Die. Respawn. Repeat.

It's hard to describe exactly what Miktik does.

She feeds her Firmament into the orb — that part I can read easily enough with my Firmament sense — but imbued within the orb is a blob of Firmament that looks nothing like any imbuement I've seen so far. It looks almost like a spiderweb. Small strings of Firmament reach out and connect to one another and to the edges of the orb.

Miktik's will acts as something like a filter. The orb itself passively pulls on all the ambient Firmament around it, dragging it into all the different strings within. I can sense Miktik plucking away at those strings, somehow manipulating them so that different types of Firmament get sorted into different strands.

She's extracting information out of the Firmament around us.

"Don't you have privacy wards all over this place?" I ask. "That filters out a lot of the Firmament getting in and out, right? It's gotta be harder to use if you do that."

"Shh," Tarin scolds me, but Miktik actually looks up.

"That's why I've been having trouble with divination lately!" she says. She doesn't exactly snap her fingers, but she does something that's a rough equivalent, rubbing two of her legs together and producing a spark of Firmament. "I didn't even consider that! You're right; we should do this outside."

She scampers off her table, grumbling all the while. "I'm gonna have to make the contractors come back and redo the ward. You'd think professionals would warn about something like that. Would it be so hard to make it a one-way privacy imbuement?"

"We'll catch up with you!" I call after her. Miktik's voice fades away as she makes her way through the tunnels of her own home. I look at Tarin with a raised eyebrow, and he concedes with a grumbling sort of huff.

"You know," I say. "While we're here and Miktik isn't around — next time we loop, how should we meet up? I don't think you and Mari should be risking life and limb to rescue me from chimeras every loop."

A little bit of scouting will let me evade most of the chimeras, I think, but the best method so far seems to be to just fly over them all — and flight is unfortunately not on my list of Interface-granted skills yet. Maybe the next time I bank my credits.

Then again... maybe if I use Crystallized Strength and Warpstep to get enough Air, and then use a few Barriers to keep myself moving?

"Easiest if we meet in village," Tarin says. "You fight chimeras! It make you stronger."

"I'll fight one or two, but I don't think I can fight the entire forest," I say dryly. He's not wrong, and if I just charge into the next fight without preparation I'm liable to get myself killed — but I can't just spend a few loops doing nothing but fighting chimeras, either.

I mean, I can. It doesn't sound like a good idea. There's too much I need to be doing that would also function as training regardless.

"I think I can find a way to get to you," I say eventually. "I'd rather you don't have to come out to look for me. Can you stay in the village until I find you?"

"I sleep." Tarin nods. I laugh; he does spend the start of every loop sleeping.

"Just don't tell Mari about the loop," I add. "We can prank her. Make her think it's weird that we know so much."

The lie tastes bitter on my tongue. Tarin looks, conversely, awed by the idea — though there's a flicker of something in his eyes that makes me wonder if he knows what I'm trying to do. What Mari and I are both trying to do, really.

He seems willing to go along with it. "Okay!" he says. "I wait. You come soon. I not wait long. If you take too long I go Great Cities myself."

"Works for me," I chuckle. "Mind going to check on Miktik? I want to talk to Ahkelios for a bit."

This is probably the greatest opportunity for me to talk to Ahkelios about his experiences with the Integrators. Even if the privacy Firmament around this workshop is relatively weak, it's better than the nothing we usually have.

Ahkelios remains silent until Tarin squeezes his way out through the tunnels, then hops up onto the desk in front of me. "What's on your mind?" he asks.

"We know other people have looped here," I say. "But... I think that's what the number behind the planet's name is. Hestia 307B — I'm the three-hundred-and-seventh looper. There have been three hundred other Trials on this planet. The entire planet's been temporally locked for however long it took the Integrators to run three hundred and six Trials."

Ahkelios doesn't respond, but his Firmament does flicker slightly in distress. Three hundred is a bigger number than either of us were expecting, I think.

"How do you know?" he asks.

"Back when I spoke to the Heart," I say. "Or when the Heart spoke to me, I guess. It said it's been through this whole thing a little more than three hundred times. The numbers feel too close to be a coincidence."

Ahkelios closes his eyes. I don't know what's running through his head. It's a long moment before he speaks again. "Then they're all probably gone, aren't they?" he says softly.

It takes me a moment to grasp what he's saying. "...Probably," I say.

