She was… Eskallia Everbough, approaching a crackling campfire, its dancing flames visible between the massive sandstone boulders that surrounded her on every side. Her footsteps made no sound on the mixture of coarse rubble and sand underfoot.

Who would be out here in the middle of the stone desert? And who would be so foolish, or so confident to have built a campfire? she wondered.

It felt good to be away from the innocent selfishness of her students at the Academy. She had come to this remote corner of the Garden to escape her troubles and her responsibilities, to stop pretending, just for a few days. Or weeks. No more than a month or two, she promised herself.

Here there were enemies to fight that might distract her, if only a little, from the storms of rage and helplessness that surged within. Perhaps she would even find something new, wonders or horrors that she could consume to numb her impotent anger. Her work at the Academy had helped at first, for years even, as she channeled all she knew to train generations of youth, always hoping, always thinking beneath her facade of wisdom and goodness, that perhaps this Outsider, or this other one, might be the one to finally bring forth the justice upon her enemies that she was forbidden.

Even those from the hated clan itself she taught, for the changes she sought could come from within the enemy, and she compressed her rage to the deepest parts of her being where it coiled and festered, all so that she could plant the seeds of her future victory with a benign smile.

And it had all been useless, the seeds fallen on the barren soil of the Outsiders’ intrinsic nature. Her meeting with the Child of the Great Mind, though she had not understood his status at the time, had sustained her over the years, given her faith that these beings from a corrupted world had the potential for goodness as well as great evil. ‘Fight fire with fire’ he had told her, a simple wisdom that had nonetheless opened her eyes to a new approach. At the time it had seemed the answer, to train and influence Outsiders and use them to neutralize each other’s evil. Now, she feared it had been, if not actively harmful, a futile endeavor.

She shook off the cold grip of despair that was her constant companion when her rage was banked. The fire beckoned, calling her for a brief respite from the frigid night air.

Why not, she thought. It’s not like there’s anything that could truly threaten me in the Garden.

She peered between the two boulders, trying to get a sense of who the fire might belong to. Sitting with his back to her was a man, or at least she assumed it was from the crudely cropped black hair and broad shoulders. He was wearing…

...is that a Trial tunic? What would a newly arrived be doing all the way out here? How would he even survive the first hundred feet of the desert?

“Hello.” The man said without turning. “I made a fire.”

Eskallia jumped back, pulling a circling halo of water from her source and a blade from her belt. Something was terribly wrong, that this figure by the fire would have sensed her presence. She quickly ran through the possibilities, monsters that used illusions to lure travelers, creatures that possessed the unwitting and rode their bodies, shapeshifters and other evils.

“What are you?” she called out. “I will brook no evil in my presence.”

Only in my heart, she thought.

The man turned around, squinting his eyes against the night. “My name is Sergei,” he called back. “What is your name? I like your water spell.”

“How did you detect my presence?” she demanded.

The man turned back to the fire. “You were blue. Everything else is dry.”

She used Scan.

Echelon

Magus

Peaceful

Level: 35 H.P.: 82

Damage Abatement: 80-100

Top Skill: Swimming

She blinked in surprise and scanned him again, with the same results. In her many years looking at Insiders and Outsiders, she had never seen anything remotely like what was in front of her eyes. It could only be the work of a Master, even a Grand Master in Deception, with a Charm: People trait far beyond any she had ever heard of.

Is he mocking me? Is it the Garden Archon playing a prank? Or worse, has somehow penetrated the Garden?

Whatever, whoever it was, her self-indulgent emotions vanished in a new wave of urgency and focus. She could feel her heart beating with excitement, even fear, an emotion she had thought long suffocated by her circumstance. She didn’t consider for a moment that the information in front of her was valid. Anyone with even a little skill in Deception could hide details such as damage abatement, and only the lowest level, newest students with abnormally low Charm couldn’t hide their top skill. Which was swimming.

It’s just too much. The Garden Archon would never be such a trickster.

She knew what she had to do. She squeezed between the boulders and entered the flickering light of the fire.

“Very funny, Lo-”

She felt the force of her Purgatory oath descend upon her, and she stopped herself just before she incurred his penalty.

That doesn’t make any sense. Why would the oath bind me when I am in front of the Oathgiver?

She looked again at the person, who had turned to her with wide eyes and a vacant smile. His hair was cropped in a circular cut around his head, his face was round and unlined, not just young, but… unshaped, as if he had rarely smiled, or frowned, or indeed used any expression.

