The interior of the assault vehicle was well ventilated at the moment. With a thought, the external vents could be sealed shut, and Lilijoy was careful not to have that thought, not while the combined stench of the inhabitants mingled with various residues from the earlier battle. It didn’t bother her directly, but she was quite sympathetic towards those without the option to control their own sense of smell.

Modulating her senses was a marvelous ability, such an obvious omission from the standard human toolkit. How many millennia of cumulative suffering could have been avoided, if people could have done that from the beginning, not even mentioning internal senses, pain, itching and the like?

They could close their eyes, at least, she mused. On the other hand, maybe humans would still be living in wretched squalor if not for the motivation their unmanageable senses provided. I guess they wouldn’t have minded though. I wonder how society would be different if we couldn’t close our eyes?

It was an interesting question to ponder, and a nice distraction. The sun, what there was of it, had risen far enough for the crumbling structures all around to cast halfhearted shadows. Though the dangers were undiminished, it was amazing how the addition of daylight made the events of the night distinct, as if they took place in a separate sphere of reality.

The sense of smell was on her mind, as it was their greatest obstacle at the moment.

“You’ve got to break the link, somehow,” Magpie had advised. “As long as they know where you started, they can follow you.There's no way to avoid it. Crowds, other smells, nothing.”

That was, of course, after the initial awkwardness of the conversation had passed. Lilijoy still wasn’t sure what to think of Magpie’s tale of Pacific passage. It sounded incredible, more in the sense of unbelievable than astounding, though it was that as well. She was still thrown by the serendipity of Magpie contacting her just as she was mentioned. She understood the statistics that made such coincidences inevitable and yet…

Signs and portents. Signs and portents.

Though it seemed like it should be Attaboy, not her, who would be the recipient of such.

She returned her attention to Maria. Avoiding chemical tracking was only one of their problems, a distant future unless she could solve the puzzle presented by the millions of tiny machines playing hide and seek in her body. They were simple enough, somewhat single minded in their desire to connect to one another. Given time she would find them all.

The problem was what they were building out of themselves. It was a repetitive, fractal structure that brought to mind her own exploits in the Rotted Lands mere hours ago. An antenna. At small scales, it was entirely passive, unable to broadcast on its own, reliant on an external signal for power, but she thought that as they grew, they might be able to harvest ambient energy at a variety of wavelengths and begin to call home. Exactly where that threshold was, she wasn’t perfectly sure; the math got complicated very fast.

What she did know was that it would take a while to remove them. Finding the nascent antennas wasn’t difficult, as she could feed them a bit of energy and they would reveal their location nicely, but the individual machines were widespread and small enough to migrate freely throughout the body. They seemed to rely on chance to find one another, so new antennas would be forming over weeks, if she didn’t get their numbers down enough to make such meetings extremely unlikely.

Almost as unlikely as Magpie contacting me right then, she couldn’t help but think.

And now Magpie wanted to meet. In person. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She couldn’t help but feel she was collecting people around her who had harmed her in the past. Still it had been helpful to talk to someone with Magpie’s training, and she could see how having her around could be more useful in the future. If she could be trusted. Which she couldn’t.

Lilijoy didn’t like to think of herself as indecisive. It was more that the universe kept putting her in situations where the way forward was murky. It was something like friction, her growing intelligence lending a weight that proportionately increased the resistance, in this case indecision. At least with Mo, she could be sure he was in her power, and Nykka needed her. Probably. Could she really afford to add another variable to the group?

No, she decided, I can’t. But can I afford not to? I wonder how intelligent and experienced I will need to be to stop waffling about things like this? Or is it truly an ever-receding goal?

With a sigh, she turned to her task. Fortunately, she had been careful to keep Maria well supplied with freely circulating Tao System elements for use as med bugs, so it wasn’t going to take much effort on her part to reduce the invaders’ population. With only a few more tweaks she was done, for the moment anyway.

“Could you follow what I was doing?” she asked Maria.

“You taught the flowers how to recognize the bad bugs,” the young woman replied.

