"Well," Errod said, "this does put a damper on our plans to break through any barricades."

Yeah. There was exactly one way to destroy the creeping void in front of us, and I'd hurled it blindly into the future. It didn't seem to be growing like it had before, which was great news, and there was a gap that we could maybe crawl under although I was hesitant to suggest it given the way Katrin was staring at the blackness. She didn't remember it killing her in Storm's Keep, right? It had happened too quickly, and then I'd undone it. Remade her and Errod, like it never happened. But man, that look. She was way too... blank.

My divination had warped and failed as I'd walked closer, disrupted by the damage to the planar membrane. I'd hopped back into my body, and then immediately backed away and left it again so I could poke at the edges of the effect. It was like the boundary between planes had been crumpled up and mashed until it stopped existing entirely, and that... didn't seem right. The Clockmaker was some sort of super genius, at least with magic - hell, he'd invented a whole language by himself and nearly everything now ran on that language. Was this the best he could do? This horrible twisted mess? It seemed unlikely.

The device had been described as being for terraforming, and it would have needed to cover a whole plane. This? This was not its intended use. That being said, the Hierophants of Oblivion would be all for destroying everything which meant... it was working this way because they couldn't make it work on a larger scale. Probably. "Okay. So. The dickheads of oblivion have been here, and... I'm assuming you guys want to turn around rather than crawl under it, right?"

Errod looked thoughtful and dropped to the ground to try and see under. "I can't see, it's swallowing all the light. The darkness has a different quality to it lower down, I do think there's a large enough gap that there wouldn't be any real risk of touching it. And given the fact that there's only a light breeze here, it's not actively pulling air in."

That was a thought I hadn't even had yet. If it had been a true void, the atmosphere would be rushing through. Instead, as Errod had pointed out, there was just enough wind to feel it. That implied there was still some sort of boundary to it, that the planar membrane wasn't fully gone. "Katrin, could you maybe send another light over there but keep it low to the ground?"

Katrin was still gazing into the abyss in an unhealthy way, and for a moment I thought she wasn't going to answer. "Calliope... is this... why don't I remember what this is? I feel like I do, but also... you said it was the Hierophants of Oblivion? So is this... is this the thing they tried to use through the portal? How do you know what it is? Why does it look like this here, but at Storm's Keep it... I just remember that there was rubble everywhere, and body parts, and everyone looked scared."

"I remember because I absorbed what was left of Connie," I lied, "and... yeah, this is the thing that destroyed the old timeline but it never got set up right this time around. I assume Ulren helped them with it the first time, so that he could have a blank slate to time travel from. But he's not here... probably... and even if he is he hasn't had time to fuck with it. So instead it just makes this big branching area where Azaraze is melded with the current plane. While the device is on it would keep growing, but this looks stable so we don't have to worry about that."

I realized I'd probably said too much, and decided to patch a plot hole before she could ask about it. "This is all based on his notes and stuff, from the lab in the last timeline. But they didn't say how long it would take for the melded areas to go away after the device is off. I assume they will, sooner or later the planes will try to fix themselves. Right?"

Katrin finally turned to look at me. "Calnon is still extremely dangerous, even after thousands of years. The wild magic unleashed there twisted everything, and lingering effects have... changed... but not fully dispersed."

"Okay so what I'm hearing is that we shouldn't wait around for it. Errod seems like he's willing to crawl under, rather than waste hours walking back and getting out from the last station and then spending even more hours marching back over land. So... you want to send a light under, see how it looks?"

That little voice was back, whispering that if I was a good friend I wouldn't even suggest it. That Katrin was clearly traumatized by dying somehow even if she shouldn't be able to remember it, and crawling under the void was going to be really bad for her. Hell, doing that was a questionable choice to begin with. But man, I really didn't want to walk all the way back - so I told myself there was no harm in looking.

