Sam: Araxes. You holding up in there?

Araxes looked up from his meditations—one did not sleep when one was undead, which often allowed for efficient use of the night-time hours but was absolute rubbish when one was trapped in an interdimensional cage with nothing to do except read meaningless treatises full of useless information.

Araxes: How the bloody hellfire do you think I’m holding up in here, Tolliver? I am bored out of my skull. And that is not a pun. What the devil is taking you so long out there?

Sam: Long story short, your location is protected by some kind of energy barrier that is preventing us from getting a lock on your position. It’s like when—

Araxes: Point of order; you said this was the short version?

Sam: Right. Okay, so, basically, there’s a gate that we can’t break through because it’s powered and maintained from your side. And we can’t get Persephone to take it down because she’s still comatose. And we can’t use the Guardian Teleport to get to you because you’re out of range.

Araxes: Wonderful. So I’m stuck here for all eternity with the living embodiment of my captor here encouraging me to read all the books ever written despite the fact that they contain no useful knowledge whatsoever. That is truly wonderful news. Have you any other missives? Perhaps my sainted grandmother has died of scurvy? Or maybe my kingdom is in ruins and my throne has been hacked apart to be made into prosthetic teeth for wayward Bugbears?

Sam: … What books?

Araxes blinked and glanced up.

Araxes: I didn’t tell you about the books?

Sam: You did not. You just said you were in an infinite room with a weird filing system and the knowledge of the ages.

Araxes: Curious. I must be going senile in my old age. Yes, the knowledge is contained in books, which reside in bookcases, of which there are too many to count and they stretch off into infinity in every direction.

Sam: And the avatar you mentioned… She’s saying you should read the books?

Araxes: Yes. Tolliver, what are you thinking?

Sam: I’m thinking that’s an awful lot of trouble to go through for a monkey trap.

Araxes: Tolliver. Did you just call me a monkey?

Sam: No. Well, sorta. Look, it’s an old hunting trick. You put some fruit in a box, cut a hole in the top, and leave it for the monkey. Then the monkey comes along, puts its hand in the box to grab the fruit, but the hole is too small for the monkey to withdraw its hand while its grabbing the fruit. But the monkey won’t let go of the fruit, so it just stays there until the hunter comes along.

Araxes: Who the devil hunts monkeys in this day and age?

Sam: I dunno, it was a story I heard. Look, the point is, its weird that the trap has physical books and shelves in it if there’s no way for you to get out once you’re in.

“Well of course they put physical books in here, you dunce,” Araxes muttered, not saying it in message. “It’s the bloody point, isn’t it? I’m supposed to spend my eternity digging through these things for knowledge that would never come. Otherwise I’d be sitting in an empty room and severely considering attempting to burn it down just to see if I… Could… Get out.”

He blinked.

Araxes: Tolliver. This hypothetical monkey. What would happen were he to smash the box to bits?

* * *

Sam jerked his head up and his eyes went wide.

Sam: Araxes, don’t you dare.

Then he paused and frowned. Actually, from a certain standpoint, the idea made a bit of sense. Attacking the room itself might disrupt whatever gate mechanism was keeping them from making connection. But… It could also damage Persephone.

Sam: At least until I talk to the sisters, get their take on it.

Araxes: I will wager half my kingdom that Sally will be utterly against it, probably issuing coarse threats involving portions of my anatomy that have been gone for centuries. And mistress Cora will tentatively agree, but will waffle worse than a breakfast buffet that also serves chicken.

“Yeah, maybe.” Sam frowned and looked up from his mental conversation at the anchor still pulsating above its workstation.

“What’s up with Boney?” Pearl asked, fluttering down from the ceiling to land on Sam’s shoulder. “Is he okay? Are you okay? You look like you just bit into a lemon that wants to eat your dog. What’s wrong?”

Sam glanced over at the two sisters, Cora and Sally, standing off to the side with their comatose third sister.

“Hey guys,” he called to them. “Let’s talk for a second.”

He brought them to an unoccupied corner of the workshop and, as quickly and clinically as he could, brought them up to speed on Araxes’ predicament and the possible solution. They reacted… About as Araxes had expected.

“I will cut you,” Sally growled. “And that boney sonofabitch. If either of you talk about breaking shit inside of Sephie again.”

“Now, wait Sally,” Cora said quietly, raising a hand. “The idea perhaps has merit—“

“I’ll cut you too.”

“You don’t have a blade sharp enough,” Cora shot back. “Now hush up and listen for once. This is not a security system that is doing our sister any favors. In fact, it is actively harming both her and our cause. It is possible that attempting to destroy it from the inside is the correct methodology. Certainly all our efforts to bypass it from without have failed, and seem like they will continue to fail.”

