Memories of the Fall

... The Dreaming Gates are strange places. Not of any world, yet all worlds of a certain import contain them. Sadly, what role they were originally brought into being to fulfil seems now lost, largely to folklore and time. What is certain is that all those we know of predate the written records of human civilisation in the lands in which they are found. Some are thought to be gateways between the lands of the living and the dead. Others, way stones that link either important times, or perhaps important places.

They take many forms, some natural and some patently constructed. A tree that has always been there. A pile of stones that always manages to have some local import to the people near it. A circle of ancient stones. A cave where the wind seems to sing and people stayed when the world was dark. A pass through which the sun rises or sets in an auspicious manner. A lake of blue waters, high in the mountains, filled with bones. All are peculiar in their own way.

A few hardy scholars who have ventured deep into them, or who have had strange encounters around them speak of misty lands, of dancing peoples and ancient song. Some even claim to have seen the edges of Eternity within. The Uncreated Place.

Certainly, the places within them are not for the weak willed or those without experience of the transmundane. The most famous of the claimed lands beyond is Elf-hame. The ancient thrones of the elder peoples of old. Others have said the paths to Elysium, from the songs of old, can be found within, or even the shores of Abzu, the waters beneath. That dread place men now call the Star Ocean.

More ominous still, some claim to have seen the shadows of the first people. Those fearful, mythical pioneers who led us down from the trees, who named the first things, spoke the first words, made the first songs and dances. Our ancestors who looked up at heaven, and down at earth, and said simply, ‘Now... we are the masters of this place.’

Excerpt from ‘The Mirrors of Being’

~by Caius von Lonhafven

~ Jun Arai & Jun Sana – The Perilous Realm ~

The breakfast picnic near the shore seemed to be a daily thing, they discovered. It wasn’t always the same group either. Some days it was just Elaria, on others, there were as many as six people. Starting each day with observing that event, they then spent the following week roving around the valley. The initial impressions on the first day were largely born out Arai found, to her relief. It was almost impossible for them to be detected, and if they were, it was assumed they were just some spirit or other weird phenomenon. The ’genuine’ phenomenon they also observed occasionally, which appeared to be spirit-like creatures, either animals or plants that wandered at whim and played petty mischief for the most part.

For whatever reason, very few people from the complex up above ever came down into this part of the valley beyond Elaria’s group and a few batches of guards. Those that did, were largely younger people dressed in homogenous robes who grumbled a lot and were directed around the villages and fields doing largely menial tasks that were quite familiar to her. Namely weeding out petty threats and local security. None of them showed any inclination to spotting them either, which was a relief.

Their explorations also led them to several other larger villages and gave them a fuller idea of the scope of the valley, which was far bigger than she had previously expected. Its four directions were much as they had been outside. North was north, the academy was in the east, the mountains and rugged valleys were in the west, with Thunder Crest looming like a black spike in the distance. It truncated with the giant waterfall and more rising forest to the south.

On the third day, they climbed back up it and explored the forest, but it was largely without suspense and had been as it was when they came through it. All that had changed were the species of the trees which were a bit less subtropical and more deciduous. What danger did exist was in the form of qi beasts like spiders and some very violent monkeys, but these, just like the people of the valley, ignored them.

Their explorations revealed a few other complexes in the northern reaches of the valley, including a massive fortress that squatted below the ridgeline that was the source of much of the military in the valley and the school’s main gate. The latter was much more impressive than that little side access they had been led to on the first day. The name of the school, Sana finally deciphered by the afternoon of the fifth day. Initially, it had seemed quite simple, but the more they looked at the language being used here the weirder stuff became.

‘Saints’ were known to them. It was a realm within the various divine cultivation methods that cultivated the Dharma and dealt closely with matters of fate. There were a few such cultivators in South Herb Picking. They were tolerated because their acolytes mostly did charitable works and helped the sick and poor. Bureau Doctrine was ambivalent on them, but the Blue Morality Scripture did not tolerate them and largely viewed them as competition somehow. ‘Roberta’ was clearly a given name in the context where ‘Saint’ was the title. If you messed with the letters a bit in Easten it became something close to bright, or blazing... or maybe shining? However, ‘Academy’ caused issues with trying to derive the possible compound vocabulary from what they knew. The phonetics were easy but the meaning of them basically became ‘High Teaching’ or maybe ‘Elevated Wisdom’.

Over the following days, this became a matter of ongoing debate between the two as their childhood fluency in Easten slowly returned to them. On the one hand, calling the place ‘Bright Saint’s Elevated Wisdom’ would be entirely in line with the weird and abstract naming many sects and schools in the Imperial Court’s sphere of influence on Eastern Azure went for. But both of them had to concede that it didn’t scan right for what they knew of the language.

In the end, they were forced to conclude that the Easten they knew was probably a derivative variation of this language. Perhaps people in the distant past also made it here and learned bits of the language and adopted it. Probably the alphabet and phonetics. Those were used frequently in lay documents in West Flower Picking Town to help define nuance in the various local scripts, usually with no reference at all to their original meanings in Easten. In any case, the variant of Easten spoken here was much more concise and fluid than the one they knew and, once you got a handle on the weirder issues of past and present tenses, a lot more convenient in many ways. In the end, they came to the conclusion that they would call it ‘Bright Saint Great School’.

It seemed to fit, mostly. Although they saw no obvious evidence of any of the elements of a ‘Temple’ or ‘Faith Pavilion’ one would associate with a Saint so maybe that word meant something different here.

To learn the language faster, they started using large swathes of the capacity of their precious recording jade-work scrips to record random scenes in the villages and fields so they could listen back to the conversations and puzzle out more complex words. Their scrips had a really useful feature there, to allow them to convert spoken text directly into written script. With a bit of fiddling, she managed to create a crude setup on it to parse the local Easten script to their own. It was a small mercy that their functionality had not been affected in the slightest by the way qi worked in this place.

“It’s funny… looking at how useful these are,” Sana said staring at her own scrip as they sat on a grassy bank overlooking some women washing clothes in the river.

“Do you remember how horrified we were when we discovered how much they cost?”