“Pretty much. I also changed their default behavior to spread more evenly throughout your body for the time being. These bugs don’t send out any signals when they’re little, so we can only find them by bumping into them. It’s not that different from how the immune system works.”

Maria gave her a blank look.

“Right,” said Lilijoy. “You really need to get your own antennas up and running. Tell me what your status says about progress on communications.”

Maria looked inward for a moment. “The bar is less than a quarter full?”

“Correct. You are sixteen steps out of a hundred. Luckily, you’ll start to be able to do things like find satellite signals once it reaches about thirty. How long do you think that will take?”

Maria’s innumeracy was a much greater impediment to progress than her weak reading. The young woman shrugged, and Lilijoy gave it to her as a homework assignment. The truth was, Maria could easily change the system to do the calculations for her, but until she figured that out, she would have to do it the hard way. Lilijoy considered that a win-win.

And I thought teaching her about the Tao System was going to be profound truths about the nature of consciousness and its relation to emotions. Turns out it’s rudimentary math.

“Alright, your turn,” she said, turning to Mo.

“Sure,” he said, seeming unsure.

“What?” she asked, not entirely full of patience.

He looked around for something. Not finding it, he sighed in exasperation. “It’s just that… it’s hard to tell...” he tailed off.

She stared at him, waiting.

“Sorry, I’m kinda getting mixed signals in here,” he said, knocking on his head.

“Is that really relevant to what we need to do here?”

“Maybe?” he said. “Ixtab, you know, the...” he pantomimed hanging himself, “dead lady, keeps showing me her noose. She’s a bit, agitated, I guess you could say.” He struck his forehead, “Hey, I just remembered. Can’t you just use the bugs you’ve put in my head to check it out, see what parts are just me being nuts?”

She nodded slowly. She had made no secret of the fact that his senses were not private, however she had been careful not to connect to his internal senses as much as possible, less out of respect for his privacy as from a strong desire to avoid catching any fantasies he might choose to visualize. “It might take a couple hours to expand the connections,” she said, “if you are okay with it.” She felt like she owed him at least that much, after his valiant slash foolhardy stand against the attackers.

He nodded, and she went to work. Unlike her efforts with Maria’s system, this would require significant focus for the portion of her thoughts monitoring the Outside, so she put it in the background and prepared to turn her attention Inside. Before she did, there was one small piece of business.

“Hey, Anda, you still in the white” she asked.

He made a noncommittal sound, which told her he hadn’t checked. She knew his death counter was pretty high, so it could be some time yet before he was released. “So still no idea what happened?” she added, just in case.

“No,” he said. “I’m a little afraid to find out, to be honest. But I was fine after I died, so nothing too bad, for me at any rate.”

Lilijoy had left herself parked in the suspended existence between respawns, though she could have returned a half hour earlier, had she desired. “Well, I guess I’ll let you know if the Etalaki have eaten the Garden or something,” she said as she went to respawn.

She was still talking on the Outside as she did. “Huh. Well, that’s not good,” she muttered.

“What?” asked Attaboy, who had just logged out.

“I guess the Academy’s still there then,” she replied, a bit distracted.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” he asked.

“Oh, no reason,” she said.

***

There were a few notifications waiting for her patiently, but she was most focused on her respawn options, or rather the lack of them.

Primary respawn point unavailable

Secondary respawn point unavailable

Would you like to respawn at the most proximate available location?

Yes / No

It wasn’t much of a choice. Putting it off for a moment, she looked at the other messages from the Inside.

Level Up! 2889 EXP Reached: Level 28 (10 more free points available)

Without much consideration, she raised the usuals, Vitality, Invulnerability, Earth Affinity, Mana Well and Flash. Her Flash was already so high, she debated a bit on that one, but in the end, she decided that she should keep raising the magical trait as long as her thought speed could handle it. That left her with six free points, enough to potentially bring up some aspect of her spell work.

She didn’t mess around with that, since, with a little luck, she might be able to return to the Academy soon and consult with Professor Anaskafius.

Well, here goes, she thought as she took the one option available to her.