It’s not him. Then who is it?

“Hello,” he said again.

“Hello,” she replied. She kept her dagger at the ready, and added more streams of water to join the one circling her body, already forming the blades of ice compressed torrents would carry into him if he so much as sneezed. “I ask again. What are you! Speak or suffer!”

A brief look of alarm crossed his face, followed by a slowly dawning comprehension.

“Oh,” he said. “I used the wrong name. My name here is Echelon. I looked up what I should do after the screen asked, and the old internet said I should choose a gamer name that was mysterious and that used my hobbies. I didn’t like the way it felt when I added the numbers though, so I just kept it all letters.”

Eskallia blinked. Then blinked again. She opened her mouth, trying to find the next words one would speak after such a statement, and found that there were in fact no words that followed. She settled for nodding, and took a step away, placing her back to the nearest boulder and moving her bladed jets between them. He watched her expectantly, patiently, as if she was no threat to him, as if they had just met at a market.

An Outsider. He’s an Outsider. Only an Outsider could spew such nonsense. She let the thought settle briefly. Then why am I still afraid?

Even with her abilities suppressed, there was no Outsider who could threaten her in the Garden, she would bet her life on it. She had even spent precious points raising her Charm: Person and Manipulation skill in preparation for the day that had never come, the day when she might finally confront the architect of her people’s woes.

She sheathed her dagger and released her spell, allowing the water to drop and vanish into the arid ground. The blades of ice crackled and chimed as they fell onto the stones.

“My name is Eskallia Everbough,” she said. “May the light fall upon you.”

He looked upwards, then shook his head, mumbling something to himself that even her sharp elven ears couldn’t catch. Then he turned to watch the fire. The silence stretched until Eskallia began to feel uncomfortable.

“How long have you been Inside?” she inquired.

He kept his gaze upon the flames as he answered. “Four years, forty-three days. Or twenty-three days.”

The uncomfortable silence had resumed by the time she realized he wasn’t going to explain, and lengthened until she had no choice but to speak again.

“What do you mean by that, ‘or twenty-three days’?”

He scratched his head. “I thought I was Inside, but then my screen said ‘Welcome to the Inside’ twenty-three days ago. That’s when I chose my name.”

Eskallia sat for a long time, trying to process what he had told her, the silence now a blessing.

He was in the Trial for over four years. She thought it again, just to make sure. He was in the Trial for over four years.

“You were in the Trial for over four years?” she found herself asking.

“One thousand, four hundred and seventy-nine days. It’s a very boring number.”

As faculty at the Academy and Dean of the Third Cohort, Eskallia understood the Trial very well. She knew her knowledge was a bit biased, as the Academy only received the very best performing Outsiders, but this was far past anything she had ever heard of. She was pretty sure there were mechanisms to bring students to the last stage of their Trial at the appropriate time. Even if there weren’t, or if they had somehow gone awry for this person, who in their right mind would spend such a length of time in that situation?

“What have you been doing since you arrived?” she asked.

Echelon’s gaze remained on the fire, his body rocking just the smallest amount.

“Identifying. Learning. I made this fire.”

Eskallia followed his gaze, and realized for the first time that there was no wood, just a small pile of stone.

“So you have a fire Source. Well done.” She couldn’t help but slip into her familiar role of teacher, now that she understood he was a very, very strange Outsider at the very beginning of his learning process, rather than an existential threat to the Garden as she knew it. “What else can you do?”

His Magus title was new to her, but she knew that such a title could mean something extraordinary. She was not disappointed. One by one, the flaming rocks of the fire began to rise smoothly into the air and circle around his seated form. Before her eyes, they began to stretch, elongating and joining until he was surrounded by a ring of molten rock, in what she knew could only be an imitation of her water spell.

He’s combining fire and earth! He shouldn’t be able to…

Her thought was interrupted, as the water she had abandoned to the ground minutes before began to rise around her, leaping from the earth in drops to join a second loop around the young man. The drops hissed and boiled when the loops intersected, and soon the second loop was a dense white band of compressed steam. It was only a few seconds more before his body sagged, and the two loops ceased their relentless motion, the magma falling to the ground, the steam evaporating to the sky.

“I don’t know how to do ice yet,” he said with a tired voice.

Eskallia fought the urge to draw her dagger and put her back against the boulder.

He’s a monster.

