"At the center of the Citadel-Beneath, there stands a circle. Its true name lost to time, used in a great ritual with terrible cost, conducted in the olden days by ancient Fey-kind, it protects us all. Who constructed it, or why it exists is unknown, though its power is apparent to all. If it were ever damaged, or its power ever fade - then our world will end."

~Berwyn at Erval, 'Wonders of the Seventh Hyacith'

My left hand had already wandered across to my shoulder when the alley finally opened up into a square, light shining through the large doorway cut into the wall taking up most of the street. Over the course of my approach, it became clearer and clearer that the “tower” wasn’t one at all - it was a collection of spires, all jutting into the sky at different heights, with the softly pulsing crystal held aloft in their midst. It was even more impressive than it looked from afar, which was only accentuated when I saw the square held within. My eye was drawn to the spires’ foundations, which were decorated in a mosaic style, the sun strategically shining through the doorway behind me, reflecting an innumerable number of tiny tiles, and filling the entire square with small flecks of light, all of them coalescing into a greater whole. Whoever designed this was a true master of the art, and I felt like an ass when I remembered how insultingly I’d thought of fey architecture before.

The square itself was nothing to balk at, either, with the main "attraction" being a hundred or more crudely to finely cut boulders, aglow with thousands of runes and pictographs each. The symbols themselves seemed to exude an otherworldly light from within the stone, and the atmosphere inside this entire empty area was crackling and popping with static electricity that made my hair stand on end, even though I'd barely taken five steps away from the surrounding houses.

Looking down, the floor was, although still tiled with the familiar off-white cobblestones, altered as well. Where the normal streets had a simple repeating grid pattern, the stones in this square were laid out in such a way that following along any one line would undoubtedly lead you to the center of everything, a sort of raised dais, surrounded by three concentric circles with three, seven and thirteen larger runestones each, and a small set of stairs leading up to it. Dotting the rest of the square was a large number of smaller runestones, which appeared to be placed with the lightshow in mind, seeing as how the reflected pinpricks of sunlight formed intricate patterns around most of them.

In the center of the dais was a smaller stone, just barely enough for a person my size to comfortably sit upon. With awe, and a hefty helping of something like fear, I began walking forward.

Or at least, I tried. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, because the static electricity saturating the square quickly became mildly painful, and then began stinging like an electric fence, causing my muscles to temble until I turned back. I knew that the center of the circle was where I had to be, but I couldn't see a way to get there.

Just as I was ready to sit down on something and contemplate this problem with Ref, the atmosphere in the square abruptly changed into one that was outright hostile. The light seemed to shift, and the runic markings became brighter for a second, until a low humming filled the air and the inner three stones shot some sort of beam into the sky. Looking up, I saw that the beams converged at the floating crystal structure, which momentarily got brighter, until it let out a more blinding pulse than I’d seen before.

Blinking the spots from my vision, I looked up once more, and saw that the sky was darkening quickly. Feeling dread, I looked around, the light slowly disappearing, looking for a way out, a vector of escape...

And then the colors shifted. The shadows deepened, the light intensified, my eyes were on fire -

A blinding flash of light.

A deafening shockwave.

The tension dropped like a lead weight. I slumped to the ground, dimly aware of an omnipresent, deafening hum in the back of my mind, like the memory of a bad dream but still there, not stopping, not lessening…

I sat up, and my weary gaze fell to the stones themselves, which were lit up. The light was playing around them on the floor, the patterns shifting like liquid, their runes glowing with power, the three concentric circles all feeding thick ribbons of light into the sky.

Wrenching my gaze upwards, I saw the floating crystal, which had ceased to pulse in favor of simply blazing with energy and light, so bright it actually hurt to look at.

When I got my sight back, I looked around at the rest of the sky, noting that it appeared to be completely black, but sort of...filtered through a luminescent screen. Sort of like looking at a surface coated with vantablack through white, glowing tinted glass, if that makes sense. Probably doesn’t.

There were “veins” of light woven through the screen above, and as I watched them, some appeared to shift toward each other, all drawing to a spot in the sky that was rapidly darkening through the screen of light. The streams collided, and an explosion of light occurred right at the darkening spot, which began shrinking again.

A few seconds after, I heard a loud CRACK from above, informing me of just how large this dome of energy truly was, that sound had so long to travel from there.

Sitting down on a nearby bench, I took a quick breather, checked over Raven’s ruffled feathers, and took out the mirror shard.

“So that just happened,” I said.

“That it did,” she replied, staring at her own sky.

“You know, I don’t think we can use this to teleport back,” I observed.

“...” she replied intelligently, still staring at her version of the rune circle, which was just as spectacular as my own.

“It’s not that it won’t work, of that I have no doubt, it’s just that I don’t think it’s a good idea to step in there while that,” I helplessly motioned toward the light show, which took that moment to pulse menacingly, “is happening.”

“...” was her witty reply, perfectly confirming my suspicions that she’d been struck dumb by the circle igniting into a brilliant display of what was undoubtedly magic.