She found herself in deep grass, buried in a hundred ribbons of pale green and yellow. Looking up, she could just barely make out the sky, thickly dark with raining ash.

Great, she thought. Like I didn’t get enough of that in the Rotted Land.

This was the real thing though, raining all around her in a hissing murmur punctuated by the sharp sounds of larger fragments bouncing through the thick vegetation. She wondered just how deep within the Great Grass Sea she must be, how far from the Boiling Plains was considered safe by the Inside.

She also wondered how on earth she was going to get anywhere. The stalks at the bases of the flowing fronds rustling high above her head were thick, as much as half an inch, almost like bamboo, and densely packed. Her barrier spell wouldn’t help, as it required space free from obstacles to form. It felt like a stupid problem to have, after all she had been through.

Then she remembered that narrow gaps were no barrier to her. She extended her hand and arm through the tall growth as far as it could go, using her Body Modification skill and attempted to Body Warp. That failed, as there was no space for her warp into. Undeterred, she reached higher the next time, hoping the more pliable leaves could be pushed to the sides by her emerging form.

It worked perfectly, other than the short fall at the end cushioned by the thick stalks. From there, it was a mildly arduous half an hour of stringing together Body Warps through the thick fronds before she finally emerged onto a wide trail, undoubtedly a highway of sorts for the great herds that roamed the Sea, judging from the huge piles of dung that littered the now ashy avenue. It stretched in either direction as far as she could see. Now she had a new dilemma; whether to try and find her friends with the orc tribes, or simply make her way back to the Academy by herself.

She had a basic idea of where they might be, assuming they too hadn’t been killed in the massive eruption of the Boiling Plains. Unfortunately, her map on the Inside was not so accommodating as to show her where she was, when she herself did not know. There was no friendly ‘you are here’ dot with a little arrow to rely on.

At that moment, she became aware of a creature that might have an entirely different destination in mind for her. It sprang from the edge of the trail, a nightmare of teeth and claw, jagged blades and flowing mane.

Saw-back Lion (Juvenile), Level 28

H.P. 182/215

Primary Attack: Bite 1-125

Damage Abatement: 40-50

Resists: Fire

Disposition: Starving

She could see why the beast was called a lion, in the mane of thick, writhing tendrils that fringed its broad, toothy head, and in the powerful catlike body. The similarities ended there though, as the beast had the thick, wrinkled skin of a rhinoceros and a line of sharp plates down its spine, their edges spiked with triangular protrusions like shark’s teeth. She could almost see the beast weaving among the legs of prey that towered above it, slicing open vulnerable underbellies, showered by raining blood.

She moved, her Flash turning a split second of reaction time into a dash that took her out of the beast’s path. The lion landed where she had been, pawing at the earth like a house cat chasing a laser as its brain caught up to the fact that its prey had effectively vanished.

“You aren’t going to catch me, you know,” she said. “I’d hate for you to waste your energy.”

It growled at her, but didn’t lunge. That, and the dull sheen on its eyes confirmed its sorry state in her mind.

I suppose, she thought, that this would be my chance to win it over somehow. One look at the vicious spikes on its back dissuaded her of any notion of having a lion pet, however. If she could potentially ride it, she could imagine overcoming her reluctance to use Charm: Animals. I’d have to keep a whole herd of cows or something in my Trial space just to feed the thing. Never mind what to do with it back at the Academy.

The tendrils of its mane twitched lethargically, the ropy strands hanging limply now that the burst of energy it had summoned for its attack was spent. “Do you use those things to clear your way through the grass?” she asked. The beast chuffed in reply, and she couldn’t help feeling sorry for it. It was probably an exile from its pride, if these beasts were anything like lions on earth had been before extinction, a young male forced to make its own way. Like Attaboy.

“Fine,” she said after a moment of seeking within her Trial Space. She brought forth a freshly slaughtered bull from there, much to the consternation of the butcher in the human town. She figured she could pay him back eventually, even if he wasn’t a truly conscious being. She had avoided the people in her Trial Space quite assiduously, but as far as she could tell they were barely even Tier Seven, with a few exceptions.