I don't know what's happened to his planet. But depending on how long the Trials run, it's very possible that everyone he's ever known is already dead. The Integrators never specified how long we have to complete the Trials — probably because they don't care how long it takes, as long as we eventually get to the Heart — and if that's the case, then who knows how many decades have passed since Ahkelios' Trial?

Centuries, even.

Naru said the Hotspot I explored was used in the fifty-seventh Trial, and Ahkelios has memories of that Trial. Accordingly, he's probably the fifty-seventh Trialgoer, which means there have been almost two hundred and fifty Trials since him. If every Trialgoer lasts for a month, that's still twenty Earth years. If every Trialgoer lasts for a year, then it's been more than two centuries since he was last alive. "Do you know how long you were in your Trial?" I ask gently.

It's not an easy question for him, I sense. Ahkelios winces a little bit, rubbing his head, and I feel the draw on my Firmament increase as he tries to recall. "...Years, I think. I don't know more than that."

His voice is quiet and subdued — far from his usual cheer. I hold out a hand for Ahkelios to climb into, not knowing what else to say, and he climbs up on it gratefully.

"You should tell me about them sometime," I say. "The people you left behind."

Maybe it'll help in some small way. Ahkelios hesitates before he answers. "I will," he says. "But... not yet. I don't think I'm ready yet."

Because talking about them will feel final, in some way. He doesn't need to say the words out loud for me to understand; I'm familiar enough with grief. It's hard to grieve properly when you don't even know for sure, and everything about Ahkelios' situation is uncertain.

We don't even know if his people ultimately succeeded in the Trials.

"Let's go see what Tarin and Miktik are up to," Ahkelios says, nodding back towards the tunnel-entrance. I nod in silent agreement.

Miktik isn't very far outside. There's a small clearing by her workshop full of assorted junk and gadgets, heaped up in disorganized piles, and she's sitting at the center of them while performing the same Firmament-sorting I saw before. The only difference is that she's actually doing it slower.

Which makes sense, I suppose. If the Firmament out here is more information-dense, I imagine it's harder to sort through, but also a lot more useful.

"How long does she usually take?" I ask Tarin. The old crow is standing by the side, digging through one of the piles of junk.

"Not long," Tarin says. "She fast. Unless Rotar hard to find. Then maybe take longer."

"Doesn't look like she's anywhere close to done," I mutter. The strings of Firmament within the orb are only multiplying, like her search query is getting more and more complex. "She hasn't met Rotar before, right? How does she know how to find him? Is the name enough?"

"Name enough," Tarin says with a nod. "Too many things make harder. More variables. You no worry! She will find."

My concerns are less about her capabilities and more about what the Heart said. Temporally dislocated. It's possible that they're just not possible to find yet.

"These are some really strange results!" Miktik says. I blink. Is she done already? "Come take a look!"

Tarin and I both approach her, and she holds out the orb and channels Firmament into it. A half-dozen strings of Firmament spin into light, forming tendrils that look disturbingly like worms reaching out of the glass. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see, exactly—

—but then Miktik does something strange, twisting the orb and injecting a different type of Firmament into it. The threads unfold and expand, and reconstruct themselves into a picture of...

"Rotar!" Tarin says excitedly, hopping to the orb to take a closer look.

I, on the other hand, am frowning — and Ahkelios is equally silent.

The picture of Rotar that Miktik has generated is surprisingly high-resolution and in full color, but several things about it are strange. For one thing, Rotar and K'hkeri—or Ikaara, I suppose, in this form—are both transparent, like they aren't fully there. For another...

I recognize the stone buildings, the dangerous-looking stairs. That's the Fracture.

"What're they doing in the Fracture?" I ask, frowning.

"Why he invisible!" Tarin flaps his wings agitatedly.

"Most importantly," Miktik says. "This is live."

Ah. That makes things worse. Because both Rotar and Ikaara are standing completely still, frozen mid-step.

Temporally displaced. I turn the words over in my head a few times. They look a little like they're stuck in time, shifted slightly out of alignment.

"They're moving," Ahkelios says. "Just really slowly."

I blink. He's right. It's almost unnoticeable, but they are moving just a little bit, with Ikaara moving just a little faster than Rotar.

They were mid-slipstream when the temporal storm happened. My best guess is that they're shifted in space and in time, a half-step out from the rest of reality.

"The hell're we supposed to do about this?" I mutter.

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