kind of funny," I said, looking back over the frescoes we'd already passed.

  "It's understandable, though, right?" She shook her head. "Like, you've gotta figure that at some point who-knows-how-long-ago, one of us made a real effort to try and spread the story around, probably when we still had some idea what the heck actually happened in the end to whisk us all off to this weird place." She gestured at the wall. "But then it got passed down, and down, and down. And this is all that's left."

  "This?" I asked. "This is the best record of how the loops ended? What about your journals?"

  She shook her head. "Don't go back anywhere near far enough. Even the oldest stuff is just, like, references of references of references. Hell, even this temple is way older than the rest of the Domain." Her smile grew apologetic. "Sorry if you were expectin' a better answer."

  I sighed deeply, shaking my head at the absurdity of the situation.

  "C'mon," Ptolema urged. "Check out the last two parts, at least. There's maybe snippets of stuff there."

  I resigned myself. Now knowing what was going on, the next fresco wasn't even surprising despite the absolutely bizarre imagery. The monks - or I suppose I should say our class and the Order, despite the fact that none of them resembled any of us whatsoever and they all appeared to be men - now stood assembled on a cliff in poses of triumph, a sunrise in the background and a vast assembly of people, all bearing the Order's symbol upon their faces, spread out before them in all directions. The blonde giantess, still wearing a serene expression, stood in the background and cut into her own flesh with a giant knife, flesh and blood alike falling to the earth and bathing the crowd in a tide of crimson. Above it all, the clouds parted in a circle, a golden portal emanating purest light beyond.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  One odd detail was that everyone in the crowd seemed to holding exactly one other person's hand. No more, no less.

  BY THEIR SACRIFICE ALL WORTHY ARE SAVED - DRINK OF THIS BLOOD, MY CHOSEN - FOR WE SHALL PRESIDE TOGETHER FOREVERMORE

  "So the narrative is that, by virtue of us all dying in the loops over and over, we somehow earned the right to elevate ourselves and a bunch of other people to immortality," I concluded. "I mean... that could be based on some actual truth, or it could just be based on inference from the 'enjoy your immortality' voice."

  "Yeah, it's sorta ambiguous," Ptolema admitted.

  "Do the others all remember that, too?"

  She nodded.

  "So anyone could have spreading it around," I said, nodding to myself with a frown. "Why is this so mythological, though? Like, even if the loop is off-limits - I assume it's off-limits - can't people just Spectate the real world and see what the Order was actually like?"

  "Eh, kinda two answers to that, I guess," Ptolema told me. "The more straightforward one is that there are some restrictions to what you can spectate here, mostly revolvin' around stuff to do with other people around. So the whole inner circle bein' here makes it harder than you think." She curled her lip. "The other-- Well, it might sound stupid."

  "I think every emotional receptor I already have is deadened already," I told her flatly.

  "Well, it just comes down to the amount of time that's passed, y'know?" she explained. "When people have to stew on somethin' for long enough, even if they basically know the facts, they start to... look at it weird. Think around it, wanna see more than what's there, build on it..."

  Construct a story. I nodded. "Until the facts feel less like the truth themselves and more like just another facet of a deeper truth at the core of the world."

  "Yeah," she said. "Hah, even after all this time, you're better at puttin' this sorta thing into words than me."

  "It's an idea that feels hard to get away from," I grossly understated, then narrowly avoided saying something personal to say something political instead. "Nowadays - or, well, what I thought was nowadays - it barely feels like people in the Grand Alliance care about the world they can actually see around them at all. It's all just weird narratives about how Humanist traitors are destroying the economy and the Uana are eating babies."

  Ptolema scratched the side of her head. "I'm glad the memories I'm stuck with here stop before politics out there got really complicated."

  Politics was always complicated, I thought, and briefly smelled the ocean air. "Who's the woman supposed to be?" I asked instead of saying that.

  "Woman?"

  "The, uh, big one stabbing herself with the knife, I mean."

  "Oh!" She nodded in understanding. "She's the goddess in all this who is meant to have brought us to the Timeless Realm, I guess? But I don't remember if she has a proper name. They just call her the Lady."