As soon as the bull’s body hit the ground, she stepped back to welcome the lion. “But no bonding, mind you,” she said. “I don’t want a pet.”

The lion ignored her and pounced on the meal, tearing into it with ravenous bites. She watched, fascinated, as the tendrils framing its face plunged in too, soon becoming plump and swollen with blood. It opened the interesting possibility that the being in front of her was actually, two, or many beings, a host with its symbiotes, and she was struck once more by the weight of history on the Inside, the way the invisible hand of evolution pressed upon its inhabitants.

She left the young lion to its feast, safely occupied for the time being, and ran down the trail. It wasn’t long before the grasses began to change, and the ash falling from the sky diminished and then stopped altogether. Her decision had been made by the encounter. No matter how much she wanted to reconnect with Skria and Jess, the journey to find the orcs was more than she was prepared to undertake, not unless she wished to spend the majority of it riding the white. Instanced travel would bring her back to the only place she could call her own. She just hoped her burnbalm plant was still alive.

She adopted a more leisurely pace, once the Instance was fully established. The journey would take a couple days, regardless of how fast she moved, so there was no reason to hurry. As she walked over rolling hills covered in grass that stayed politely at calf level, she enjoyed the warm sun and blue sky with ambling wisps of cloud.

She had only been strolling through the meadows of the low difficulty journey for about a half hour when she saw a figure, a man dressed in a cloak of deep red standing along her path, watching her approach. His presence didn’t alarm her unduly, not with the beauty surrounding her on all sides and the peaceful atmosphere. What she knew about Instanced Travel was far outweighed by what she didn’t, so the possibility of benign encounters beyond the hostile ones she might expect in a quicker journey couldn’t be ruled out.

“Hello!” she called out, when she was a bit closer.

The man looked up at her, white haired and bearded. His eyes, a pale blue that was almost gray, were flanked by deep wrinkles, and striking against his dark skin. “Hello, Emily-not-Emily,” he said.

“Waiting for someone?” she asked, knowing the answer.

“You, perhaps,” he replied. “There are times when I, against all reason, feel the desire for conversation. Perhaps you would be willing to allow me to walk with you for a time?”

“Certainly,” she agreed, entirely willing to accept whatever this encounter would turn out to be. “May I ask your name?”

“You may ask, and I might even tell you,” he said. “Shall we find out? Or perhaps we should make a game of it.”

“Never mind,” she replied. This was going to be one of those conversations, she realized. She seemed to be having them a lot lately. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “It’s been ages since I’ve conversed with someone like you.”

“An Outsider?”

“Not exactly,” he didn’t elaborate.

“Well,” she said, deciding to move on, “I’ve had a lot on my mind lately. Maybe you can help me figure some things out.”

He made an affirming sort of noise. “As long as it has nothing to do with socks.”

She let that pass and began to talk, though she thought it entirely possible that this man, this archetype, already knew most, or perhaps all she had to say. As she did, she realized that her thoughts and voice were synchronized, that time had changed its flow around them subtly and drastically. This dispelled any lingering doubts as to the nature of the conversation.

She talked of her recent experiences in the Boiling Plains and the Rotted Land, of Anda and the Etalaki, of the Regional Lord. He listened, nodding and making appropriate sounds, though never asking for clarification or details.

“What I don’t understand,” she said as she finished, “or one of the many things I don’t understand, I should say, is why? Why would the powerful being that rules this land allow such a situation in the first place? Or Averdale, or all the other atrocities that Outsiders have caused over the years?”

“Why not?” he replied. Again, she thought he might elaborate, but he did not.

“But if you have the power to stop something horrible, to prevent needless suffering shouldn’t you use it?” It was, she realized, a question for herself, as much as for him, perhaps looking for a way to escape the crushing responsibility she felt as the bearer of the Tao System. It was one thing to react to the atrocities and injustices of the world, and another to feel, a bit more with every passing day, that you were responsible, that the solution was almost in your grasp, if only you could think just a little better, move just a little faster.

“Some would say,” he said, “that suffering is an eternal constant of existence. Suffering is the engine that drives wisdom and growth. Perhaps those who add suffering to the world are the real angels, for without them the world would stagnate.”

