The stark whiteness of nothing greeted him for the third time since he’d been brought to this strange place. Keshel was beginning to worry that he would never get out, that he would keep going through trials and memories until eventually he died like all the others.

  He didn’t want that to happen; he hated the idea of that happening.

  But the likelihood of ever seeing Karbion again, ever seeing Abbil or the watchtower or his mothers grave… well that likelihood was significantly lower than he’d like it to be.

  Keshel closed his eyes against the nothingness as the stranger stiffly introduced herself, “I’m Reiav, I’m here to help Teisel, I assume you are too?”

  Keshel nodded slowly, “Yes, I’m Keshel.”

  “Ah, great…” It sounded like she shuffled around a bit, “So we aren’t alone then, that’s nice.”

  Keshel thought for a long moment, silent, “I think… the next theme might be loneliness. The last one was betrayal, the one before that was pain, and the first one was… fear maybe.” He frowned, hesitating, “But if the next one is loneliness, she might separate us.”

  He opened his eyes to gauge her reaction to that, and it wasn’t encouraging. Her face was pale, her eyes wide. “I hate being alone…”

  Keshel almost agreed with her out of principle, but part of him had liked the sense of doing what he wanted to solve the problem, not bowing to the whims of a group. “Well we don’t know that it’s going to happen, it was just a thought.”

  Reiav seemed a bit encouraged by that fact, but Keshel still wouldn’t call her excited about the idea. “Alright, so what are you going to do once you find the real Teisel?”

  “Give her a huge hug,” Keshel responded without even thinking. “If there’s anything I’ve learned after all those memories it’s that she really really needs a hug.”

  Reiav frowned, unsure, “That’s a… solid plan. But what would you tell her?”

  Keshel sighed, “I’m not sure what I can even say really.”

  Reiav nodded, agreeing entirely.

  --

  When the next part of the world melted into view, Keshel was prepared for a lot of things. He was prepared for hordes of demons waiting to rip them apart. He was prepared for an impossible height that he’d have to fall. He was prepared for a dark nothingness with Teisel in the center.

  But what Keshel hadn’t been prepared for was an empty room with beeping machinery along each wall. He blinked at it, turning around all the way to get a better view of the space. He thought he could see writing on the walls; it lurked behind chords, tubes, wires, and buttons. Every available space was covered in the familiar symbols.

  He turned the rest of the way, pausing.

  There was a huge glass cylinder in the center. The machinery was more concentrated there, with computers, buttons, levers, and wires. Yet, the inside of the tube was empty. Keshel dreaded what that might mean, but he found himself beside the container, resting two of his hands on it, his mind solemn.

  “Look for anything that might help.” He advised Reiav before moving to one wall and tracing the letters there. He moved across equipment, forgotten items, and empty notebooks that lay unobtrusively across counters.

  Keshel inevitably turned back to the walls, remembering the hours spent in that other room, tracing the words and absorbing their meanings.

  ‘Does my father know I loved him?’

  ‘Is Ulenik getting what he deserves finally?’

  ‘Can anyone hear me, please… please answer.’

  ‘I refuse to fall, I refuse to despair. I’m being helpful, aren’t I? I’m serving, and isn’t this the greatest thing an alanerea can do short of protecting someone?’

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  ‘I’m not useless, but why is it so quiet here? All I can see are their minds, all I can feel are the constricting walls of this city, all I can hear is the voice of whomever deigns to contact me. What’s my purpose in being here, if only to have silence?’

  ‘I don’t like it here. I want to see the sky again, I want to follow the sunlight… to see the joy of a new day over and over again.’

  ‘Can anyone hear me? Please, please can you hear me…’

  ‘I refuse to fall, I won’t despair, I’m alright. This is hard but at least I’m not reminded about my legs, at least I don’t see perfect people and wish I were them. At least I have something, because isn’t that better than death?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I’m not useless.’

  ‘But… the alanerea are gone now. Am I useless yet? Well… I can’t be, there are niortak now, they seem happy. They don’t even know I’m here though, so at least they aren’t ignoring me.’

