The tent takes up an entire row all on its own, though it’s mostly unoccupied. A Light illusion casts the tent in shades of black and vermillion. Rather than giving the impression of doom and destruction, the illusion is tasteful, with red, geometric patterns overlapping on the black background.

Red Griffith raises an eyebrow at me. “You look like you fit right in.”

Like Maria, Red also tries to abate my unease with levity. I appreciate the gesture, though it isn’t necessary. Walking with Holiday went a long way toward calming my nerves. I wonder if he sensed my initial unease and intervened.

At the center of the tent, several ascendants mill about. Each is dressed in solid black; at the periphery, a few other ascendants in black converse with ascendants in non-uniform attire. Those must be the ascendants interested in representing the black faction.

While we walk to the cluster of ascendants at the booth’s center, memories from iterating scenarios pool to the forefront of my consciousness.

The black faction ascendants show mild interest in our approach–and the person important enough to receive Ascendant Crimson Teeth’s personal escort. In less than a second, their demeanors change, backs straightening and robes pulling taut. Since the Death practitioner should see that I have three affinities, Red and I assume that the Remorse practitioner has informed the others.

The Remorse practitioner in question–a woman in a skin-tight, floor-length dress–smiles, her needle-sharp teeth blindingly bright next to the painted red of her lips. A ruby choker binds her neck, its chain studded with tiny soul gems. Her vital signature marks her as a dual affinity practitioner–she also has a Dark affinity.

“Crimson Teeth,” she asks, “who is this?”

“Ascendant Lucinda,” he greets her, smiling pleasantly. “This is Ancient Black. He has business with the black faction.”

Her eyes light up, as do those of the people around her. “Well met. In the competition grounds, I am serving as principal representative of the black faction.” She shifts her weight. “What kind of business did you have in mind?”

I try the direct strategy first. “I seek an ascendant named Achemiss. I heard that he’s agreed to create artifacts for people who represent the black faction in the Hall of Ascension’s competition.”

“Ah, yes,” Lucinda says. “Unfortunately, Achemiss only creates artifacts for core members of the black faction.”

I suppress a frown. “Is that so? I was under the impression that he would offer artifacts to ascendants who have pledged themselves as competitors on behalf of the black faction.”

“He will create artifacts for ascendants who represent us, but only after twenty years of membership to the black faction.”

“Twenty years is inconsequential for most,” Red transmits mentally. “It is a fair restriction.”

Lucinda looks around at her compatriots. “We can contact Achemiss. He would be pleased to offer his services to an ancient within a reasonable timeframe.”

I had a feeling that reasonable wouldn’t cut it. “I want to meet him in person to discuss terms.”

“I don’t believe that will be possible.” Lucinda says. The other black faction members eye me as though trying to understand why I’d make such a request.

The memory cuts off.

“Try playing a different angle,” Red mentally suggests. “You have no leverage to get a meeting with Achemiss. He’s a recluse who operates through agents. There’s another strategy we discussed and discarded, but it might be our only option.” He pauses. “You need to entice him. If he wants something bad enough, he’ll do what it takes. Hopefully.”

Red shares the memories of a new scenario, one in which I’ve already pursued his suggested strategy.

“Ascendant Lucinda,” I say, “I’ve heard remarkable things about one of black faction’s newer artificers, a man named Achemiss. I want him to create an artifact for me, and I’m willing to trade an artifact that should be of great interest to him.” Obviously I don’t actually need an artifact–it’s an excuse to dangle a prize out in the open.

I anticipate Lucinda’s protests. “Yes, I know Achemiss doesn’t normally take orders due to a large backlog. I don’t need my commissioned artifact immediately, but I want his assurance that the order will be fulfilled.”

She clasps her hands behind her back, black lace bobbing with the movement. My Beginning intuition says that she’s curious but guarded. “What does your artifact do?”

“It warps reality, changing the properties of anything you can think of. All it needs is ascendant energy.”

“Can you perform a demonstration?”

“It’s sensitive, for Achemiss’s eyes only,” I reply.

She smiles. “If you demonstrate it for us now, Ascendant Cursory could pass along a recording to Achemiss.” She gestures to a man with sunken eyes and silver hair.

Red’s scenarios run for longer than Euryphel’s, so I still have just under a minute left to work with. I don’t think it’ll be enough, but at least I can gauge their reactions. I brandish the dagger, gripping the hilt tight. I can’t let them see that my ascendant energy is blue, so as I channel my energy into the dagger, I activate a pinky ring that Farona Pyre gifted to me before I left. It envelopes the blade in a sheath of absolute darkness, visibly hiding all vestiges of ascendant energy. Nobody comments on the obvious obfuscation.

“Give me an item,” I prompt, eyeing the black faction members. “The transformation is perfectly reversible and will reverse on its own.”

Lucinda tosses me a plain, squishy orb.

“A stress ball?” I raise an eyebrow.

“You just asked for an item.”

I slash the dagger on the ball. It transforms into a black skull with pink, heart-shaped flames for eyes.

I hold it up to her. “This is just an example of what it can do.”

The Death practitioner approaches. “That skull is composed of real bone,” he remarks. “I can even feel the energy in it.”

The scenario ends–too short.