  I glanced down the hall. "Is that supposed to be her statue over there?"

  She shrugged. "Gotta be, I 'spose."

  I nodded, then moved along to the final fresco.

  This one portrayed a location I was more recently familiar with: The Stage, here represented as a vast, flat plain with two impossibly large white columns at the back. Between these, the goddess stood, arms outstretched and face now for some reason replaced by a massive fireball encircled by a ring of eye-like crystals, like some nightmarish angel of the Dying Gods. Before her, their faces also obscured for the less dramatic reason of the angle, untold thousands kneeled, now divided cleanly into two groups.

  INTO TWO TRIBES I REND YOU, TO ENDURE ETERNAL ELSE SHIFT AS WIND - TO WATCH, TO REMEMBER, TO BUILD - UNTIL THE DAY OF MY RETURNING

  "This is meant to be the split between Primaries and Secondaries," Ptolema told me, even though I'd kind of figured that out already. "Equal numbers, half on one side, half on the other."

  "Where did all these other people even come from?" I asked. "I can understand why we'd be here - insofar as any of this makes sense, at least - but why would anyone else be wrapped up in it? What's their relationship to the Order and the conclave?"

  "Dunno," she answered. "There's a bunch of theories floating around, but nobody really knows exactly why the people who ended up here ended up here, really."

  "There has to be some sort of pattern," I insisted.

  "Well, there sort of is." She furrowed her brow. "Most Primaries were arcanists, just like I said most are from our time a minute ago. It's pretty specific, even-- I wanna say 90% claim their memories go up right up until some point in the weekend of 1409, when the conclave was going on." She gestured at the fresco. "That's where this narrative comes from. Everybody bein' uplifted in some big batch, led by the Order."

  "Are all arcanists from back then here?"

  "Nope," said. "Not even close."

  "So why them in particular?"

  "Like I said, nobody knows."

  "It can't have just been random," I insisted.

  She shrugged hopelessly.

  I shook my head. "What about the other 10%?

  "That's the fly in the ointment," Ptolema said. "It's all over the place. They claim to have been from totally different times in the Remaining World, or even before the collapse. But, well... It's hard to tell if they really are?" She held her hand to her mouth pensively. "We're talkin' about arcanists here, so obviously a fair chunk of 'em are gonna be Witches. But even looking past that, there are some Primaries whose memories just seem plain messed up. Missin' chunks, thinking stuff happened that plain didn't happen..."

  My blow flattened. "You think they're just deluded, you're saying."

  "Well, I didn't say that. Just, y'know, could be." She considered her words. "Like, I've already told you how there's a bunch of ways to get your sense of self mixed up here if you really have a mind for it. Even if you can't fully Spectate through somebody else's eyes in the way you would your own, you can still spend enough time watching other people's lives that it starts to overwhelm everything else. And it can be hard to tell your proper Primary memories apart from your ordinary ones." She sucked on her lip. "On top of that, there's kinda a taboo about talkin' about your old life at all in some circles here. And there are always people who make up things about their pasts to seem special, too. So it's hard to document."

  I nodded. "What about Secondaries?"

  "They don't have permanent memories at all, so we know even less. They've just always been around. Though people debate whether they were created here, or were connected to people in the Reflection too, but just forgot."

  The paintings suggested the latter, but that meant of course meant next to nothing. I looked back at the previous frescos, trying to ituit some deeper understanding. Why this distinction? Why arcanists? Why particular, yet apparently-unrelated arcanists?

  "None of this makes any sense," I muttered after several moments, but then glanced towards Ptolema and realized I was talking to myself. She'd already moved on, heading towards the statue.

  I followed after her. After the fifth fresco, there was a section on the wall of the church where it looked like there was room for a sixth, and perhaps was at one point, but at present it was conspicuously empty. I could only think that maybe they'd redone them at some point, and there was nothing left for the remainder of the space-- Or maybe the other way around, the temple's design ending up too large for the painted narrative.