It wasn’t just four Sources. Such a thing was conceivable, though not advisable, as it would spread the practitioner too thin. No one in the Garden would have enough free points to do justice to so many Sources; even two was stretching it, and would guarantee severe weakness in other areas. But it wasn’t that he had four Sources, or even that he could use all four at once. It wasn’t even that he could somehow blend them, a feat she had seen performed before with two sources, though very rarely.

None of those things were enough to re-evaluate his status as existential threat to the Garden as she knew it. What had her heart pounding and stomach churning in ways they hadn’t since the day she was caught by a dangling creeper and became tempered was that he hadn’t been using any spells. She had just witnessed direct Source manipulation, something that .

What do I do with this? This Outsider could destroy entire cities, could…

She realized what, in fact, this Outsider could do.

He’s the answer. After all this time…

The clearing among the boulders was dark and the wind was driving away the residual heat. Echelon remained utterly still, but soon new rocks rolled into a pile at the enter, and once again the flames leapt in the air.

“I have a question,” he said.

“Yes?”

“What are free points, and how do I use them?”

***

The mists swirled and the fire blurred and receded from Lilijoy’s awareness.

“Library, pause memory,” Lilijoy said.

She sat back and rested the back of her head against the chair, staring at the stone ceiling.

Well, now I feel like an underachiever. Where do I even begin?

So that was Echelon. Perhaps she could begin with the most amazing aspect.

He had an even worse fashion sense than I do. Was that a bowl cut? Four years in the Trial… why didn’t I think of that?

But really, who would think of that? The Trial was a gateway, the thing you did so you could do the thing you wanted to do. And yet she had Nandi’s Boon. With enough time and training, perhaps she could repeat Echelon’s feat. Perhaps it was his raw power that allowed him to withstand whatever, well, trials were also coming her way. Or Attaboy’s.

She shook her head, thinking about all she had learned, thinking about her glimpse into the mind of Eskallia, and the sobering reason she had taught at the Academy.

She was trying to forge students into weapons against Sinaloa, and she finally succeeded with me. She finally found someone so naive, so malleable that she could turn them to her ends without them ever knowing.

Lilijoy found herself torn between humility and pride in a very uncomfortable way. How many students had been caught in Eskallia’s plans over the years? And was it really wrong, what she had been made to do? She had finally brought defeat, if not really justice, to Sinaloa, given them a measure of punishment for the terrible things they had done. Even if she was just a tool.

What frightened her the most was the realization that she wasn’t truly much wiser than she had been that day in the Grove when Eskallia had turned her into a vessel of retribution, that there were other beings like Eskallia, who had their own plots and goals stretching over far more years than she had been alive. She was still just as vulnerable, just as likely to flinch from safety and run to danger, not recognizing the difference until it was too late.

“Library how long are Eskallia’s memories of Echelon?”

Four years.

Just kidding.

Thirty hours.

Edited.

“Speaking of edited, what was with the censoring?”

I think

you know.

“Purgatory stuff. Do you do that?”

Yes.

She thought about that for a moment, as it had bearing on her other research project. It seemed that the Purgatory oath was taken very seriously indeed.

“Library, what happens when someone breaks the Purgatory oath?”

Can’t say.

What oath?

Well, that figures.

“Library, do you have any memories from someone who broke that oath?”

No

That was pretty definitive, more so than she had expected. The Library was quite certain that no one who had broken that oath had left any memories. Or it was misleading her.

“Library, how many written entries do you hold pertaining to oaths, their creation and enforcement?”

That knowledge

is restricted.

She had run into this before, researching about wards while preparing her infiltration of Averdale. She knew from experience that she could probably learn a bit, if she was willing to spend the time to narrow down the parameters of her inquiry. There might be texts with sufficiently oblique references, or memories from which she could infer an oath’s presence or penalties. It didn’t seem like the best use of her time at the moment though, fishing blindly for scraps. First, she would ask Rosemallow, and then maybe Professor Anaskafius. Once some time had passed.

Maybe Marcus or Anda could tell me more on the general subject too, she realized. I need to be better about asking their advice. Maybe even following it too.

It was a surprisingly difficult thought. She had been ripped from her life of abject ignorance so abruptly, given immense power she had only begun to understand and flung herself, or been flung, from one challenge to another. The universe seemed intent on setting her apart, pulling her apart, forcing her to rely on herself alone and teaching her the dangers of trusting others.