She laughed at that. She did indeed remember. The first ones they had gotten had been on their tenth birthdays to help with their schooling. When they had gotten upgraded ones made from Grandmaster Li a few years later they had discovered exactly how much the unassuming jade-work enchanted tablets really cost. Now she had to agree that the small fortune they had paid to Grandmaster Li for these upgraded versions was worth more than a thousand times its weight in spirit herbs in the intervening years...

“So what do you make of their…I guess means of cultivation?” her sister asked eventually.

“It’s certainly…” she trailed off, not sure how to express her views on it. “Unusual?”

“I’d have gone for befuddling,” her sister sighed.

“It feels like there is no way a method that pulls in so many directions could actually work,” she agreed.

“More likely we are just not seeing the piece that joins it all together,” Sana said, sounding a bit frustrated.

Truthfully, sat there, she felt equally frustrated. It had been a momentary bright spark of hope that bloomed upon that discovery, only to be cruelly smothered in its cradle. The way it behaved to them was, to their admittedly basic observation, in line with what they understood of Spiritual Cultivation. But there were also aspects of Physical Cultivation, Dharma Cultivation, Soul Cultivation and even Treasure Cultivation. That list covered nearly the entire gambit of cultivation types extant on Eastern Azure and in combinations that were, as she understood it, quite incompatible in a few ways.

Unfortunately, never mind the group who met each morning on the lakeside, who it was clear at this point were not any sort of beginner in an art, most people who practised the strange method were already over that critical point of creating their foundation. Children, if they were taught such things, were taught at home, and taught early. Young adults were all at least approaching whatever their equivalent of Golden Core was, and most of the guards, never mind the students were stronger than they were to the point of simply exerting a faint pressure if you tried to investigate their foundations.

“Don’t forget that it seems like there are a bunch of different methods or law things as well,” she added.

“Mmmm, I was just looking over that recording,” Sana sighed, putting the scrip aside.

“Elaria seems to practice something like Soul Cultivation, or maybe it’s closer to being a Sword Immortal or Treasure Cultivator, Halla looks like a straightforward Spiritual Cultivator and Marcella is again something like a Treasure Cultivator, or maybe a Body Cultivator?”

"What I wouldn't give right now to be able to ask Ling or Juni..." her sister sighed.

That much they had gleaned over the past few days from the moments the group talked about their methods or theories over breakfast. They were oddly collegiate in that regard.

"Yeah," she said, trying to sound convinced there.

The two of them shared freely, but even amongst their close circle of Herb Hunters, Lin Ling and Kun Juni, there was something of a distance in regards to the fundamentals of methods and practice. That was just the way it was.

That did, however, briefly bring up the spectre of her friends’ fates; hopefully, they were okay. It was hard not to dwell on some things. Especially now that they had these moments where things were, if not less stressful, then the stress was less prominent.

“It doesn’t help that the discussions, especially that one this morning about the ‘way’ the world ‘structures’ or something, are so esoteric that I got a headache just listening to it without understanding,” she said eventually, turning her mind back from those more maudlin matters to the topic in hand.

“It certainly seems they have a rather more robust view on fate and karma or at least are not so constrained in how they can talk about it,” Sana mused.

“Unfortunately that’s not helpful to us,” she felt compelled to point out. “Unless we want to just sit on a rock and meditate to death.”

“Stop infringing on my territory,” Sana giggled. “I’m meant to be the voice of sour gloom, you’re the voice of patient and hopeful optimism.”

“…”

She eyeballed her sister for a second before just shaking her head.

“So what else did they talk about that we missed in the moment?”

“Scenery. Complaining about teaching in the school,” Sana puffed out her cheeks and sighed again. “It’s all interesting if you’re a chronic gossip I guess, but nothing much to help us there.”

-So, the same as before then, she added to herself.

Mostly those who came to the breakfast picnics talked about that other stuff. The scenery, teaching, what they had done before they got here….

The latter was quite interesting, when they could follow it. When they couldn’t it was like listening to disjointed anecdotes in the queue to Mrs Leng’s shopfront or eavesdropping in the teahouse. What they could grasp was that there was a war going on between two great clans, their names indecipherable, in a rival country that was spilling over into the neighbouring lands. The politics of the nation Elaria came from were becoming increasingly difficult. Frustratingly she never elaborated in detail because the others seemed to know what she meant.

Marcella talked a lot about her home city which sounded comparable to a hegemonic power from the central continent. It seemed to have a lot of politics and was ruled by a group of three powerful experts called the ‘Eternal Tri-um-vir-ate’. It was apparently a great military power with vast reach in this world. Halla spoke not only of this land, but also a lot of the country she currently lived in, ‘Renhallan’, which was apparently on a different continent to the one this place was located. Its capital was a great coastal city, which traded a lot and was also ruled over by an Empress.

The world as it was portrayed to them seemed to have Emperors and Empresses to spare. The dynamics spoken of were certainly very different to their own Eastern Azure Great World.

Those discussions also told them that this school had at least two big rivals. A place that was very confusingly named the ‘Orthodox Wise Gathering’ and another great school in the country on the continent to the south called the ‘Divine Imperial Great School’.

She was just about to turn to Sana and ask if anything had been said about the ‘local’ conflict when the world twisted.

Compared to the last time it occurred, this was much less jarring, for all that it occurred in the middle of the day. The horizon bled through itself in a 45-degree arc. Everything appearing to move without actually moving. There was a heart-stopping pause, and then everything twisted through itself in a series of very non-imperial geometric transformations before snapping back, largely to how it had been.

“What…?” Sana groaned beside her.

She looked at her sister, who was now flat on her back. The ground level had changed subtly so she had just fallen half a metre.

She stood and stared at the valley below. Much of it was unchanged. The river course was a touch different. More gravel, less...

“The people are gone?” Sana frowned, sitting up.

She scanned the distance. The women washing clothes below were indeed gone, but now people were working in the distant fields. The unripe crops were now fully grown.

“The season changed,” she mumbled.

“…”

They both turned around to look at the forest above them. Before it had been greens and paler green. Now it was a riot of oranges, reds, blues, greens and golds. Looking back at the valley, other changes started to pop out at her. A lake moved. The large stone circle was still there, in roughly the place it had been, prominent on its hill. The clouds had shifted and the light felt quantifiably different. The summer warmth was gone in the air, leaving autumnal chill alongside the empty, yellow, sunlight.

A strange sensation of wrongness crept over here and a weird crackling started to intrude into the sounds of the world around them.

