“Responsibility…”

  “Sleepless nights…”

  “My own kin…”

  “Murderer…”

  A slew of barely audible, indistinguishable voices shimmered like light on the distant water. Voices of the many. Voices of the past. Grief masquerading as voices.

  But no longer was the dark-skinned woman from desert lands prancing about the halls of a grand masquerade. Whether by magic or simply the nature of the place she found herself in, the gaudy dress was gone and replaced with her usual mercenary attire. It was the only thing about her situation that could bring about any joy.

  For the place she had been dumped into was joyless. Wavy, distorted bookshelves painted in autumnal luminance filled her view all at once; they did not especially shatter the possibility of hope and joy alone. No, simply living, experiencing, being in the realm sucked all hope from her heart and killed it.

  Gathering what strength she had, Ma’at pulled her face off and up from the wooden floorboards.

  Terrifyingly immaculate, she thought. It looked like an ancient library, at least a section of it. Countless untitled tomes lined the shelves, covered with cobwebs and bathed in a dull, unnatural light that beamed down from small glass windows above. Amber-colored glass, the source of the calming light permeating the place.

  She walked over to one of the shelves, picked up a book, and perused its pages. Everything in it seemed like nonsense to her. It wasn’t written in any language she had ever seen or heard of; letters odd and bent out of shape lined almost every inch of every page like binary code. She checked others, and they were very much the same. A library filled with nonsense. Or, perhaps, filled with knowledge she could not even fathom. Was there any clear distinction between the two?

  “Ma’at! Over here!” another voice called, much louder than the ones that had whispered to her as she slept.

  She searched for its source, wandering into another room, countless shelves passing her by. She entered a slightly larger room with a small, wooden table and chair. Beside it was a man, a soldier in mesmerizing, monolithic armor with runes carved into it that glowed an eerie yellow-red color.

  “It’s me, Orion.”

  “Orion?” Ma’at gasped. “No… this isn’t possible. The last time I spoke with you, you were gearing up for another dive. It can’t be you. You can’t be here.”

  The man let out a short, stilted chuckle beneath his featureless helmet. “Nothing gets past you. That’s right. Cerberus hasn’t let me go. But I’m here nonetheless.”

  Ma’at took a weary, shaky step back. She couldn’t believe her eyes. She shouldn’t. She realized what she’d fallen into. What the Reliquary Room was. Or, at least, what it was part of.

  “The Depths. Right again,” Orion answered her thoughts as if it were completely normal. “The Depths of the Void Sea, where mind and matter collide. A pinprick of metaphysical space left over from the Goddess’s creative tyranny.”

  “No,” Ma’at replied. “That can’t be it. What are you? The door couldn’t have led to such a place. And why would it be in the Count’s castle?”

  “You know what the castle is, don’t you? You and Tien had a feeling when you crossed the threshold in the woods.”

  He wasn’t wrong. She’d felt a strange sensation, not unlike how it felt to enter a cognitive world. A Paracosm. “You’re saying… the Crimson Castle… everything… is part of a Paracosm?”

  The Cerberus soldier nodded, his armor clinking as he did so. “Sit down, you look pale. Hmph. Maybe I should administer a resonance stability syringe?”

  “That’s not funny,” she said, sitting down anyway. “And I can’t trust you. I can’t trust anything here. …I need to find Beatrice. I need to find Sato and Grin and-” The memory of the Black Blade of Woe cleaving Grin in half resurfaced finally, and an odd panic crawled into her stomach. “Oh, no… Grin…”

  “Calm down,” Orion whispered, his voice muffled by the heavy helmet. “No sense in losing it now. If he was pulled in here with you, he might be able to survive even the most fatal end.”

  Ma’at looked at him with disheveled hair, her hazel eyes wild and sunken. “You’re a mirage, Orion. Nothing more. I’m talking to myself. For all I know, I’ve already spent too much time in here, repeating the same conversations.”

  “You’d know about mirages, wouldn’t you? Except, you spent most of your life in Altruin, not Sirithis.”

  She glared at him, her gaze narrowing. “One more word, and you’re dead.”

  “These new friends of yours,” he continued, unbothered by her threat, “they barely know you. The real you. You hide it all to protect yourself. You can’t bear to let anyone in. But the past always catches up.”

  One of her blades instantly unsheathed itself and swung at him, slashing his form in two. Like a cloud, it split in a haze, then reformed as if nothing had happened.

  “You’re only hurting yourself when you hurt me,” the soldier said, pointing to her body.

