William work up dreary, like from a long nap, to find himself jammed in the corner of a cellar, an arm wrapped around his knees, the other hand balled up in the hair at the back of his head. The cellar seemed familiar, or parts of it were. The walls matched the basements at Bell Yard, the barrels looked just like the ones in Leonard’s storeroom. William unwrapped the hand around his knees and dragged his finger along the floor. It was his own, from his own home, the row-house with the white brick and teal shutters, deep in the docks, just a short walk from the ocean.
There was a door on the other side of the cellar peaking out from around a barrel, the only way out by the looks of it. Moving was like trudging through water, but he pulled himself up and walking out the door. William did not hide himself away in cellars.
The long hallway ahead was lit in a dull grey and from the first step the floor was covered in a thin layer of a shiny, black liquid. William kicked and it splashed up on his beige pants, the stains as dark as the night sky. Ink then. It was always ink. The ink lapped up treads on his books as he walked, the ripples followed in his wake. There was nothing in the halls he could see more than faintly, and there wasn’t anything to see, save walls, and a tiled ceiling, and the ripples in the ink. The echoes of his steps pulsed down the hall, disappearing into the background, the only noise accompanying him until he heard the voice far in the distance. As faint as it was, it stood out to William as strongly as a scream.
“…when reasonable efforts cannot succeed without endangering the life of the-”
William stopped. He could see the closed door maybe twenty metres ahead. There had been no fork in the hall, back was the cellar and forward was the door. Towards the voice was the only way.
He slowed his steps. He placed heels in the ink like the ground would crumble beneath him.
“Order eight, subject five-two, section two-c-one. Law enforcement officers may discharge a service firearm only in…” The voice was deep and gravelled. “…self defense, or defense of another…”
William reached the door.
“…when there has been some overt action from the subject to establish intent to kill or…”
William rested a hand on the doorhandle.
“…believe the subject has committed a life-threatening…”
William prepared himself. He was the second best fencer at the docks, so said Manton once when he was really deep in his cups, and William had managed a score of ninety-one in swords back at Arx before he’d met Manton. There was no sword hanging comfortable on his hip now, but William instead had the crazed energy of an animal hellbent on keeping it’s own life.
He threw open the door and ran, three leaping steps, splashing the ink up off the floor before he processed what he saw in front of him and realized that there was nobody else in the room. There was a desk, large and extraordinarily heavy looking, carved out of thick, old oak. Manton’s desk, in fact.
Across it lay a rifle.
The Enigma IA-L Two-Nine-Seven-Dash-One Soini was one of a handful of introdynically powered firearms. It was one hundred forty centimetres long, majority barrel, and the auctor on it’s short forestock was etched with a gold-copper alloy. Like all engimas, it was one of a kind.
William picked up his rifle, his engima. His esprite system locked to its stock like the engima’s arteficer, Soini, had laid those traces of gold and copper down to conform to the meridians in William’s hand alone. Maybe he had? Was it so outlandish, when William was the sole individual in the world who could shoot it straight?
The door on the far end of the room opened to a staircase up, and that staircase let out to a rooftop above the city. The sky was pitch black, not a single star graced it. In the distance rang the unmistakable sound of clashing steel, of sword combat.
William jogged to the building’s edge and peered down.
Manton Stockwell, in his hands that longsword he favored, clashed with a man in a fencing mask. It was no sparring match. They kept distance, tiptoed around each other, every moment their sword tangled was filled with tension and anticipation and hunger - the careful dance of two people who meant it.
Manton Stockwell was an exceedingly good swordsman, a frequent fixture at local competitions and well decorated to match. He and William sparred often, double so near the… near…
William almost always lost. Sure, a spark of ingenuity or a lick of cheating might have caught him the rare victory, but Manton, at least when it came to William, was not a good loser, and could come up with a near infinite number of creative and painful ways to make William pay for it. Many people, other guards, William’s friends, Hakra, Chiara, even Maakeo, would see his bruises and ask why he was letting Stockwell do that to him four times a week. William never answered seriously.
All that to say, William probably knew Manton’s swordsmanship better than he knew his own. He knew within a moment what other eyes might struggle to see. Manton was losing.
