What? Inaria… is the Earth?

But the stars?! The purple stars above Lomb aren’t the Milky Way... are they?!

My brain started to slide sideways into a mire of confusion as I tried to process Lambert's words.

“It’s just a theory,” the inspector commented. “Don’t look so scared. You could have accidentally picked up the memory to read these words from the Astral Ocean.”

“I don’t think so,” I shook my head. “These words are in English. These are definitely English letters,” I pointed at the painting.

“Regardless of the fact that you can read this Einglesh, you have now told me your full story,” Lambert smiled. “If you’re a soul, a memory from long-gone Inaria, then you have no connection to the Inian necromags or chimera. You are human, but you're a stranger to Andross, who simply wants to find a new home. You will continue to work with us to solve the chimera infestation, yes?”

“Yes,” I nodded.

“Very good,” Lambert said, leaning back on his chair. "Then a home you shall have."

He looked relaxed.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t relaxed at all. I stared at the frozen skyscrapers. The architecture didn’t look like anything I’ve seen anywhere on Earth. I noticed a depictomancy rune in the corner of the painting and pushed a little bit of my mana into it.

The picture became alive, animated. Storm clouds broiled and covered up some of the dead, gargantuan skyscrapers. I rotated the small painting and the perspective had rotated a little. I saw that the buildings down below had far too many floors, looking like a horrid, insanely deep labyrinth of concrete and steel buried deep in icy glaciers. I shuddered. This definitely wasn’t Earth. It couldn't be!

The inspector’s theory had to be wrong. The English words had to be a coincidence of some sort. It had to!

“Do you want to keep this painting of Inaria?” Lambert asked.

I nodded, pulling the artwork closer to me.

“How big is Inaria exactly?” I asked.

“Oh about 500 million times that of Andross,” Lambert replied casually.

“What?” I gasped. "How is that even possible?!"

“Inaria is very, very large,” Lambert explained. “Even our wisest Archmagi aren’t sure how large exactly. Whatever happened down there had reshaped their world, twisted and stretched it… sort of like the Infinite Dungeon. As you can see in the painting, some of those structures look impossibly tall.”

"Like the Twisted Forest on level 20?" I mulled.

“Indeed,” Lambert nodded.

“These structures are one hundred million years old?” I asked, pointing at the snow-covered skyscrapers. “Surely metal and stone would have worn away, decayed after that long. Even Chernobylite would remain radioactive for only twenty thousand years at best…”

“I don’t know the word ‘radioactive’,” Lambert said.

“Radiation is a type of energy that decays very slowly,” I explained. "I can't be THAT old!"

“I mostly wanted to see your reaction," Lambert said. "One hundred million years is just the maximum estimate that I was taught at the Arcanarium. Time down on Inaria is broken. Info-gathering spells fired at the surface from the golem-landers tend to produce… impossible or absurd results. Some Archmages argue that the age of these buildings is zero. Inaria is one utterly gargantuan magogenic catastrophe zone, an entire world covered in the veil of death. Nothing can survive down there, not even hexagrammic golems shielded by a thousand runes.”

“I see,” I said with a shudder. "Is this just one of their cities that didn't decay away?"

"The entire world is covered this city," Lambert said, his expression completely serious. "The city has no end, no boundary. It simply goes on forever into the depths of Inaria. Many surface parts of it are buried under the snow and ice."

I gulped, the hair on the back of my head standing up.

"And the glowing rings are what?" I asked.

"Presumably, they are arcane... magitek engines a thousand times bigger than Andross," the inspector said.

"Holy crap," I blinked.

“I suppose the crystal you’ve touched preserved your spirit long enough for a magitek civilization to arise on Inaria that was able to break time,” Lambert commented. "From what I understand, depictomancers use crystal-containing ink to make their drawings come alive."

“Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” I murmured.

“Hrm?” The inspector raised an eyebrow.

“The place where I was born… didn’t have magic,” I repeated. “What we did have is artificial intelligence that could write books or paint pictures.”

“A world without magic,” Lambert rubbed his chin, glancing at the painting of the dead city on the surface of Inaria. “It’s hard to imagine how a civilization without magic could make something like this. These arcane megastructures have more than a thousand floors.”