Is that how this ends, growing stronger until I can no longer relate to anyone? Then what, do I split myself when I need company? Entertain myself with my own internal universe of subsets? Or better yet, why not remove that need altogether?

What’s the point?

A wave of loneliness crashed over her, and at that moment she could only think of Eskallia, wandering in the desert, looking for something, anything to distract herself from her unhappiness. From the outside, it was obvious that her existence had become compressed, everything passed through a filter of retribution poorly masquerading as justice.

She was lonely too. I guess that’s one problem you can’t grow out of. And then she finds Echelon, someone… unique, and all she can think of is using him. She thought she knew why she was doing what she was doing, she had a purpose and it consumed her. Devoured her from the inside. Are those my choices, devoured by the Inside or from the inside?

Lilijoy sat in silence, thinking, trying to understand Eskallia, thinking of how powerful the experience of seeing through another’s eyes could be. She thought of the danger posed by Emily’s memories, her struggles to avoid losing her identity, the way she had walled them off. Now she had let Eskallia’s experiences into her head without a second thought.

Well, I guess I’m having the second thought now, right? Instead of being amazed by Echelon, or happy to have finally learned about him, I’m wallowing in a morass of… Eskallia. But only because it resonates, she resonates with me. There’s a big red button I can push to make myself happy, to remove the loneliness and doubt, so why haven’t I pushed it?

She had the power to change her own emotions, but increasingly she had become aware of an odd paradox, that it took emotion to change her emotions. There were times, and they were becoming more common, when how she felt made her very reluctant to alter her brain’s chemistry, even when she was struggling. It had become a real issue, ever since she had experienced the dichotomy between her thoughts in Stage Two and her biological mind without Stage One assisting. There was a fear it seemed, among her other emotions, a fear that she would turn into something monstrous, something unhuman, if she followed that path.

With a thought, she checked on her Outside self’s memories, suddenly anxious to connect to a part of herself unaffected by whatever mood had her in its grasp. She remembered her morning, analyzing Rule Two, watching chickens, talking to Sepehr. Now she was in the hovercar, nearly at the old spaceport.

She reached out. Hey self!

Hey yourself...self. I have an idea for you. Well for us, but since Eskallia’s memories are getting you all wiggy… anyway, what if we pulled the emotions from our soul vortex?

She could feel the reasoning of her other self, and they shared a memory of a similar conversation, a similar thought process, when the part calling herself Jiannu had pointed out the power they had, the leverage to look out for one another. Without meaning to, their thoughts converged, and she was one mind in two places, not split but simply herself, doing two things.

Since both of those things involved sitting passively, there was no strain, no sense of difficulty whatsoever. In fact, she realized that splitting her mind had been, while perhaps not a crutch, a necessary illusion, that the distinction between performing multiple actions and sorting multiple senses was a residue of sorts from an earlier stage of consciousness. Her brain, her system had the power it needed, whether she chose to perceive it as two streams of consciousness or one. There could be a continuum in the degree of separation, rather than a harsh distinction between selves.

A sense of uplifting clarity stemming from her perceptual breakthrough filled her, washing away the sense of futility that had infected her, that had been infecting her, slowly and subtly since her experiences in Averdale.

No, she realized, not futility. Trauma.

Her system was working to control the symptoms, effectively controlling them in fact. But it wasn’t the symptoms that were the culprit here, it was the higher order emotions, Anda’s so called rational emotions, that were impacting her. Maybe trauma wasn’t the right word for it. The events of the last month had begun to change how she perceived the world, and with the end of her innocence had come…

Experience? It’s is the opposite of innocence, but that doesn’t capture it.

She cast about for a word, a word that contained the essence of what she was feeling, what she was becoming.

Corruption.

It was a harsh word, but as she thought about the changes just within the past week, she couldn’t think of one better. Her experiences had begun to twist her in subtle ways.

She dove to her soul vortex and followed the swirling threads that captured her feelings and experience, searching for some evidence of her suspicion. If the spinning, multi-dimensional construct represented her foundation, the powers she had derived from experience, then she thought she might be able to see it, see the growing taint that was beginning to play a role in her world view. The core was within her and contained her, and so far she had only the faintest notion of how to use it.

