“You’re the archival spirit?” Hunter asked.

  “Yes, my liege!” she said, still beaming at him. “And I must say, it is an honor and privilege to meet you!” A shadow seemed to briefly pass over her expression, and she added, “Especially after so long alone.”

  Hunter eyed her, unsure of what to make of the situation. She’d clearly based her appearance on his own… unless somehow this was Dazel, and he’d found a way to mock Hunter while also trying to manipulate him.

  That thought alone almost made him wince as he looked at the woman standing across from him. The fact that she’d saved his life didn’t mean that she wasn’t deceiving him, somehow. She might need him for something. They hadn’t bound any of the archive items because they were worried about this entity, specifically, having plans and motives of her own.

  She thought was the Monarch of Earth, too. Should he have corrected her? Ashtoreth would have known exactly what to do: what to be suspicious of and where and how to lie. But Hunter just found himself wishing that the eldritch abominations outside were low enough for him to safely dispatch.

  “Thanks for your help,” he said. “What was that, back there? When I warped in—what happened?”

  “The entity currently trapped in Diadem assailed you as soon as you entered the realm!” she said. “While still in their full power, they tried their utmost to turn you into nothing but a psychic and material soup. Then—because this surely would have killed you—you’d have merely been a material soup, and a psychic nothing.”

  “And you stopped them.”

  “Correction!” she said excitably. “We stopped them. As they put their plan into motion, so too did I enact mine, stealing a fragment of their time-stretching magic, then communing with you in a single stolen moment so as to direct you in the task of striking them at their most vulnerable point of cleavage.”

  Hunter blinked. It still sounded like she’d done all the work, but more than that…

  The creatures he’d seen outside had been around level 1000… but he was almost certain that you needed to be even higher to start messing around with time.

  “Cleavage,” he said. “We broke them into pieces?”

  “The smallest pieces possible, to aide in your digestion!” she said happily. “Metaphorical digestion, that is. The singular entity that inhabited this place was… quite powerful. Even if you’d waited for tier five privileges, they’d still have been your match. But over the course of thousands of years of unpleasant cohabitation, I scored their being with the lines required to fracture them into the tiniest pieces possible. Metaphorical scoring, that is.”

  “Thanks,” said Hunter. “Good work.”

  Icon practically glowed. “Thank you, my liege!”

  “Do you know why I can’t telepathically communicate with Orchard?” he asked.

  “Why, for the same reason you won’t be able to leave!” she said. “The time stretch is still in effect—Diadem is currently its own isolated reality, experiencing its own private time.”

  “We’re still time stopped?” Hunter asked incredulously. Just how strong had that thing been?

  Just how strong was Icon?

  “Indeed,” said Icon. “I believe that my dislikeable coresident may have been making a play upon the Cradle monarchy—but it’s difficult to tell, given that they’re antithetical to my very existence.”

  Hunter nodded. He could believe that it was hard for them to understand each other. An archive whose job was to store and curate all of humanity’s lost knowledge—and an incomprehensible eldritch horror. Forerunner Wikipedia and Cthulhu becoming unwilling roommates was prime sitcom material.

  “They stopped time and attacked me as soon as I appeared because they want the throne of Earth?”

  “Earth,” she said slowly, nodding as she considered the word. “I must confess, it feels… somewhat unspecific. Isn’t there soil on most planets? Dirt, at least…”

  “Focus, Icon.”

  “Yes sir!” she said immediately. “To answer your question… I don’t know. At some point in their power progression, outsiders become capable of more sophisticated thoughts, but what they do with those thoughts is a mystery. It’s possible that they realized the best chance they’d have to kill the monarch would be to isolate the first person who arrived, then destroy them. It’s also possible that they did it for no reason whatsoever! After all, it was raining teeth back there. I don’t think that was a tactical decision.”

  “Right,” Hunter said, thinking about the teeth that had struck him like pebbles as he’d flown.

  Then he thought of something else. When he’d arrived, there had been no landscape around him… just metal structures in every direction, similar to the bastions that Hell had invaded with.

  Yet he could remember that there were very distant lights in the sky, almost reminiscent of the outer market that they’d visited. Still, he was sure he’d seen stars, too, as if the entire structure that he’d been on wasn’t underground, but had been floating in the sky somewhere, a truly enormous space platform in the shape of a—

  “Ring,” he whispered. He looked around at the strange glass pillars in an otherwise bare steel chamber. “What is this place?” he asked at last.

  “Oh dear,” said Icon. “Your arrival was perhaps more damaging than I thought. You, my liege, have arrived in Diadem, the fourth of the Five Realms of Humanity!”

  “No—I know that, but it isn’t a planet?”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  “Of course not,” she said. “It’s the seat of government.” She cocked her head at him. “You didn’t find an [Archive Consult], did you? My automated placeholder would have explained all this.”

  “Uh… no,” he said. “Look: things have been very… hectic since the initialization. It’s clear that the old humans left some things for us, but I don’t think everything went the way you meant them to. You might need to explain more than you’d anticipated.”

  “As you say, my liege! As I said before, I am Icon, archival spirit of the Five Realms! And as—”

  “—I’m Hunter, by the way. Hunter Wolfhard.”

