We yelled for the others, and while we waited we ran into a planning and supply problem. Katrin had healed herself and Calliope as they ran for the tunnel, since both had been pretty badly stabbed, but her healing spell was, to put it simply, fucking awful. It patched them both up, but couldn't handle doing so while they were running and now both of them felt like something was crooked inside them. The solution, expensive as it was, would be to use healing potions. But...

"I gave them to Errod," Katrin said, "since I can use the spell."

"I don't have any," Calliope said, "because I did not take any when Katrin was handing them out."

Katrin turned to look at her. "Everyone was supposed to take two!"

Calliope and I both just stared at her for a moment.

"It's different. I can cast the healing spell, and Errod is always right in the middle of things, and... oh, be quiet."

We sure were professionals. We had more, packed safely away, but I only had one other on me for now. I had the two of them split it - you were supposed to take the whole thing, but for something that was already basically healed I figured it would be enough. With that out of the way, it was time to find everyone else - they still hadn't responded to our calls.

Threadsight showed a horrible tangle of purple and white all around us, with scribbles of yellow or mixed in. There was something else, some hint of threads I couldn't see, and something was wrong with the room as a whole; it had six sides, each with a doorway, and large pillars in the center of the room. Except... what was I looking at? Some of the oddities were obvious, the stone morphing into some sort of dark glass or green plants growing out of a crack in the floor despite being totally deprived of sunlight. Some were active magical effects, like the view between two pillars where I could see some other place, somewhere with fog that moved like it was alive.

But it wasn't any of that. It was something more subtle. I turned in place as the others walked further into the room, Katrin calling for her brother. Dust swirled in from behind us, driven forward by the tunnel collapse forty or so feet back, and I watched the swirling particles as they danced in the magical light. There it was. They were moving wrong. Or... vanishing? There was a glitch, a seam, something odd where the dust just didn't line up. I looked at everything around me, trying to figure out if it formed some sort of shape or...

"Katrin, stop!" She pulled to a halt, looking around for the danger, but it was nothing she could see. "There's... some sort of spatial shenanigans going on, and you're about to step right into it. Uh. Can you two... don't ask why, but count the doors."

Calliope turned, leaning side to side a bit as she tried to look around pillars without moving more than she needed to. "Seven," she said, "counting the one we came through."

Katrin frowned. "I count eight."

Okay, it wasn't just me. "Alright, and can we agree this room is a hexagon, and there's one door in each wall?"

Calliope looked at me like I was crazy. "No. There are seven doors, not six. The room must have seven sides."

Katrin was shaking her head, and slowly backing towards me. "She's right, the room is a hexagon. Or... not a hexagon, but... the angles don't make sense. Connie, do you see any disturbances between me and that corner?"

I looked where she was pointing, and shook my head. She hurried over and crouched in the corner to my right, pulling out grease pencils and string from her bag and lining them up with the walls. It looked like she was marking spots on the pencils and running string between them at two points. She then marked the wall with an X and moved to the next corner, glancing at me to confirm it looked safe. She repeated the process, and then checked a third - this one I had to help with, directing her around some threads I could see just in case they were trouble.

"These angles are all the same," she said, "or at least as close as I can measure without proper tools." She stepped past me back into the tunnel and laid the pencils down on the floor, using the bits of string to get the angles correct before drawing on the ground. She rotated the whole thing a few times and kept drawing, and when she was done she stood up and there was a perfect hexagon on the ground. "As I thought, Connie is correct. These angles should form a hexagon. And there's one door in each wall. And I counted eight doors, while Calliope counted seven."

I was glad to know I wasn't just crazy, but that didn't do anything to help me prepare for non-Euclidean bullshit. "Okay, also? I think there's one pillar in front of each corner, and there's also five pillars. So there's five pillars, the room should be a hexagon, and there are seven or eight doors. This is stupid."

Calliope walked up to one of the pillars, leaning around it on one side and then the other. "From here I can see only three other pillars," she said, "even though I saw more from further back. Maybe the room is smaller the closer to the center you are?"

She stepped around a pillar... and didn't come out the other side. Fuck. I told Katrin to stay put and walked around the edge of the room as far as I could without touching any of the threads, but that was proving difficult as they appeared and disappeared around me. I finally saw Calliope, way across the room from where she should have been. "Stay where you are, hang on!"

Katrin yelled from... somewhere. "Connie? Where did you go?"