After a moment Katrin did send another orb of light up ahead, this time sliding it underneath. It seemed to dim as soon as it was underneath the anomaly, and while I knew that it was probably just the lack of reflected light it still felt... well, spooky. The gap turned out to be plenty large enough for us to slide under without any risk to our bags - let alone ourselves - and the tunnel beyond was clear. It was just this one branch of darkness poking through from whatever had happened up above.

On a whim I turned on my threadsight, wondering if there was some way to sever unwanted threads with this thing. Interestingly, that didn't look possible - a few fate threads were passing right through it and seemed just fine. One was from Errod, which was interesting - he had another that was visible on Brinkmar but which was veering off in another direction. Probably Trallanar. I noticed the thread shift and turned to see Errod had moved to hug his sister, whispering quietly to her. Hmm. Now that he'd noticed she was kinda freaked out, he was almost certainly going to suggest we turn around.

I felt bad for being annoyed, I knew I should want Katrin to be comfortable, but honestly I also just didn't see how that would be an option here. The curse meant we couldn't just wait for everyone to clear out, and in the meantime we'd be bound to run into trouble one way or another. Our best bet was to go to a large city where there would be old evacuation points, and try to sneak out. If we happened to also get to see the palace or something like I was hoping, well, that was just a happy coincidence.

Another option would be to just tell them what had happened. So they'd died. So what? I fixed it, right? And they'd died before - hell, everyone had died before since the world ended. Even I was partly just a created copy at this point, although I at least also had my mind and soul from the original run. They were a bit degraded, sure, but it did lend me some continuity. Actually, that was probably why Katrin seemed to kinda sorta remember it. Her mind and soul would have been on their respective planes, so when her body died... well they wouldn't have turned into a ghost, right? Because she didn't die in a normal way, she was obliterated. So when I remade things they got hooked back up, and her brain was reset, but her mind and soul would have held onto some little bit of what had happened.

That was, presumably, why so many of the people that I remade looked upset or confused. When it had been everything, the first time around, the other planes had collapsed too and so there was no leftover trace aside from me. And Ulren, I guess, though in his case since he disappeared in a blast of temporal mana he might have skipped past everything to the future rather than truly living through it. Either way. The point was that I'd done a hack job. This train of thought wasn't useful and I knew it, but I was trying to avoid making a decision on whether or not I should tell them what happened. Even if they took it well, would they be mad I hadn't just told them right away?

And I couldn't explain the real reason why, that was for damn sure. I couldn't tell them that I'd been thinking about how I maybe could have stopped the world from ending before, and how I murdered someone that - from what I could remember - had been really nice and supportive when I'd been in a shitty frustrating place. And I'd just... figured it would all be okay so long as I used Ulren's device. I wasn't any better than him.

Maybe a bit better. That guy is the fucking worst. But still.

"Katrin, you good? We can go back, it's fine, but I want to decide so we can get moving." I was vaguely aware that I hadn't chosen the nice way to handle this, or the honest way. I hadn't steamrolled her though, and for whatever reason that was the best I could do. I felt... stretched thin. Spending so long just marching down the empty tunnels while I thought about my fucked up memories and what might have happened to me was rough, and I had to keep synching up with Mecha-Callie which made me retroactively aware of being stuck in that body. It was getting a little more familiar over time, but it was still unpleasant.

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I'd tried to have my other mind do fun stuff, but instead I was just moping around. It was like when I had a day off from Harlan's Hardware and could do anything in the world but instead just sat there scrolling on my phone. I could go into any memory, see anywhere I'd been before in this world through divination, try to create new places and experiment with my abilities, or just relax and read. But no. I was being a sadsack and idly wandering the hallways of my mind.

Katrin pulled away from Errod. "I'm okay. Something about that blackness just really bothers me. We... we can go under."

Errod turned her to make sure she was looking him in the eyes. "You're sure?"

She nodded. "It makes sense. There's going to be danger regardless, and we want to get to a city. It's fine."