The sound of faintly cracking stone…

Turning, she saw for a brief, horrifying moment the containment runes on their storage talismans, currently sat on top of their heavier overgarments on the bank dissolving…

Without thinking she dived for them and kicked hers away from her clothes and precious scrip. Sana was ripping hers off her neck and throwing it away even as she scrambled back.

*TWHACK*

*SHUUUNK*

She flinched as space abruptly twisted. The expected lethal collapse of space didn’t occur, instead, their talismans just turned inside out and spewed all of their contents randomly in a twenty-metre radius over the hilltop before falling to the ground as shattered jade. One of the large water jars wobbled precariously in the aftermath, where it had landed on a slope. With a curse she threw herself for it, managing to grab it just before it fell over.

Shaking, she checked it wasn’t damaged. They only had 50 litres left, spilling it would have been a disaster.

“What the ever accursed fates!” Sana exhaled, even as she scrambled over to help her with the jar.

It took a few moments to find a flat bit of ground to put it on where she was satisfied it wouldn’t fall again.

“Are the scrips okay?” she asked nervously, still supporting the jar with one hand while she checked it for cracks.

“…”

Sana stared at her dully, then dived for the nearest one, fumbling with it for a few seconds before sighing in relief.

“Yes. Thank the fates.”

The rest of the stuff was easier to deal with. They stashed the food and fasting pills that remained in their packs along with the most valuable of the herbs in smaller jars. Everything else just got piled up in a few of the other jars or on the ground and left where it was for now. It hurt on an existential level to just see the pile of spirit herbs, rare wood and ores in a pile on the ground, but there was no way to store them or bring them with them.

The following two weeks became a strange cycle of frustration and lingering stress. Perhaps it was the autumnal weather, the colder temperatures, or just the subtle change in the light, but it became harder and harder not to think about their dwindling food supplies. It was also becoming more apparent to her that the pressure this place was exerting on their metabolism was getting stronger rather than weaker.

The material pile, they eventually moved to a small rock shelter in one of the hills on the edge of the valley. It was an area that had been in their minds for a while, if only because of the weird set of three stones that always seemed to be in a state of random flux on a nearby hilltop. Beyond that though, all their exploration and exertions became curtailed as they both struggled to limit the expenditure of their remaining, very limited qi reserves.

By her measure, she thought it was the sixteenth day since the previous change, when everything twisted through space again in the same fashion it had before.

The season changed again. Winter now, with snow drifted high on the ground. It was shocking in its own way because one moment Arai found herself standing between two hills wishing it would stop raining, and the next she was in the middle of a small snowstorm, up to her breasts in snow that was not pleased to find itself disrupted by an inexplicable person.

She was certainly glad she was wearing her heavy robes. At least to begin with. By the time she had her bearings and struggled back to their base of sorts, she was wet through and struggling not to succumb to wasting qi to maintain her body temperature.

Sana was sat in the entrance, looking equally bedraggled and staring in a disgusted fashion at a small fire nearby. Staggering over and sitting down by it she eyed it as well.

“So, it turns out that with this, we are no longer deemed worthy by the world of feeling warmth,” her sister said with a cold sniff.

“Well, in fairness it might have always been that way,” she pointed out.

“Possibly, but even so…” Sana spat into the fire, which hissed.

“Maybe the place is just as sick of us, as we are of it,” she added, sitting down next to Sana.

“Euwww… Get away, you're even colder than I am,” her sister snivelled.

After they had sat there in the cold and the gloom for a good thirty minutes she noted another nuance to their circumstances that was, if anything, just adding another layer of weird onto it.

“Our clothes are drying, and we can get warmth from that… but not from the fire directly?” she eyed the flames sceptically.

“I am so over trying to make sense of what does and doesn’t work as normal in this place,” her sister muttered from under the robe they were currently sharing.

The snowstorm finally passed in the pre-dawn hours, allowing her a brief look at the starry sky before the sun rose. In the early dawn light, the landscape before and below them did look spectacular, she had to admit. Swirling snowdrifts and frozen fog obscured many of the hills around them. In the distance of the positively yin morning, she could see smoke rising in spirals from the nearest village.

“At least the people are still here,” Sana observed sourly, trying not to sound like she was chattering from the cold.

That prompted her to consider her own physical situation. With fasting pills, they were basically prolonging the problem of running out of food. However, they were now faced with the prospect of a week or two of this kind of weather before the valley, hopefully, shifted again. They might well run out of their remaining pills and be forced to start eating spirit herbs before that point.

“So what do we do?” she asked. “Sit here and try to conserve energy? Or go find a house attic or barn to lurk in?”

“…”

Sana stared silently out at the sea of snow below them.

“Well, I’m going to see if we can even get out of here, without having to swim through snow,” she added after a further moment.

“…”

“We go together,” Sana said with a weary sigh, pulling herself to her feet.

“Better that than getting separated and stuck.”

It was possible to navigate in the areas with rocky outcrops, but outside of those places the snow was so deep that it went over their heads. It also held a remarkable chill, beyond anything she had ever experienced with snow. Not that that was much, admittedly. West Flower Picking Town was on the side of the subcontinent where it oscillated between tropical humidity, seasons of nothing but rain and periodical droughts when the winds on the ocean changed. In the end, she had to acknowledge that passage out to the wider valley was to all intents impossible without fairly ludicrous exertion. Exertion neither of them was willing to risk in their current circumstances. It was a humbling moment to realise that while their physical condition was still pretty good, they were now just as limited as normal mortals in the face of this extreme environment.

They were making their way back across one of the rocky outcrops where the snow was a bit shallower when Sana grabbed the back of her robe and hauled her up short

“Look, over there, at the three big stones.”

She turned to look in that direction. The stones themselves were vaguely where she remembered the perpetually shifting ones from before being. Now, however, they were stood upright in a crude circle in the dell between a bunch of hills and had acquired a bunch of much smaller outer stones. Sat at one side of them was Elaria, wrapped up in a thick dark robe, staring pensively into the gloom.

As they both watched, from the next hill, the woman got up with a sigh and cast off her outer robe. Reaching out a hand, she stood there for a moment until a sword blurred out of nowhere and appeared in her grasp. It was about a metre and a half long, made of a flat black metal and rather unostentatious. If she squinted at it hard, it could be a variant of a Jian, but the blade was longer and thicker and a lot less flexible looking.