  She blinked. “Yes,” she said. “It’s good to meet you, Hunter Wolfhard. Your name translates to me as a somewhat curious mingling of meanings. In any case, as the archival spirit of the Five Realms, it is my enthusiastic duty to subject myself to you and enter into your service as your loyal familiar!”

  Hunter was silent.

  “—Or just a loyal summon, if you have a familiar already,” she said. “A familiar is much easier to work with, though. I’ll integrate more effectively with your—” she stopped, then eyed him for a moment. “You are the Monarch of Cradle, yes?”

  Hunter tried to not to wince. He clearly needed the services of this spirit in order to get back to Orchard… but he doubted that would work out if he outright lied to her. “No, actually,” he said. “I’m a scout for the real monarch. She’s back in Orchard.”

  “Oh,” she said, sighing. “That’s a relief! After all, just jumping in the way you did was hardly the most intelligent strategy! Sending an esteemed, expendable scout was much better informed.”

  He made a mental note to tell Ashtoreth that even the archival spirit thought he was basically a piece of meat on a stick.

  “Does the real monarch happen to be well over level 1000?” asked Icon.

  “She’s also 650.”

  “Hardly ideal!” Icon said. “In fact, it’s literally the bare minimum—but fear not, as I am well-versed in the optimistic methods!”

  “Okay…”

  “For example, the ongoing temporal stretch is something that resembled my maneuver to shatter them into pieces—it took a long time to prepare, and is now expended. Even if your quest is for naught, the next expendable scout will be more than able to complete your mission—so long as they are as fast as you are.”

  “Fantastic job at being optimistic.”

  “Thank you, sir!”

  “How many outsiders would you say we created when I arrived?”

  “Tens of thousands!”

  “What? Seriously? It looked like there were just a few dozen.”

  “They were scattered across Diadem,” she said. “A greater concentration appeared around you only because my adversarial housemate was focused on you at that time. With luck, the shattered entity won’t be able to coalesce into something utterly beyond fighting.”

  “With luck,” Hunter echoed.

  “The optimistic method insists that we consider only those possibilities where we have a chance, then act upon them!” Icon insisted.

  “Okay, that’s reasonable,” said Hunter. “Can I get to Pinnacle?”

  Icon actually laughed at him. Then a look of horror dawned on her face. “Oh—uh, sorry. That was rude.”

  Hunter peered at her. Had Dazel made this being? What had he been like, thousands of years ago, if this was the familiar he’d created for himself? There was no way it could be true—not unless he was completely different than he was now.

  “For one, I’m guessing you’re not a [Pinnacle Curator],” said Icon. “And perhaps more to the point, the inner conduit doesn’t exist right now.”

  “Not good,” said Hunter. “But when you say that it doesn’t exist right now, you mean that… what, that it can be repaired?”

  “Re-created,” she said. “Which I suppose is how you repair not existing. But the only mechanism by which this could be done requires the reality spool, and fixing the spool would take days—even for an expert. And even if you could fix it, it has no fundament!”

  “Uh—fundament?”

  “It’s depleted,” she said. “Empty. It has no more reality to unspool.”

  “You guys left us an armory for five million people, but you left the god machine empty?”

  “God machine?” she asked. “I suppose you could call it—” She stopped, cocking her head and examining him with an expression that he found unsettling.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing at all,” she said. “It’s only that you know such a curious medley of things—god machine? I can only guess at what would furnish you with such a phrase. Now: the reality spool, I am happy to report, was left fully operational and at maximal capacity. And that fact, unfortunately, is why the outsiders broke into Diadem in the first place.”

  Hunter let out a little laugh. “To snack on some reality? Like ants at a picnic, then?”

  Icon paused in consideration a moment before breaking out into a grin. “Pic-nic!” she said. “What a lovely word, in both meaning and phonetics! But yes—they drank down all the fundament, then broke apart the spool by licking up the dregs. Metaphorical licking, that is.”

  “And in all of that somewhere, they also broke the conduit,” Hunter said. “Gotcha.”

  “Oh no!” Icon said, smiling. “You misapprehended me. I broke the conduit. I did it when I trapped myself inside Diadem with the encroaching outsider so as to keep it locked away and to better contend with it. Doing so required a… flexible interpretation of my purpose, but I must insist that I will no apologies for my rather gymnastic adherence to my duties. Had I not done so, the inheritors would have found, in Diadem, an insurmountable obstacle—as evidenced by the moment of your arrival.”

  “Okay,” said Hunter. He nodded. “If it means anything to you—I think you did a great job.”

  “Thank you!” she said, her voice almost desperate. “Oh, thank you, Hunter Wolfhard. You can’t comprehend how much I’ve wanted to hear those words.”

  He suddenly felt very awkward. “Right. Well… the Monarch will thank you properly, if she gets the chance. Now, are we stuck here until the time stop runs out? Is there any way to get a message out to my allies? Warp someone in?”

  “I’m glad you’re caught up enough to ask, Sir! I’ve composed a robust list of options that we can use to proceed with—” She stopped suddenly. “Wait—you said you wanted to warp someone in?”

  “Yes.”

  “One person?”

  “Yes.”

  Icon’s eyes narrowed. “Another level 650?”

  “Yes.”

  She peered at him, clearly suspicious that he was stupid. “Did you forget the part where I said there were tens of thousands of them scattered across the ring?”

  Hunter couldn’t resist smiling. “Just trust me on this one,” he said. “We need the Queen.”