  Ptolema slowed as she stepped up towards the altar and approached the fence encircling the steps downward. "Anyway," she digressed, "in case it's not obvious, the reason this place is all wrecked is that believin' this stuff went out of style a long, long time ago. At some point, other ways of thinking got big instead. The most popular nowadays is called Formism. That's the idea you heard at the guardhouse, about this being the only real world."

  "Why Formism?" I asked.

  "I think it's a Plato reference," she clarified. "Like, Platonic forms."

  "Oh."

  "At first, it just took this whole narrative and spun it around - instead of the Lady bringing us here, she created copies of us in the Reflection, so we might experience it. ...but eventually, even that connection got dropped. Now people just treat it as a given that their mirrors are shadows of their selves here, just like all other planes are shadows of the Timeless Realm. Like it's physics." She came to a stop. "Most people who even care how we ended up here will still accept the conclave was important somehow, but only in kind of a loose way."

  "Can't you just, well, remind them of the truth?" I inquired. "You and the others still know what really happened, after all. It can't be difficult to prove who was there that day."

  "Eh, you'd think so, but it's kinda hard to totally confirm who you were out there without it being a huge hassle," she said, peering down the hole and idly conjuring a small flame to light it up. "Besides, I think I remember Bardiya sayin' something about it way back-- 'Once something becomes about faith and not history, not caring about the facts goes both ways.'" She looked back over to me. "So it's kind of a wash."

  I nodded a few times, taking a closer look at the destroyed statue as I passed it. There wasn't much new to see up close, save for the fact its left hand looked like it might've once been holding something. "I suppose I kind of get it, now that I've heard all this context. If people remember much more time in here than out there, and feel more and more isolated from that life... well, no one would want to think of themselves as just a copy. I certainly don't, right now."

  I could even see the metaphysical argument for it, even if it wasn't really relevant from a causal perspective. Like I'd been musing a couple days prior, everything in the planes flowed back into itself. It was what it was, and couldn't-- Well, you get the picture.

  "It's spooky, ain't it?" She gave a hesitant smile. "You get all kinds here. People who basically accept they're just copies left here to rot for some reason, and others who think we're like gods compared to the ones out there."

  I frowned. "That seems like kind of a stretch." I scooted to her side, looking over the railing around the stairs. They seemed familiar, somehow. "I've got no right to complain, though. A few hours ago I thought I had barely a decade to live. Compared to that, I guess it doesn't really matter whether I'm a copy or not."

  It was more than that, actually. Now that I was growing accustomed to the idea, it almost felt like a strange sort of relief. That all my mistakes since that weekend, all those failed relationships and ill-fated attempts at finding meaning through my work-- They'd never even really happened to me.

  It was all just... meaningless. Everything I thought my life was since that day, good or bad. Gone.

  "Su...?" Ptolema spoke, concerned. "You okay?"

  I blinked, realizing I was probably letting my feelings show on my face. "Sorry, just-- Spaced out, for a second." I cleared my throat. "So if we combine the facts with this myth, the Order - or maybe Neferuaten specifically - did something to summon a 'god', and then that 'god' caused the loop. And then when that ended, we were brought here somehow." I held a finger to my mouth thoughtfully. "The only thing from back then I could see being interpreted as an appeal to a deity would be their experiments with entropy and the Apega, and honestly, that had always seemed like only thing there mysterious and powerful enough to have been responsible for it all to begin with." I pursed my lips. "In the loop, there was security footage of Neferuaten heading out towards the Everblossom in the middle of the night of our second day at the sanctuary, and in the real world, Bardiya recounted that he saw it light up around the same time. So she probably did something, and - somehow - it ended in this." I looked to Ptolema. "I dunno. What do you think?"

  "Wow," she said. "I mean, I was gonna say I kinda figured it was somethin' to do with the Apega and the entropy stuff too, but you really tied a bow on it."

  I shrugged. "I'm just guessing about the latter half, really. Based on what you said your feeling was about her. This all feels way too much for me to even think about in a serious way." My eyes wandered towards one of the windows. "My head feels sort of heavy, actually. I feel like I might be in shock."

