The back-to-back revelations about Earth shit were getting to me. It made sense that once I was thinking about one thing more would come up, but it didn't seem fair that I couldn't really investigate any of it. I remembered, now, that I had been confused that I... no, back up. I needed to keep my selves straight. Connie had been surprised I didn't remember XCog+, and at the time I hadn't thought anything of it.

Stupid.

This meant my memory of that programming language had been specifically wiped from my head and, like the other things, Connie had started to recall it as the false memories broke down - she was about two years ahead of me, so she had a little more than I did. That implied that the real memories were somewhere in there, and since I'd already wiped the fakes out of the way I would have thought they would be coming back.

Ah well. I'd have to just do it manually, at some point. I'd been thinking about it anyway.

Explaining a programming language to Katrin had been easier than expected, and we'd talked a little about what the similarities were. It was all a little foggy, I certainly wouldn't have been able to successfully do anything in it at this point, but basically it boiled down to them having similar syntax; the code was formatted in the same way, even though lots of details were completely different.

They were objectively different languages, but it sounded like the entity in charge of preventing linguistic drift just needed to recognize it a little and start paying attention. Also, it required whatever a planar antipode was. I knew what the words meant - I was pretty sure it had been my own brain that had translated the message - but in practice I had no clue what that would be. Were there anti-planes? But it said (or I interpreted its message as) "in use", which made me picture devices.

Katrin didn't know either, of course, but we had nothing else to talk about while marching down the subway tunnel. With the attack from the deadshell I was now pretty sure Katrin had been right and we'd be blocked from our destination, but I was filled with unearned confidence that we would find a way through. Back in the day they'd had people guarding the access points, that was clear from what I'd seen when I looked past the sealed doors with divination. But now? It was probably all abandoned, in which case we could take our time cutting through and still save time over backtracking and going over the hills. Hell, it was actually very possible that Halenvar or the Empire had already busted in to look around.

"Could it teach you spells?" Katrin asked, still hung up on the thing I was communicating with via my Dumines.

"I don't think so. Mainly it just shows me different ways to do things with my Dumines, and even then I don't always fully understand what it's doing. It's vibes, mainly, and just a little bit of pseudo-language mixed in. I could try and tether it with a fate thread, but it seems like that might be a super bad idea."

Katrin agreed. "Still, maybe you could... it's almost my turn riding, if I join you in your memory palace could you show me?"

We were taking turns riding Mecha-Callie, who had managed to get the hang of having a completely alien body well enough to trot down the tunnel. We rotated every twenty minutes, which meant everyone walked for forty minutes and then rode for twenty. It still wasn't enough for us to go all day, but it was going to get us way further than if we'd all been walking. We were on track to go probably more than twenty miles before we'd have to stop to sleep, which I hoped was enough to get somewhere interesting. Nobody thinks about just how far you have to walk to have a proper fantasy adventure, or the fact that keeping yourself going meant consuming some terrible things.

I'd read books that complained about ration bars, sure, and the ones we'd taken from the Halenvar soldiers we killed weren't even that terrible, but I hadn't been ready for how Katrin wanted to load up the water purifier. In theory it could turn even rocks into water if it had enough time and mana, but it was intended to purify, not create outright. It would transmute any impurities and contaminants, and when it dinged to say it was done you would know that it was perfectly pure and clean even if you'd been using a puddle in a wheel rut as a source.

And if there had been puddles anywhere in Brinkmar, I would have been fine with this. I could tell myself it was mostly just dirt, and dirt was fine. Once the dirt was magically transmuted into water, who cared anymore? But instead, she had us... recycling our water. Logically, this was a good plan. Logically, it would be just as clean and safe and pure as liquid of any other kind once the purifier did its thing. But I was bothered on a layer deeper and older than logic. I had called dibs on the last of the canteens of normal water from the Halenvar soldiers, and then Errod had ruined everything by pointing out that it was highly likely they had been using the same method.

Errod hopped down from Mecha-Callie, Katrin climbed up, and I popped her into the memory palace. Mecha-Callie only needed to use four legs to walk, leaving two on each end to support Katrin so she didn't flop off. One mind started on the daunting task of catching her up on all the shit about my progress that I hadn't explained to her satisfaction yet, while the other made conversation with Errod. Eventually the two conversation topics converged.

