Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day
"Is that reallyyou?" 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 ."
Ptolema, however, seed 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 tightly. "I thought we'd... gods, I can't even rember 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 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 co inside? Lem make you so 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 so pretty good stuff lying around sowhere."
"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 sothing."
"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 so 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 sothing."
"Must be pretty ti-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 so 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, sotis."
"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 co to expect during my brief ti 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 ss 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 ca to mind when I imagined where Ptolema would live. I'd never been to her apartnt 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 so exercise equipnt, 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 judgental asshole.
She showed 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 sothing."
"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 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 so lemon tea." She glanced back over at . "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 so 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 so 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 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 an?"
"Yeah," I said, nodding. If she had any real connection to the outside world, she wouldn't need to ask. But at the sa ti, she does know about it.
"I rember 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 tis 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 khi always had our stuff together better than the dopes running things from the Mnomic, but even pulling it off feels like it's gotta have been a big waste of resources. They could have just built so artificial islands out in the Circle Sea, or sothing."
"I an, that would have ssed 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 rember 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 rember that ti 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, so stuff happened... I had to get over so 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 so 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 so kind of mid-life crisis. "Y-Yeah," I said. "I get you."
"People keep thinkin' I'm depressed when they co over and see how much of a dump this place is, but it's not like that or anything," she told cheerfully. "I've just been feeling sentintal 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 sothing like 'what are you talking about?' or at least to look a little confused, but instead she just stared at , her brow slowly furrowing.
"We haven't talked in a really long ti... I think the last ti 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 beco one of the directors of your family's company in Irenca. And that you were married to so 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 ti we t, you didn't co 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 monts. She took a slurp from her teacup, the lemon odor wafting across the table. "...how did you find 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 so misunderstanding, and a guy who was supposed to be their captain led out here," I told her. "He wouldn't even talk to , 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 confird, nodding. "My best guess would be that he realized we had a connection from sothing I'd said, but didn't want to reveal his own identity for so 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 . "But, uh, I kinda ant that more broadly. Like, how did you get here? Do you know where you are?"
I looked at my cup. "Not really, honestly. I an, 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 on the day they all died, and I..."
My words faltered. I looked up at Ptolema's face, at the puzzlent in her eyes as I tried to wrangle my situation into a coherent explanation for a second ti. 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 so sort of imposter, whether through so taphysical 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 sohow swept in as I was.
But... she hadn't given 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 soone I knew - who just a mont 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. Sohow, the longer I spent in whatever this realm was... the more I felt sohow at ease. It was weird that I wasn't still freaking out, but sohow, it felt like a pressure on had lifted. Sothing in my gut told 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 mont. "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 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 ti as you need."
I sighed. "Okay, then." I thrumd 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 , 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 ti ever, I realized - I found myself going into far more detail than I'd ant 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 ti 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 ans 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 by Neferuaten the day previous. Through it all, Ptolema listened quietly and attentively, only occasionally interjecting when I'd phrased sothing 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 rember, 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 ss 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 so kinda duplicate convinced I was sharing mories. 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 an-- 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 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 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 seed sohow 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 .
"Hey," she said, "why don't we take a walk for a bit?"
𒀭
The countryside of the Valley was just as pleasant on foot as it was from the air above, and as I spent more ti 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 seed to be a certain grace to the way that different features of the landscape were arranged. Hills always had vistas that were in so way remarkable. Fields of flowers always had colors that contrasted with their environnt. 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 sothing new, or transitioning between subtle bios.
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 imrsed 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, sowhat 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 ti, I'd kinda thought that you weren't... well, it doesn't matter."
Next, she started telling about the village up ahead - apparently nad 'Aimos' - but after a couple more vague remarks along the sa 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 so 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 mont, then nodded cautiously. Co 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 sll of the fresh bread was absolutely incredible, hitting my nose like a savory hamr 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 handso. ...In fact, everyone I'd encountered since I'd left the Magilum thus far seed strangely good-looking. Even Ptolema's face seed sohow fresher and maybe more symtrical.
Was that a property of this place, too? It seed kind of strange, but I guess it wasn't impossible.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
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 consud earlier in quality, though was sowhat less to my taste. The pork had a subli 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 sothing larger despite the fervent protests from my gut.