  ‘I refuse to fall. But why should I? Why should I try to keep the despair away? I can barely feel anything.’

  ‘No one cares. No one can hear me. No one can see me.’

  ‘I refuse to fall. Because what would that mean, that I gave up? Who would even notice? What’s the point in staying afloat?’

  Keshel removed his hand from the wall, sighing long and hard. He realized that he didn’t know how coherent she was currently; her logical side had been severely less… powerful in the last room he’d read from the walls of. How could he know for sure that she would even know what he was trying to do? That she would even know that he was on her side?

  Keshel frowned and glanced at Reiav, who was going through a box on the far side of the room. She didn’t seem sure of herself in the least, and why shouldn’t she be? She was as out of her depth as he was. Neither of them were professionals at this kind of thing.

  Keshel went over to her, silently glancing over the things she’d found. There was a notebook, a broken glass figure that looked like a creature he remembered seeing drawings of back in Karbion, and a strange device with measurements on the side.

  Reiav handed that last object to him, gesturing at it, “I think this is meant to measure the stars. I don’t know why they have it down here though.” She shook her head and held up a slip of paper, “This was with it though, I’m not sure what it says.”

  Keshel took the note, glancing over it. “‘To whom it may concern, this device is wildly inaccurate and vastly outdated, please contact the timekeepers of Lamariel to receive the latest edition of our Star Reader Junior?, remember to keep consistent with your measurements if you want to remain off of our blacklist.’” He frowned at it, “It’s an… advertisement?”

  Reiav tilted her head at it, “It reminds me of the snail fuel people. They put something like that on every barrel we get from them.”

  Keshel sighed and picked up the notebook, flipping through it. “Did you see anything—” He stopped at a diagram on one page. It looked like a tube with an outline of a person inside. There were notes on the page detailing past failures.

  He silently read them for a long moment, and then for Reiav’s benefit, he spoke them aloud, quietly, hesitantly, “‘Only one in ten participants have been surviving the process, about half of those have their bodies remaining viable for use in the future. It's gruesome work, but one that must be done.’ What is this?!”

  Reiav took the notebook, but of course she couldn’t read it—how did he even know that she couldn’t read the characters? She looked at the diagram though, and seemed to understand it. “So it’s possible Teisel’s body is… ‘no longer viable;’ that’s a load of snail droppings. Why would they go through with a procedure if it has such a high casualty count?”

  Keshel partially understood how it could have happened. The survival of the whole was always more important than the survival of the self. It was almost like protecting the innocent. Reiav flipped to the next page and paused. Keshel blinked at it too; it was a diagram of a floating city. “It’s…” Keshel trailed off and started reading the notes, “‘With the SUI-12 gone we need a new home, the niortak and larborak will not give us land. So…’” Keshel nodded, the floating cities.

  Reiav seemed to understand too, “So they made their own land. That makes sense.” She paused, frowning, “What else is in here? Just notes about the process?”

  Keshel nodded, “A lot of math too for some reason.”

  “There’s a lot of math with engineering, medicine too I think, and this is like both of those combined.” She sighed, looking over at the empty glass container again, “This probably means she died, doesn’t it? I mean… her body isn’t here.”

  “This is the dream realm, it could just be her perceptions of how things are.” Keshel reminded her.

  Reiav flipped through the book, “Squall, they use different numbers than the niortak. Here, tell me which numbers are which and I can probably figure out what these calculations are.”

  He hesitantly pointed to each one, naming it, and then Reiav nodded and hunkered down. Keshel wasn’t really sure what she was going to do with that knowledge, but he figured that it might just be a weird Reiav thing. He watched her trace a few of the symbols for a second before shaking his head and going back to the writing on the walls.

  It never really got better, the tone of the thoughts at least, but there were times when it was about the same as before, just steady streams of words, none worse than the last but still generally sad. Most of the time, it was slowly deteriorating. Teisel’s thoughts about herself, about her place in the world melted into something almost unrecognizable.

  Keshel read the words and bore witness to her pain.

  He bowed his head when he got to the end, where an almost identical stream of letters and words to that first room from before appeared to his eyes.

  ‘I think I will fall now.’