  She frowned. "Do you wanna go back to my place? We don't have to do this all at once. We could catch up some more, or I could tell you some things about the Valley. More, uh, practical stuff."

  "No, it's alright," I said, shaking my head. I looked down the stairs. "You wanted to show me something down there, right? Or else you wouldn't have lit the way."

  "Oh, yeah," she acknowledged. "...well, we're almost done anyway. This part will only take a minute."

  She hopped the fence, then led me down the stairs. The moment the chamber below came into view, I realized what I was looking at instantly. It was a military holdout of some kind, filled with racks for equipment and indents in the walls for bunks. A passage off the left wall led into a dead end, blocked by soil and stone.

  It was the underground segment of the sanctuary's security center, the room where we'd spent the lion's share of that awful day cramped in together. I could see the spot on the wall that not-Anna had cut into in my loop to ostensibly adjust the runework, where Mehit had been lying grievously wounded, and where we'd all haphazardly sat as Ran had navigated her camera around the sanctuary.

  Even if I ought to have been primed by the abbey earlier, seeing it orphaned in this strange way, in an environment utterly exotic to where it lay in my memories, was strangely disturbing and disorienting. Like some kind of architectural uncanny valley. Ptolema her flame to rest against the ceiling, where the arcane lamp sat inert, divorced from the sanctuary's runework.

  "Should've seen something like this coming," holding my arms together as I felt suddenly struck by a chill. "I guess they built the temple around this? Like some kind of holy site."

  "Yup," she affirmed. "It creeps me out too, honestly. This was actually one of the last places I saw before I died on my version of that weekend."

  "Where did it happen?" I asked, grimly curious.

  "Few halls down, near the initiation chamber with all the boxes full of sentimental crap," she answered, pointing. "Well, not that you can actually get there from here. The whole underground's cut up into weird chunks and scattered around the Valley and the City. It's the only Landmark that's like that, instead of bein' all in one piece."

  "So I'm guessing the sanctuary was brought here with us too, somehow?" I guessed. "And then scattered around? Between all these different Domains? And now the ruins are called 'Landmarks' because people don't know what they're looking at." I bit my lip, taking a step forward and looking at the weapon rack, which other than being left barren and coated in a layer of dust was eeriely unchanged. I adjusted my glasses. "But how is it still intact if it's been so long? The abbey was like this, too. Even though it was half-drowned in a swamp."

  "This... is another bit where it's tricky to know where to start," Ptolema intoned. She reached into her bag and withdrew a bottle, taking a sip. "You keep talkin' about stuff being brought here after the loop, but the thing is, you're a little off. Nothing's been 'brought' anywhere."

  I hesitated, looking back up. "I-- I don't follow."

  "I mean," she, gesturing around the chamber, "that we're still in the sanctuary. Like, literally in the same metaphysical knot where the loop went down. It's just all been scattered around."

  "...okay," I spoke slowly. "But there's miles of countryside up here."

  "So, you know how you say that lady from the Waywatch--"

  "Ryathe."

  "--Ryathe, right, turned a chair into a cube and put it in her pocket?"

  "Yeah."

  "So the last big thing about this place is that everything here is like that," she explained. "All the Domains, and everything in them, are... well, not fake - like, those are real plants growing up there, in real soil - but set up by people. See, 'cause this space is closed off from the whole rest of the universe, there's actually a finite amount of particles here-- The rules of this world divvy them up so everyone has a share that only they can control with the Power, so it's not a total mess with everybody stealing and blowin' up each other's stuff." She looked up the stairs. "The term people use for it is 'prop'."

  I nodded mutely. "I remember hearing the term at the assembler, when I had it make the food for me."

  "It would have drawn on your own prop, yeah," she explained. "Though if you didn't give it any directly, it would have just grabbed whichever unpledged stuff you used the least recently from wherever you left it lyin' around. You have to be careful about that sort of stuff-- If you're not careful, it can end up trashing your personal belongings. It's why most people just carry some spare around." She reached into her pocket and produced a cube of her own, holding out her palm. "Condensed matter. Try casting somethin' on it. You'll see the rule for yourself."