  She looked down. As she did, a gash tore open her chest and stomach. Blood sprayed out from her body profusely, and she fell to the wooden floor like a ragdoll, the chair she sat on tumbling to its side. “Ghaayargh!”

  Orion crossed his arms, visibly disappointed in the woman. “Look at you. You’re a scared beast, clawing at itself when there’s nothing else to lash out at. You haven’t changed at all.” He snickered. “You’ve just found people who accept your silence. They don’t care about your suffering in the slightest. They don’t care to know. They don’t want to know. They’re just business partners. Colleagues. Everything in this world is about money and violence. Survival. That’s all they care about.”

  Ma’at spat out a pint of blood, struggling to her knees. “You… are NOT Orion!” She shuddered, the blood loss already crippling her vitals. “He would never… ever… say something like that…”

  The illusion that masqueraded as her old friend Orion raised his boot and stomped on her hand.

  She wheezed in pain, grasping at her wrist to pry it out from beneath his foot.

  “You’re not listening to me. Maybe you do need some serum. Here…”

  “No! Stop! Stop!”

  Ignoring her pleas, the hazy figure in enigmatic armor tore her other arm away, stomped on that hand too, and crouched down beside her bleeding body. He reached behind himself and took out a mysterious, pale syringe. Sparing no time, he jabbed it into her slashed torso, injecting the sanity-stabilizer straight into her bloodstream.

  The thing imitating Orion faded away without a trace, and Ma’at slipped into another deep sleep.

  “Commander…!”

  “My family…”

  “The city…”

  “Everything… is lost…”

  Voices in the dark spoke to her from beyond the shadows. Hushed whispers. People talking from a very far distance. Was it… a dream? Her imagination?

  “Ma’at. Wake up, Ma’at. You’re in trouble now. What did I tell you? You’ll die if you keep this up. Even you know that. One more job. One more tired blood-filled job, and it will all be over, right? That’s what you’ve been saying for years. I couldn’t watch you suffer anymore. How do you do it, from where you are? How do you watch from behind those eyelids of yours? Please, find something new. Search. Seek. Explore and learn this world before your time is cut short.”

  “Camelia…?” She opened her eyes to the dismal amber light. The same room Orion had spoken to her in. She pressed her right hand to her stomach, then scanned it. No blood. Her wounds had closed. More than that, they had vanished completely, as if time had been reversed. “That was… the voice I heard when Cloak knocked me unconscious outside the Indigo warehouse. How…?”

  “How, indeed.” The Witch of Warmth appeared before her, offering her hand.

  Hesitatingly, Ma’at took it, and Camelia dragged her to her feet.

  “This place does not operate on the same wavelength as reality, Ma’at. It is beyond all of that. Think of the sky. If the sky is the boundary of the world, then is that where the world ends? Does it end where we see it end? Or does it exist beyond sight? Beyond syllable and sound?” She gripped the edge of her large, scarlet hat and smiled endearingly. Her red lips glimmered in the orange gloam. “Does the mind end where the physical brain does? Does it end where we voice our thoughts? Does the cognitive world overlap with the real, or does it simply exist in a tiny box within our heads?”

  “You can’t be here,” Ma’at said, walking away into another room. The one before sickened her after Orion’s battery. The new room she entered appeared closer to a war room, but still the endless bookshelves towered over everything.

  “You can’t ignore me,” Camelia denied, following in her footsteps. She giggled as she did so.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Even now, you wish I’d chase you. You wish I’d look for you. But you can’t wish something like that into existence. You have to make it happen. You have to forge the future with your own hands. Stop following the whims of this ‘Vroque’ business. They only want to use you. They don’t care about your goals.”

  “Even the Writer?”

  “The Writer is a special case,” she observed, her finger up pointedly. She conjured a tiny flame at its tip and smiled as it warmed her face. “All he wants is an entertaining story. Seem familiar?”

  “Count Julius…”

  The scarlet witch nodded, her big hat flapping up and down. “They are both old… very old… and can only be sated by the finest entertainment there is.”

  “The finest entertainment?”

  Camelia smiled, looking Ma’at in the eyes. “Pain and suffering, eternal. We have been trained from the bygone age… the primordial age… to feed upon that suffering. It fueled our gods, and so it shall fuel us in turn. The cycle cannot be stopped.”

  “It can. I’ve seen it. There’s a light-”

  “Only through suffering can we achieve greatness. Stop running. Face your fear.”

  “I… I can’t. Not again. Some things are better left locked away. The war was long, long ago now. Countless people are being born every day with no knowledge of it.”

  “It scares you.”

  “What?”