I wasn't about to argue, so I walked over to the void to go first. There was a lot of room, but it was still a bit scary; I found myself remembering a time that I was trying to go between two buildings across a plank, and I just told myself that if the plank had been on the ground I wouldn't have had any trouble balancing on it and so clearly it was just fear holding me back. I resolved to just pretend there was solid ground on either side of me and relax, and then the board snapped in the middle and I fell all the way down to the alley and almost died. Good times. I was fifteen and thought that the parkour videos I'd been watching were just so cool, but as I fell off that building it didn't seem so cool anymore. I didn't ever stop doing some stupid shit and climbing things I shouldn't have, but that was the last time I did it just because it looked cool.

Anyway, this wasn't to impress anyone and I did, in fact, have solid ground under me - but to be safe I flattened myself against that ground and wriggled my way across on my side so I could see as well as possible, with Katrin's light hovering nearby. Only one section was low enough to be at all concerning, and even then it wasn't taking up the whole tunnel. There were some other branches that were smaller, and just on principle I went past them too before I stood up. Then I turned on a light and hurried down the tunnel far enough to get my divination back on in case another deadshell was nearby.

The others all got through without difficulty, although for just a second it looked like Errod was going to stand up into a narrow branch of void that was sticking off at an odd angle. After just another half hour we came to what appeared to be a station, but it had been through hell and there was rubble everywhere. There were also huge metal barricades blocking the exits, and strange holes tunneled into the ground. Katrin sent some lights out to illuminate the place - we hadn't been stealthy anyway - and I started to climb onto the platform to see what the best way to proceed might be.

"Deadshell!" I said, pointing, and Katrin dutifully blasted lightning at the approaching construct while looking totally unconcerned. Well, good to know that plan worked. Mecha-Callie was there an instant later and slammed into it like a freight train; I wasn't sure if it was reeling from the lightning attack or surprised that another deadshell was attacking it, but it didn't come close to dodging and cracked into a support beam so hard that it left a cartoon-style dent shaped like its stupid peanut shell body.

Errod looked less confused than the time before, and I thought about the way he'd shrugged off the tentacle thing in Nusos so quickly. With the guidance of the spirits in the glove he struck repeatedly, taking all three legs out from under it as I arrived and threw my ghost back to my body, already attacking even as the apathy effect tried to overwhelm me. I'd had a chance to plan for this, focus my thoughts, but even so there was a part of me that was suddenly thinking this was boring and I wanted to go do something else - why bother with all this planning for in case we needed to fight... a deadshell? Wait. I pulled the squirming spirit out and my body pointed to it. "DEADSHELL!" I yelled, and another blast from Katrin hit it.

The creature died instantly, seemingly already injured from the initial attack even though it'd still been in its casing. Everyone stood around a moment shaking our heads and pacing around to dismiss the adrenaline that was arriving late to the party. Still, it had gone ridiculously smoothly - nobody had a scratch on them. The thing's presence implied there was no good exit, despite the tunnels and damage to the structure, so we started trying to decide on the easiest way to blast our way out.

This mostly involved me using divination to pop through walls, and while some were very thick I quickly found a barricade that had been patched; from our side it looked like all the others, but on the far side you could see that someone had expertly smooshed the metal around to fill a hole. There was also a very dead deadshell laying nearby, and a lot of corpses stacked against the wall. I could vividly imagine the scene, someone breaching the wall just a little and deciding that, for sure, there was nothing there to be concerned about. Make the hole a little wider, and then gosh... why is everyone suddenly needing to lay down and take a nap?

Whoever had finally dealt with the construct had blasted it clean in half, and then cut one of the halves in half again. Judging from the distance between the parts, it had probably tried to keep fighting after the first division. I popped the others into my memory palace so they could see for themselves, and then Katrin got to work on her spellbook. Her trick with the two-dimensional shield wasn't going to work; it wasn't actually two-dimensional, and it couldn't dig into things as it formed. Lightning and fire and other energy attacks were likewise not going to get the job done, and she hadn't been able to figure out any transmutation magic yet. That left force attacks, and the only ones she could do were for large areas.