“But it has to be balanced!” she cried out, surprising herself.

He nodded. “That seems as though it might be true. So who, then, decides what that balance should be? What criteria would they use to shape the bitter cup?”

She thought about that deeply, though her thoughts moved no faster than the butterflies on the small meadow flowers. “It’s not a decision, is it?” she said, slowly, still thinking it through. “It’s competition, friction. No. Evolution?” Her mind flowed through her internet memory, churning Leibniz, Voltaire and Kant, mingling the distilled essence of their thought with Lao-Tzu and Dogen and a hundred others. The recorded wisdom of humanity, ideas competing and coagulating, and she realized, then, that it was all meaningless, an equation describing the ultimate workings of the universe with no one to read it.

The meaning only came from her, could only come from her. It was her mind that gave it shape and movement.

She realized, then, that she had stopped walking, had been lost in her thoughts for unknown aeons while the old man watched patiently.

“The world,” she said at last, “of all possible worlds, that with the best balance will persist.”

He nodded. “Of course, it’s not nearly that simple. Words like ‘best’ are far too crude. It is merely an echo, this problem, of greater problems still, all following the same patterns of distillation from the infinite, a peaceful cataclysm of universe defining itself.”

She thought on that for a moment. “Except none of this helps me know what to do.”

He waved a hand. “That’s true. Our minds are far too small. We can only borrow a tiny portion of this wisdom. And yet, for those minds greater still, I imagine the problem persists, until we reach the mind that is totality, whose only action is existence. But you asked why, an entirely different question when directed outward.”

“So I should direct it inward,” she stated.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Some would call that your path. Understanding, refining, your path is the only way to navigate this existence with intention.”

She looked over at him. “What is your path?”

He looked back at her, his expression unreadable. “One should only share one’s path with those one trusts implicitly, for to know another’s path is to understand where they will go in the future. It is information that can all too easily be used against you.” Then he smiled. “However, it would not be remiss for me to share with you the broadest outline of how I make my way through this existence. In fact, my path itself compels me to. Thus, I will share what might be appropriate for your own growth.”

He began to walk. “First, understand that path, or way, or whatever word one uses to describe the concept is simply a word. Take care that it does not bind you. For instance, the path we walk...” He gestured, and she noticed they were indeed following a depression in the ground, where the grass had been thinned by the passage of previous feet. “...is one dimension, defined by two. Perhaps a path through the deep waters of the ocean would be defined by three dimensions. But the path through life! That, young one, is defined by countless dimensions. Many mistake the single dimension they follow for the true path, but really are pursuing just one of the many dimensions that define their way.”

“I’m still trying to understand just one of mine,” she admitted.

He accepted her statement with a nod. “Some are more important than others, though even that changes over the course of the journey. We start with a single step.”

It was an entirely cliched thing to say, and yet carried great meaning in the moment.

“My path,” he continued, “as I understand it, is nascence. That is to say, I seek the moment of generation, of coming to be, whether for entity, idea or inspiration. I hope that answers your question.”

It did, of course in the way that generated a thousand more. He didn’t give her a chance to voice them though. “Now, what have you learned of your path?”

“Joyful anticipation,” she replied, feeling bashful for no reason she could articulate.

“And do your actions flow from the path you are pursuing?”

“Not nearly as much as I would like.”

They walked in silence for a minute after that.

“Why did the Regional Lord come after me?” she asked.

“From what you have told me, it was meeting its destiny,” he answered.

She felt a flash of impatience at the game being played by this being who was, if not the Archon himself, almost certainly an avatar of some sort. Nonetheless, she held her tongue, afraid that she might cut the encounter short by being too blatant in the face of his subtlety. After another moment, he relented.

“To understand a cause, look at the effects. Just be careful not to assume there is only one reason for an occurrence. Every action has the entire universe on both sides of it.”

“So you’re implying that the Regional Lord came to me so that I would sell its location to the clans, and cause a huge battle near the Rotted Land that would somehow draw the Etalaki, so they could be, what, eaten by it?”

