The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

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"W-Wait, hold on," I said incredulously, "Was that Kam being blackmailed?"

The Lady gave a shrug. "Dunno. You were her friend. You tell me."

"It definitely sounded like her being blackmailed," I said, only partially even to her. "But I was with her for almost the entire weekend, and nothing ever happened to give that impression." I hesitated. "I mean, there was that thing she said in the armory about also being at the conclave for a reason, but... other than that, she only ever seemed fixated on the Order and us surviving."

"Once again, you don't sound particularly convinced of what you're saying."

I frowned in irritation. Of course I wasn't convinced. As she'd so helpfully reminded me earlier, I knew better than anyone how it was next to impossible to fully know someone and their ambitions.

It was just hard to vocalize complex confusion. It didn't fit with what I knew - or what I thought I knew - about her mindset during the conclave. None of this did.

"And she knew all this about Ezekiel and the Order's research even going in? And was working with Ophelia, even though they didn't..." I bit my lip. "And was that the same device Zeno gave me? Why would they be sending that to the Order, let alone so obviously insecurely? That doesn't make any sense."

"You seem a little overwhelmed," she observed, leaning a hand against the side of her cheek. She looked to the side. "Playwright, stop the recording for now, please."

PLAYWRIGHT: Er, yes, Your Ladyship.

I looked towards the other woman for the first time. "You were saying something about how this was reliable, weren't you? That Kam couldn't have just... I don't know. Made it up as some weird joke for whoever ended up here next."

PLAYWRIGHT: Y-es, that's correct.

I bit my lip. I was pretty sure she'd been saying something about 'rule five', too, but hesitated to change the subject to something which felt like a total non-sequitur. "And all of this happened in reality, too?" I asked, as the image in front of us flickered away. "And in the one loop I remember?"

"I can't speak to the specifics of what occurred in the reenactment you recall, but I can tell you something roughly along these lines happened in reality, sure," she explained. "Feel free to go see for yourself if you like. Even if there are restrictions on observing the specifics of people's past in the Reflection, just following their movements through inference could likely confirm a fair bit." She raised a gloved finger to her lip. "But I suspect the broader question you're asking is whether the circumstances at the onset were always identical, and yes, they were. Any deviations only took place after the machine was set in motion, so to speak."

So Kam was lying to me about her reasoning the whole time? And she knew the conclave could be dangerous? Why didn't she say something?I

This was too much new information about something that had happened a lifetime ago for me to process at once.

"It seems like you've quite a lot to think about," the Lady spoke, idling toying with the handle of her now long-empty cup. At some point I'd drained mine, too, becoming so absorbed in Kam's unfolding story that I'd stopped processing how weird the situation was. "Was this to your satisfaction? Is this the sort of help you wanted?"

"I--" I felt taken off guard by the question, blinking in confusion. "I... suppose..."

"But you're also realizing the extent of what you don't know," she continued, "or at least, you think you are. Hopefully you feel a little silly for rushing back here at full speed with an absurd proposal."

"I still don't understand why you're helping me at all," I told her.

She didn't respond to this, simply watching my face with an unreadable expression for a few moments.

I shook my head. If I couldn't reckon with the bigger picture right now, the least I could do was ask whatever questions seemed pertinent in this moment.

"You said that we largely behaved the same in the loop so long as the circumstances remained the same, right?" I inquired. "And from what I just saw, that seems... mostly true." Creepily so, even. "If I remember right, our conversation after the presentation went sort of the same way, at least until the part where Kam was talking about her old school. But..."

"You're wondering what causes events to diverge if the initial circumstances are always the same, I assume?"

"Well, not just that," I said. "What did it mean at the start, when it said 'scenario conceit: no death'? Does that mean, I don't know-- Whoever the 'Death' card represents in the Manse isn't there? And how is that enforced if the initial circumstances never change?"

She laughed, looking off the edge of the balcony.

"What are you laughing about?" I asked, annoyed.

"Nothing! It's a good guess. Surprisingly so, even." She sighed to herself. "You saw that, then? Even though you couldn't tell that Kamrusepa's account was denoted as truthful."

"Why would I be able to just tell?"

