Die. Respawn. Repeat.

He-Who-Guards stared at the painting of Isthanok, wondering why it felt so achingly familiar. He reached out for it and brushed the edges of the paint with a finger. His sensors reported to him all the ways it varied in texture, thickness, and color, none of which was quite the same as being able to feel it beneath is fingers.

That was nothing new, of course. He couldn't feel anything these days. The body he now wore came with many advantages, but a sense of touch wasn't one of them.

Not by default, anyway.

It had taken many nights of quiet patience from Ethan. Guard couldn't use Ethan's skills the way Ahkelios could—it was far more dangerous for him to even try, without the guidance of the Interface—but he could... interpret those skills, in a manner of speaking. Translate them into something he could use.

Together, he and Ethan had discovered that if he threaded the Firmament produced by Breath of Life through his body using a variant of Firmament Control, and threaded it through his body in just the right way, he could feel again.

Sometimes, Guard wondered if Ethan knew how much he'd done for him, in helping him restore that part of himself.

He fed his power into the circuit for Breath of Life until the air around him sang with brightened Firmament. Then he switched to the circuit for Firmament Control and began to carefully thread that power back into his body, feeding tiny filaments of Life-fortified Firmament into his fingers.

Slowly, the dirt and paint on the wall became something more than numbers and data.

He traced the edges of the painting for a long moment, not knowing what he was looking for. It was a traditional painting of Isthanok by almost any measure—not entirely accurate, perhaps, but impressive nonetheless. The biggest difference between the painting and the real city was that the citadel-shards remained intact, floating above the Great City and painting the buildings below in swathes of refracted light.

It was an interesting choice. A dedication not to what Isthanok was, but to what it could be. In many ways, the painting here depicted what She-Who-Whispers had always dreamed the city could be, and yet even in her years as the Trialgoer in charge of it, she'd never repaired more than a third. There was always some other, more urgent task taking up her time and attention.

Not infrequently, that task was him. Other times, it was something the Integrators demanded of her, some political fiasco involving one of the other Trialgoers, or some anomaly caused by the Trials themselves.

Guard's memories of those times were a fuzzy thing. He'd been incomplete for half of it, puppeted around for the other; he was only even conscious for barely half the time he spent patrolling and protecting Isthanok. Ahkelios had expressed surprised to him more than once that he continued to do so. In his position, Ahkelios claimed, he would never want anything to do with Isthanok again.

He could understand the sentiment, even if he didn't feel it. For Guard, protecting Isthanok was a duty, and he held no resentment for the city or its people.

Whisper, on the other hand...

Guard's fingers paused on a small bump in the painting. It was the tiniest thing—a spot where some errant paint had splashed onto the rock, dried, and then was subsequently painted over.

An imperfection. The words came to him without any conscious impetus; he hesitated, finger hovering over that spot as he stared. Something about it felt significant.

The painting of Isthanok was that of the Great City at its theoretical height. It was a painting of everything Whisper wanted this place to be.

Had she been here?

Why did Inveria matter so much to him?

Unlike Guard's memories of being an automaton, his memories of being a silverwisp were almost perfectly intact. There were gaps—empty periods of time in his memories that seemed too cleanly cut to simply be a fault of the transferral process. He suspected those were memories that Whisper had intentionally left out in the hopes that he would forgive her.

This wasn't one of those memories, though.

He remembered being in Inveria. He remembered admiring the walls and interacting with the citizens of the other Great Cities, learning about them, laughing with them. He remembered participating in the annual competition and painting... something.

Or helping to paint something?

He'd still been a silverwisp back then, he was sure of that much, but the memory he held was fuzzy in a way that none of the others were. Even his memories of his time as a barely-coherent Firmament puppet had a coherence to them that was missing here. It was like someone had taken a brush to his memories and painted out broad strokes of them, leaving behind something that didn't quite make sense.

The more he thought about it—the more he ran the memory through his head—the more sure he was that that was exactly what had happened. The changes were too precise, too specific. He could remember the conversations he had with others in Inveria, but not his time alone in his room. He could remember that he joined the competition, but not what he painted, nor who had helped him paint.

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He wasn't a particularly good painter, after all. Besides, the competition required a minimum of three individuals per team.

Guard stared once more at the painting of Isthanok, his fingers still resting on that tiny speck of imperfection.

He'd been here. He'd been involved in this. He was sure of it.

He could almost imagine the conversation that emerged from that tiny speck—Whisper demanding that they fix the flaw, himself making the argument that the flaw was part of its charm. It served as proof of their journey and a reminder of the moments that led up to it.

And yet, try as he might, there was nothing where that conversation should have been.