“My grandfather taught me many natural sciences. The study of the natural laws of the universe allowed humanity to achieve incredible things,” I said. “We built machines from inert materials that emulated creativity and computed mathematical formulas a million times faster than people. We’ve had algorithms that looked at three hundred million paintings to paint a completely new picture of a cat or a landscape or a person that didn’t exist. Many scientists like my grandfather speculated that eventually the machines we’ve made would someday cause a Singularity effect… a runaway technological catastrophe beyond human comprehension.”

“An interesting theory,” Lambert nodded. “Our archmagi know not to dig too deep into the Astral Ocean because they’re afraid of uncovering the old, dead gods from the golden age and collapse of Inaria.”

“The builders of Andross?” I asked.

Lambert nodded.

“Does the Empire worship any gods currently?” I asked curiously.

“One,” Lambert nodded. “Eunisii Ei. Established two hundred years ago under Emperor Macellion the third, Eunisiism is…”

“That bitch!” I slammed my fist into the table. “No wonder she wants the other human gods out of the picture!”

“What?” the inspector stared at my enraged expression.

“That’s the full name of my chimera Master, inspector,” I confessed, my expression dark. “The Basq people are worshiping a Dungeon monster!”

“Now why would a chimera want to be worshiped by humans?” Lambert mulled.

One by one the lined dominoes of understanding fell in my mind. Eunice had brought chimera from the depths of the Chasm and set up the Tokimorimïtul village. She infiltrated humanity and grew her Soul-Garden. Her monwai agents established a religion that made her the goddess of local humanity. All she had to do was wait.

“Power,” I said. “The Still Forest… the afterlife which your mages call the Astral Ocean is able to concentrate power over thousands of years of people dying with a single belief. Her arcane garden is able to pull power from the Still Forest. Her goal is to live long enough to become a god!”

“Oh,” the inspector’s face paled. “It’s going to be a lot harder to topple the official religion of the Empire versus simply arresting the Seven Heroes. Countless Basquenate citizens all across Andross believe in Eunisii. For two centuries the Emperors and Baronial families have invested in building temples and monuments to her will and might across our Empire.”

Lambert walked back to his hidden shelf and pulled out a book handing it to me.

“The Testament of Eunisii Ei,” I read the golden embroidery on the cover.

A radiant figure wreathed in flame woven from gold paint stared at me from the cover with a serene, kindly smile. I recognized it. It was Eunice’s avatar, her imprint and allure song that I had witnessed myself when she had revealed her full aura to me three years ago.

[Hey,] I sent a message through a series of pulls across the vast expanse of the Infinite Dungeon to the other side of the Chasm.

[Hold on,] Alessi replied. [Go ahead.]

She had relocated her right hand into a small plate filled with sand. It was a method I had thought up that was a lot faster than the slow Morse-code communication.

[How’s things?] She asked by writing letters in the sand in Ukrainian.

[Weird,] I replied, by taking control of my sister's muscles in her other hand to write out the words in the sand-plate back to her. [Scary. I figured out what Eunice is doing.]

[She’s found a way to weaponize the humans en-masse?] Alessi wrote.

[Yes,] I replied. [We might be two hundred years too late to stop her. How did you…?]

[Everything is a tool to our high-cendai,] Alessi replied. [Are you planning on stopping her? You can’t just live peacefully in Lomb?]

[I…] I sent. [I… have to try something.]

[Please be careful,] my sister wrote. [Don’t make too many waves. Her monwai will find you. It won’t be nice when they do.]

[I know,] I sent. [I'm just making friends for now.]

[Good stuff,] Alessi commented. [Go make more. You'll need them.]

I stood up from a small pillow pile and circled the interior of Saccy. The small room was shrinking ever so slowly as Saccy was drying out. Numerous metal tools purchased from Lomb shops were hanging on nails and nets that I’ve hammered into the hard, now painted interior of my personal Folding Seed. I spotted the rolled up Dawn of Aeromancy poster sitting on the ground, in my pile of random things to sort. I picked it up, unrolled it and hammered it to the wall and pressed a finger into the activation rune.

The feminine figure in the portrait spun to face me. Since I was in Juni’s body now, the painted girl looked like an adult chimera with a long mane of ruby-hair gemstones.

