The impossibility of the task before Randidly made him grit his teeth. He pressed himself up out of his small crater, blood leaking from sundry cuts spread across his body. Small pebbled tumbled and shifted underneath his feet. Grimacing, he stood and swayed. His head spun. Information continued to flood into his mind, but all of the extraneous details became vague. His focus narrowed as his well of mental energy ran dry.

He categorized each element in his environment. By moving one at a time, he could keep himself ahead of the dizzying collapse.

He ignored both the shrieking fury of his Fatepiece and the whisper of his instincts, as he neared his limits for the second time today. In a way, he had succeeded with his clever activation of the Songstress of Absence. The bubble of the new Cohort covered the memory. Perhaps had Randidly not been forced to stop the transference of momentum up to the mechanism, the process would already have finished.

For now, he distantly saw the petals unfolding in the real Nexus, revealing the core mechanism that would pulse and ascertain the situation in the new Cohort as the third and final step. All that would be left after that would be the kiss of genuine reality.

Randidly moved on to another element; an image with enough blazing potency he felt it against his skin, like the heat of the open top of an active volcano. The blurry and bright figure of Elhume floated in the memory, still within the bounds of the tear in space. Hooks of Aether spread out from his body and grabbed onto the bubble designed to delineate the edges of the new Cohort. Elhume pulled and the bubble shifted.

Randidly looked at the barrier that had been created for the new Cohort.

It began to phase right through the edges of the memory, the real Aether of the bubble causing the fake Aether of the memory Nexus to waver and grow insubstantial. A new shift pulled his attention back to the Nexus. The unfolding of the pulse mechanism stalled out. An electric crackle ran through the bubble. Randidly’s eyes widened, understanding Elhume’s purpose.

The Cohort mechanism sent out a pulse through the bubble, as though sensing some element was amiss. Randidly gritted his teeth. From his investigations into the memory version, Randidly hadn’t noticed anything that could cause this sort of development. Likely, some added defensive measures were added later, for the later Cohorts.

Too late to worry about that now.

The Cohort mechanism should have been just taken a bite from existence. The essence of the memory wouldn’t have mattered; Randidly had guided it to bite all around it. Once the ‘swallow’ into the Nexus had begun, he would have taken care of the problem of its reality. But now that problem had been brought forward.

Elhume began to tug with more force. The bubble rippled and shifted further under his ministrations. The edges of the memory Nexus began to fade, vanishing as the real energy drifted forward. Elhume demonstrated that he didn’t want to harm the memory.

Again, Randidly swayed as he calculated his options. His head pounded. But he raised his hands and ignored the weakness in his images and his Nether Core. His resolve firmed. For my second magic trick… let’s make something that never existed, appear!

A little earlier than I planned, but at least I have a person of prestige in the audience.

In the depths of the ground beneath the battlefield, the carefully prepared orbs of Nether Ritual began to stir. He released a long breath. The small wounds across his body healed. Energy discharge crackled from the annihilating effect that the bubble exerted on the memory, as the ‘fake’ Aether constructs along the edge of the Nexus suddenly were liberated of their connectors. Yggdrasil reached out and drank down all that energy, reinforcing Randidly as best he could.

All the while, the Songstress of Absence continued her long solo, maintaining the critical connection.

Randidly gestured and his Nether Rituals began to swirl beneath the ground. The resentment and ill-will of the dead within the memory had been leaking out of Randidly’s body, after his massive manifestation had been broken, but a portion of that energy was caught up in this new rotation. Once more, they found purpose.

To those forced to wander for so long, enough the madness Randidly promised was more than capable of motivating them.

Some spirits had been lost, some gave up, some were destroyed. But those that lingered around, drawn by Randidly’s goal, allowed themselves to get swept up in new possibilities. Listening to his instincts, the scale and scope of the complex Nether Ritual underneath the ground began to grow.

Congratulations! Your Skill Left Hand of the Nether Oracle (M) has grown to Level 1001!

Congratulations! Your Skill Yearnings of the Nether Heir (P) has grown to Level 1171!

Elhume tugged again and more of the memory Nexus began to fade. About five percent now existed in and outside of the Cohort bubble. An entire exterior portion of the Nexus, becoming wan and inert. Randidly sensed that the memory came back after the real Aether had passed, as a lack of bright light will allow light to slink back into existence, but it was a reduced version of what it had been previously.

That part of the Nexus had been firmly shown it didn’t exist by the genuine article. Any hope present in that corner that could have believed in a miracle had vanished. For Randidly’s face-off against impossibility, it became useless.