Guard was more resistant to memory alteration than most other practitioners. The size of his core was the sole reason he remembered the loops. Short of doing what Whisper had done and essentially dissecting it, any focused attempt to erase or alter his memories left traces they wouldn't leave in anyone else.

Before he'd completed his first phase shift, he might have still missed these changes. Even now, he could feel a foreign fragment of Firmament attempting to block him from examining these memories and trying to divert his attention.

The circuit for Firmament Control still flickered in front of him. Guard reached for it, and watched with a morbid combination of fascination and disgust as he pulled free a single remnant of third-layer Firmament. It had somehow been hiding deep within him, perfectly camouflaged until the moment it activated to try to once more redirect his attention.

It struggled in his grasp, third-layer Firmament trying to break free from his first-layer grasp.

Guard cocked his head.

Once, he'd considered the size of his soul to be a curse. The raw potential of his Firmament meant only that it would destroy him from within long before he really learned to use it.

Now?

For the first time, he really, truly leveraged the might of his soul, and crushed that piece of Firmament in his grasp. He didn't stop until he was sure he'd wrung out every last drop of malicious intent.

"I hope you are hungry, little one," Guard told the Void Inspiration still nestled within his core. Ever since they'd learned that Inspirations could be moved around through their bond, the Void Inspiration had stuck with him—in large part because of the sheer volume of Firmament he had to feed it. It perked up at his words, eager, and he fed to it the limp remains of the curse he hadn't even known he carried.

Then he glanced back at the painting on the wall. He took a moment to absorb it in its entirety—to memorize everything he could about it. His sensors recorded every bit of data they could.

This would be important, he knew. There was only one person with the ability to alter memories like that. One Trialgoer that had apparently infected him without him ever realizing.

It was strange. In practice, this was much like what Whisper had done to him, yet for some reason he felt within him the beginnings of an anger that was much, much deeper.

Perhaps it was finally time for him to find out where Whisper had gone to "recover." She had layers of contingency plans, he knew. If anyone might have something about what Teluwat had erased from him, she would.

Guard glanced down at his subconsciously-clenched fists.

And perhaps, he decided, it was best for him to give himself a moment to calm down before he returned to Ethan.

He sat on a nearby rock, cycling air through his vents and staring at the painting in front of him. At what felt like a remnant of his past that he didn't even know he'd lost.

Slowly, he began to draw Firmament into himself. The process helped calm him, but more importantly, it also pushed him ever closer toward his second phase shift.

When it came to Teluwat, He-Who-Guards refused to leave anything to chance.

The Web of Threads, Fyran explains, isn't supposed to be available to a Trialgoer still undergoing their Trial. Threads in general are supposed to be scrubbed away from any active Trialgrounds; the Integrators don't want to make Concepts particularly accessible, according to Gheraa.

The reality of it is a little more complicated, especially in less-surveilled planets like Hestia. For one thing, the complicated space-time anomaly that is the Fracture makes it extraordinarily easy to hide little things like Threads. For another, Inveria is deep underground, which also makes it largely immune to the scrubbing.

"Technically, Rhoran's in charge of getting rid of all the Threads," Gheraa adds. "So there's that."

I snort. "That explains a lot."

Fyran raises an eyebrow at this, but doesn't question it. Instead, he continues on to explain what he was able to learn about the Web of Threads during his time in the Fracture. Hiding from Hestia's Trialgoers meant he had to take his chances with any rifts that appeared within the Fracture. Sometimes—many times, even—those rifts killed him, but other times...

Other times, they led him to strange, self-contained fragments of history, and it was in those that he discovered the Web of Threads and what it meant.

"There's a spot in Inveria where you can really connect with the Web of Threads," Fyran says. "It's in the center of the city where all the tunnels meet. If you want to try deepening your core, you should start there." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

The fundamental nature of Firmament, it turns out, isn't all that different from the Web of Threads and how it works. I can see it, I suppose. Every type of Firmament I've encountered reflects on some Concept or the other, and they're very often linked—related in ways both small and large. The idea of Firmament itself is...

There's something there, I think. Coupled with Gheraa's explanation of the Sunken King and how all this came about.

Either way, step one of deepening, as Fyran explains it, is simple: connect with the Web of Threads and immerse it fully within your core. Understanding every Thread connected to it isn't important, only a connection with the Web itself. Once it links to the Firmament core...

"Just to be clear," Fyran warns. "It's going to hurt."

"And I'm going to have to die," I say with a sigh. "Possibly a lot. I remember."

"That part comes later," he says. He grins at me, though, and something kindred sparks between us. Nothing to bring two people together quite like the shared experience of dying over and over again.

"You coming with us?" I ask.

"Considering what you told me?" Fyran shrugs. "Not like I have anything better to do."

"Right." I glance at the tavern door. "I'll go get Guard."