Sam opened his mouth to voice an opinion, then whirled around when an ear-piercing shriek cut through the work room like a bandsaw trying to slice springsteel.

It was Persephone. The core was vibrating wildly, keening like a banshee, and sparks danced across the mana sigils on her orichalcum surface. She spun on her axis, bounced off a tablesaw, and rocketed ceilingward, nearly missing smooshing Pearl into the rafters.

Sam: Araxes, what did you do!?

Araxes: Expedited matters

* * *

Araxes sidestepped the bookcase as it toppled to the blue ground, wreathed in flames and crackling nicely thank you very much. The impact sent embers and blazing pages scattering outwards, some of which landed on another bookcase and started it aflame as well. Far more quickly than Araxes would have expected, come to think of it. Perhaps it was the dryness of the material.

“What are you doing?” the child-avatar practically screamed at him.

“I tire of this game,” Araxes replied, raising his palm to another bookcase and unleashing a bolt of magical flame. The gem in his pelvic cradle warmed slightly as he drew on its power—he was going to have to put some work in to powering the blasted thing up. He’d been seriously neglecting his murdering as of late. “Tolliver is right. I have put my hand into this box and it has closed on me, so I am going to burn things until either you release me or the box falls apart around me.”

“These halls hold the knowledge of tens of thousands of years! You cannot—“

Araxes rolled his eyes, raised a finger, and sent an energy blast hissing into the child-avatar. The bolt caught her right across the bridge of her nose and snapped her head back.

“Do hush, my dear,” he said, bringing more fire to bear on the books. “I believe I’ve already made myself very clear that I believe not a word you’ve said up to this point, so your constant screeching will not—ACK!”

A blast of pure force caught Araxes across the shoulders and sent him cartwheeling into a burning shelf. The whole thing collapsed around him. A book bounced off his skull, a mass of flaming papers fell into his lap, and a pair of burning shelves pinned his legs.

“Ow,” he grunted.

“Active Defenses now online,” the child avatar said from where she floated in a corona of white light a dozen paces off. “You will be eliminated.”

“Well it’s about bloody time,” Araxes muttered, struggling under the weight of the burning shelf. “At last I’ve gotten a reaction out of you now.” It took a few seconds, but he finally managed to heave the burning mass off his legs and stood up, dusting off charred robes. “So tell me, how is my demise going to arrive this time?”

Araxes: Fear not Tolliver, I have devised an excellent plan. I shall force the child-avatar to slay me, and then I shall re-corporiate by Cora’s side, as per usual.

The child avatar floated upwards, and a rushing noise filled the Blue Room. Pages began to rustle in an increasing breeze, and Araxes was suddenly aware of the temperature dropping like a rock. It did not bother him of course—dead, you know—but it was an intriguing notation.

“Going to kill me with ice, my dear?” he inquired brightly as a bright white corona of light began to emanate from the child avatar.

“Defiler of knowledge!” the girl boomed in a voice completely at odds with her slender form. “Know the power of true understanding!”

“Yes yes,” Araxes rolled his hand at the wrist several times. “Could we speed this up? Some of us do have places to be, you know.”

Sam: Araxes, what makes you think that your re-corporiating thing won’t get whacked out by being inside one of the sisters when you die?

Araxes blinked.

The avatar lifted her hand, and a ball of pure light formed there.

“Ah, I wonder,” Araxes raised a finger. “Could I perhaps call ‘do-overs’?

The blast of light caught Araxes right in the skull and blew his form apart in a hail of sparks.

And when the sparks faded, Araxes was standing… somewhere else.

Instead of blue, the room was gray as far as the eye could see. And not in the same way that the Blue Room was blue. This was a simple dull monotonous absence of color, like an old gravestone with the name long worn off and not even creeping vines able to muster the effort needed to cover it. Instead of infinite, it felt cavernous and claustrophobic, too large and too small all at once.

Also there was a door.

“Wait a moment,” Araxes muttered to himself as feeling began to seep back into his extremities. “This seems familiar.”

The door was set into… Well, it appeared the door was set into thin air, didn’t it? Though examining it closely, he could see that it was in fact a portal of some kind. And on the very edges of the frame were hints of stone.

And that was when Araxes realized he was not alone.

He straightened very slowly. Very slowly he turned. And his eyeflames went wide and bright. There, not ten paces away, kneeling in the center of the single most complex runic circle he had ever seen in his entire life or death, was a man, covered tattoos of mana sigils. Hair white as the driven snow, body emaciated and shrunken, limbs unmoving, shackled by magics stronger than any Araxes had ever encountered.

The man was watching him, eyes burning with madness.

“Well,” he said in a curious sing-song voice. “Another visitor. That makes four in less than two weeks.

“What a banner millennium this is turning out to be.”