The glowing threads of the path of joyful anticipation she had only just begun were the first thing she could discern in the mass of loops and twists. But rather than a burgeoning, she saw fading, or perhaps a growing lack of continuity, disjunct patches connected by the faintest threads. There was her encounter with Arpentra, a burst of diamond tinged with gold, and connected to that, around a curving corner that traced a dimension with no correspondence to space and time, she saw her most recent experience in the library, a smaller bundle of tangled pearlescence.

The most recent experience along her path, that tangle of glowing white, looked distorted to her, as if acted upon, or contained by an invisible repressive force. She struggled to make sense of it, to understand the parameters, the nature of the interaction between joyful anticipation and… whatever it was. It was an absence rather than a presence, and no matter how she tried to trick herself, to categorize and name the unknown, to assign it color, or sound or scent, her mind refused to give it form. The harder she pressed the more she felt an uncomfortable sense of confinement.

I wonder if that’s what claustrophobia feels like, she thought. It’s like trying to remember something, or come up with a word that I should know. Tip of the tongue spread across my entire being.

She withdrew, and the sensation lingered like bitter dandelion sap upon her tongue. She put that to the back of her mind and plunged back in, only to retreat in frustration, overwhelmed and disoriented.

I need something specific to follow. What is the thing I’m most reluctant to examine? Where is the most resistance?

She was thinking of Anda, his idea that fear was the warrior’s weight.

What am I afraid to find?

She returned yet again to the soul vortex, and this time tried to follow her own reluctance, pushing her perceptions against a gradient of fear. There was no traction, only frustration, and time and time again she found herself outside the vortex with no understanding of how she had returned.

This isn’t working. I need to follow something, trace my emotions about something or someone.

She ran through a list in her mind, Eskallia, Doctor Quimea, her encounter with Mooster, all the things that had impacted her so strongly. Then she discarded that list because it came too easily, her intuition telling her she would only see what she expected, that her soul vortex could be a mirror just as easily as a microscope.

To think the thought I cannot think,

the written word that has no ink,

I cast my gaze behind my head,

and find I meet my eyes instead.

Where did that come from? Why did that verse pop into my head?

But she knew, or suspected, why.

Consciousness is a narrative, but poetry is where the narrative and the unknowable meet. The place where the unconscious has its say. That’s where I need to look.

She slowed her mind to its pre-system state and took a deep breath, using her system to slow the restless waves of her organic brain, opening and falling into a state of theta wave meditation. Her thoughts rose and fell, pulsed and faded with each gentle stroke, and she opened her mind, released the relentless narrative of cause and effect. She diffused and expanded, allowed herself to evaporate from flask to open air, integrating her Stage Two processing with the process of unfurling the folds of her narrative.

After timeless time had passed, she allowed her story to resume, unhindered by constraints. In the glow of her reawakening she could see how a gradual force of compression, recursive thoughts of control and fear, had come to dominate her narrative. Two words surfaced.

Mud pies.

Now she knew where to look, where she might find the kind of traction within her feelings to begin to understand the corrupting influence of her experience. Not in her traumas, or the untold machinations she had modeled from her encounters with her adversaries. No, the way to understand the corruption was to follow what had become of her feelings towards Attaboy, the layers of armor she had created in the guise of caution, the manner in which her self-protection had become confinement, compressing and reducing her. Or even in her relationship with Anda, how she had begun to find reasons to keep him at arm’s length.

She thought again of Eskallia, the way vengeance had reduced and channeled the Head of School’s thoughts, no matter how vast her mind had become.

That’s what corruption looks like, she realized. It can take many subtle forms and it grows and feeds from the experiences we don’t understand.

With a thought she returned to the vortex of her soul, and now she could see it, the absence of meaning that permeated and intertwined within her being, pressing, reducing, severing and eroding, its consequences growing in step with her intelligence. It squirmed and twisted under her perception, or rather the act of perceiving it caused it to slip and twist, to escape her apprehension.

Oh boy.

Her Inside and Outside bodies slumped in their respective seats, as she felt the weight of the task ahead of her. But even as she realized what had been happening within herself, she could see that the corruption was fading in places, that already the simple act of observation had changed the dynamic of her mind, and she realized that her soul vortex was not a record of her past, but a conversation with her understanding in the present.

A new light was forming, not quite the white diamond of her currently chosen path, but something more like the first time she had seen the sun, the real sun, the memory of the sun on the Inside. It had a familiar golden tinge, and she realized it represented a feeling that had become all too rare in her world view. A feeling that, applied in just the right amount, was a powerful healing force.

Hope.