  I hesitated. Even hearing all this, it still felt instinctually dangerous to cast without a supply of eris. But I obeyed, trying the Object-Manipulating Arcana, and though I felt the incantation working properly, it refused to move.

  "Huh," I said.

  "So yeah," Ptolema said, putting the cube away. "People collaborate to get the most out of it. That's kind of the whole basis of society here."

  "What... is this landmass, then, exactly?" I asked. "The 'Magilum' looked like a a tiny version of the Diakos, but the horizon makes it seem like we're on a real planet, like out of the old world."

  "It's meant to look that way, but the Valley's actually more like a big floating island," she clarified. "But anyway, that's just basic stuff everybody knows. The other thing only we know about is where prop comes from." She tapped her palm against the side of the wall. "Other than-- Well, other than a couple exceptions, Landmarks are the only stuff in the world that doesn't seem to belong to anyone, and so never change, just driftin' from the Domains as they come and go. But they're not the only thing made up of pieces of the sanctuary. Everything here is."

  I was silent for a moment, feeling like I'd mistaken her meaning somehow, confusion spreading over my face. "I don't follow."

  "I mean it's it's the same place, but broken down. Like somebody ground a big animal down into mince, then had everybody make meatballs outta it." She pointed upwards, towards the branch of a willow peaking in from the shattered ceiling. "Like, that tree up there probably started out as a bunch of rock and metal. But 'cause prop can be broken all the way down into elementary particles, we can make anything into anything."

  "I-- Even if that's true, it doesn't add up," I protested. "Even if you count the ground beneath it, it can't have been more than a few million tons worth of mass. There's an entire country up there."

  "Well, there's a lotta tricks people pull to stretch it out since you can throw energy around willy-nilly-- Hollow stuff, thin stuff that behaves like dense stuff, all sorts. The Valley is kinda rare in that it doesn't use most of them to keep the fidelity high, though even then the ground only goes down about three meters. We're probably not far from the void down here." She kicked at the floor. "But either way, there's probably a lot more than you're thinking. Remember how far down the Apega was? And the stone walls down there that went on forever?"

  "You mean, it counts the Ironworker's facility, too?"

  She shrugged. "That was part of the loop, wasn't it?"

  It was. And I remembered it - the smooth cavern that seemed to span miles in width, descending beyond even what could be seen with the naked eye. Presumably wrought out of an even larger chunk of matter that had to be enormous.

  Ptolema was right. Just from that room alone, rearranged, you could make just about everything under the sun that was comprehensible at a human scale. Towns. Visible landscapes. Maybe even a few large lakes.

  More than enough for the ingredients of life.

  Suddenly, I found the way I was conceptualizing the space I was in shifting and contracting.

  "So... we're actually just trapped," I concluded. "In the loop, except stopped. Forever."

  Ptolema made a funny expression. Somewhere between confusion, worry, and perhaps a hint of irritation.

  "I mean," she said, tilting her head to the side. "That's kind of a negative way to look at it, don't you think?"

  ??

  We went back to the village because I was thirsty. I'd expected Ptolema to just conjure me some water, but instead she recommended I try something from the small cafe opposite the bakery that seemed to be the only other culinary enterprise present. I got a strawberry milkshake. It was delicious.

  The conversation had largely tapered off after that, probably because she realized I needed some time to let all this settle in. We walked slowly back down the road towards Ptolema's cabin. Still an alien sight to me, the sun--

  I frowned. "What is that, anyway?" I asked.

  Ptolema, who had been looking down at some odd device vaguely reminiscent of a beach pebble in shape and color, looked up at me in confusion. "Eh?"

  "The sun, I mean," I clarified. "Is it a lamp, like in the Remaining World?"

  "Oh!" She scratched the side of her head. "I think the whole sky is just straight-up Radiomancy."

  "Oh."

  --had risen pretty high in the sky at this point, and it was now strikingly warm, considering how wet it had been overnight. Most of the cloud cover was gone. I looked at the skyscape mutely. If it was an illusion, it was a very convincing one.