Pensively, Elaria swung it around in a few exercises and then started to go through a series of sword forms. She kept that up for almost an hour. Rhythmically flowing through movement after movement in a slow, fluid dance.

“Those three stones, do they look familiar to you now?” Sana said with a frown.

“Familiar? They are the stones that were changing?” she stared at the stones surrounding Elaria.

“They aren't the stones that were shifting,” Sana said. “I thought they were at first, but those are still over there.”

Her sister pointed off into the afternoon light. She followed the direction of her gesture and sure enough, on a distant hilltop, the other set of stones was still shifting slowly. One and then another fading in and out of the gloom as they gradually interchanged with each other.

“So why are these familiar then?” she asked Sana, trying not to let tiredness creep into her voice.

“They are the other point that doesn’t change,” her sister said, eyeing her dubiously. “Don’t you recall how we talked about that?”

She did, in fact, remember, but it had been a long time ago, relative to their current circumstances.

“Didn’t we cross those off that list?” she added after some consideration.

“Yeah,” her sister said dryly. “I know why as well. We looked and couldn’t see them in the summer, but don’t you recall there was a lake around here?”

“Let us say that I don’t, and you make this explanation a little more direct sis,” she said with a sideways look at her sister.

Sana stared at her with eyes that said that she was being silly before sighing. “We couldn’t find it because I’ll bet the stones were under the water surface of the lake that was covering half of this place. It must be a seasonal shallow lake.”

She nodded, that was reasonable.

“And that’s not the only time we have seen this place,” Sana said with a triumphant look.

“…”

“Yeah, yeah, getting on with it,” her sister sighed. “Anyway, those outer stones, there are twelve of them. Like the other ring, but the other ring doesn’t move. Nor does the tree. This one moved a bit early on.”

“I remember, it was why it was on the maybe list.”

“Well, what if it wasn’t the ring moving, but other stuff. The contours of the valley have changed significantly between the various early shifts and these later ones!”

Sana pulled out her scrip and flipped through the different scene recordings of the landscape. The scrip projected one then another and another on top of each other as she watched.

“This point here is the stone circle there. If you fix those points vertically…watch,” Sana said with a grin as she changed a few settings in the landscape plan.

She watched the landforms rise and fall with the different ‘shifts’ they had mapped. Flowing backwards in time, until finally, it was…

“This ring of stones is the one that was on the hill? When we got caught with the shadow creature and the freezing fog,” understanding finally clicked.

“Yep,” her sister nodded. “These should be the same stones.”

“We will know for certain if we go over there and look at the carvings. I recorded them while we were recovering as it helped take my mind off the circumstances at the time.”

So focused were they on that that she almost failed to see that Elaria had finally stopped her practice and having collected her stuff was strolling off between the hills.

“Erm… she’s leaving?” she pointed out, pulling her sister's attention back from her smart discovery.

“Right… so... What the fates!” Sana blinked as they both watched the other woman fade out of existence into the fog.

In the end Elaria took a further two days to return, during which they spent quite a bit of time looking back through their records of the obvious landmarks much more comprehensively. Just in case they ever had the chance to test the theory that the ‘key’ elements stayed the same and it was the terrain itself that was what was changing. It was also, she conceded, a welcome distraction from their dwindling food and water supply in this wintery hell.

Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to get from their ‘cave’ to the circle of stones either. The trip took a lot less time, once she had the bright idea of chopping up a heaven blaze pine trunk and using the bits to melt the snow. While their qi was weakening, it was certainly enough to fulfil that task. The weather also turned a bit as well over the following few days, as if something was finally listening to their prayers. With a few days of crispy bright weather melting and freezing the top of the snow, they could basically walk on it without risk of vanishing into a white-blue pit of ice every ten steps.

So, now they sat on the hill, waiting for her to return a third time.

It was odd, she had to concede, as they watched. Between one second and the next, the dark-robed woman would just shift out of the haze and stroll towards the circle of stones. Today, Elaria wore a thicker robe, with her hood pulled up against the chill of the windless dell. However, rather than start sword exercises, this time the other woman just sat on a random rock in the inner ring and stared at nothing.

After watching for almost thirty minutes Sana finally broached what she had also been wondering.

“Should we risk going closer?”

While they had mostly determined that the people in the valley were oblivious to them except under the most persistent provocation, they had never dared to test that with Elaria, Marcella, Halla or any of the other occasional members of the group on the beach.

Her…their reticence came simply from the knowledge that their actions could be detected at all. Elaria and her associates were certainly the strongest beings they had yet set eyes on in this valley. Trying to guess their realms had been a fun early game but had been quickly abandoned as they never made any overt display of power that would allow their theories any purchase.

“She has never seemed at all threatening,” she mused. “I see no harm in at least getting to the edge of the dell.”

They moved as much out of line of sight as was possible. Eventually arriving at a rise in the ground about 5 metres from the seated woman who remained apparently oblivious to them. Occasionally she would get up and pace around at random, muttering under her breath, before returning to her sitting spot to sit in silence once more. As they looked on she did this for about 30 more minutes before abruptly stopping, shaking her head and wandering off into the mist.

“Well that was weird,” she said after Elaria had vanished from sight.

“I guess she just came out here to think?” Sana mused.

“Yeah,” she agreed, looking around at the somewhat clearer dell.

It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. Turning her head left and right, but not too quickly.

“Umm… do you see that grass over there?” she said eventually, pointing to a random bit of frosty grass sticking through the shallow snow.

“Yes? What about it?” her sister turned to look at her then the grass she was pointing at.

“Look at it for ten seconds, then look anywhere else for the same period of time. Then look back at it.”

There was silence for thirty seconds while her sister did just that, then a hiss of surprise.

“Everything is subtly shifting now?” Sana said nervously.

“It seems to only be the little things,” she replied, trying not to sound quite as uneasy as she felt at that prospect.

Over the course of the rest of that day, her chance observation was born out somewhat disturbingly. It only seemed to be in the vicinity of these hills, but everything was almost continuously shifting now. Not all in one go, but little bits, here and there. A rock outcropping twisting and changing there. A hill changing shape. Bare trees got bigger or smaller.