Magic. What a strange word. Even now, having seen everything I have, it still evokes some sort of feeling inside me, one of disbelief, one of inconsistency, as though everything I’d seen could be explained by science.

Actually, it probably could, even if the science required to explain it was reliant on this strange bizarro-world, with “Things” missing. I idly began thinking about what “Things” were actually missing here, and if I could even notice them missing if their concept didn’t exist, when Ref’s voice shook me out of the contemplation.

“This is bad,” she said in a very peculiar tone. Sort of like a mix between hope and it’s opposite?

“You don’t say,” I replied in a voice like hers, only that my tone didn’t have the hope part to it.

“I do say. This is bad for two reasons.”

“What would those be?”

“Well first, this thing is obviously active. You can’t step inside there, that’d be like trying to walk into an active volcano that’s also inside a nuclear reactor currently in meltdown and also has seven trillion Volts flowing through it.”

What a weird, but oddly fitting description.

“No, the really bad thing, “ oh no, “is that the circle can’t do that on its own.”

“What do you mean, ‘can’t do it on its own’?”

“What I mean is that this effect has to be manually triggered, this is a completely different modus operandi.”

“Do you mean to tell me that there’s someone here? Someone alive?”

“That’s the only possibility.”

“Holy shit.”

***

And so, I began the arduous task of trying to find the place from whence the circle thingy was controlled. Ref used her god-like intelligence skills to guess that the control room was probably inside one of the spires, and I used my inborn human pattern recognition abilities to deduct that it was probably inside of the biggest spire adorning this square.

After a brief session of “the floor is lava”, in which I succeeded in not touching any of the dancing light-patterns on the floor, an act which would have ‘annihilated me beyond mere physicality and logic’, I entered the largest spire on the rim of the central square, quickly finding a set of spiral stairs toward the back, and began climbing up, checking every story for something resembling a control room.

From the outside, there was no discernible difference between the floors, except for the fact that all the windows appeared to glow from within with the same kind of light that the runes in the circle exuded, and that they were all opaque, but from the inside, all the rooms served some function. Some were storage rooms, littered with crates or barrels (but never crates and barrels), some were libraries whose volumes I couldn’t open, and some were simply bizarre, holding racks full of differently-colored crystal, floors littered with broken glass, or glass tubes of glowing water flowing top-to-bottom and vice-versa.

In one of the rooms about halfway up, I stopped to take a breather and drink some fey-water, which was just normal water but with a bit of “otherworldliness” attached to it. It was as though the water didn’t really behave right, like it fell too slowly or was a tiny bit too “dry”.

It was when I put the canteen back into my bag when my hand brushed against something I didn’t remember putting into my bag, some sort of soft, smooth fabric.

Pulling it out, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my temple as a memory reasserted itself - this was the not-quite invisibility tarp which had covered Ref`s crate!

I’d completely forgotten about it’s existence, and it was as though seeing it again “brought forth” memories which really didn’t want to “come forth”, but were forced to.

“Hey, remember this?”

“Holy shit, I completely forgot. How in the hell…”

How in the hell indeed. How does a living idea forget?

“Do you think it’s… like you? What did you say back then… ‘meme-something’?”

“Memetic? It’s possible, but being ‘memetic’ would mean it’s easier to remember, or that it changes itself in your perception into something else, sort of how I twisted my concept onto the concept of your reflection… but an idea can’t twist itself into the concept of not existing, or the concept of being forgotten, just like you can’t force yourself to die on the spot by stopping your brain activity.”

“Well what about ‘anti’memetic? Sort of like how antimatter is the opposite of normal matter in charge, maybe this thing is the opposite of a meme? That could be why it was so hard to see…”

“I’m finding it hard to wrap my head around the concept of an idea existing to not be remembered, but it’s one of the only things that make sense. I wonder how it was made? How it was transported and stored…”

“Regardless, this could be useful. Do you think it’d work on these Fey beings the same as humans?”

“I don’t see why not, your perceptions aren’t too different. But how will you… oh that’s genius.”

I’d stood up, fluffed out the silky material, and swung it around my shoulders like a blanket.

“Wooow, this is disorienting. I can’t remember where my legs are,” I said, and took a few wonky steps forward using my memory of how walking was accomplished, rather than proprioception.

“That must be part of the effect, to hide everything that exists beneath it as well as itself: It’s interesting that I can’t seem to perceive your head, even though it isn’t covered by the cloak - perhaps because your head is conceptually a part of you?”

“Must be. This is awesome.”

After that, I packed up everything and set out, now clad in my newly minted “antimemetic cloak”.

***

It was in the highest room of the spire that we found it. It was thin, thinner than any human could be, and taller; It was also sitting with its back toward us. It was wearing a silvery armor, which probably would have gleamed in the dim light, but was set upon by a thick layer of dust. If it wasn’t ridiculous, I’d have thought that this figure had been sitting here for weeks.

It wasn’t moving save for a small tremble, and I had no idea what to do, so I sort of… circled around the room, which was bare short for eight stone slabs in a circle, one of which it was sitting upon, and a long rack holding a weapon - a very ornate spear.

His face, I could see it now, was scrunched up in deep concentration, and he seemed to sway very, very slightly on his stone.

