Ascendants Farona Pyre and Krath Mandur deliberate over the construction of the dagger for several minutes. They step away and converse in their own separate bubble of air in the void, separated from the rest of us.

To her credit, Vik tries to listen in by connecting a subtle thread of wind to their bubble, but Jeseria notices and cuts her off.

When Farona and Krath return, the former grabs Maria and resumes their previous efforts. Krath returns to my side to plumb the dagger’s secrets. “There’s always ways to influence how artifacts work, even if they aren’t obvious. This is a dagger, so it should involve how you use the blade,” he asserts.

Raising an eyebrow, I dull the pain in my arm and cut a circle into it. As energy courses into the blade, the skin turns black and rigid, but the wound is still present. It doesn’t affect the dagger’s function.

Krath comes forward and grabs my arm, inspecting the area of transformation. “Assuming I’m right that the dagger’s transformation can be affected, what do you think the problem is with the current approach?”

“That’s fairly obvious: How is the artifact supposed to differentiate between an injury, or a sigil? We’re missing a method of conveying intent.”

A smile tugs at Krath’s lips. “Intent. Hmm.”

“What?”

“I’ll give you a hint,” Krath says. “You were just discussing the difference between Life and Death when it comes to souls.”

I blink. Necromancy is the art of investing intent into souls. “You think I can use a soul to influence the transformation?”

He tilts his head noncommittally. “You won’t know until you try.”

“That would make the artifact a lot more useful for a necromancer,” I mutter. There are no souls in the void above Vizier’s Crown, but I have a number stashed in my void storage, lashed together and anchored to a physical medium. I widen the void pouch on my waist and reach my hand in, plucking a soul free.

For my first experiment, I simply plunge the dagger through the soul and into my skin, and nothing different happens, aside from the soul churning around the dagger like frothy water. That in itself is remarkable–aside from ensouled beings like people, disembodied souls pass unhindered through physical objects.

I take a deep, focusing breath and pinch the soul between my fingers, envisioning my skin and a two-inch spike emerging from its surface. This time, when I channel ascendant energy into the dagger, the carved circle morphs. My skin rises up, forming into a wicked thorn. It’s like what I envisioned, but better, my rough sketch turned into a finished painting.

Krath claps his hands slowly. “That was fast. What about something more interesting?”

—

I pull up the orb of a disembodied soul with my left hand, stretching it between my fingers. The soul stretches across my forehead like parchment. With my other hand, I stick the point of the dagger to the crown of my head, pushing up my hair.

I grit my teeth, then cut–a shallow half moon crest. The soul ripples. My skin weeps a single drop of blood, the cut leaving an angry pink trail. I mirror the half moon and create a rhombus within it, creating a diamond-pupiled eye. I pump my energy through the filter of the soul and into the sundered flesh.

I sense my skin warping, my brow ridges thickening, my cheeks hollowing slightly...and I feel the eye forming on my forehead, lidless and open.

Y’jeni, it actually worked.

I can’t see anything from it, but that’s where my practice comes into play. In preparation, I’d already disconnected one of my optic nerves. I could try making a third, but that would take more time, and I’m not sure how my mind would handle three visual inputs. As it is, I don’t know how my mind will make sense of the new, alien structure, but that’s why we’re experimenting.

I connect the optic nerve to my emergent eye and flinch in disorientation. I close my one working normal eye and focus on the blurry image from the new aperture.

“What can you see?” Krath asks.

I frown. “I’m trying to figure that out.” Ascendant energy continues to leech into the blade, sustaining its transformation. I realize that my voice is deeper than usual, more resonant.

The image comes into focus. When I look at Krath, even though he’s unchanged by the dagger, he looks like a radiant light golem, his tongue black against white fangs. Looking down at myself, I see black, rugged skin. My alternate vision becomes blurry the further I look into the distance, such that the other ascendants–practicing in their own areas–are indistinct. If they were closer, I wonder what I would see.

“I perceive the alter world directly,” I call out. “The world as reflected in the dagger’s surface, transmitted directly to my brain.”

Krath smiles. “As I suspected, this dagger is more than what it appears to be on the surface.”

“It’s certainly more than meets the eye,” I quip, snorting at my own bad pun.

Before, it would have been impossible to properly glimpse the centipede monstrosity in the dagger’s thin surface. But now, I should be able to see its alter self fully–at least the sections of the centipede nearby, where the eye is in focus.

“I’m going in,” I announce to everyone, elevating my voice. I wrap myself in Death to insulate against the cold and the pressure, prepared for the moment I leave the protected area. I pass through the shimmering, barely-visible portal and behold the transformed mass of the centipede.