It never happened while you looked at it, but it did usually happen after a few moments of not looking at it. The only reason she was certain she hadn’t noticed it before was because of the fog and the lower visibility and then the sun glare on the snow. Now, in the duller overcast light, with their vision opened up to a mile or more across the hills, it was much more pronounced. The whole wintery landscape was like a slowly shifting deck of cards. Always the same bits, but always recombining in subtly different ways.

Elaria returned the following day. Now striding with a certain purpose, she arrived at the circle and sat down again, totally ignoring them. The red-haired woman stared off into the foggy middle distance for a good hour before standing up and pacing for a few minutes. This time, when she stopped, it wasn’t to sit but to start drawing in the air.

At first, it was just circles. Five of them to be exact, arranged in a loose pentagram. She walked around them pensively as they hung in the air as shimmering pitch dark lines edged with reddish-gold light. Next, she drew five lines between the different circles to connect them. After several moments more contemplation she sighed, waved her hand and dispersed the whole thing to start over.

This time she drew the same shape, but with five equilateral triangles, joining them at their outer corners. Equally unhappy with that, they watched as she drew five circles and connected them with curving lines. Then diagonal lines then squares with curved lines, circles with curved lines and so on. Growing more and more perplexed, they watched Elaria do this for almost three hours before she abruptly stopped and kicked one of the standing stones hard enough to make it shudder before stalking off into the fog. In her absence, the last set of five circles connected by slightly different curved lines through their centres wavered and vanished.

“What in the fates was that about,” Sana murmured.

“You ask me, but who do I ask… her?” she muttered.

This sequence of events continued for almost eight days. Each day Elaria would appear, either to stroll around drawing random sigils and weird symbols in the air or to practice sword forms. If she did the latter, she usually got angry and stalked off after an hour or two. At other times, she would abandon her sword work after a while to sit on a fallen rock and draw strange recursive geometric patterns, seemingly at random and then spend hours trying to fit them together in inexplicable ways. All the while cursing someone or something called Mandelbrot at great length.

As they watched in silence, letting their scrips record what they could, she found it was impossible to tell what criteria the other woman was using to reject the designs as she did. Occasionally she would revisit one with a different permutation, but very rarely.

The patterns and the geometric patterns now ranged from simple through complex to outright mind-bending. A few made her feel decidedly queasy and one even gave them both a sense of unearthly vertigo. Any time Elaria arrived at a really complex symbol through this method, she would then spend hours trying to simplify it. Usually, she succeeded, but occasionally she would give up with a flurry of alien curses and stalk off to stare at snow instead.

On the ninth day, since they started watching, Elaria came with three other people they had never seen before. The man was gaunt-looking, with a severe moustache and close-cropped hair. His dress style was bizarre; a bulky and colourful jacket, tight trousers that hugged his calves with knee-high leather boots and a broad cloak. He wore a sword that was like a long spike and something about his whole demeanour just screamed ‘I am a noble’. The other two women were both older looking than Elaria. One had the same reddish-golden hair but tending towards white/blonde in places; olive skin and bright, piercing green eyes. She wore a long blackish-green dress like robe, slashed with silver and gold. The third woman was simply dressed in a white robe with moons and stars embroidered into it in silver and white gold. It draped over her spectacular figure, concealing almost all of her body bar her arms but leaving remarkably little to the imagination. She had a tanned complexion with sandy blonde hair loosely tied back and deep purple/blue eyes.

The three considered the surroundings before dusting off some stones and sitting down on them.

“So,” The green-robed woman said in Easten, again without an accent. “What is this problem you wish to tax our poor minds with sister?”

“Mmmmm,” the white-robed beauty smiled. “It’s rare to see you stumped in quite this way. I am intrigued”.

“Indeed… I too am intrigued,” the man drawled.

“Humph” Elaria gave a sardonic sigh, “Oh well, you are all here now.”

“So,” she paused speaking for a second to start drawing then continued. “I’ve been trying to solve one of the absolute theorems, it’s an abstract issue that came up in our collaboration with the Milford Institute…”

Both of them winced. This was going to be hard to follow it seemed. Sana frowned for a moment, then decisively started to clear out space on her scrip.

“You’re going to map the actual moment?” she blinked, wondering why she hadn’t thought of that.

“No way we can follow this in one sitting, and a flat image is going to be no good if they are doing all that drawing,” her sister said frantically deleting things. “Rule one of recording formations – depth is as important as form.”

Finishing cleaning out junk, her sister activated the jade and put it on the rock in front of them to let it do its thing. Fortunately, they had only missed a few moments of the preamble. The discussions lasted almost three hours in the end. All the new arrivals spent a lot of time pondering over the geometries and suggesting weird and unlikely changes.

If the first day had been somewhat dry, the second day’s discussions turned out to be a proper revelation of sorts. The green-robed woman, who they now knew to be called Eleanora, took to the centre of the stone circle and proceeded to give a logical and succinct deconstruction of the entire methodology of what the group was trying to do. As she worked backwards through it with the others chipping in at various points, Elaria sat to the side listening pensively and saying little.

Over those few hours, they realised quickly that Eleanora had a natural talent for explaining complex things so they were easy to understand, even if they certainly were not simple. Pouring over the recorded moment after the group departed they were afforded time to work out a lot of the nuance that had passed them by. From that, they eventually managed to get a rough understanding of the system that was being used by the people local to this place.

It was, from what she could gather, something akin to formations. This was eminently helpful, as that was something they were at least familiar with and used on a regular, albeit very basic level. Most notably when sealing herbs. What they had in front of them though, was more akin to a whole cultivation system that worked entirely off the basis of formations, or ‘Arrays’ as they seemed to be called by the four discussing them.

The principle problem that Elaria was trying to solve somehow related to the inability of two parts of this system to properly interact in a way they should. The hypothesis she was putting forward was that there was a missing symbol in among the five that linked any three together and allowed the remaining two to become interchangeable. Its attempted elegance was breath-taking, even from her ignorant standpoint. Translated into the formations of their world, it was akin to seeking a way for a Myriad Elements Succeeding formation to transform from any pair of Yin/Yang Elements to another at any point in the cycle, rather than purely through succession. Something that she knew from Grandmaster Li to be a paradoxical impossibility as it would involve stepping ‘outside’ the system of the world somehow. Put another way, Elaria was arguing that the system they used should allow for A to B, but also C, D, E or X without ever passing through intermediary letters.