Randidly’s Nether Core seemed to shiver at the prospect before it, but it began to gather up speed. His mouth spread wide into the reckless grin that he couldn’t seem to shake, even while the rest of his body functions were on the very of collapse.

“And so we advance. Because anything else means we lose everything,” Randidly whispered to the seething air around him, filled with storm and discharge and the hollow souls of the dead. The Dread Homunculus folded its arms across its chest.

He felt the pulse of agreement from the environment and began in earnest. Nether flowed out of him in vast currents, sinking into the ground.

Randidly had spent a long time considering the problem of how to make the memory real. He had spent hours meditating on this problem, the crux of the whole issue, the one problem so perfect it hadn’t a single flaw for Randidly to attack.

The goal was easy. The path to achieving it seemed impossible.

The Nether orbs beneath the ground began to shift. First, he had to orient them to his position, now slightly askew from his original plan. He sat in the center of a vast circle. The orbs congregated into four separate circles, to his North, South, East, and West. They began to spin in their individual rotations, and then the wheels they created rolled around the larger circle. The pull of the movement drew more and more of the lingering significance of the dead and living in the memory, congregating it into cores in the middle of the smaller circles.

It wasn’t until Randidly had been deconstructing a particularly thorny bit of unrefined emotion from the Alpha Cosmos that he realized why the sensation of considering the problem felt so familiar to him. The helplessness he felt when he considered making the impossible possible was the same vast emptiness that loomed above him when he sat along in his bedroom as a child and stared at the ceiling. It was the ineffable and confusing ambiguity of life.

It was the house you wanted to live in, but it possessed no visible doors or windows.

And the answer, if it could be called one, he arrived at was the same approach Randidly began to take to life as he grew up: he might not be able to see an answer, but some sort of attempt was better than being frozen by the difficulty.

He would flail and grasp, reaching for the limits of the world.

Elhume used his hooks to iron out any embers of resistance in the memory even as Randidly wove his Nether Ritual underneath his feet. Randidly forced his Nether Core into high gear, allowing almost all of his awareness to slip away. The Nether Ritual gathered momentum, pulling from the fabric of the memory.

Randidly’s heart pounded; in terms of sheer scope, this Nether Ritual was the largest and most transformative he had ever created. Already his palms became slightly sweaty and he felt the tug of the four condensed cores in the circle. And their rotation pulled a different sort of significance and began to create something truly profound in the very middle of the circle, directly beneath Randidly’s feet.

The ground began rumbling, already weakened by the multiple impacts it endured during the last fifteen minutes. Randidly poured his hopes into the ritual as it gathered speed beneath him, pushing more and more into the Nether and hoping the momentum of it would carry him.

However, he tensed immediately as he realized his narrowed focus made him briefly lose sight of the threats against him. As Randidly raised his head he expected a blow to be immediately descending toward him. Yet he looked at the blurry form of Elhume and while the highest authority in the Nexus fixated on him with a heavy gaze, he did not strike.

“Are you so unwilling to harm the memory you won’t even try to stop me?” Randidly muttered. But while that likely had a thread of truth, it wasn’t quite right. Because Elhume was very willing to throw punches earlier into the memory, practically blindly.

Perhaps, after Randidly proved he could survive punches, Elhume was just unwilling to escalate further.

After several long moments, Elhume just tugged on his hooks. The bubble drifted again. More of the memory Nexus became deprived of its accumulated reality. It became the flat, predetermined movie it had been before Randidly had arrived and worked so tirelessly to stabilize and dig a foundation for the memory.

Randidly’s expression darkened because he suddenly thought about another source of a threat. As his Nether Ritual generated a powerful tide, he felt the other source of potent significance in the memory. Specifically, Randidly looked across the stilled battlefield toward Deganawidah. The Nether Ritual continued to spin, its sphere of influence increasing. Very quickly, it became obvious that the ritual’s energy pressed against the Nether Monster.

Yet Deganawidah didn’t respond either.

A part of Randidly knew why they didn’t attempt to stop him. He made no attempt to hide the wishes he poured into the Nether Ritual, so they simply had to look to know his intent.

Randidly clenched his jaw, not willing to entertain his doubts. Perfect. This is just the window I need.

He looked down through the ground beneath him, to the central area of his Nether Ritual. The circles grew wider, covering a larger area, each core fattening into a basketball-sized minor Nether Prince. More and more meaning poured into them.

And in the middle—

A cold wind blew out, released by the Nether Ritual. The shape was shadowy at first but gained definition as more meaning flowed into Randidly’s working. It had been hewn from ice, but ice taken from the deepest sunken glacier, never before exposed to light.

Its long legs clicked as it stirred.

It was a spider.