After we left, she walked us down the road and into the nearby woods that seed 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 sumr in the real world, here it seed closer to autumn, and I could see so 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 , 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 ssing with ." She took a large bite of her sandwich, licking her lips happily. "Sorry for dragging you along. I'm not tryin' to ss you around, just... it's good to appreciate the small stuff, you know?"
"Mm," I humd. "Hey, is it a social convention to have a really short na here, or sothing? 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 an-- It's not like it's so hardline rule or whatever, but there's not much point in family nas here, so people just stopped using 'em. And since there's not that many folk around, it's rare that you'll run into sobody with the sa first na, even if it's short. So a lot of people with longer ones ended up just going by nicknas."
"Do you have one?" I asked her curiously.
"Nah." She shook her head. "Ptolema's too short. Well, I guess so people still call Ema, but only sotis."
I nodded. "And how do you an, 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 sothing."
I gave her a flat look for a mont, 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 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 so of the fantasies about als 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 ti. "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 rember that weekend is basically the sa as you. I rember us all etin' up for that dumb assembly the headmaster did, the trip to the Aetherbridge and the weird mural, the argunt over dinner... and then on the second day, that ss 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 sa mories?"
"Well, uh, lem finish," she said. "That goes as far as the second night. I rember 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 an...?"
"I an that I rember 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 ssage 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 . "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 rembered 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 mont before I rembered 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 sobody 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 ntioned. After that, things get fuzzy, and then..." She scratched her cheek. "I rember standing on the Stage with everybody else who was at the conclave, at the very end of sothing that felt really, really tiring. I rember sobody asking 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 EXPERINT AND FULFILL YOUR REQUESTED DESIRE. AT LEAST, FOR THE TI BEING. YET, DO NOT PRESU THIS ANS 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 so stuff I know without really knowing how I know it. I rember that we repeated that weekend a lot of tis, and that we were stuck in it tryin' to do... sothing. 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 rember that it was all Neferuaten's fault."
I blinked. "The grandmaster's fault?"
"Oh yeah," she affird, nodding vigorously. "I dunno exactly what she did, but I definitely rember 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 an, it's 'hard to say'? Don't you rember 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 sothing that sounds dumb or hard to understand, tell , okay? The last thing I wanna do is make sothing ssy even ssier."
"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 soone who'd walked this route a thousand tis 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 so 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 mont by the sudden topic shift. "Yeah," I told her hesitantly. "I learned about them all before my Induction."
Type-I. The patient gains the mories 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 mories of the donor pneuma, and the mind attempts to integrate them directly without any form of compartntalization. Can lead to the formation of a new, truly gestalt identity, or psychosis. (Usually psychosis.)
Type-III. A reverse of type-I, where the mories of the donor pneuma supersede those native to the body, which in turn beco the subject of dissociation. My own 'condition'... if you can call it that, considering the circumstances.
Type-IV. The most extre form, where the donor mories 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 compartntalization where the two sets of mories result in the formation of two discrete personalities. The least common, and increasingly discredited in the pneunology 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 seed 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 so 50 years ago, and the Idealists in power had embraced the panic about the issue as fresh at 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 rember readin' about, when they'd first let in on the secret," she told , 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 rember what his na 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 an," I told her.
She raised her brow in surprise. "Really?"
"I an, we're about the sa age. They probably gave us the sa 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 rembered 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 soplace far away." I looked to her. "Co on, just tell ."
She hesitated for a mont, but then nodded. The trees were growing thicker; this seed like an older part of the wood. "To be honest, Su... even if so 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 Tiless 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 Tiless Realm - the highest plane of all - was that it was less a place and more a state. The convergence of all dinsions, where everything ever existed in a single mont.
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 out." She took another small bite from her sandwich, savoring it more now that it was almost gone. "So, the Tiless Realm is an 11-dinsional space, right? The 10 ordinary dinsions, plus the facet that would normally be experienced as ti passage. That's where we are in an absolute sense, but obviously, you can't really, well, exist in a place where ti doesn't exist, you're just there. So there's also a sort of 10-dinsional mbrane where the sa 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-dinsional mbrane, 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 sothing different?"