Over the following days, the other members of the ‘discussion group’, as they came to consider it, all made suggestions. First taking a day each to make their own thoughts on the problem, as originally presented, known.

The fancy noble, who was called Edward, spent a long time exploring how the symbols placed within the large and small circles within the geometry interacted. From what she could determine, the term for them was ‘Symbols of Power’ or perhaps ‘Representations of Power’. Many of the ones he presented were mind-bogglingly complex. So much so that they could only hope to pour over them with the recordings after the fact.

The white-robed woman, Maria, was equally revelatory in her approach and style. She tore the whole thing apart and put it back together as if it was a formation. Setting aside the fact that she clearly knew cultivation methods familiar to them, she also explored the problem through the medium of a bunch of other comparable ‘systems’. Showing those where it did seem to work, albeit not in quite the same way or which showed the problem of it not working through slightly different angles. Then she returned to formations and simplified her complex, sprawling maps down to interconnected links of only 2, 3, 5, 7 and 11. Just watching formations of a complexity to dwarf anything they had ever seen, even in the Blue Water City Astrology Bureau, reduced down to something you could fit on a small wall in five minutes was an opportunity both recognised they might never have again. That said, she couldn’t quite grasp why Maria had selected those particular numbers. She talked about the potential for infinite transformation and how this was one of the ways you could approach the simplest aspects of such a fundamental principle of an ordered cosmos that had to be embraced to be subverted. But that was a bit like someone taking her by the hand and saying, ‘this here, is the world’ while holding up a mango for a prop. ‘Do you understand?’

The following day was also occupied by a lengthy discussion about fundamental cosmic forces that went straight over their heads and ran a horse and carriage through their knowledge of Easten in the process. It was still recorded because there was certainly some worth to trying to unpick some of it, especially the formations stuff. Still, it was mostly just talking and occasionally drawing weird diagrams in the air or simulating explosions of small orbs of burning gas while the green-robed woman grew increasingly vexed. Both Eleanora and Maria broke into a lengthy argument with the nobleman, Edward about various exceptions to something Maria called the ‘Special Theorem of Relative Energy Transformation’, and how that could be represented in symbolic form without invoking a tribulation. Something all seemed to agree was deeply problematic but for wildly different reasons.

Watching from the sidelines at this point, she started to feel increasingly uneasy. Tribulations were something everyone who did anything with qi and cultivation knew about. They were also something anyone with any sense wanted to avoid unless they were absolutely necessary. They were not common in West Flower Picking Town, and most that did descend were just 'Normal' or 'Spiritual' grade.

Even so, spiritual white-blue or white-purple lightning could hit up to six times and turn a small town block into smoking chaos. Anyone undergoing an Earthly Tribulation had to do it out of town, and she had only heard of two Heavenly Tribulations in their entire region in her lifetime. One where the golden and black tinged lightning hit twelve times and melted a small mountain peak on the coast into a bubbling pool. However, there was no evidence of any tell-tale signs of tribulation as the discussions wore on so their worry there gradually lessened. Eventually, the group decided to call it a day and went their separate ways.

The next dozen or so days after it was just the black-robed woman, Elaria, and occasionally her older sister Eleanora. Elaria spent most of her time drawing and redrawing diagrams with renewed vigour, while Eleanora practised sword arts and read a book nearby, only occasionally interjecting this and that. The weather stayed much as it had been. Crisp and cold. But there were no more blizzards. More concerning though, to both of them was the passage of the approximate fourteen to sixteen day mark for the landscape swirling about and changing. By now they had been sat here in this icy wilderness for thirty-six days by her count.

It was three days later, on the thirty-ninth day that they passed the most dreaded milestone within their dwindling stores and ran out of actual food pills. They had already managed to string them out a week past what she had hoped. A small triumph in its own right, but their water was also dwindling and fasting pills were like a delayed alchemical bomb if you took too many of them in succession.

So it was, that both of them were sat there looking glum in the chilly hollow, staring at the small pile of fasting pills and wondering how many edible and not too toxic herbs they had to supplement them, when Elaria appeared once more. She was alone this time, and sat around for almost two hours, doing nothing much at all before starting to draw. This time the symbol was different. The group had arrived at something of a consensus about the problem that had originally been proposed and Eleanora had taken it off to work on it somewhere else from what they could grasp.

This was something else they had watched Elaria work on in her spare time, not consulting any of the others over anything about it. However, she had witnessed enough of what they were calling the ‘Deconstruction Theory’ teachings and the various discussions about ‘Array’ and formation structure to get a vague idea of what she was attempting.

It was quite audacious really. Tangentially it was related to the bigger problem the group was concerned with, but now they grasped that was less about transformation in its own right and more about using that concept to create a kind of seal that would be functionally untouchable to anything inside it. This, on the other hand, aimed to create a special technique that could take one material, say rock, and turn it directly into another material, say a living chicken.

Once she would have been roundly unimpressed with that idea, having shrugged and said: '…and? Anyone at core formation can do that so long as they have qi and a shifting technique'.

That ‘her’ would now be called ignorant and a fool by the two of them. They had sat through enough of the discussions to be clearer than they had any right to be, she was sure, about how that kind of technique worked. The nuance was one she had never really considered before. They didn’t change the fundamental nature of the rock to become a chicken, they just took something called the ‘principle’ of a chicken and imbued it into a rock, letting the background rules of the realm sort out the difference. The end result was something that both Eleanora and Edward termed something like ‘Instinctive Solution’ or ‘Instinctive Resolution’ maybe. Their dictionary and deterministic aspects of their scrips weren’t able to provide any better term for it.

Having set aside the problem for so long, it only took Elaria two days to create the technique itself. Sat there, watching her while Sana sorted out herbs back in the cave, she had to feel that Elaria put it together remarkably quickly given they had deliberated for over a month on the other things. The first version of the symbol was somehow unsatisfactory in a way that made her swear, a lot, with all kinds of words that the dictionary function on Sana’s jadework scrip couldn’t translate.

That she thought was a pity. They were both getting increasingly worried about the dwindling water supply, and new words to hurl at the sky every now and then would have been nice. As if in tune with her own dissatisfaction, Elaria eventually stormed off, still spitting invectives, leaving behind several smoking holes in rocks and a sad wobbly jelly-like creature that looked lost as it sloped off into chill fog and snowdrifts.