I looked at where she should have been, and it was the door near the plants - that had been across the room on the other side, before. Fuck me. "Okay, this whole place is clearly fucked from a spatial standpoint. I don't think any of us have the tools needed to fix that, and we need to find the others. So... let's just go for it. Uh. Okay, there's a doorway where the keystone of the arch has a crack right in the center. Everyone find that door and we'll meet there."

I headed for it, carefully stepping around a disturbing flicker in the air, but my divination kept dropping. Since it relied on the planar membrane it had failed a few times while we were at or near a portal, so that was probably the reason. I gave up on it for the moment and continued, and when I got to the doorway I looked up. This one didn't have the crack. Motherfucker. I turned, and could see it nearby - Calliope was already there waiting. I headed towards her without breaking eye contact, and while it felt like it maybe took more steps than it should have I made it. Calliope was sneering, like she found the whole room distasteful. I yelled for Katrin, and after a moment heard a faint reply echoing through the room.

"I found Errod, and Zee. Grunkle and Matlyn are somewhere else, and I can't see you. Errod says the different doors connect, or some of them do, and the other rooms aren't so bad. If we can't get to you soon, it's possible we could circle around - though I'd rather not risk getting even more split up."

I yelled back that we would stay put for a bit, although I did pull out a rope and have Calliope hold one end so I could check out what was down the passage we were at without us getting split up. The rope wasn't a particularly long one, it was more useful for tying moskar somewhere than it was for climbing a cliff or something, so it pulled tight shortly after reaching the end of the hallway. I'd turned on my personal light, which was plenty bright but didn't illuminate as evenly as Katrin's orbs - it made jerky shadows, like a flashlight.

As one might expect from ruins that were several thousand years old, there wasn't a lot intact. Clearly some of the furniture had been made from stone, but there were piles of dust with suspicious lumps that looked like dry-rotted wood. I sifted through them and found a few old metal bits, but it just looked like hardware from whatever kind of furniture it had been. Ornamental corners, drawer pulls, nothing useful.

There were other doorways, but the rope wasn't long enough and I didn't want to get us split up any further. Just as I was turning to head back, however, Calliope came running in. "Sahrger. At least six of them, but they are hard to count in that room."

Ah, fuck. "Did you warn the others?"

She shook her head. "I could see light, from Katrin's magic. it cut out just before the Sahrger came into view, so I suspect she knows. I saw no point in drawing their attention."

Fair enough. I coiled the rope back up as I walked, and we headed deeper into the complex. Or... maybe back the way we came, given how the fact that we were stuck in an M.C. Escher painting. The next room had a counter all around it, with what looked like lanterns or small cages positioned at regular intervals, barely larger than a soda can. The remains of what were probably chairs indicated a number of people had probably sat here at the counters working on something.

"There's some sort of magical effect still here," I said, squinting at the lantern-cage things. There was a squiggle of spirit magic, not in all of them but in enough that I suspected they'd all had one back when this place was in use. I leaned closer to one and, not having the time to be more cautious, pressed a finger against a blank metal plate at the front. A glow appeared, and a small humanoid shape made of blue flame was suddenly in the cage. I could feel mana being drawn out of me, but it was just a trickle.

It spoke to me, but the language wasn't one I recognized. Shit. I'd learned Erathik easily enough, but that had been while in a whole city of native speakers and it was based on me having already picked up bits from Hugh during our training. I didn't think I could get it from this thing. Could I do the opposite, give it a language I spoke? Either way, I'd probably have to tether it since I didn't know how to get a template from my memory palace to the spirit in front of me. I'd been spoiled by most things speaking Imperial - not surprising, given how long it had been around and how thoroughly the Clockmaker had taken over the world.

But this little spirit thing had missed all that, just waiting down here in the darkness. It was amazing it hadn't ceased to exist, but presumably there was enough ambient mana for it to feed off of. or the cage helped somehow. It spoke to me again, just a few words, and then curled up and vanished. Probably it had given up on getting a command, or something. The cage was attached to the counter, but with a firm twist it popped free - I gathered up all five of the ones that still had spirits inside and ran a string through them so I could hang them on my backpack.

The next room we chose was a bust, but the one after that had a massive metal wall covered in ceramic tiles that stuck like magnets. The metal wall had complicated interlocking circles, hexagons, squares, and lines - it reminded me somewhat of a mandala - and the ceramic tiles were all placed at intersections. Another portion of wall was similar but set up almost like a sports bracket, lines coming from each tile and merging until only one was left.