"Y-Yeah," I said hesitantly. "I an, unless I was sohow gaslighting myself. My mind felt... strange, there."
"No, that's totally normal," she told , shaking her head. "It's because the human mind doesn't really get what it's looking at. There's so kinda background system set up to fra it in terms we can understand, but even then, we're animals that are designed to only exist in 3 dinsions. It's like..." She twisted her lip thoughtfully. "You did flight training, right? When you first beca 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 movent 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-dinsional 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 sothing important, here," I interjected. "How can we possibly be in the Tiless Realm in any sense? How could it have happened?"
"I'll... get into all that in a little bit." She looked to . "We definitely are, though. This isn't just so 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 dinsional 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 dinsions 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 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-dinsional beings," she told . "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 in this?"
She hesitated, her pace slowing slightly.
"Ptolema," I began. "The part he told 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 here... and one 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 sothin' like that away with so cliche line." She closed her eyes, shaking her head. "I copped out! Beca a total stereotype. 'Rich girl says she's gonna do sothing noble and ambitious with her life, gives up the second she hits 50'. I feel mad every ti 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 dicine for decades to try and beco an illustrator."
"An illustrator?" She furrowed her brow in surprise. "Were you any good?"
"Not really," I told her. "The culture was nice, though. Sotis 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 an, 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 ant," she told .
A silence hung in the air for a few monts 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 , her eyes cautious. "You might have worked this out already just from hearin' the stuff about the Tiless Realm, but the thing is... death doesn't exist here."
I stopped in my tracks. Ptolema kept going for a mont, not having realized, then looked back, curling her lip.
"What do you an," I said slowly, "that death doesn't exist?"
She inhaled. "I an 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 mont at this information. In the corner of my vision, a squirrel stopped for a mont 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-dinsional, didn't you? Do people not get dentia, 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 sothin' happens to your mind, the 'you' that's completely stored in the Tiless Realm just gets used to fix it."
"Wait, so that wasn't so 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 tis, 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 dismbernt."
"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 . "I'm a surgeon, Su. Even back in the day, I did stuff like this all the ti."
"Self-amputations?"
"Don't be weird about this," she chided , 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 ti 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 unhard. 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 mont, then looking down at my own hands. "How did you do that?"
"So quickly, you an?" 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 elentary particles with the Power." Her smile grew a little warier, for a mont. "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 ho," I concluded, though in truth that had been obvious for so ti. "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 stemd directly from the Tiless Realm, then again, that was only logical. 10-dinsional 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 comnted.
"Well, I am a lot older than the last ti we t," 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 rember after the conclave."
She glanced away, opening her mouth in an 'ah' expression. "That's... kind of what I ant, 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 ti 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 rembered. "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 cody on behalf of the universe.
In any case, it made sense. From the absolute center of the universe, 'ti' was nothing but a term for dinsional 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 rember." Her expression grew a little more serious. "There's a bit more to it, but basically, the word 'Primary' ans sobody who rembers a life outside this place in the normal world. And those mories 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 mont. So birds cried in the distance.
"My mory 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 , her eyes sohow tired, fixed for a mont on sothing far away. "I can rember 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 monts, getting farther and farther apart."
"What's the earliest you can rember?" 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 rember their na or face." She smiled, but it did not reach her eyes. "For to still be holdin' onto it, it must have been an important mont, for who I was back then."
I was at a loss for words. For the first ti 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 . "And records of records, and records of records of records." She looked to be considering sothing, 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 so guy's journal."
"How old?" I asked.
"250 million years," she told , 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 rembers... and so people, Primaries, that they do." She swallowed, licking her lips. "And it talks about even older tis. Places and people the guy misses. Stories he's heard of half-forgotten places."
"That's...."
Terrifying, one third of 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 co from. "You saw how much junk I've got in my cabin."
"I did."
"Everyone's different, though." She looked at strangely. "So people find it tougher than others."
I hesitated for a mont, exhaling through my nose.
"So... to sum it up, you rember 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 rember 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 ntioned it? That there were more versions of the conclave than just the one you rember."
"...yeah, I did," she said, scratching the side of her head. "I have so 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 sa way. Rembering 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?"
User Comments
0 comments from readers