  “The fact that you will never be repaid for your suffering. That the war will become a distant dream… a forgotten nightmare. That your sins will go unpunished, and you will be allowed happiness regardless.”

  “I had no choice… and I faced my punishment.”

  “Oh, but you don’t see your days in Ironside as a punishment. You never have. They only serve as a reminder that you are now free, yet you decide to shackle yourself to yet another city state. You can’t handle being given the ability to choose.”

  Ma’at shook her head violently, turning away from the witch in anger. “Look at what freedom brought us!” she cried. “Sirithis is erased, gone from every map… because of me…!” She stumbled forward to the end of the war room where a map of the world was pinned to the wall. The city she spoke of was nowhere on it.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “Because of you?” Camelia snickered, walking to her side. “You were one piece on the chessboard, Ma’at. Nothing you did or ever tried could have swayed the outcome.”

  “That’s only what I want to think. What you want me to think.” She looked at her cracked, callused hands. “I killed them, Camelia. I smothered my heart and killed them. My own people! For Altruin!”

  A deep, rumbling sound like great gears or an avalanche sounded beyond the walls. It was as if the place knew that she had confessed to a great sin and was altering itself accordingly.

  The mercenary turned her head expecting to see the scarlet dress of her friend, but no one was there. Camelia was gone. Ma’at stood back up, gloom entering her heart, and walked into the next room.

  Though, calling it a room was a disservice. It was the bottom of a mountain of books all leading upwards to a pinnacle of light. Beyond the trek was a nearly infinite expanse that eventually led to towering walls also made of books, made of gibberish and nonsense.

  “How long has it been since I’ve confessed?” She spoke to herself in a hushed, cracked voice, like one would have if they were severely dehydrated. “How long has it been since I’ve thought back on those days? …Beatrice!” she screamed suddenly, the void carrying her voice in quieting echoes. “What do you want from me!?” Falling to her knees before the gray, dusty mountain, she broke into quiet sobs. Tears for her kin, slayed by her hand. Tears for Grin. Tears for the Relic War.

  Two small feet appeared through the veil of tears. When she looked up, she saw someone she hadn’t been expecting in the slightest. It wasn’t Beatrice nor Camelia. It wasn’t Sato nor Tien. It was Millarca, daughter of Count Julius. “You’re…”

  “Yes,” she said, calm as could be. “Millarca von Lothaire, if you remember.”

  Ma’at wiped the tears from her eyes, composed herself, and came to her feet to greet the girl. “Of course. I remember. But, what are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to help you out of this place, and rid you of that mooncursed snake.”

  “You mean Beatrice?”

  Millarca nodded and briefly smiled, her beauty nearly entrancing Ma’at in an instant. “As I am sure you’ve gathered, this Masquerade has not gone to plan. The arrival of the Witch of Warmth was the first oddity, and then Ilzif the Scourge’s betrayal threw us through a loop. And finally, the Lady Blackthorn we know and love is not the same creature that has intruded upon our home.” She gazed languidly and wistfully up at the mountain of books halting their path.

  “Right, before Grin was…” She shuddered from the memory. Beatrice’s black eyes stained her retinas. “Before she killed him, he said that she wasn’t who we thought she was.”

  “I don’t believe it’s quite so simple as someone pretending to be her,” the vampire princess disagreed. “There were times in which we conversed that I was certain it was she, my good and wise friend Beatrice Blackthorn, and others that made me question who she was entirely. It is certainly possible that she is no more than a lookalike, but something about the notion does not sit well with me. I know her better than anyone else. There are pieces of her there, but the full picture has been tarnished by something rather sinister in nature.”

  “A-Are you real? I can’t tell anymore. This place… it’s driving me mad.”

  Millarca bent down, picked up a book from the pile and opened it from the middle. “Yes, it is really me. I am merely following my father’s orders to protect the rest of our esteemed guests. I happened to see Beatrice leading you all into the room.”

  “How did you see us? The walls, the floors… they were blocking the exits.”

  The girl looked up from the book of nonsense as if she had really been reading it somehow. “Father and I… we see all that occurs within the castle. It is our territory, after all.”

  “Territory…” Ma’at murmured. “So it’s true? The castle is a Paracosm?”

  The vampire’s dark red eyes flashed. “How did you know? Very few guests ever solve the mystery of this place.”

  “Well, it’s our job to hunt Enigmas, and they tend to hide in or weaponize Inner Worlds. I guess we’ve gained some kind of sixth sense for these kinds of things.”

  “Hmph. It is as you say, the Crimson Castle is our Inner World encroaching upon reality. However, only those who have been invited or who share our blood can see and enter it at will.”