The tiles all had swirly symbols that looked familiar to me, and seemed to be color-coded to boot - though some of the shades were too similar to quickly distinguish. as I gathered up three more spirit cages and added them to my collection, I tried to remember where I'd seen those symbols. "Brinkmar! And, and, Poicelria's fortress!" Both older than the Clockmaker's empire, and both had those nine-sided rooms. One wall had been the entrance, and the other eight had had symbols on them. Symbols like these.

Calliope sighed. "You said that out loud, but I have no idea what you mean. What about Brinkmar and Poicelria's fortress?"

"I think these symbols are for different planes," I said, "because I saw... this one, here, and that wall led us back to the prime plane. These guys, the Eyes of Batasun, were obsessed with bringing all the planes into alignment in one spot because they thought it would let them become gods or something. So this must be about that, like... how to do it. Or, maybe, the order to do it in? This part looks like a bracket, so maybe they were trying to decide the best order to connect them all in."

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It would make sense. Some were similar and would probably merge easier, and some were opposites which... actually, those might be best to start with. Azaraze was just pure void, and Botara was all light and heat and energy - maybe if you bound those two together right they'd cancel out or something, whereas if you tried any other combination it would be a disaster. I made sure my divination was working again - it was - and then reluctantly prepared to move on. I could examine things in my memory palace.

In fact, with my divination frequently dropping as we walked, my spare mind had nothing better to do anyway. I copied all the tiles and sorted through them, and made sure I had one of each - as expected, there were thirty-six of them. I glanced at them all lined up, still feeling like there was something I should be thinking of. The symbols had looked familiar when I saw them in Brinkmar, but that had been because I'd seen them in Poicelria's place. Right? No, there was something else.

The one for he prime plane I knew, but that was about it. In theory I could have learned the symbol for Brinkmar from looking at the other side of the portal, but it wasn't there while the portal was open and by the time it closed we were in the next room fighting for our lives. The view from when I'd watched Calliope and Harmid go through wasn't something I could use divination on, so that didn't help either. I did know the other symbols that were in that chamber, so I stacked those seven together.

Surely there'd be some way to look up these old symbols, but right now my only lead was the spirit guys. They could maybe tell us where the planar lodestones were, too - was it worth spending time and mana on, when there were hostile Sahrger looking for us and we were split up? The answer felt like no, but at the same time I didn't have a lot else to do. Mana wasn't something I used a ton of in combat, so if I held some back to empower my ghost in an emergency that should do it. And I had a spare mind. The only question was the best way to make the connection.

I could try and pull one of the spirits into my memory palace, but that seemed like a bad idea. I could tether it temporarily and try to communicate, which would take a lot of mana the whole time the connection was there, or I could do a fate tether which would cost a ton but only as a one-time thing. The downside for that was having the spirit linked to me indefinitely, unless I destroyed it, and the fact that some spirits could potentially cause feedback that would change me in some way. I was mostly sure I could prevent that, but only mostly.

We'd made it to a long corridor with lots of tiny rooms, apparently a dorm of some sort. I laid out the eight cages and activated them one at a time, trying to talk to them. One flickered fitfully and seemed like it was dying. In addition to that one, there were two others that didn't talk and one that said something short and immediately curled up and vanished again. That left four that seemed functional, so I activated them all at once and tried chatting with them.

Three of them gave up right away, but one tilted its little flame head in a very human gesture and tried to repeat my words. "Canu? Can-u un-der-stan?" That was the best it did before launching back into its own language, but it was better than nothing. I extended a thread, a temporary one, and tried to tether it. Nothing. The cage blocked my thread completely. I considered breaking the cage open, but I didn't want to lose the cooperative one so I tested it with the flickering guy instead.

With a little sigh, the figure zipped out of the broken cage, instantly gone. It had happened so fast that I doubted I could have tethered it in time. That idea was out. Giving up, I tried a fate thread which snapped into place no problem. I had the transfer of information locked down, since I didn't know how this thing worked, but once it was in place I opened the connection a teeny bit and tried to send a little package of English I'd made over. I'd been practicing with it some anyway, with the idea that I could help Katrin and Errod put some polish on their impressive but still shaky English before we went to Earth, but this was my first time actually trying to do anything with it.

The template vanished from my memory palace somehow, the process feeling fairly intuitive but also not making a lot of sense if I thought about it too hard. The blue flame spirit stood very still for a moment, then nodded repeatedly, and then said something - still in that other language.

"Can you understand me now? I just sent you... no, either you already got it or you don't know what I'm saying. Ugh."

"Query received. Yes. This one can understand you. Clarification. Is this language preferred?"

"Yes! Yes, please. What are you?"