It was horrifying before, my vital vision illuminating the monstrosity's endless segments and slumbering heads, like a perverse insectoid hydra. With my mundane vision, the centipede was impossible to see in the relatively lightless abyss. But with the third eye bestowed upon me by the dagger, I see unimpeded through my own tendrils of Death and behold the monster’s transformation.

Its body appears to be made of stone–thick slabs of marble segments held together by sinews of compressed air. Its legs are tentacles of water, and its heads are torches of fire. An elemental centipede.

It makes absolutely no sense. How could this thing even function? The fiery heads remind me of the female practitioner we turned into a burning phoenix back in the lost quadrant. That had similarly made no sense–a true phoenix is a riftbeast bird that creates fire. We called the woman a phoenix, but she’d literally turned into a bird made of fire–an impossibility. Krath Mandur’s transformation into the radiant golem also made little sense, not to mention the wall that turned into Achemiss’ giant, disembodied head when we first received the dagger.

I feel the warmth of the hilt in my hand, present despite the insulation of Death energy around my fingers. The dagger warps reality–it isn’t an illusion. There must be a justification for what it can do.

Nothing is impossible in Eternity, I reason, recalling Holiday’s lesson. It’s a place where the impossible is made possible, but only if you want it enough–need it enough. That was a key part of the lesson, Eternity rising to the challenge of impossibility, rewarding those with the biggest, most defiant of dreams, interfering directly on the world. We saw that interference most clearly when a tribulation of lightning struck Karanos, converting his sacrifice of energy and ritual reagents into a return beacon.

A thought that feels almost absurd enters my mind as I study the elemental centipede. Perhaps the dagger isn’t imbued with the power of different affinities, like Krath and Farona suppose. What if this dagger is a fragment of Eternity itself, formed from my thoughts, forged by my desires, and baptized in the energy of this paradoxical world?

It would explain why the dagger looks just like the one from the final loop layer, the ornate dagger that seemed to symbolize the world’s instability, caused by my becoming a half-step ascendant.

But what if it’s more than a copy–what if the dagger is the very same one from the loop? The loop wasn’t real, after all, but the souls within it were. With Eternity’s energy taking root in me, perhaps more was real in the loop than I realized.

Because ultimately, what did I want in that loop, way back when?

I wanted to escape. I wanted to see beyond the veil, peel away the illusion and return to reality. Y’jeni, how I dreamed about escape, so much so that I couldn’t believe my eyes when the door to reality manifested before me. Only with Euryphel’s coaxing did I make the final leap and step through.

I channel a larger volume of energy through the dagger, enough to sustain the transformation for at least a minute, and withdraw its edge from my forehead. Stained with blood, the blade shimmers in my hand like a celestial projection, as though forged from a galaxy.

I could never see the dagger in its own reflection, and didn’t realize that it, too, had a transformation until now.

On a whim, I slash the blade at the air in a ponderous motion, mostly for the novelty of swinging an object made of stars. Glimmering dust spins like planets around the stationary stars, the soft glow showing like a beacon in the surrounding darkness.

This celestial dagger is the source of paradox. It’s the window into the impossible, realities that make no sense, that are incompatible with the laws of the world: dreams.

With those ruminations out of the way, I approach the closest centipede head and carefully inspect its head, body, and legs, noting how the elements coexist to form the greater whole.

Transformations caused by the dagger aren’t necessarily helpful. If it’s just me versus the centipede, keeping it as flesh is advantageous for my practice. But if elementalists are in the mix, they could disable the centipede by controlling the elements composing its body.

Alan, Vik, and Maria are elementalists; we’re only missing a water elementalist to deal with the centipede’s legs. It’ll have to be good enough.

When I exit back through the portal, Maria’s thoughts chime worriedly in my head: Jeseria’s spotted Ketu Bryant, and he isn’t alone: he’s tagged up with that woman he fought in the second pageant round, the Life practitioner who transformed into a dragon–Danessa Fleur. They’ll reach us in the next two minutes.

It’s precisely at that moment that I notice Sah, the dragon waiting for me outside of the rift. He’d been hanging out with Maria before, too far away to see clearly with my third eye. He looks suspiciously unchanged, aside from his head, which is quite a bit larger, his jaws nastier-looking than usual. You wouldn’t want to get bitten by jaws like that.

“Are you even paying attention?” Maria hisses.

My eyes snap to her. “Ketu and Danessa are upon us. That just means it’s time to finish what we started. You already prepared arrays for them, didn’t you?” I’d seen Maria withdraw several lengths of rope and arrange them strategically in space, beyond the protective air boundary. She had no trouble going anywhere, given her undead constitution.

Maria nods. “All around the perimeter, yes.”

I nod back toward the portal. “Did you figure out the deal with the centipede’s End arrays?”

She grimaces. “No, unfortunately. Not enough time. What about you, any successes figuring out the dagger?

“You’ll see for yourself shortly.”