  Everything clicked together in Ma’at’s mind. It had been a while since she’d solved a true mystery. But there were still many left to solve, and first, she had to find the others.

  “Have you seen my colleagues? Sato or Tien? Or Grin?”

  Millarca shook her head. Her wavy, pristine brown hair drifted from side to side like ebbing waves. “The Reliquary Room is impossibly vast. Take it as a sign that we were able to meet.”

  “A sign, huh?” She too gazed up at the pile’s peak. Autumnal light radiated out from it, as if asking them to climb up and step inside its rays. “We better make the climb, then. The rooms back there… lead nowhere.”

  “No point,” the blood-crowned girl replied. “The climb is meant to be impossible. The more one climbs, the more the pile shifts, and the climber is sent spiraling back down to the bottom.”

  “Then, how do we get up there?”

  Millarca smiled. Again, through vampiric charm or otherwise, her sheer beauty alone threatened to entrance her. “Take my hand.” She held out her seemingly delicate, fragile hand. It was like a bird’s wing; tactile and deft, yet broken with the smallest amount of pressure.

  Ma’at took it, hoping despite Millarca’s claim that she wasn’t yet another illusion.

  In a sudden plume of dark mist, the youthful being suddenly became a bestial one with splayed wings. The monstrous bat, now holding Ma’at’s hand with one of her feet, flew up and into the arid sky. She flapped her wings ceaselessly, carrying the two toward the radiating light. Countless books flashed by them, and the towering walls of bookshelves and paper threatening their escape to the outer reaches seemed even more impossibly tall as they reached greater and greater heights.

  At last, they came to the top. Millarca dropped Ma’at onto the rumbling mound of dust and pages, and the light was there before them.

  “Is this the way out?” Ma’at asked timidly. The light reflected in her hazel eyes.

  “Not out of the room, I’m afraid.” The vampire walked into one depth of the light without fear. “But it will lead to what you seek. Your salvation, your goal.”

  “I don’t know what I want anymore,” she relented. “For a long time, I thought that finding Camelia was all that I cared about. But now… I feel like it was all an excuse to wander the world without any real purpose.”

  “Ma’at, was it? Do you know how old I am?”

  She shook her head.

  “I have lived for over 200 years, though I have stopped counting. Do you know what I have realized after all this time?”

  Ma’at remained silent, just out of reach of the orange luminance.

  “That time is a lie. Time does not exist, my dear. It is a river, an ocean, a world. We are everywhere and nowhere at all times. Young and old simultaneously. The soul is timeless, and everything it touches is timeless, too. Do not fret, little Sirithisian, for there are as many stars in the sky as stories to be told. Some may die, some may live, but you must not stop searching and seeking and flapping your wings. The past may be a great weight one day, and another a refreshing gust to carry you to reaches unknown. The future may be an anxious creature threatening to swallow you whole, but it is that same creature who may hold bountiful gifts, perhaps a whole world within its gut! You fear the past, and so the room tortures you with it. But take it in stride. Embrace it and face what comes. Do not allow yourself to be mired in sloth, for nothing will come of it. Step into the light, and face the next trial. Only then will you be reunited with your friends. And they are your friends, dear Ma’at. You have felt it deep in your soul. Such bonds should never be tossed aside nor questioned. They are simply there. Be glad that they are.”

  As I stepped into the light, a flurry of countless visions flooded my mind.

  I saw Camelia, then I saw Millarca, almost one and the same.

  We wandered the Reliquary Room endlessly, resting and growing very close.

  Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration.

  It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs:

  “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one forever.”

  Then, in the next moment, as a falling leaf sheds from a tree and tumbles to the ground, she was gone.

  Alone again, Ma’at gazed through an open window. Nothing but the same autumnal light shone through. A beautiful melody, however, rang out pleasantly and coated the room in swirling symbols. It sounded like a piano, but she didn’t see any pianist nor the instrument. She peered down and saw herself playing it, saw herself playing the piano in accordance with the tune.

  Then, in the next moment, she saw Grin playing his song with a bright smile on his face. It was strange at first, but it was genuine, and upon realizing it, her heart bloomed. Tears fell from her eyes. Light circled his form, danced with his fingers along the bouncing keys. It was a gorgeous performance.

  Then, in the next moment, she saw Camelia again. They were having a picnic on a grassy plain. The blue sky was draped above them, and she was happy. She was content for once, filled with efflorescent serenity. A labyrinthine ecstasy.

  Plip!

  She felt a drop of rain. The white clouds were injected with black ink. Why now? Why rain now, of all times? When she was finally at peace?