  I slurped. We walked.

  "So," Ptolema asked, after another couple minutes. "Do you believe me? About all this stuff?"

  I processed the question. "Not really," I said honestly. "I think I'm still kind of treating this like it's all a coma fantasy, or something."

  "Ahh." She smiled uncertainly. "Well, I guess I can't really blame you. It must all seem pretty wild."

  "It's okay," I told her. "If it's not a coma fantasy, time will keep passing, and eventually you'll be vindicated." I turned my head. "Thank you for, uh, doing all this for me, by the way. I appreciate it a lot."

  Her expression grew more confident, and she seemed genuinely pleased by this remark. "It's no trouble at all!"

  We walked. I slurped.

  "You'll be fine," she spoke confidently, putting her arms behind her head as she broke into a more cheerful stroll. "I know this probably all seems scary right now, but you can live a really good life here. Some people are downers about it, but I wouldn't wanna go back out there for a second. Always worryin' about time, having to make choices between the stuff you care about, dealing with one thing getting thrust on you after another."

  We walked. Ptolema's cabin came into view over the top of the hill.

  "I keep thinking," I said, in a pause between slurps, "about what the other Utsushikome said to me, at the very end." I furrowed my brow. "Again, it's fuzzy, but I remember she said that what she wanted more than anything, having gone through the loops for so long, was for me to find a way to be happy. To scratch out some meaning from my life." I looked at my feet. "And you know, I did try, over and over again. Or at least it felt like trying. But in the end, nothing worked. I ended up basically wasting my whole life going in circles. ...or I suppose I should say she did, considering I'm apparently the one who said that stuff in the first place."

  It was strange to talk about this so frankly. I felt like I ought to have been embarrassed - especially saying it to Ptolema, of all people - but the sense of unreality I was feeling was thick.

  "I felt bad about it from time to time," I continued. "Well, whenever I believed it'd really happened, anyway. That 'she'd' gone through whatever awful things happened in the time loop for so long for 'my' sake, and I'd fucked it all up. But now..." I bit my lip, looking skyward. "It all just feels like a wash."

  Ptolema was wearing an expression that indicated she didn't quite understand my state of mind, but still wanted to help. "Hey, there's no need to have regrets!" She said. "I might've made it sound kinda small, but anything you can do out there, you can do in here. Or even better!"

  "Maybe I should have gone all-out on art after all," I suggested, not because I thought this actually true - it probably would have been a disaster, a lifelong career where your starting point is 'average' isn't a great idea when the sin which comes easiest to you is envy - but more because I suddenly felt anxious, and wanted to diffuse the emptiness I was feeling with something more tongue-in-cheek. "Is there a market for that here?"

  "There's a market for everything!" Ptolema expressed confidently, despite the fact it could obviously not be that simple. "I mean, trends come and go, but it's not like there's a ton of new blood here. People are always into creative stuff made by someone who hasn't been around much. And when they get tired of it, you can always try something different."

  "It's like Kam's spiel, huh," I observed. "Having the time to be everything, instead of having to choose."

  "Oh yeah," Ptolema intoned. "I forget she used to go on about that." She turned to face her approaching home. "Still don't get why she wanted to be an accountant."

  We walked. I slurped.

  It was funny. A few days ago, I'd been willing to do anything for more time. And now, as if I was chosen by the gods, the universe had - at least as I was experiencing it - seemingly bent itself over backwards to grant that desire in the most overwhelming way possible. Broken the foundational rule that had occupied my psyche for almost my entire life-- That you were always losing things. That there were real do-overs. That everything was finite.

  There's a feeling one gets when, say, entering a cheat code in an echo game. A sense of structure falling away, where it feels like you've gained and lost something at the same time. On the one hand, whatever was frustrating you in the game is gone. But on the other, the artifice of the entire exercise is called into question. If you could just do that the whole time, why were you bothering?

  I wondered to myself if maybe I had a secret genie. After all, this was the second time in my life I'd got exactly what I wished for.

  I walked. I slurped.