William flipped down the stand on the rifle and rested his hand on the auctor, waking it back up, connecting himself to it, another limb, another nerve running from that spot behind his left ear to the tip of the engima’s barrel. It’s quiet song hummed alive.
Through the scope William tracked behind the man’s right ear, hidden behind that mask, his spier, if he resided with the ninety-seven percent of the population who had it on their right side. The fencer pushed the offensive and Manton was forced into a retreat, on the back foot.
William didn’t really so much remember, as the moment was burned into his very soul, but he recalled how Nim Suttiran’s fingers pressed into his shoulder, the way she spoke to him with her voice low and spun out of silk, ‘it’s yours if you use it’.
This was using it.
Manton’s opponent hung still, his sword close to Manton’s neck, only locked back by it’s blade tangled in the guard of Manton’s longsword, and William pulled the trigger.
There was no travel time with an engima, not at any speed worth measuring. The auctor always did it’s job impeccably, reaching down the pinhole barrel and plucking the strings of the sonnant field until they were dead straight. They’d stay that way if William performed his job just as well, and nowadays it was easy as breathing.
He let the enigma have what it demanded, let it rally the anisity under his skin, through his palm, manifesting into a ray of brilliant light, bright as the sun, straight through the man’s skull.
William woke up gasping.
The visions of the city, the cellar, the rifle faded fast out of his memory, not that it was any great loss. He’d be back there in a few nights anyways. He was laying flat in a bed, or something else about that soft, coated in sweat, some hand pinned his shoulder into the mattress. His eyes didn’t want to focus. His head hurt with a fury.
“Easy.”
It was Everett who held him down, he could make him out after a bit of blinking, looking full of concern. William untangled his own hand out from the blankets and jammed a palm in his left eyesocket. The pain radiated somewhere behind there. The pressure didn’t help.
“Where-” William coughed, his voice didn’t want to work. “Where am I?” He managed.
“An inn,” Everett said. He let up his grip, “owned by a friend of mine.”
The room contained, as William could make out from his current, horizontal position, a small desk with a chair, a dressser, on top of which was William’s bag and rifle, and a window, with a bright amethyst purple sky behind it. There was no reason to disbelieve Everett as the room did plausibly seem like it could belong to an inn.
“Could you grab something? Front pocket.” William used his freed hand to point at his pack.
Everett was up and over there.
“Red case.” William croaked.
Everett retrieved the requested item but did not hand it over. He fiddled with it until he sorted out the clasp and let out a little breathless ‘oh’ as he opened it and observed the contents. The little pill case had about a dozen varieties of medications inside, about two-thirds available over-the-counter, which spoke just as much to William’s sense of preparation as it did his impressive list of perscriptions.
“Which one?” Everett asked.
“Orange, circle.” Lucky it was primal knowledge at this point. If William had to think about it he would have been in trouble, but he knew this headache, stuck in the left side of his brain like a knife, even though he didn’t think he’d ever had it quite this bad, or woken up with it. William grit his teeth and pushed himself up.
Everett dropped a pill in his hand.
“Two.”
Everett dropped a second pill in his hand, and forced a glass of water on him before William had a chance to swallow them dry. He fell back into bed when he had them down and pulled up the blankets, closed his eyes, tried to breath. For a while that was all William did, while Everett sat quietly at the bedside.
“I’m sorry.” Everett said eventually.
William opened his eyes. “Why? Was this your fault?”
Everett looked thrown by the question. “Well, I told you the remittet was harmless, and then…” He trailed off.
“Oh.” William did remember that, now that he was thinking back. He’d catalogued it away in his mind and didn’t give it another thought. There’d been more pressing concerns. There’d been the way Everett’s esprite system tangled into William’s own. There’d been the retching sense of anticipation over what William was in for.
“I’d never seen a reaction like that,” Everett continued, “but I’ve been thinking on it, and while unusual, it makes sense. Or rather, I can see how the remittet could cause this.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “you aren’t dying, in case you weren’t aware.”