  Plip! Plop! Plip!

  The rain came down harder, as if to specifically ruin this moment for her. Across the field, a bright light shone. Not the same orange hue that permeated the room, no, but a sweet, melancholic light that also emitted a sorrowful song. A light created from a myriad of colors, unbridled and ever-flowing.

  “It’s… too bright! Who’s there? Turn it off!”

  “Ma’at! It’s me, ****!”

  “Who…? Leave us be! We’re happy. I’m happy. I’m finally happy!”

  “I don’t think she can hear us, ****. She’s already Enigmatized.”

  “Then… we have to save her! We have to bring her back to reality!”

  “Reality…?”

  Lights flashed. A color storm of epic proportions racked her mind as if she’d been hit by a metal bat. Suddenly, she was back in the Reliquary Room. A hallway made of creaking wood and lined with bookshelves storing pointless tomes.

  The faint light barely showed through the shutters lining the walls. A grim silence had taken hold of the place. She took slow steps forward, heading toward the edge of the wall, where the hall continued to the right.

  As she neared the corner, a sudden feeling on her leg stopped her. It had clasped around her ankle. Something had grabbed her.

  “...Ma’at…”

  She shuddered in fright, her skin ran cold. She didn’t dare look down.

  “...You promised… to protect me…”

  “No! You’re fine! I just saw-”

  “You broke the promise… you lied…” The voice broke off into revolting, gargling noises.

  Finally, she looked down at its source. The top half of Grin’s severed body held her leg, a bloody trail leading from his mincemeat intestines. Sanguine pus dripped from his nose, mouth and eyes.

  Before she could scream, he did.

  And as he did, at first, she was stunned and terribly scared. Scared for the young man, scared for herself. But she remembered the vampire girl’s words. She believed in them. She believed in her, believed her to be real. She had to face the trial in stride, without fear. She had to live, and live happily.

  “Grin would never give up. And he would never blame me for what happened. He’d blame himself. He only ever blames himself… and those infinitely stronger, wealthier than he is. But, it doesn’t change the fact that I did fail him. I hadn’t seen it coming. I had trusted Beatrice too much. But… why? Why would she do such a thing?”

  The gargling, bloodsoaked Grin vanished as she spoke. The door at the end of the hall opened.

  Steeling herself, Ma’at walked down the new hall and entered the revealed room.

  It was a mixture of a library and an observatory. She cast her gaze across all but the orb of everything that was the piercing azure glow in the corner of the room. Warm oak much like the rest of the place and cold ivory struck her mind like a mallet. Everything seemed awfully familiar. She could feel her own presence firmly rooted deep within the place. She had finally reached it. The true room. The truth.

  “The Reliquary Room.”

  She finally drew her gaze back to the dazzling object obscuring her vision with countless colors. On the back part of the step, toward the right, she saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. Really, what she wanted to do was impossible, for any attempt at understanding an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant she saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What her eyes beheld was simultaneous, and everything that could be said to describe it would be successive, because language is successive.

  At first she thought it was revolving; then she realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aspect’s diameter was probably little more than a couple inches, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since she distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. She saw the teeming sea; she saw daybreak and nightfall; she saw the multitudes of Vastyliad; she saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; she saw a splintered labyrinth (it was Zul); she saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in her as in a mirror; she saw all the mirrors on Aeos and none of them reflected her; she saw in a backyard of Halei Street the same tiles that twenty years before she’d seen in the entrance of a house in Altruin; she saw bunches of grapes, snow, Tranquility, lodes of metal, steam; she saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; she saw a woman in Aza whom she would never forget; she saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, she saw the cancer in her breast; she saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; she saw a summer house in Adrisk and a copy of the first Sirithisian translation of Into the Maw and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a young girl, she used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); she saw a sunset over the Larueszeradt that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in the Greatwoods; she saw her empty bedroom back in Reville; she saw in a closet in Zalmor a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; she saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Void Sea at dawn; she saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; she saw the survivors of a battle sending out letters; she saw in a showcase at the Fire Festival a pack of playing cards; she saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; she saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; she saw all the ants on the planet; she saw an Avincian astrolabe; she saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made her tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatrice had written to Millarca; she saw a monument she worshipped in the Plaguelands cemetery; she saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been a meaty warbeast; she saw the circulation of her own dark blood; she saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; she saw the Aspect from every point and angle, and in the Aspect she saw Aeos and in Aeos the Aspect and in the Aspect Aeos; she saw her own face and her own bowels; she saw the Writer’s face; and she felt dizzy and wept, for her eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.