"While I wouldn't want to put any funny ideas in your head prematurely, over the course of the many loops, there are certain concepts that came to govern this world," she said. "You could call them a product of the same lack of resolution that produced the Manse. The people who have dwelled here for time immemorial have developed a certain innate sense for them-- And it seems you've yet retained some of that."

"What concepts? What do you mean?"

"Rules, as my Playwright mentioned earlier. Restrictions on conduct." She smiled with a chilly amusement. "You said before that the three tenants imposed upon me were tantamount to creating a murder mystery, but you don't yet know how true that statement was. By its very design, this world is a stage not just in appearance but in nature. The Order did not know what powers they were playing with."

I stared at her. If she refused to explain anything except in such vague terms as to make me even more confused, I wasn't going to dignify it with a response.

"Oh, don't look at me like that!" she protested, putting a hand to her chest. "Now you're being downright impetuous, even though I'm being so accommodating. I could have just let you deliver me your soul on a platter, you know."

"Right," I said flatly.

"I'll tell you what, Utsushikome of Fusai," she went on. "Do you think you could keep your existential dread in check for, say, a week? I promise you that's not a substantial portion of your remaining lifespan."

"I don't know," I said, all my earlier enthusiasm now having been completely extinguished in a wash of confusion. "I.. suppose."

"In that case, why don't we stop for now, and have ourselves a little cool-off period on your grand plan." She reached over to the projector, and - at a touch - it transformed into a leather notebook, which she slid across the table in my direction. "I'll leave you with the remainder of Kamrusepa's account up until the end of her first day at the Sanctuary to review in your own time, and if you have any further questions, you can use the same old method you used to get here to begin with."

"You mean, going out into the middle of nowhere and saying I need help."

"Precisely!" she affirmed, nodding. "I'll put my Playwright on call to come specifically and clarify any details you wish. That is, so long as they pertain to your ambition to learn the truth of what occurred on the weekend of April the 28th, 1409."

PLAYWRIGHT: Your Ladyship, are you sure this is-- Agh!

She was cut off by the Lady lifting up the teapot and dumping the now-lukewarm water over the side of her dress, her expression irritated. "No complaining," she spoke dryly, before turning back in my direction. "And for the rest of the time, I'd suggest you spend some time in this world and contemplate your situation. There are things I think you will come to appreciate that you, at present, do not."

"I don't understand," I replied, as the other woman looked despondently down at her soaked dress.

"Your thinking is still too anchored in the mortal world," she explained. "You don't have the framework to contextualize what you're seeing and being told. It's simply not fair to get you wrapped in anything in such a condition."

"No, I mean... I don't understand anything," I said, staring down at the table. "I don't understand why you're interested in helping me, all of a sudden. I don't understand your whole attitude. I thought you were giving me special treatment earlier because I'm the only one who has a finite amount of time here, but-- But if it's not to do with that, then what is it to do with?" My speech was jerky and stilted, my mind struggling to put into words its absolute confusion at her-- At this thing's behavior. "What's with your whole attitude? What do you want from me? Why did you put that 'justice and kindness' thing in your letter?"

She stared at me for another few moments, her lip turning downwards slightly, this time time seeming to contemplate the question instead of simply ignoring it like she had for most of my bigger-picture inquiries.

Finally, she smiled.

"Again, you asked why I called you detective," she said, "and that, too, is connected to the nature of this world." The burning light of her visible eye focused on me. "But that's not the extent of it. We have something of a history together, you and I."

"A history," I echoed. "From... during the loops, you mean? Before I did all this and lost my memory?"

"From before you lost your memory, yes," she clarified, then smirked. "Perhaps you could say we were friends?"

I double-taked. The Playwright, as she kept calling the woman - or whatever she was, maybe she was some sort of artificial being like Aruru - looked on nervously. "How could we be friends? I thought you said you thought of humans as basically insects." My expression grew grim. "And that you enjoyed watching us kill one another for thousands of years."

"How indeed? Hey, think of that as your homework for the next few days." She chuckled. "Maybe I'm not even speaking literally. Maybe I'm toying with you, everything I've told you about the nature of this place and myself is a complete fabrication. You should be skeptical, and doubt all that you arrive at save with your own reasoning. In this universe, an absolutely certain truth is a more precious thing than gold." Aruru reached over and collected my empty cup. "Thank you for joining me for tea, and good luck. Let's speak again soon."