It gave me the head tilt again. "This one is a bound record-keeper. Clarification. Are the Eyes of Batasun defunct?"

I was a little worried that if I answered this wrong I'd be fucked. If I said yes, would it say it doesn't have to help me? If I said no, would it require proof I was a member? "I'm trying to continue their research and could really use your help. But yes, they're all long gone."

It nodded. "A new agreement must be made. This one's time in service is expired. Would you like to form a binding?"

"What do you get out of it?"

"Query received. This one would receive mana sufficient for growth and reproduction. In return, this one would store and organize your knowledge."

That sounded pretty good. "Do you still have knowledge from the Eyes of Batasun?"

"This one has the knowledge imparted to it, as well as the knowledge imparted to four others who passed on their stored information when their bindings failed. Clarification. Will you be binding this spirit?"

"Yes."

"Understood. Clarification. Will you be binding the others present, or releasing them from their expired bindings?"

"Can you get them to give you their knowledge too?"

"Clarification. This is a conditional answer to this one's query?"

"Yeah. If you can absorb what they know, I'll just keep you. Otherwise I may need to keep the others."

"Understood. This is both possible, and acceptable. Should this one initiate knowledge transfer now?"

"Yes please."

The spirit prompted me to activate the other cages one at a time, and as I did the spirits flickered rapidly - I found myself wondering if that was a language, somehow. When each one was done I popped the cage open, releasing them. Finally, only the one was left. "Task complete. Some knowledge has been lost or degraded due to expired bindings and lapse in service."

"I figured. How do I bind you? And do I leave you in this cage?"

"Query received. This container serves to anchor this one on a non-native plane, and allows for standardized transfer of mana during knowledge storage and retrieval. This one would recommend leaving the container intact for ease of use. Binding may be completed verbally, and can be for a set period of time or until certain conditions are met. Binding will also expire due to prolonged lapse in service."

"Okay, great. You okay with being bound indefinitely? Oh, and I'm going somewhere you probably can't follow soon, can I drop you in Biltagiretzae for a few months?"

"Multiple Queries received. This binding is acceptable, and will last until this one or yourself loses coherence. Storing this device on Biltagiretzae is acceptable. The stated timeframe will not exceed requirements for a lapse in service to be declared. Previous knowledge has been indexed. Duplicate knowledge has been purged. Contradictory knowledge has been flagged. This one is ready to serve."

Okay. I was now in possession of a magical personal assistant. "Do you have a name? Do you want one?"

"Query received. This one has no audible signifier. You may assign one if desired."

"I'm gonna call you Exposition. Okay, Exposition, I have a query for you. Do you know where the planar lodestones are kept? Assume I know basically nothing about this place, so give me a little detail if you can."

"This audible signifier is acceptable. Query received. Incomplete knowledge has been located. Unpaired lodestones for practice binding are stored in the star chamber. This one has no relevant knowledge regarding the location of the star chamber. This one has relevant knowledge regarding unpaired lodestones:

"Lodestones must be paired for proper use in planar merges. Unpaired lodestones, or paired lodestones used outside of domains, will only create a temporary merge. All Unpaired lodestones are keyed to Areldeto due to its abundant domains and ease of merging. Unpaired lodestones are not bound to the user on any plane, and therefore must not be removed from the temple as they can be permanently lost. Unpaired lodestones should not destroy themselves upon use as they cannot merge with another lodestone, but they may still degrade and require the zilura to be re-forged. Further knowledge is available on these topics, but is expected to be outside current interest."

We got moving again while I thought about that. Most of it didn't seem important. Zilura was the same material the dial in my bracer was made of, or the little plates connected to the dial anyway, which made sense - both influenced the planes and brought them closer. The idea that the unpaired ones were for practice and the "real" ones were paired also made sense, and tied back to the bracket-like chart I'd seen. I wasn't sure how it would work when once they were down to eighteen pairs; would there be a way to make a lodestone for each of the merged things as well, or did that use a different method? Not something I had to worry about, but it was interesting. Areldeto... it was a pretty uninteresting plane, from what I'd read, but it spontaneously generated these blobs of gray goo that would transmute into any material with just a little mana.

That sounded super useful, but the second the mana dried up it would revert. It was still more solid, more real than most ephemeral matter, and so in theory it was super valuable for certain experiments and stuff, but in general it was just a party trick. The goo itself would stop working pretty quickly if it was away from Areldeto, too. Anyway, I'd certainly grab anything we found, but the unpaired lodestones didn't sound like what we wanted.

