Chapter 1289: The Origin of the World
“A demon?”
The two witches looked at Roland with momentary blank surprise. “You mean — the alien species from our world?”
For ancient witches, people from the Cargarde Peninsula presented a particular difficulty that had nothing to do with reason and everything to do with bone-deep conditioning. They bore a resemblance to demons that the centuries had not softened from the witches’ memories; every encounter still reached into the same reflexive combat posture, regardless of conscious knowledge that these were human beings who lived and reproduced as people did, who had been integrated into this world’s society for generations. Roland had spent considerable effort persuading his Taquila companions not to act on those instincts. To then ask them to resume vigilance, to apply demon-protocol to someone in a convalescent ward surrounded by Awakened martialists — it required the right choice of messenger.
He had chosen Phyllis and Dawnen: the first witches to enter the Dream World with him, the ones with the most time in this world, the most practiced at concealment.
“Think of it that way, if it helps,” Roland said. “I’ll explain what I’ve observed, and why.” He laid out what he knew of Valkries — the memory fragment, her behavior in the sanatorium, Fei Yuhan’s account of the history books — and what he didn’t know. “There’s no magic stone on her, which is the one clear difference from a real demon. But treat her as though there is. Watch her behavior, her patterns. Be careful.”
The history books. That detail had not left him. Learning this world’s history was the most direct path to understanding it — and the most revealing method, because a native of this world would not read it chronologically, as though mapping a foreign country. They would already know it, the way a person knows the layout of their own house. Valkries was reading from the beginning, building a picture. And Fei Yuhan, who had told him this with the easy manner of someone sharing a casual observation, had almost certainly known what she was doing when she shared it.
Both worlds were, at this moment, experiencing the Erosion. That was not coincidence.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” the witches said.
“Even if she turns out to be a demon — don’t act in the sanatorium. The Awakened there will notice, and we cannot afford attention. What I need to know is how she came through the memory fragment.” He let the implication settle. Room 0510 was not a portal to a single consciousness; it was a gate onto a foreign civilization, an entire city where another species lived. If others could follow where Valkries had come, the scale of that problem extended well beyond one recovering patient.
“Your Majesty — what if you encounter danger while we are absent?”
“Don’t worry. This isn’t the real world.” The Fallen Evils had demonstrated the limit: they could not touch him unless he sought them out. His body here was a dream’s image of a body, and the dream protected its dreamer in ways the waking world did not. “Stay safe. Call every few hours.”
“As you command.”
They placed their hands on their chests and left.
The room had moved.
Epsilone registered this as she entered — the familiar shift of passing from ordinary space into somewhere that no longer quite obeyed ordinary rules. The floor and walls ran with a low crimson light, slow and dark as candles guttering behind colored glass. It swayed and didn’t resolve into steadiness.
This was the overlapping place, where the two realms leaned against each other and the physical world became provisional. No external force could reach in here. No record of it existed anywhere that could be found.
Betta was in the center of the floor, half-kneeling, both palms pressed flat against the stone. Half-transparent, like a shadow someone had half-erased. He had been in that position for more than two weeks.
“Still not finished?” Epsilone asked.
Delta stood motionless to the side. His mask flickered as he registered that ordinary mind-communication was suppressed here, in this space between the realms. He found his voice — the physical instrument, awkward from disuse.
“This world has expanded considerably. A full analysis is no longer straightforward. But Betta is nearly done.” A pause. “And you? Did you find something?”
“The magic power robbers have laid a trap.”
“I expected as much.” Flat. Unsurprised. “A reasonable plan — but we don’t need their scattered offerings anymore.”
Epsilone said nothing. She stood, and the crimson light moved across her.
The rules of this world constrained even oracles. They operated as agents of God, but they were not exempt from the world’s conditions; they had to work within them, exploit them, rather than simply override them. Direct destruction was difficult here. The more effective path was to destroy the creator of the Realm of Mind directly.
This world had originated from a consciousness. Like load-bearing columns in a structure: remove the creator and the edifice falls, and the magic power, no longer held by the architecture of the dream, would find its way back to the Divine Domain. Natural as water running downhill.
The difficulty was locating the creator within a world now grown vast and layered. That was what Betta was doing. That was why they had struck the Prism City — to harvest the magic power necessary to fund the analysis, to give Betta the material he needed to search.
Locating the creator, however, was not the same as removing them. The creator existed inside the world’s protection, wrapped in the same fabric that held everything else together. The last few attempts had failed against that protection. To bypass it, they needed to draw the creator into the crack between realms — the seam where God could reach through and alter the rules of the dream directly.
Even oracles might fail at that.
But they were running out of time. They were God’s remaining option. If they failed, God would dissolve the Realm of Mind entirely — the work of thousands of years reduced to nothing, everything built here returned to raw potential. They did not want that. The Realm of Mind did not deserve that ending, if any ending could be said to be deserved.
Beyond a doubt, the fault lay with the creator.
Epsilone pressed her fists closed. Opened them.
What is this?
Something was happening in her chest that should not be there. A pressure. A directional pull toward an emotion she had no name for — or rather, had a name for but should not be able to feel. Oracles did not carry emotions. That was not cruelty or design flaw; it was simply what they were. Emotion was the material of created beings. Oracles were instruments.
When had this started?
She looked back along the sequence of recent events, searching for the point of contamination, and found it.
The traitor. The execution.
She had gone in under cover, approached cleanly, the operation proceeding exactly as operations were supposed to proceed. The traitor had not noticed until it was too late — and then, inexplicably, had not resisted. When Epsilone’s arm had passed through her chest, the traitor had simply held her — held her, the way someone holds something they want to keep — and spoken one sentence.
Epsilone did not remember the words. She remembered the voice: how familiar it was, despite having no reason to be familiar, as though it reached something pre-linguistic and older than memory. And the warmth. A warmth like returning to somewhere she had been before she knew she had a self.
The traitor had smiled, at the end. Tranquilly. As though this was the resolution she had wanted.
Why do I keep returning to this?
Why does it make me angry?
Anger was an emotion. She should not have it.
“What are you thinking?” Delta asked again — flat, patient, limited to his voice because thought transmission was blocked here. “Say it.”
“I —”
The room shuddered.
Betta opened his eyes.
The half-transparency resolved; he was fully present, both hands lifting from the floor, rising to stretch before him. Three blurred shapes materialized on his palm — condensed from light and inference, gradually gaining definition as the lines reorganized themselves into something interpretable.
“The analysis is complete.”
Delta’s attention fixed on him entirely. “What did you find?”
“Three creators.” Betta’s hands were steady, the figures on his palm still clarifying. “But only two remain. One has already been eliminated.”
Epsilone read the structured information before it was spoken aloud.
The traitor, Lan. Significance level: 1%.
Self-cognitive being, Zero. Significance level: 42%.
Unidentified being, Roland. Significance level: 57%.
She stared at the third figure.
The warmth that had no origin moved through her again, slow and unwanted.
She did not speak.