Kneeling down, still in my cloak, I got closer to his face, and flinched when he did, coinciding with another CRACK from outside.

I left the room, took out the mirror shard, and described what I’d seen in a whisper.

“I think he’s controlling the circle,” she said once I finished.

“Seems like it requires a lot of concentration, so I don’t know if we can wake him.”

“We definitely can’t, the shock alone would cause the dome to collapse. He’s likely under immense mental strain. Take me inside so I can look at him, please.”

I grabbed the mirror shard and went inside the room once more, noting that he had started humming a repeating set of seven very precise tones, the sound seeming more present than possible in such a quiet voice.

I snuck around him in a circle, holding out the mirror shard in front of me, and went back into the corridor.

“He’s definitely controlling the circle all by himself. It’s not healthy, and he will die if he keeps going. But considering the alternative, I can see why he raised the dome. If what we think is out there is out there, then the dome is the only thing protecting us.”

She paused, looking at me with a pained expression.

“I think I know a way to lessen his strain, as well as talk to him, but you’re not going to like it.”

“Tell me.”

“If you were to sit opposite him, and assume some of his mental load, it may allow him enough focus for us to talk. And we do need to talk to him, he needs to turn off the circle if you want to use it to escape.”

She was right, I really didn’t like it.

“I don’t see another way, and it’s not like I’ve not operated this kind of thing before.”

“Hah! If you mean the teleportation circles, compared to those, this is like driving a fleet of twenty semi trucks through twenty different cities all at once versus driving a bike through a busy intersection. It’s nothing alike. Don’t take it lightly, a single slip won’t just turn off the circle, it will release all the energy inside it at once. Explosively. It would atomize the next continent over.”

I swallowed. That sounded like a little much.

“Are you sure there’s no other way?”

“There may be some others, but they would take too long to set up or carry along risks of even worse things.”

“worse things? What could be worse than dying?” I asked indignantly.

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe dropping a few layers and losing your atomic coherence, and being left as less than a wraith! Maybe tearing a hole into the space-time continuum and erasing the entire stack of worlds from existence! There are many fates worse than death, Amelia. Remember that. And don’t sass me.”

Sufficiently chastised, I stepped into the room once more. He was swaying even more, now, and there were beads of sweat on his brow.

“Take off the cloak, your pack and your new sword, they’ll interfere with the ritual,” Ref whispered to me, and I did so, hanging my sword and the antimemetic cloak onto the nearby rack, which also held the Fey’s weapon.

I sat down on the slab opposite the Fey man, glancing at him over the crystal embedded into the floor in the middle of the eight stone slabs, copying his position as best I could, and whispered into the mirror.

“Now what do I do?”

“Alright. Remember the circle in the forest, or the feeling you get while standing in one of the teleportation circles? Try to find that again.”

I tried. It was incredibly hard, and I doubt I could have found it if I’d not felt it before, but eventually, I discovered the silent place once more, and one by one, my senses fell away.

I became pure awareness inside a body, no thoughts of any kind, simply being. There was a feeling of warmth from before me, and I extended myself toward it, creeping my awareness along the cold stone floor, inch by inch, until the warmth became more and more, encompassing me directly.

There was a flow of energy around me, wanting to pull me up and apart, but I managed to stay put for the moment. There was another awareness bordering mine, feeling like an echo of something I’d felt long ago, like myself but not. I followed this awareness along the stream of energy, branching out when it did, flowing upward, outward, stretching and branching, almost becoming the flow -

And then I stopped. I was aware of a vast circle, encompassing many, many miles, with an echo of the strange other awareness all around myself.

I could feel it now, the points where it connected to the circle, melding its own fraying edges to the steel-like energy flow of the circle of light.

I looked at one of these connections, spotting the sparking and breaking of this connection, and quickly swooped in to grab it for myself.

It melded to my own awareness, and I felt a tiny prick of... something, but it was manageable.

I spread out once again, and spotted many, many more instances of fraying connections, noting the ones which were refusing to reconnect, the ones which were refusing to stay connected, and the ones which were slowly weakening.

I gathered around all those failing connections, and with one fell swoop, severed them all, and then connected them to myself.

And then, there was tranquiPAINPAINPAINPAIN-

I screamed as what felt like hundreds of white-hot knives were stabbed into my body from all angles, my mind splitting apart into innumerable threads, all of them connected to a tiny part of the circle.

I almost wanted to fall unconscious, just to escape the pain, but I remembered Ref’s words, and held on, although it was a losing battle. I felt some connections slip away, and scrambled to hold onto them through the pain, when I began hearing a melody in the back of my mind.

Almost unconsciously, I began humming the first two notes, and noticed another voice respond with the others.

My pain began to recede, becoming a dull ache in my head rather than glowing knives stabbed into my entire body, still humming the first two notes every time the other voice finished the other four.

Eventually, I managed to pull a bigger part of my awareness back into myself, and opened my eyes, which felt cramped, like I’d clenched them for too long.

I blinked away some tears, looked up, and my own eyes met another pair of very light yellow ones.