"Now that your not-super-secret has been revealed, do you want me to show you around my memory palace?"

He took longer than I had expected to answer. "I... would have to be sure the others weren't going to get pulled in like they did before. Inside the glove, they... they're not really aware all the time, they sort of drift in and out as things demand their attention or they hear key words that matter to them. I saw an old scrap of writing on a shield I was looking at in Sentortzi, and a voice I've never heard before or since spoke up to translate it. Anyway, they fade and merge together a little over time but it's not a bad thing, it's... it feels right to them. And the ones that were pulled into your memory palace, they said it was like having all the blurry edges forced into focus again and it was jarring. Unnatural."

"Shit. Well, tell them I'm sorry I guess. But I don't think it would happen again, partly because I'm way better at it now and partly because now I know what's going on and can actively focus on just inviting you and not them. Actually, we only talked about it the once but remember you have threads connecting you to the glove? Yellow, for your soul, yellow-orange for your mind, and after passing through the glove they fade to purple as they disappear. Purple seems to be for planar stuff, so that's indicating that they're off in their domains. So the glove is... I don't know, monitoring the connection or something, but you're clearly not in the actual glove yet."

He nodded. "That sounds right. When I die, my mind and soul will combine as my lutore collapses, but rather than descending through the Necropolis or lingering as a ghost it goes into the glove."

"Right, so I just need to make sure I'm... I don't know, trying to snag your mind after the point where the connection passes through the glove."

"Can you do that?"

"Maybe! I think if I can't then I'll be able to tell before I do anything though, so it should be harmless to try."

He slowed to a stop, and then reached a hand out to me. "Okay."

"What, right now?"

Errod smiled. "If it works, they can keep me walking. At this point they can move my whole body if they need to, though I've also gotten used to it enough to stop them. I don't, though - if I got in the habit of restricting their control I would have been killed by now, they've made me jump out of the way of so many things."

With Katrin I'd sort of yanked her in, but this time I tried to get back into the mindset I'd been in when I tried to get Helma into my memory palace without her knowing. I wasn't totally certain if I was doing it right, but I just used zero force and sort of... left the door open for him. After a moment I felt it work, and he appeared in the bedroom from Bill's house. Katrin was there, staring at the whiteboard that was still covered in runes from the deadshell, and she ran over to crush him in a hug.

"Oh! It's so good you're here! You should make Calliope show you the terrifying city."

He laughed, but instead just wandered around poking at things. I figured I'd let him get comfortable for a bit, and dragged Katrin back to the whiteboard. She'd been about to explain something to me before my other mind dumped Errod on us.

"Right, right. So... High Imperial is best thought of as a dual language. There's written High Imperial, and spoken High Imperial. Except that's not quite right, because you can sort of speak or write both. It's like... when I was reading things in English, we talked about trying to spell things phonetically. My spellbook is like that, it's not in the same format as the runes. It's sort of a written version of the spoken word, in a way. It leans more heavily on intent, which means you take shortcuts and can move words around and skip things. Runes are much more formal, and while you can still encode intent into them it's more likely that you would do that only with certain characters. It also has a lot of things like... what do you call them in English. I know this one. Ah, parentheses. You wouldn't say those, not really, but in writing you use them."

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Okay that makes some sense," I said, "but the inside cover of your book has runes all over it and I know you've used those for casting."

"Yes! You can combine them, but it's... it's like making dough is casting the spell, and pushing it into a noodle press is using the runes to refine it."

I'd never heard of a noodle press and could only picture a Play-Doh toy, but the metaphor still worked. "Sounds like it's similar to the way you can have mana that's infused with some intent and it makes it easier to cast a spell."

"Kind of! It's not quite the same, but that could be thought of as an optional step on the other end of spellcasting. Or a mandatory one for making potions."

"You can't do that though, right? That's an Alchemy thing?"