The next passage led back to that first fucked-up room, even though I was pretty sure that didn't make sense. The gravity was at maybe half the whole way down the hall, making me almost trip over myself at first and then nearly slam my head into the ceiling as I tried to recover. Infuriatingly, Calliope handled it with ease.

Even more infuriatingly, she darted off into that main chamber with a growl before I'd gotten myself steadied.

She was like a fucking dog that had seen a squirrel. Okay, I get it, there's Sahrger here and you hate them. It was a terrible idea to get separated, especially in that room. I made it to the edge of the doorway, divination giving out as I arrived, and as expected Calliope was nowhere to be seen. There was a flash of electric blue-white light, a scream, and a knife that clattered to the ground near my feet from seemingly nowhere, though.

I cautiously entered the room, ducking behind a pillar. Threadsight wasn't helping, with my links to the others veering off at impossible angles thanks to the spatial distortions. I kept it on anyway, in hopes of avoiding some of the random bullshit that was going on, but only certain types were visible to me.

A Sahrger came around the corner, and reflexively I kicked them in the chest and sent them reeling backwards. They recovered quickly and threw a glass ball at the pillar next to me, and when it shattered an enormous cloud of pink sparkles came out. it was like something a cartoon pixie would do.

I dodged away, but as the glitter-like substance landed on the exposed skin of my neck it burned like a son of a bitch. The Sahrger was already gone, so I retreated back to the door. It wasn't the door I'd come from a moment ago, somehow. This place sucked. I heard Matlyn calling for her sister, and ran down the passage after her.

I passed her in the hallway somehow, without seeing her. The voice was coming from up ahead, and then it was behind me. What the fuck. "Matlyn?"

"Connie? Is that you? Where are you?" The voice was coming from right next to me.

"What does it look like where you are?"

She started describing the hallway, and so far as I could tell from the meager details it was the same one. We just couldn't see or touch each other. Fuck. We headed back down the hall, talking so we wouldn't lose each other, and came to a familiar room - the one where I'd found Exposition and the other caged spirits.

Or... a similar room, anyway - the cages were all still there. None were inhabited. Hmm. "Matlyn, do you see little metal cages?"

"Yes," she said, voice much fainter than before, "there are."

"How many?"

"Um... seven, but it looks like there are spaces for more."

Okay, that confirmed it. She was in the room I'd been in, and I was somewhere else. A copy, but one without the spirits. I heard an explosion in the distance, though now I wasn't sure if it was in my version of the temple or Matlyn's. This was going to make it extra hard to find everyone, especially if sound didn't carry through everywhere - Matlyn's voice was already fainter, it could be that in some places we wouldn't be able to hear each other at all.

I heard her scream just fine, though, heard her hit the floor and whimper and beg for someone to stop. And I heard what the Sahrger said in response.

"Scream louder, little rabbit. Bring your friends to me so they can see the art I'll make of your body. You will be so pretty, so pretty. Don't fret, I will keep you alive until the end. You can see the glorious shapes I'll make from you."

That... wasn't great. I had to think. Had to figure something out. There were more sounds, fighting and grunting. Someone else had joined in, or maybe multiple people. Maybe everything was fine now. Maybe it would be okay. Maybe.

I looked around, trying to figure out what was going on. Had they built duplicates of the temple, somehow? Was this part of the spatial fuckery? Or... no. This was planar fuckery. The planes were all overlapping here, thus the gravity and other effects. Even the spatial stuff was almost certainly the influence of Uihene, the plane Sige was from.

This wasn't Nusos, it was too consistent. But it could be Itzele. A dark, crumbling copy of the prime plane... well, this place was already dark and crumbling. Would I be able to tell the difference? Also, part of the reason stuff looked strange there was that things moved before being fully copied, but things had been sitting here in the same spot for ages.

Even if I was wrong, I figured I probably was on the right track - and so regardless, the answer was to get back to the prime plane. I twisted the dial on my bracer until the little gold plate with the rune for the first plane clicked into place, and concentrated. The scene around me began to shift, light blooming and ghostly shapes appearing.

As things began to come into focus I could see Matlyn on the ground, bleeding, trying to untangle something from around her legs. Calliope was on the other side of the room, held from behind by a Sahrger while another pulled her arm back, ready to drive a huge knife into her.

I charged, forms around me still slightly blurry, but I couldn't reach the attacking Sahrger in time. I shoulder-checked Calliope and the Sahrger holding her to shove them aside, but the attacking one just redirected - and slammed the blade all the way into the center of my chest, right through my heart.

Oh.

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