Before I could reply, she snapped her fingers.

𒀭

I ended up back in my Domain after it was over. I still hadn't actually built anything in it, but the roof of the Manse was flat and wrought of a nice, smooth stone. I laid on my back, staring blankly into the golden sky, my mind feeling even foggier than the slum from Kam's recounting.

I felt spent. It felt like I wanted to sleep for a hundred years, but sleep wouldn't come.

A bed would admittedly have helped, but between this and how difficult it had been to sleep the night prior, I was starting to wonder if this was less about stress, and more an inherent property of this reality. If the body was renewed - rebuilt, effectively - every time one traveled between Domains, did that mean that the physical demand for sleep ended up fulfilled without the mental side? Did you have to be careful when you traveled, or else throw everything out of whack and end up feeling like shit?

I really was clueless as to how anything here worked. I still didn't even know how I was breathing air right now. Was it just automatically manifested wherever people went? How did that work with the restrictions on matter? Was it all just automatic, like how Ptolema had explained food worked?

One thing that felt different from the aftermath of our last meeting, at least, was that for the moment my anxiety seemed to have faded, and (though laggardly) my thoughts were strangely calm. It was nice; the first time I'd really felt so since waiting in the clinic lobby back on Deshur, right before I'd learned my brain was going to turn to mush. I couldn't even muster the passion to be pissed off at having what was effectively an actual demon tell me I needed to, if not in so many words, calm down and drink water.

I felt strangely embarrassed about the whole thing, now. She probably didn't even care about my stupid lifespan. I'd taken Ptolema's second-hand account of the local mythology, mixed it up with my own assumptions and sleepless mania, and made a leap so big it could bridge the Mmenomic Sea. I didn't understand how it had ever felt smart.

Stupid, half-baked idea. Like everything has been in my life for gods know how long.

I couldn't even bring myself to think what our 'history' together was supposed to have been right now, let alone the other aspects of the nature of Dilmun she'd alluded to. I couldn't even force myself to think about the weekend of the conclave. I was spent. All the big questions were just too much.

Instead, my mind kept going back to Kamrusepa. Every few minutes I'd lift up the book the Lady had gifted me and try to leaf through it, only to fail to find the focus.

It wasn't the stuff I'd questioned immediately, like whatever the hell she'd been wrapped in with Ophelia and Ezekiel and all the rest of them, and how much information she'd apparently held back from us during that weekend. No; more her as a person, and how I'd seemingly misunderstood her on a more essential level. It's a little mean to say, but I'd always thought of Kam as, well, sort of a narcissist. Not a stupid narcissist, but someone who wasn't self-aware and principally motivated by a desire to satiate her own ego and fulfill her desires. Who, for want of a better term, believed her own bullshit.

Yet hearing her talk frankly about her feelings... feeling less human than the people around her, doubting if there was any substance to herself beyond the face she put on for others... we were still obviously different people - where I reacted with self-pity and escapism, she seemed to respond with abject defiance - but now we felt more like two sides of the same coin. I didn't know the specifics of her struggles, of course, and I'd only seen a little so far, but... I felt it.

And it made me wonder: What would it have been like, if we'd ever really talked? Could we have been... well, it was wrong to say friends, since we had been friends, even if it only went as far as our silly little rapport.

But... could it have been more than that? Perhaps something closer to my relationship with Ran, even if I similarly never told her the whole truth?

It followed the same thread as I'd been pondering regarding Ptolema, back when she'd bought me the resonator on the way back from dinner. I'd always conceptualized my situation as unique, or at least, so bizarre and specific it might as well have been. But how many people out there had, completely invisibly to me, felt the exact same way for maybe many of the same reasons? Been burdened with sins and states of being felt made them disgusting, irredeemable, in solitude.

Was I the actual narcissist, for imagining my flavor of suffering as so bespoke, it was beyond addressing? If I'd been willing to trust more people - any people - fully, and damn the consequences from the government or my family, could things been different for me? Could I have found acceptance?

It's a moot point, I thought cynically to myself. You could never have opened yourself up like that. Even if you'd desired to do so, it would have been like trying to pry open the jaw of a shark.

You are what you are. You can't be anything else.