The next day, Sana re-joined her to watch Elaria viciously slaughter thin air for a whole day with various sword forms and cutting exercises.

Watching her swing the sword with unerring precision, she eventually commented. “Do you get the impression that this sword art she’s practising, which looks completely mundane might actually be ridiculously profound?”

“Mmmmm,”…. Sana mused. “It does have a certain odd sharpness to it, I guess.”

“That’s not really it, although I do agree,” She shook her head. “Think on it. We have been able to touch our own qi here, but not replenish it even with pills. Neither of us has Spiritual Cultivation laws or a dantian. In this place, it’s become really easy to forget that we are almost at the peak of Physical Foundation. Both of us were only half step from Mantra Seed before we got trapped in here.”

Sana frowned watching the repetitive sword strikes. “For once I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Simply put, although this place changes its landscape more than a noble daughter changes her mind buying a new dress, the space itself feels remarkably stable,” she said dryly.

“It’s possible we’re somehow not in sync with it?” Sana rebutted. “This is old ground.”

“Possibly, but we can interact with stuff, break stuff, pull stuff up and so on. The limiting factor seems to be we can’t draw nutrition of any sort from the environment right?”

“Yes,” Sana said wearily. “As I said, this is old ground.”

“Yep. It is sis. But look.” She gave Sana cat’s eyes and pointed at Elaria’s sword cuts.

They both watched as each cut produced a tiny flicker in the air about her.

“I dunno what kind of qi that is, but its qi and you can actually feel it.” She almost hissed.

“Have you actually felt any other qi in this place? We can see it in things, but apart from what’s in our bodies, or what was in the spirit herb pile we have been able to observe ‘qi-like’ things but never so much as touch them.

“I’m not convinced,” Sana muttered. “Isn’t that a bit too coincidental?”

“Well, maybe, but also not really, because I dunno about you? But I am not going over there to try to lick qi condensation off the edge of a sword that’s slightly breaking the space of this place with every swing. I don’t have to be at Dao Seeking to know what that’d look like,” she said dryly.

Her sister opened and shut her mouth a few times before just sighing and putting her chin in her hands.

They watched as Elaria did a few more sword swings, but the anomalous event – if it was such – had passed. Staring at the sword and then the space she had been cutting for a few moments Elaria sighed, shoved the sword halfway to its hilt in a rock and stalked off. Moments after she departed into the mist, the sword blurred and vanished as well.

…

Elaria didn’t return to the circle for almost five days. In the intervening time, they mostly passed the time with simple meditation and pondering more of the discussions they had heard. Almost out of desperation she started trying to do geomancy to see if there was any auspicious route out of their circumstances. Various methods were tried, from Fate Sticks to a five elements board, but all of them showed remarkably little in the way of anything useful. The best she got was from the fate sticks, which suggested that ‘staying the course was the harmonious way’.

As Sana pointed out, somewhat acerbically, that could be read both as ‘if you keep doing what you’re doing an opportunity will come’ and also as ‘just keep doing this, it’s the least horrible death you can suffer.’

It was something of a relief when Elaria did finally return the next day. Her arrival with another person in tow served as a welcome distraction from their own woes, and certainly from the faint pressure that was growing within her body as her vital qi started to cannibalize itself to keep her in ‘healthy’ condition.

Elaria’s companion looked like a younger version of herself, with redder hair and bluer eyes. This, as it turned out was a rather prescient observation, because the woman was, in fact, Elaria’s younger sister, Elsabeth. From their chatter, they quickly gathered that she had come for a short visit from their home city of Caludonum. They laughed and ate a picnic in the icy landscape. Played a game of strategy on a board that looked a lot like Imperial Chess but had more pieces and wasn’t as fast-paced, and finally had a snowball fight and made snowmen. All the while they talked away in a language neither of them nor the deciphering formation on their jade scrips could make anything of. Eventually, as the sun went down, they both departed arm in arm into the mists in the direction of the valley slopes.

When next Elaria returned, she seemed invigorated or maybe re-energised and once again began to tackle the development of her strange technique. This time her drawing was much more fluid and confident. Drawing out symbols like they were writing in the air and then somehow transposing them in a way neither of them could quite follow. When it was done, there were two mirrored seal-like circles in the air. She stared at it for a while, walking around it and considering the two mirror images from different angles.

“Has she succeeded with it at last?” Sana asked, frowning as she asked the clearly rhetorical question.

She traced back the logic as far as she could see and found herself nibbling her lip as she tested her own understanding on it.

“Maybe?” was all she could hazard after a moment.

Then because she was feeling a bit peeved. “It seems like when they are overlaid they should enable some form of change in a controllable and repeatable fashion…”

“You’re only saying that because you have a good memory.” Sana sniffed.

She held up her hands and shook her head wryly. “Monkey poop. You got me. I got no idea, all we can do is watch and see.”

Her sister just sighed again and turned back to watch Elaria who was now, rather unusually, pacing around talking out loud to herself. Up until this point she had mostly worked in silence except when annoyed enough to start cursing things.

“This should work as it was, but it’s too complex. …The real thing should have a simplicity that unifies itself within the whole and allows it to constantly revise itself in accordance with the situations and objects it needs to adapt.”

“Still, this is the closest anyone has come to proper concept transformation since the bloodbath that led to the ruination of the Heroic Age.”

“I wonder, does its vexing inability to find its Unity have to do with those vile old men in Lothringar… that would be troublesome.”

They watched, as she walked back over to the complex circle and examined it again. It somewhat reminded her of the way in which you might consider a much-loved family pet that came home one day with an extra tail. Finally, she turned to the side and drew a second circle and spent a few moments tracing the symbol carefully into it. When the last stroke went in, the whole thing trembled and collapsed in a noodle of dark lines and golden-red sparks.

Narrowing her eyes, Elaria drew a second symbol. This one a little bit more complex than the last. In the end, she drew nineteen different symbols before one didn’t collapse. This one looked a bit more elegant than the original that still hung there, presumably frozen just prior to integration, but not by much.

