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weren''t putting them under exceptional pressure.
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that, until just after 1AM.
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Yes. It would be suitable.
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pain, of things going wrong, or being forced to experience something horrific in their final moments or even being cursed to live on in a ruined body, now deprived of the agency to finish what they started.
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speck of dust in contrast to the amount of time in which we won''t exist.
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annihilation. Something that removes you utterly from all context, all relationships - however close - all space and time. To die is to become absolutely nothing. Forever. Imagine the phrase ''for a billion <X> years", where instead of the X, I wrote the word ''billion'' again an infinite amount of times. That''s how long you''ll be dead.
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-just.
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Life-Slaying Arcana, it wouldn''t have been difficult to do something simpler and more decisive than this, like blast my head off with a controlled backlash. But I didn''t want to die in a way that would debase my body; leave it a bloody mess. I didn''t want to die in a way where it wouldn''t be found for weeks, leaving it grotesquely decayed. I didn''t want to imagine my parents having to see it, having to choke back the smell.
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lot harder than I''d expected, and I strained my calf muscle and grazed myself in the process, scuffing the plain-looking dress I was wearing. I could have just flung the rope over and then tied it up from below, but I''d read in a novel that death was much less painful and more likely to happen if you broke your neck from the initial fall instead of having to be suffocated. So I wanted to maximize the extent of the drop by trying to stand up and jump instead of just falling.
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executing those plans in the realm of the physical. Now that I was sitting there, my legs flopping on either side like an idiot, it was obvious I wasn''t limber or strong enough to pull myself upright again without falling. I tried to shove my body upward with my hands enough to draw my legs towards my chest, but all I managed to do was hurt my palms and wirsts.
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I guess this height will have to do, I thought.
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was scared, or at least lacking in will. And just didn''t know how to process those feelings.
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It hurts.
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I hate this.
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perverse of me to even know, accepted hugs and kisses under the most repugnant of false pretenses. I stole constantly, and not just in terms of physical objects. I stole kindness that wasn''t meant for me, success I didn''t deserve. My entire existence was theft. Just existing in this state was violence.
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Oh, I see, something in me realized. This is what you were waiting to realize.
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This moment isn''t really about you atoning at all, is it? About restoring the dignity of the person you murdered.
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No. It''s about you. About your suffering, like always.
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You really are,
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Disgustingly selfish.
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wrongness of reality for having allowed any of this to happen. To demand a better justice than this, against the world, against myself...
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would be in a lot of pain if I weren''t heavily drugged. It was a modest, sparely-decorated room in pale colors with what was obviously medical equipment; a hospital.
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Inner Sanctum Exterior | 5:00 PM | Second Day
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Gill-ty," I repeated, for emphasis.
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If we went back inside, at this point.
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really confused, but it''s the kinda ''confused'' where I''m not sure knowin'' any more stuff would actually help," Ptolema said. "Is the conference still on, or what?"
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never initiated conversations with teachers or older arcanists out of nowhere - she was a reactive person by nature, and especially so when it came to authority figures. But seeing her, she was unquestionably curious about something. She''d even put her book down.
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why a location like that would have been chosen. Why a normal arcane refuge wouldn''t have been preferable."
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What?
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She asked Theo about all that...?
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on," Neferuaten said, making a dismissive gesture. "That could easily be coincidence."
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Come on, don''t pretend you haven''t noticed, too, I thought. Don''t play stupid just because you want to act the part of the sycophantic defender.
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lie, but it''s still weird either way," she said. "Linos said that they got away with keeping this place despite the anti-colonization legislation that exists nowadays because it was grandfathered in - something was already built here before the end of the Great Interplanar war. But remember when we saw that creature, swimming overhead? I said it at the time-- Something like that wouldn''t even be able to move, let alone survive, at this depth normally. Which means we''d have to be close to the rim, where the gravity is much lower." She narrowed her eyes. "At surface-level, that''s far too low for humans to reasonably inhabit. So this whole place would need to have been deliberately built thousands of miles away from even the basic infrastructure set up on this plane during the Colonization period... That is, assuming we are on the Atelikos, at all."
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Lightning doesn''t strike twice.
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never resist showing off. Of course he''d try to awkwardly fill in the blanks with some overwrought explanation instead of just finding a way to dismiss the question." She looked to Ran. "You noticed this at the time?"
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do you think we made you go all the way out to the Empyrean Bastion? It''s not as though setting up the trip was inexpensive, I assure you."
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want you to solve by pointing you towards a wrong answer. I''m talking about overwhelming someone with questions and spectacle to hide the fact that the story itself doesn''t make sense."
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nothing here makes sense," Ran transitioned. "I can buy that a lot of the excessive parts of the design is because it''s meant to be a faithful re-creation of another place, or because you''re worried about security and wanted to survive under siege if it came to it. But that only goes so far. Why are there so many recreational facilities and so much empty ''outdoor'' space? Why are there these giant bedrooms for a place people are only going to visit a few times a year? Why is there a huge garden outside a guesthouse that, before us, was supposed to only be used for applicants? None of it adds up for the stated purpose."
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didn''t you bring us here through somewhere else''. ...When you combine those questions, you can start to make some interesting theories."
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Let''s apply Occam''s Razor to both of those, an analytical part of my brain said, moving by itself. If we take everything we''ve seen here at face value, it''s sort like a cross between a resort and a testing ground for new technology... But that doesn''t tell me anything I didn''t already know. As for the second part, the obvious answer is they didn''t send us anywhere else because they couldn''t send us anywhere else.
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But why not?
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hurt that we''d been lied to a little bit, exactly, but it was making me pretty disquieted to have it all laid out. "What are you trying to say? What do you think this place is, really?"
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something Hamilcar was worried about, I feel less and less comfortable with so much going over our heads."
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Gods. I''m the one getting prophecies, and yet she''s put this much together...
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where we are," Ptolema said, crossing her legs and giving Neferuaten what was, by her standards, a pretty serious look. "I mean, it''s like you were saying a minute ago, Ran. if we couldn''t have been transpositioned in the way they said we were transpositioned, is this actually the Atelikos? Or some place else?"
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planar adjustment fugue is the proper term. If you doubt it, I''m certain we have some books which would cover the topic around."
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some people are naturally overeager storytellers."
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any answer, if it''s like that?" Ptolema asked, frowning.
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know."
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complicated." She tapped her foot against the ground. "I''ll tell you what. There''s only so much I really ought to say, but with things having gone as they have, it''s probably alright to be a little more open So I''ll give you... Somewhere around half an answer to both of your questions. Will that be enough to reassure you, do you think?"
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was an unusual field.
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ever conceivably happen.
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all data ever produced in human civilization by a factor of several hundred. Naturally, they had no idea what to do with it. There were planetariums where they used the information to show how the galaxy would have evolved from the perspective of the Solar System and a lot of book and documentaries that obsessed over data some believed showed evidence of nonhuman civilization, but those were the only places it had found ground outside of niche physics.
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habits, ones which couldn''t be explained by any understood natural law. For example, a specific type of star might begin expanding at a slightly faster rate all across a region of space. Or circumstances would conspire to form certain types of nebulae most often. But then those same trends would suddenly halt, as if the cosmos had grown bored of them."
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