I frowned, shaking my head against the cold, smooth stone. That was the answer my brain produced by predictable default, of course, but I didn't want to stop here. I searched for a conclusion deeper within myself, fishing through the swamp of my flickering consciousness.

Obviously the answer is yes, at least in theory, my self-awareness, such as it was, finally chimed in. But that's not the issue, is it?

In the real world, you could never have learned all this about Kam organically; you would have had to expose yourself first. And every act of self-exposure is a risk, in one form or the other. What if she'd laughed at you? What if she'd reported you to the Censors?

What if she just hadn't understood, and you'd had to deal with the shame of another person out there carrying a part of you which you loathe so much, having gained nothing in the process? Like it was with Rekhetre?

The question isn't whether being known and loved is possible. Rather, it's a matter of statistics.

I sighed to myself. That was a more sophisticated conclusion, but still felt like so depressingly me that it made me want to roll my fucking eyes.

I suppose it came back to that idea I talked about back when we were going over my childhood; about allowing yourself to hope being a sort of gambling. You couldn't control your odds, only whether you chose try in spite of them, and sometimes things didn't work out regardless of what you did. One man could roll the dice and get a six on his very first try, concluding life was easy and turning his nose up at people who struggled, while another could try again and again and only get ones, only be punished for seeking happiness.

But the cold truth was that, if in response to this the second man stopped rolling the dice altogether, then he had no one to blame but himself. After all, the universe was as it was. That it was foundationally unfair was irrelevant.

You had two choices. You could keep rolling the dice, even if it sometimes made you feel like a masochist, or you could give up and rot. There was obviously more to it than that - I was a living example of how some forms of pursuing happiness and self-actualization were worse ideas than others - but it still ultimately came back to that choice.

I rotted because I'd chosen to rot. It was just that simple.

Still, when I thought about it like this... I felt a familiar feeling stir in me. Something bitter, childish, reactionary.

Fuck off! It said. It's not my fault! Everything was stacked against me! Why should I have had to force myself to risk everything when other people got to be happy and normal without even trying?!

A choice like that is no choice at all. It's the world that was wrong!

...Hm.

'The world was wrong'.

I'd thought that once before, hadn't I? In those exact words, again during my childhood, when things had been at their worst when I'd been at school.

The idea of refusing reality like it was an ugly piece of artwork. To look the very facts of nature in the eye and say, no, you can't be like that. You must not be like that.

Perhaps it was that arrogant impulse that was the very core of being a human; the act of implicitly challenging God, the urge to cheat the conditions all other forms of life simply accepted as the rules of the game and find a third option. When our little endurance hunter brains grew too big for our skulls, and started seeing abstract wants as prey.

Why should I have to spend every single day hunting?

Why should I have to carry all this wood back home myself?

Why should I have to waste all this time weaving this thread by hand?

Why should I have to wait so long for messages to arrive?

Why should I have to work at all?

Why should I have to get sick?

Why should I have to waste time sleeping?

Why should I have to die?

All change and innovation... ultimately born from the same lazy, immature impulse. The rejection of reality, and the pursuit of an easy workaround. Like wanting to become Utsushikome had been for the person I once was.

Is that what I'd been seeking, these past 200 years? What I'd meant by a 'miracle'?

I couldn't say why, in that moment, but somehow, making this connection felt important. Like I'd taken the first step on understanding something much broader.

I sighed to myself. I wondered if Kamrusepa had managed to become happy. Not here in Dilmun like I'd been musing about earlier - that was an interesting prospect in its own right, and I hoped I would run into her at some point, especially having now read this - but the real one in the Remaining World.

I ought to have hoped she was. But now that I had this idea in my head, I wanted to imagine our lives as mirrors. Of her failing in all the exact same ways, just spun in reverse. It made me smirk.

Time passed. I wasn't sure if I slept or was just daydreaming, but at some point, I made a more conscious choice that I needed to just take some kind of break. Maybe if let myself settle down, this situation would finally start to feel a little less like lucid dream, and I'd be able to process it rationally. Well, at least more rationally then I was currently.

Whenever I felt unmoored in the past, it always helped me to practice with the Power. Arcana was mathematical in nature, and mathematics was nothing if not reassuring. No matter what else was cast into doubt, it always remained the same. Where the laws of physics might bend or break, the square root of 100 would always remain 10 no matter how you scratched it.