That meant it was time to encode something with the hexes on the cover.

She popped them up and started sliding them around, and I could finally sort of see what she was doing. Mostly it was defining the shape as a wedge, turning a wide blast into a force spike. But I could see that she wasn't confident in it, re-wording it and re-arranging it over and over. She wasn't writing a whole spell, just setting variables, so I wasn't getting the full picture. She finally stood and faced the spot I'd marked on the barricade, gathering mana and unleashing her modified spell.

It barely made a mark.

She held up a hand to keep me from saying anything. "I know. Hang on. It's just... if I narrow it, it doesn't constrain the sides like you'd expect. It's not building on itself, it's... it focuses to a point but it doesn't push forward as a solid object, so the point hits and then the sides hit and the shape isn't doing anything. I need... I need it to be more like the shield, but moving. A block of solid force that flies into the wall, not this... shove."

She fiddled around with the runes some more, then flipped through the pages of the spellbook, then fiddled with the runes some more. Twice she actually cast something, and if anything it went worse than the first time. One was a barely-visible cone of force that just hung in the air motionless, and one was basically a light breeze. She was getting more and more frustrated, almost growling to herself as she roughly slid the hexagonal tiles into place and then reset them. Errod looked concerned.

"Fuck!" she yelled, in English, and threw the book down. I hadn't ever seen her this annoyed, and I suddenly wondered if it was because she couldn't stand the thought of going back past the void again. I was trying to decide what to say when a flickering glow lit up her eyes from behind, and with an inaudible whisper the barricade wrenched forward so violently that it cracked the tunnel all around the edges. My ears hurt from a sudden pressure change, and then the weakened section of the barricade ripped open with a rush of air and Katrin staggered and almost fell before Errod caught her.

"Hey Kat," I said, "honey, uh... what did you just do?"

She giggled, steadying herself and pushing Errod's hands away. "I... just made up a new spell. It's... I made overlapping layers of force, and then... it's almost like a hammer and nail, but as they move in relation to each other they trap air inside and compress it. It's... the other spell kept moving the air around more than anything, see, and I needed it to all go one direction. And... it um... it worked."

She sounded a little manic, but shit. She'd earned it. Technically you could make a new spell really easily in High Imperial, but there was a difference between the magic equivalent of "Hello World" and a spell that had multiple combined effects woven together. This was the kind of shit people had to write down in a book. "Yeah, I'll say it worked. Okay, what are you calling it?"

"I don't understand."

"You gotta name it. Katrin's Pressure Blast. Or... I don't know, Katrin's Wall Cracker. Katrin's Air Spike."

She shook her head, but she was still grinning. "That's - to the extent that any spells have names, they're just descriptions of what they do."

"Well, not anymore. Fuck that. You can think about it for a bit, but you have to give it a proper badass name."

"It doesn't have to have my name in it though, does it? It seems... egotistical."

Errod looked back at us - he'd been examining the damage. "This absolutely needs your name on it. Katrin's Instant Entrance."

"Oh that's good," I said, "you've got a knack for this. Hey, side note, not a big deal but just uh... just a quick question. Do you think anyone in Evellunis didn't hear that?"

They both froze, smiles dropping. Mecha-Callie ran up and widened the hole, and we scrambled out into the upper part of the station. It was probably a good idea to get somewhere a little further away before anyone could come to investigate. We hurried up the stairs, through a long abandoned lobby, and out into an open courtyard. Smoke drifted up from somewhere nearby, and a dozen bodies were scattered around like discarded toys. A circular platform was embedded into a building across thew way, clearly one of the flying discs Errod had guessed they were using. And yet... it was deathly quiet.

We picked a direction and began running, looking for a good place to get behind cover. Mecha-Callie had snatched up Katrin, and I'd pulled a knife out to be ready for anything, but rather than the enemy when we turned the next corner I saw a broad, empty street - and looming over it a half mile away was the diamond palace of Evellunis, seat of the Queen of Brinkmar.

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