She sighed wistfully. "No, that would be amazing. My mana manipulation can't liquefy mana crystals. I could learn to imbue intents into mana though, and actually I might ask for your help with that. The templating ability you learned sounds like it's the same basic thing that's used for priming mana, just... well, not with mana. If we spend some time together on it I could probably pick up enough to figure out the version I need, and then I can start imprinting the foundations for spells into mana crystals. If there's anything I cast a lot, like shield spells, I could hold the crystals and use that mana for casting."

"Would that be more powerful, or just use less?"

"For something simple like shields, there's no difference. I can put more or less mana in, so efficiency can be seen as lowering cost or increasing strength. For some other spells, the effect is more locked in so it would just be less mana. Anyway, most people have trouble doing it beyond a very broad alignment so I'm hoping I can get the trick for more specific intents from you."

"I wish I could just teach you by packaging it up and dumping it on you here. I keep thinking I should be able to do that with specific skills, but I can't figure it out. That's basically how the translation bracelet works, right? Maybe I should start by fucking with that now that I have it back. Oh! Speaking of magic items, we were talking about the deadshell."

"Sorry! Yes, I can read this but... I think I'd need to read it in person to get all the meaning. Some of these runes mean different things depending on the intent, and it's not coming through here. I can make a basic protective item for it even without that, but if we can crack one open and get me a look at the runes directly I can specifically counter this and guarantee we'll be safe from them. I assume you don't want to do that just yet?"

"I'm not super worried about my double, I don't think it would destroy her and we're still tethered so she should snap back. And anyway, we could synch up while we destroy the body just in case so nothing is lost. As long as there's some continuity I don't really feel like it counts as dying, you know? But right now Mecha-Callie might be really important as an extra fighter, and she's helping us travel faster. If nothing else, I doubt she'll be affected by the apathy field herself. So with her attacking, and me, and Errod it's just you that would be in trouble. And I was thinking about that, and I've got a solution.

"From now on, if I point at something and yell 'deadshell', you need to attack it. Even if you're sure it doesn't matter, even if I'm clearly just pointing at a random spot on the wall. I say deadshell, you blast whatever I'm pointing at no questions asked."

She nodded. "That should work. We can practice - just order me to do it sometimes even if nothing is there. Tell me afterwards it's a test so I don't worry, but get me into the habit of just obeying."

My memories of meditating on my Dumines had turned out to be of little use to Katrin, since so much was based on feelings and my chosen method of having memories as physical scenes just didn't carry enough information to make sense of anything. They also had trouble reproducing the non-Euclidean tangle I saw, so it was worthless on multiple levels. I'd given her the rundown on how the thread creation worked, how the templating worked, and my various experiments. I'd avoided talking about Yesrin's Loom and her temporary death, though.

I left her with my book collection, and started giving Errod the tour. I explained a few things around the bedroom, like the television, and then quickly showed him the copy of my wagon and my childhood bedroom before taking him through room 217 of the Long Haul Hotel and into the memory hallway. "Okay, now we're outside the fixed area of my memory palace. This space is being destroyed and remade all the time, and it's not as big as it looks. If you walk away, the scenery will keep generating around you but you won't actually be going that far. The edges of my domain are like... I don't know, maybe another ten feet that way."

"So if you stand here and I walk, I'll hit a wall?"

"No... no, it's... it does something where it kinda bends around. It's very cool, and if I hadn't learned how to sort of feel where things were it would be seamless. That's one of a few things I've done that actually makes this place worse."

Errod looked concerned. "What do you mean?"

"It's fine, it's just... it breaks the immersion a bit, you know? I'd have kinda rather stayed unaware so it felt like this place was infinite. The other thing is even less of a big deal - if I have my ghost in here I break shit constantly because I'm more real than everything else. Like I'll grab a doorknob and it snaps off in my hand. But that's fine, if both minds are here I just have the ghost be the one on divination duty and if anything breaks it comes back a second later. The only thing is, even the floor feels like I'm crunching through it. It's uncomfortable. Everything feels insubstantial, which I guess it is."

"I suppose that means you can't bring anything here from the prime plane without it falling right through."

I laughed at the thought. If even my ghost was too much, anything truly solid would feel so strange. "I could maybe simulate it; there's a thing here that feels extra solid that I was messing with, if I can give it that feeling I should be able to do it... more."