“I know. I know I’m not dying.” William shoved himself deeper in the blanket. Of course he knew what lapsus felt like. Waking up with the condition was new, but there wasn’t another headache that hit in that specific spot by his ear, it was benchmark stable lapsus.
He even knew unstable lapsus, not that he’d well… know, if he had unstable lapsus… Which he did not.
He wouldn’t be very cognizant if he had that.
“What did you call it?” William asked.
“What?”
“The auctor. Rem…”
“Oh.” Everett said softly. “The remittet.” The word sparkled as he pronounced it. Of course, he elaborated no further. “You should rest some. There’s water here,” he tapped the ceramic pitcher on the bedside table, clink. “The bathroom is down the hall. If you need anything I’ll be downstairs. Do you need anything?”
Answers perhaps? But William didn’t even want those right now. “No.”
Everett shut the door quietly behind him as he exited.
William felt nothing but relief in being left alone. He did not have the wherewithal to feel anything more, and he’d never been one for being miserable in company. He looked out the purple window. It must be some sort of treatment upon the glass. A stark white cloud passed by, not a bit discolored. Perplexing.
William turned over and closed his eyes. If he slept, and he wasn’t positive he did so, it was nothing more than dozing, but when he did open his eyes again the pounding in his head had grown distant and while the sky was still purple, it was darker and reddish. His watch had been removed, he noticed.
He sat up. It was easy to forget how nice it was to sit up and not feel the urge to vomit. William had not realized until now that he had been stripped down to his undershirt. He still wore pants, socks. All of it was clammy. A chill already creeped in, even with the thick quilt still pooled around his legs. A change of clothes helped, and donning the thickest sweater he brought with him. His belt and watch were hiding under his jacket on the dresser. On quick appraisal, it seemed nothing was unaccounted for. His weapons, the two blades and two guns, were stacked neatly on the dresser. The revolver hadn’t so much as left it’s holster. Finding his things and reclaiming his watch brought a sense of relief and fresh resolve. It was time to figure out where he was, and why an auctor was neccessary to get him here.
William opened the door to a hallway, for which his room resided dead in the middle. The stairs were to the left.
From what he remembered from Manton’s alternate space theory textbook, long range teleportation wasn’t stable enough under normal circumstances. Meanwhile, short range could be feasible if the conditions were just right. He saw this in the Arcadium’s elevators. Of course, being written by academics, the book didn’t make things clear or provide distances, only equations, so William did not actually have a frame of reference for what distinguished short range teleportation from long. It was more than thirty stories (the tallest of the Arcadium’s spires) and less than the distance between two cities (they’d have done away with trains by now if it was an option).
He remembered being frustrated that the answer wasn’t plainly written, even going so far as getting a pad of paper out to run the calculations himself before he thought better about willingly doing mathematics after midnight. Now, William wished he made different decisions, but that wasn’t an unusual thought of his.
He took the stairs slow, in defense of his still spinning head and less than certain gait.
This was William’s best theory. Everett had short range teleported the three of them somewhere, with his own power none-the-less. The remi-whatever did not have an external power sourse, it was introdynic. That explained how the high anisity cost of opening an alternate space was handled - there was no better power supply than the human esprite system. As for where, the mountains maybe? An inaccessible location would explain the need to teleport. It would mean Everett lied, when he said earlier in the carriage that they wouldn’t be travelling to the mountains. The thought made William a little sad. Everett had an earnest quality to him that would be a shame to be proven fake, not that such a reveal would be much of a suprise. The sun rose and set, the wind blew in and out from the ocean, and everyone was lying all of the time.
Down the stairs William found what must be the front door and off to it’s side a quaint dining room with a few seats and a small bar. His travelling companions sat at a table on the far side littered with cups. They noticed William only after he’d stepped inside. Rell gave a little wave.
William was resolved to drag his current location out of them. The letter of their agreed to deal was not fulfilled, they were one day into a nine day trip, but William thought he had an argument, with the madness of a skullclamp and his… asterial difficulties. Extracting information was a well practiced skill of his.
He approached their table and pulled up a chair.