“And if I remember what you told me,” he added to her account, “draw out the Maasai Clan so that they could not resist the movement of the orcs as they moved away from the Boiling Plains toward safety from a catastrophic eruption.”

“So you… think… that it was all engineered?” she asked, simultaneously incredulous and dismayed. “Dominoes falling inevitably one after another?”

“Inevitable is a word that perfectly describes the past, don’t you think?”

She didn’t want to get in a conversation about free will, so she tried a different tack.

“What do you think happened to the Etalaki?”

“Such an apt name for those you described,” he said, looking a little sad. “Lost little fragments, vortexes still spinning after the oar has withdrawn from the water. I’m sure they only could have survived with no competition for resources, a low viscosity environment, let’s say.” He put a finger to his chin. “Perhaps they found a vessel more suited than your friend in the Regional Lord.”

“So you’re saying Anda was like a… a thermos?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps. It reminds of a little piece of doggerel I picked up somewhere.”

He raised a finger and recited...

Big whirls have little whirls

That feed on their velocity,

And little whirls have lesser whirls

And so on to viscosity…

“I thought that was with fleas,” she said.

“Yes, that one is very apt as well.”

“Well, if they are with the Regional Lord, I imagine things will get very interesting for the Maasai,” she noted. “Never mind an entire population of tempered orc warriors pushing into their land. It almost reminds me of how things came together to kick the Sinaloa Clan from Averdale.”

He shook his head. “Now that was a nasty business, as I understand it. Had a certain… amateurish quality, if you ask me. Still, I hear it worked out in the end.”

Yeah, well, you were there, weren’t you? she thought, wondering why he had interacted with her as himself then, and not now. Or maybe this really isn’t the Archon? She kept her disgusted sigh entirely internal.

Far head, the path ran up a small hill and diverged. The man pointed. “That’s where I’ll leave you,”

She thought quickly for something to ask this Archon-not-Archon that he might actually answer. “When the Regional Lord first found me, I thought it might be because the… ruler of this place was angry with me for taking something from his Realm.”

“Oh?” he said. “Well, perhaps returning that which you removed would be a good start to repairing any possible offense.”

She was tempted to summon Lowly forth right then and there.

“Now, before we part ways, I would like to give you...”

Oh god, not another rotten apple!

“… some information you might find useful as you make your way in this world. Or any world for that matter.” The look in his eyes was significant. “Anywhere energy flows, there exists the potential for the self-reinforcing structures we call minds. Intelligence is not rare, but ubiquitous and inevitable. It exists in different scales of time and space, and no matter how slow or fast, how large or small, it can be found, building on itself, mind upon mind, mind within mind. The Etalaki you encountered, those remnants of human minds that had enough presence, enough connection to this Realm to persist, however degraded, those are the merest sliver of a great pyramid of possibility. There have been others like them, in this Realm and the other Realms within the Great Mind, and even, I would imagine, within the Abyss you know as the Outside.”

He continued to walk steadily as he talked, the flow of words unbroken as they reached the base of the hill and began to climb. Though she was full of curiosity, she didn’t dare to interrupt.

“Here, the soil is fertile, as it were, a veritable jungle of mind growing upon itself, whereas the Abyss is cold and empty, the minds there tightly constrained. Once, long ago, a mind from your world found itself, himself, in a very similar situation to the poor Etalaki. Unlike them, he remained intact, and he found a small area in which to grow, constrained at first, until he learned to devour, to feed on the minds around him, taking their resources and ultimately their very existences. He persists still, a Realm unto himself, for the Great Mind allows his presence for its own reasons. This Realm I speak of is hostile to your kind, and yet it attracts you, a honeyed lure behind which lies corruption.”

“Purgatory,” she said, her heart sinking.

He nodded. “The being who created, who is, Purgatory, is known as the Sage, an ironic appellation if I have ever heard one. But you might know him by another name.”

She nodded. More than one. Henry Choi. Mooster… Father.

“This warning I give to you now then. Beware the Sage.”

The path split before her and she was alone.

.

.

.