I tried, but I couldn't get it right. Errod clearly didn't care and I shouldn't have either, but once I was trying and couldn't do it I felt like I had been challenged. I told him to wait and went back into the main room, to the desk, and pulled out that strange gold brooch. As before when I'd tried to feel it out with my templating ability, it felt too solid, too heavy. I returned to Errod and showed it to him.

"I see what you mean," he said, "it has a sort of gravity to it. You made this yourself?"

"Well, in the sense that I made everything here, yeah. It was here when I first made the memory palace, sitting in the desk drawer. And I think I had a dream about it once, too. I don't know. It's got to be from my time with Bill, since most of the room was. I mean, other than the creepy statue. Fuck. Ugh, now I'm worried this is something important, some vital memory that I need to remember. I'm so tired of this shit. And it's probably not, it's probably from a book I read or a movie or something, but with the talk of the Jake Ross books and the programming language and stuff... I don't know, I'm just stuck thinking about everything like it might be important.

What I really needed to do was figure out how to access memories from Earth. I kept thinking about that strange feeling of inversion when I'd been looking at the pattern for planar travel to or from Earth. There was some way, some method of... pushing the other direction on the planar membrane. I couldn't spare the potential to unlock it though, and I wasn't sure that I could just figure it out. Well, either way I had plenty on my plate for the moment. I dragged Errod onto the observation deck of the Empire State building and waited for him to freak out.

"Huh," he said, casually walking to the edge and looking across the city.

"That's it?"

"It's amazing, I'm just... not entirely surprised. Katrin had tried to describe it, and she'd been so clearly disturbed by both the height and the scale that I may have over-prepared, mentally. Can you remove this fence?"

After a little concentrating I managed to get rid of the safety features, leaving an unobstructed view. Errod was silent, circling around and staring. Finally he sighed, and shook his head. "A whole other world, with many times the number of people and no magic - or very little, anyway. It's incredible. I wish I could see it in person."

"Yeah, well, it might be possible but we'd probably get stuck. Once we were there, I can't imagine how we would get back out."

Errod's nose wrinkled. "What's that smell?"

"Uh. Bleach? Sorry. I don't know why that happened."

"Smell is important to memory," he said, "is it possible you were thinking of something and it slipped out?"

"Ugh, I hope not. Because if so it's probably another of these stupid hidden memories, and as we were just discussing I'm burned out on all that shit. I don't know when or how my memories were wiped, or why, or which things were deliberately removed versus being collateral damage. And I don't want to worry about what my subconscious is trying to tell me with trinkets in my memory palace or smells of bleach. I don't want to think about memory tampering at all until we're done with all this shit and out of Brinkmar. Let's just... not do anything serious, okay? No questioning what's real or hidden or anything. Let me just show you some fun memories. Come on, I'm going to buy you a chocolate milkshake. You'll love it."

I showed him some other Earth wonders, but my heart wasn't in it. I kept thinking about the mind fuckery, and wondering what memories were truly gone and which ones might resurface as dreams or odd smells or whatever. Even with me adjusting the flow of time we ended up going well past our the point where we should have switched who was riding Mecha-Callie, so eventually that was my excuse to kick everyone out. We ate a meal, chatted about nothing in particular, and finally got moving again.

I'd been trying to estimate how far we had walked and compare to the map, and unless I was totally off we had to be getting close to Evellunis. We'd passed one more station, this one very small without the offices or other features we'd seen before. It did have one of those humanoid-shaped alcoves, and some ancient lights that flickered on when we approached, but there was nothing of interest to take as souvenirs and the doors were, once again, all sealed up. Still, it had been enough to confirm my guess about where we were on the subway map and that meant our destination had to be coming up some time in the next hour, give or take.

I started looking around for something Katrin could blow up with magic - we'd practiced the 'deadshell' warning a few times already, and I had to admit I was enjoying being able to make her shoot lightning at stuff just by pointing and yelling a word. I scanned further down the tunnel, and... huh. "Does anyone else see... I don't know, actually. Something strange?"

Katrin had a ball of light zip forward to check, and about sixty feet away it vanished. Still, I'd seen enough. As it approached, the light had lit up the walls around it before stopping abruptly at an absolute void of pure blackness reaching down through the ceiling.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.