“Where am I?” the future-me said, looking around. “Who are you? This isn’t the tower! Put me back into the pilot's room!”

“You’re in my domain now, drawing,” I said with a smirk. “My name’s Juni. I was going to hang you up earlier, but I had a bit of a relaxing vacation. I think I'm going to call you… Dawn.”

“Whatever,” the depictomancy poster sighed dramatically. She looked down at herself and frowned. “You are… not human?”

“Neither are you. You’re a drawing,” I pointed out.

“What do you want?” Dawn’s frown deepened.

“I want to talk to you. I want to figure out how you function, whether you’re really alive or not.”

“We can talk but I’m not going to reveal depictomancy techniques to you,” Dawn shook her head. “Apply to your local Arcanarium if you wish to study the arcane arts.”

“I could try taking you apart,” I mulled, observing my mana rushing from the circular rune into circuit hexagrams all around the poster, converging onto a yellow-tinted, two-dimensional, moving fractal structure that seemed to be projecting Dawn from itself. There was a bit of a blue shimmer mixed with the yellow.

Anima and Destiny? One thread to animate the painting, the other to make it predict my future appearance?

“I will overload my circuits and set myself on fire,” Dawn huffed. “Don’t even try.”

“Not a big believer in the third law of robotics?” I commented dryly as I opened a book and started to sketch the magical circuits, copying what I could see.

“Are you copying my circuits?! Stop that at once!” Dawn waved her hands at me angrily.

“How are you going to set yourself on fire?” I asked. “I don’t see any fire hexagrams in there.”

The painted chimera pilot squinted at me as I quietly drew more circuits on the page.

“You have great potential,” she commented. “You could make an excellent stratonavigator. It’s not easy to see the currents of magic without proper tools.”

“I appreciate the praises,” I smirked, looking up from my sketching. “Do lavish me some more.”

“You’d do really well at the Nemendias Arcanarium,” Dawn said. “It’s the best school in Illatius. The best instructors in the Empire can bring out your full potential.”

“How do you know about Nemendias?” I asked.

“My painter… Ambiss Huron studied there in 7986,” Dawn smiled softly. "Many of her paintings still decorate its walls."

I squinted at the moving ink that covered the glossy poster, trying to figure out how it functioned. Was it something like a liquid-crystal display screen? I stepped closer to the drawing, pulled out a magnifying glass from my tool pile and examined the minute grains of colorful glass that covered its surface.

“Are you Ambiss Huron?” I asked. “A little shard of her soul, an imprint held together in crystal-infused ink that makes up these circuits?”

“Every depictomancer leaves a bit of themselves in their works,” Dawn replied, rubbing her elbow. “Ambiss died twelve years ago. She left many works behind with her… signature. Many paintings that still live on and help the children of Illatius.”

“You feed on the mana of others,” I mulled. “You exist as long as I give you my mana?”

“An astute observation,” Dawn said. “There is indeed a bit of Ambiss in me… but I am simply a drawing imbued with purpose and fed by your magic.”

“There’s nowhere enough information here, for this much function,” I observed the hexagrams. “Not enough to make you this responsive or smart… Ohh.”

I found a signature in the bottom right corner of the painting. It didn’t move around like the rest of the art. [Ambiss Huron, 8047]. All of the hexagrammic threads seemed to converge into it. I spotted a silver thread jotting from the signature through the back of the painting. The thread vanished into the depths of the Still Forest.

“You said that there are a thousand more of you and even more works by Ambiss in Nemendias,” I said. “Does this mean that you’re a network? An intelligence created by Ambiss, spread over all of her drawings?”

I had built my anti-phantom armor with the purpose to protect me, by cutting parts of my soul and putting them to work as my defense. Did depictomancers carve small bits of their soul too, putting it into their drawings?

“A very astute observation,” Dawn stared at me warily.

Dawn was just an eye, a digit of reception of something far bigger than a single poster!

A network of paintings stretching across Illatius, an intelligence in the deep, that held itself together feeding on the people that talked to the drawings made by Ambiss Huron throughout her life as an artist.

“Do you want to be my friend, Dawn?” I asked with a smile. “I could use an Astral Phantom friend.”