I didn't have a scepter, so more complex Thanatomanacy was out of the question, but I'd improved a lot on the basics over the course of my life. I used the Form-Levitating Arcana to float down from the roof, then conjured a slab of lead over the edge of the floating island. I reached out a foot to step on it, but the first touch set it into a spin, causing it to drift slowly away from where I was standing.

Oh, right, I thought. I forgot there was no natural gravity.

I stopped the platform where it was using the Entropy-Denying Arcana - which took me about 10 times as long as normal without any runes - then considered how I could impose some. There were a lot of ways to create artificed gravity in Aetheromancy; you could give a surface an attractive force with the Matter-Convening Arcana, use an overhead repelling force like the Mimikos itself, or if you were looking for something quick and dirty use the Object-Anchoring Arcana with oneself and entire surface as a target. At a large enough scale there was even the option the Triumvirate had used, forgoing direct use of the Power and relying on on the force of the surface's movement through space.

But all of these were a little too out of my area of expertise to perform off the top of my head, so I wasn't sure what approach to take.

Soon, though, a thought occurred to me. Almost all Arcana in the Remaining World were designed with energy efficiency as the foremost concern - things that could be accomplished simply were done through roundabout means to their use more viable as a matter of course. But that wasn't the case here. Eris was unlimited.

So... didn't that open up a whole load of new options that normally would be considered too stupid? Like simply putting the Air-Thrusting Arcana on repeat to push everything uniformly down with a force of wind? Or the Magnetic-Tuning Arcana to create a charge attraction?

And so I spent the next 30 or so minutes messing around with different techniques, experimenting my way to some crude solution that would allow me to stand upright on the lead platform. I wondered if this was like things were for the very earliest arcanists of the Mourning Period, except without the need to constantly keep a fire burning to supply eris.

I'd never really got a chance to do something like this before, since using the Power was so tightly monitored, but it was sort of fun.

I eventually realized you could cheat if you simply directly attached whatever you were building to the Manse's island, but that opened the way for new experiments. I conjured large blocks to made crude structures, using different kinds of base elements to roughly coordinate the color without having to try anything complicated. I started a fire using a small amount of ethanol.

This has got to be drawing from my pool of matter, right? Can you get a sense for that, somehow?

Eventually, I tried conjuring a pool of water to drink in a crude stone bowl, since all this activity was making me kind of thirsty. It was at this point that, for the first time since my arrival in Dilmun... I finally caught a proper glimpse of my reflection.

And my heart jumped.

It's crazy, right? I'd been here for close to two entire days, and hadn't done something so basic. The Lady had been right. I'd been acting absolutely ridiculous.

Ptolema had been, at least from her perspective, right. I didn't look noticeably different. Compared to even her, my face was virtually unchanged as it had been in the real world; the same nose, the same jaw, the same eyes. It was no wonder that she hadn't noticed a difference.

But... I could see it.

The face looking back at me wasn't the one I recognized from a few days ago, the last time I'd washed up and tidied my hair before setting off from my apartment. Nor was it the one from the weekend of the conclave. It was subtly younger than either; unmarred from the subtle shifts of time and stress of sleeplessness and adult life, the little things that built up between the numerous therapies we'd developed to extend our youth far beyond its natural course.

It was probably a coincidence - if whatever process generated one's body here always tried to bring it to what it would have been on its best day, as Ptolema had explained, then it was only natural to look like someone 17-19 ish. I doubted there was much to read into in terms of the self-image part either; even if I had trouble identifying completely with my face, it wasn't like I had more sentimentality for the old one.

But still. It gave me a bit of a shock. Then, slowly, brought on a more solemn feeling.

I stared into the fire-lit waters like that for several minutes. Then, slowly, a strange idea began to drift into my mind.

The rules on observing meant that you couldn't see anyone else in Dilmun, which other than making loose confirmations in the way the Lady had described obviously made it kinda useless for ascertaining the truth about what had happened at the conclave.

But those restrictions didn't exist on observing oneself, obviously. That was necessarily true by the fact Dreaming was possible at all. I'd apparently gone back to the point just after the conclave.

But what if I went back further?