With careful broaching of the subject he could convince them. He wouldn’t push too hard. He’d done this a million times. William caught a glance out the window as he sat down, out the open window. A breeze of fresh air drifted in, crisp with an edge of vegetation.
Against thick green trees and low hanging clouds and approaching dusk was a shifting hue of deep violet.
Not the window.
The sky.
“Where the fuck are we?” William said to Everett.
Everett flinched. The room was silent.
For a long moment the silence continued, then Rell began to chuckle, small and breathy at first, but it continued, and morphed into a full bodied laugh. She looked out the window up at the sky.
“Oh my god.” She managed between wheezes, “I didn’t think of that.” She leaned back in her chair. “I only thought of how happy I was to see it.”
Everett shot an unsure glance out the window.
“The sky.” She laughed.
Realization visibly hit him. “You’re right.” He furrowed his brow up. He looked out the window at the remaining shades of violet, leaving quickly with the sun. “It’s good luck.” He said.
Rell hummed in agreement, and picked up her a cup of amber liquid and took a drink, then set it back down. “What do they say? Time to face the music?”
Everett remembered the issue. “I’m not sure we should discuss this now. You’ve been through a lot today.”
William meanwhile had pushed deep crescents into the palm of his hand.
“I know it’s a lot to ask, but if you could restrain you’re curiosity-”
“Where did you teleport me?”
The corner of Everett’s lip twitched. “Fine then. It’s a decent guess, but we didn’t teleport.”
“You’re claiming this inn was just behind the treeline from where you used that auctor?”
“No, I’m saying out absolute position hasn’t changed more than the kilometer I carried you after you lost consciousness. We’re no more than a few hours walk from Presense and a carriage ride away from Bianeuve.” A quick glance towards Rell. “We will still take you home if you wish. You aren’t trapped here.”
William knew instinctually that he was not a short walk from Presense. What of the auctor. What of the unnatural, the unimaginable color that wove itself in long strands across the sky? Everett was lying.
“I’m not lying.” Everett said. “The remittet doesn’t teleport anything. It opens a door to an alternate space that already exists.”
William frustration collapsed. There was a scope here he couldn’t wrap his mind around.
“To teleport,” Everett continued, “you need to create a new alternate space and adjust it’s dimensions relative to the outside world, a task much simpler than what the remittet accomplishes. I cannot overstate how difficult this is.” Everett paused. “The people who designed this process… there is no one more brilliant.”
It clicked. “We’re in an alternate space.”
“We are.”
Oh.
Oh no.
Truely, William did not have a strong understanding of this theory, almost nobody did, save battle hardened researchers and fresh doctoral students eager to forge research on only esoteric and useless topics, because make no mistake, the science seemed all but useless, save rescuing those trapped in collapsed buildings and mines, and elevators, if you happened to be an organization with infinite pockets, a contraption that worked just as well with only a cable, a motor and a counterweight.
That textbook had brought William to his knees. He crawled though it, piecing together his fractured understanding bit by shattered bit. Each chapter was a mountain, but not chapter two. That one was written plainly. That chapter explained how alternate spaces die.
The pin. The walls and doors.
The crash.
“How big?”
Everett always had a sturdy way about him, a calmness that he no doubt worked to maintain, that reached even behind his golden eyes. William had already trusted him once. “How large is the alternate space?” Everett clarified.
William nodded.
“Well…” Everett let his gaze be pulled, once again, out the window. The breeze from it rustled the spare hairs that had fallen out from the bunch tucked behind his ear. “It’s planet sized.”
William took a long moment to think on this, and then he stood up from his seat at the table, feet landing solidly on the floor, walked out the dining room without stumbling, then exited through the front door. The inn from which he emerged was situated on the top of a hill overlocking a small yet respectable number of wooden buildings of various shapes. A dirt path with two wheel tracks ran through the middle. William walked along it for, oh, thirty meters or so before he glanced up at the sky and that was when he gave up on walking at all. He sunk into the weeds at his feet.
Up there, two purple dusted crescents hanged pretty in the sky, Altior and Breve, same as they always were when they graced the world with their presence.
Except… except they weren’t gracing his world with their presence, were they?