Red and I cycle through a few more scenarios, refining our strategy. The biggest challenge is coming up with an excuse for why Achemiss must see the dagger–and me–in person. As time moves forward, Red’s scenarios start progressively later and, consequently, branch later in their logic. The future’s paths unfurl like leaves in spring, and the flux of scenario experiences only grows.

When my head is close to bursting and I strain to maintain my mental walls, I have to call Red off. My affinities just aren’t high enough to keep up. At least our relentless looping serves as good training.

It’s almost hard to tell when I’m acting in the real world, my actual experiences are so drowned out by scenarios. Experiencing my own memories via Remorse is fundamentally different to hearing about what I’ve done in scenarios. When I entered Euryphel’s soul, I felt first-hand the emotional toll of running ceaseless Regret loops. But until now, I didn’t fully understand how experiencing iterated scenarios leads to dissociation from reality. I can see how for some Regret practitioners, it might grow addictive. You can spend most of your life in dilated time, effectively multiplying your lifespan. You can do whatever you want in scenarios without fear of repercussions.

It's a terrifying power. At least most lack a high enough affinity to exploit the Regret mechanic. For instance, five seconds of scenario time, while valuable in combat, is too short for most other endeavors.

In the real world, I wear a pleasant, interested mask as Lucinda talks, retreading old ground. A combination of Death and Beginning is necessary to keep my facial expressions under control to pass the scrutiny of the black faction’s Beginning practitioner, a short, whip-thin woman who’s been watching our exchange with a detached gaze.

“If we like what we see, Ascendant Cursory will send along a recording,” Lucinda explains.

I need more than a recording, of course. I hold up the dagger, letting a sliver of energy into it while shifting part of the obfuscating sheath. Its pristine surface reflects and reveals the mirror half of the world. I don a mask of shadows–matching the appearance of the dagger’s sheath–to prevent the artifact from reflecting my real countenance and revealing my identity. Since I activate the mask and sheath simultaneously, I know they’ll assume the two functions are a package.

Now, to use the dagger to the greatest effect.

Deception.

Achemiss wants immortality, but that isn’t all he cares about.

If he really wanted my world to end as soon as possible, he should’ve let Ari catalyze its ruin with her descent. Instead, he intervened personally. He wanted her dead more than he wanted my world’s destruction.

Karanos couldn’t speak to why, but I’ve been giving it serious thought over the past months while training my Beginning affinity. Though he denies it, Karanos is a genius, his memory and spatial awareness indisputable. But he still isn’t a Beginning practitioner. He doesn’t have an intuition for probabilities and connections, massive webs of conditional likelihoods that connect everyone and everything.

Aunt Julia has mentioned it to me before offhandedly when discussing her affinity. I’m not yet at her level of expertise, but I’ve been steadily developing my sense of the probabilistic web.

The opportunity to run repeated scenarios with members of the black faction, who know Achemiss personally, has provided me key new observations about Achemiss, even if they’re subtle. Those subtleties have a notable impact on how Beginning weighs Achemiss’s motives.

The first revelation: Achemiss stays in contact with even his allies via an artifact with similar functionality to Suncloud’s transmission artifact. There’s only one such artifact and it’s held by black faction ascendants on a rotational basis. Ascendant Cursory is the one responsible for it now.

The second: Achemiss cannot be contacted immediately. It took several scenarios to figure this out, but there is a set schedule for transmissions. The black faction can only communicate with Achemiss once per day.

When I realized this, it became clear that Achemiss’s relationship to the black faction was more complicated than I thought. In Maria’s words, “He treats them like a business partner.”

As I gradually tease the logic out, the power of Beginning buzzes in my head. Before, we operated under the assumption that Achemiss killed Ari because he believed in the black faction’s vision. But now what I’ve seen leads me to believe that can’t be the case. The alternative motivations are either related to his immortality, or his personal obsessions–his projects and his workshop.

Achemiss uses his artifacts to impressive, immoral ends; with them, he sends constructs to other worlds, like he did with the lizard whose claw stopped Ari’s advance. I can only imagine how much the Hall of Ascension would value that kind of artifact. If Achemiss sent intelligent constructs, like liches–like Maria–he could greatly accelerate the ascension process. But they wouldn’t want Achemiss to employ his artifacts. Especially now, adding Achemiss to their ranks as Ari’s replacement would be terrible for optics. They’d want to take the artifacts from him and share the power among their pool of ascendants.

My affinity concludes that Achemiss works with the black faction because of their protection from other interests like the Hall of Ascension.

But what if there was an artifact that could transform other artifacts, rendering them bound to the user, so that they couldn’t be taken away?

“I want to do the recording in private,” I reply. “There is sensitive information regarding what I want commissioned that is for Achemiss’s ears only.” I turn to Holiday, not even waiting for a response. “Is there a place I can go that is convenient?”

“No, but if Lucinda and her cohort agree, I can bring you to a nearby plane that’s deserted.”

Lucinda appears to consider the offer. “Holiday, if he runs off with our recording artifact, that’s on you. Cursory will accompany you and make an introduction. Then you and Holiday can proceed into another plane.”

“Are you sure of your plan?” Red asks.

“They were never going to let me simply meet Achemiss. It won’t happen unless Achemiss himself asks for me to come.”

“And what you plan to put in this recording will be enough?”

“It’ll have to be. A world depends on it.”