William decided it was best to close his eyes very forcefully so he did not have to comprehend what he was seeing any longer.
“Hey.”
He startled so badly a muscle in his neck yanked. Sharp, awful pain. He put his head in his knees and dug his fingers into his hair.
Everett sat down beside him. William heard how the grass shuffled out of his way.
“Are you alright?” Everett asked.
The concept of alternate spaces was grotesque enough on their own to make William feel sick. Noone should be capable of just… making more room out of nothing. It made a mockery of reality, and reality mocked them back for it. The reason the technique was highly niche and barely used was clearly stated in the text, how when it failed, it took everything in both spaces with it.
So it wasn’t so much William that had the problem. “That can’t be safe.” He mumbled between his knees.
There was another Lucid hanging over his Lucid.
Like a guillotine.
“It’s been like this a long time.” Everett said. He spoke so softly. “More than a thousand years. Nothing has happened thus far.”
William left his head in his knees.
“I’ll admit, I’m suprised you know about hall crashes. It’s not common knowledge, well…” Everett thought on it, “anywhere I’ve been.”
William had never heard of any of it before the book.. before that recipt… left by… why did he leave-
William’s head shot up. “Manton Stockwell is here.”
Everett jerked back. “He is, yes. Here in Obscure.”
“That’s why you brought me with you.”
“Yes.”
It was well and dark now. William could only see Everett by the thin light reaching from the inn.
“You understand now why I had to bring you here before I told you?” Everett said. “You wouldn’t have believed me if I did. No one from Lucid does.”
He was right. William wouldn’t have.
“Can we go inside now?” Everett asked. “It’s cold, you’re shivering.”
William was fairly sure he was trembling, not shivering. Those two were different, but he took the offered hand from Everett and let himself be led back to the inn, back to the dining room and let himself be put back on his chair across from Rell.
Everett left him there. He walked off behind the bar.
Rell finished off her beer and then stared at him.
William looked over at the bar, the door through which Everett had left. He looked back at Rell. She still stared.
William looked out the window at the world outside, covered like a blanket by the dark. Rell still stared.
William looked over her shoulder and she still stared.
He made a noise that was half frustration, half threat and half despair.
“Bad day for you.” She finally said.
William didn’t respond, so focused was he on breathing.
“He did warn you…”
The door behind the bar opened and Everett returned with two glasses, one of beer which was enthusiastically swipped up by Rell, and one of water which he placed in front of William.
“Drink.” He ordered.
William did despite not really wanting to.
“You should eat as well. Vedran made a good stew.”
William couldn’t be less interested in doing so. It must have shown.
“I know how it goes with lapsus,” Everett said, “but all you’ve had today is the rest of Rell’s nuts.”
The door behind the bar opened again. From behind emerged a man with Asieeran olive skin holding a steaming bowl.
“You’ll have to try your best.” Everett took the bowl and placed it in front of William, then pulled up a chair himself.
The stew was full of root vegetables cut into neat squares. William pushed them around. It smelled… fine.
“And don’t think too hard about what’s in it.” Everett added.
William did as he was told. He did not think about what was in the stew. He stared hard back at Rell when he caught her sneaking glances at his way. He felt better with something in him, if not a little nauseous. And tired, he felt very tired.
It was like a tide rolling in when one dared to look away from the ocean, how quickly the exhaustion came upon him. The distaster he was grappling with grew quiet, like as if underwater, distorted and distant. Everything grew distorted and distant.
Everett took away the bowl and urged William upstairs. He shook out the quilt left in a mess on the bed and poured a fresh glass of water from the pitcher at the bedside, while William watched from the doorway.
“You’ll be better in the morning, so get some rest.” Everett said, then he closed the door behind him.
The red pill case still sat on the bedside table. William picked it up and slipped it open. He swallowed dry what he always took before bed, then selected one more small white capsule. Perhaps it was giving up too easily, but under these circumstances, how could be he blamed? It did not matter how much his eyes wanted to close, the effort required for each step, he could very well lay there in bed trapped awake. Better to give in.
He got down the capsule, put out the lamp, crawled under the quilt, and waiting for the waves to take him.