Shaking her head, Elaria turned again and in another spot started to draw again, taking that symbol and the original one as the base. This time she went thirty-one circles before one didn’t collapse. After that, she had to draw it out ninety-seven times, then finally two hundred and forty-one before she seemed to find something she was happy with.

Turning to consider the different symbols, Elaria stood there in silence with her arms crossed, frowning. Only after a whole minute did she scatter the diagrams and start drawing another one from scratch. Five swirling circles with curved tails that connected to each other at the middle point. The outer edges of the circles then connected with an esoteric double line that twisted weirdly despite never seeming to cross. The final design at its heart looked like a weird cross between a lotus and a chrysanthemum that joined into a strange symbol that seemed to have no real beginning or end.

She joined up the final few lines in one fluid motion and watched as the design hung in the air trembling for almost a full minute without turning into reddish-gold noodles. Apparently satisfied with this, she nodded to herself, snagged the sword into her hand from where it had been sitting unobtrusively against a rock and walked off in the mists. The symbol continued to hang there, trembling faintly until she had vanished entirely, at which point it slowly dissipated.

She didn’t come back for two days after that, giving them plenty of time alone with their thoughts. Mostly Arai found hers turning towards how much she hated fasting pills, despite them being the only thing now between them and a rather unpleasant end to this whole adventure. When Elaria did return, it was with a white-robed woman with dark hair in tow and a slightly older looking woman with darker hair who looked very similar to her.

“What on earth is so secret that you can’t just tell me, your mother, and Iseult here by the usual secure channels, dear daughter? And so problematic that you need to call us both into an entrance to the Dreaming Gate of the Low Kingdoms?” The older woman said bluntly when they were all inside the stone ring

Elaria nodded and then spoke in a bizarre language. “Amasela amadala aqale phantsi ukuceba. Ndixhalabile kukuba iindwalutho ezisemhlabeni apha zijikile zabuya umva zjonga emantla. Ibali lezinto ezifumaneka ngezantsi, idangatye liphume nalo. IChronominthian ayikatywinwa nayo. ukuba kukho ukungqubana apha ... ngoku ...”

The words seemed to blur and shift, more song than language to her ears. With them came a faint echo of an almost impossible antiquity.

The woman who self-identified as her mother paused and replied. “Uqinisekile ngale nto? Ngokuqinisekileyo ii-proxies zabo bezisebenza kade, kodwa kutheni le nto ifuna ukuba ulumke oku?”

The white-robed woman, Lady Iseult added. “Ndivile amanye malunga namabali, kodwa ndiyavumelana nomama wakho ... ngaba sikhona isidingo sokuba nexhala? ukuba silapha, sithetha ulwimi lwakudala kangangokuba nabakhonzi babo uthixo abakwazi kuhlola?”

Elaria looked pensively into the icy haze for a few moments before speaking again. “Ingaphezulu koko. Ndiva ukubawa kwenkanuko yabo kujikela kubaphangi kwikheji kwakhona. ukuba bayazifumana izitshixo zoko, iya kuba yinto elusizi. Kungenxa yoko le nto bendinyanzela ukuba nditywinwe kwakhona ngeChronominthian.”

Iseult asked something in the same language. “Ukwazile ukwenza inkqubela phambili kwelinye itywina, esisenzo esikhulu, kodwa enye ingxaki ngu ...?”

Nodding, Elaria walked over to the middle of the circle and drew out the symbol in its series of iterations from yesterday.

The two other women walked around the symbols that floated in the air. Looking pensive.

Lady Iseult eventually exclaimed. “Uyenzile inkqubela phambili koku!”

Finally, Elaria’s mother lapsed back into Easten, much to their relief. “In theory it's suitable, but this is quite esoteric… it may draw as much trouble as it will solve?”

Elaria shrugged. “Really that’s just a thing we have to run with. It shouldn’t invoke a genuine primordial adjudication at any rate. That was always the problem with the old sequence. Not to mention the ‘archetype’ is currently in the same bracket as the ‘words of power’.”

Her mother frowned. “I still worry that this particular approach will not be sufficient. Or…”

Elaria grimaced, apparently agreeing. “Or it will provoke an excessive reaction?”

Iseult nodded at that as well. “It is all very well to make it here, in the Dreaming Gate. Those old thieves that robbed the cradle back then are terrified of the powers beyond it. But…”

Elaria cut her off. “Perhaps… I do think we can carry out some tests in simulation and see what is what. As it is I’ve only tried it out on basic things. It certainly is capable of turning firewood into perfectly edible croissants for instance.”

Her mother gave Elaria a long look they both recognised. “If you have just created another Ridkul's Escalating Monkey Cage daughter dearest… I will personally make sure that Linris takes all your research budget and use it for something profitable. Like cross-breeding flying pigs with unicorns.”

Elaria managed to look mildly put out, while Lady Iseult had a fit of hysterics.

When she calmed down she turned to the older woman. “Sannae, we will probably have to go with this, as much as I share your reservations. As Elaria has noted, time is not on our side in this matter. The Holy Empire is being much more concerted in its attempts to gain real influence with many of those robber barons who are not content with Lucian’s reforms across the mountains, beyond the Dark Veils. The last thing your throne needs and we in the Ten Songs need is for there to be another conflict on the scale of the 2nd Succession Crisis.”

Sannae suddenly looked a bit disconsolate. “I know, but it is an Empress’s prerogative to want the best solution for her people.”

Elaria clapped a hand on her mother’s shoulder and gave her a hug. “Do not worry mother, we are strong. Between myself and Eleanora, Linris and Halla you have a core to this court that….”

“It is not that dearest,” Sannae sighed. “It is Elsabeth that worries me… I feel a terrible turning point encroaching… and I worry it is not simply this matter twisting things.”

“You think they have designs on it? Even with the protections resurgent in this land?” Iseult asked, glancing around grimly.

“These kinds of places are not so easily touched by those old thieves to the south nor their lords and masters.” Sannae supplied. “But Undergrove. Undergrove concerns me, even with the calibre of watchers down there now.”

“Undergrove concerns everyone.” Elaria sighed. “Even with the help we have gotten, it may yet require the playing of a hand that will cause…”

“…issues.” Sannae said softly.”

“That’s a good way of putting it,” Iseult agreed, sounding tired suddenly.

“Well, there is no point lingering out here dwelling on that,” Sannae said abruptly. “Let us head back to your quarters and find some strong alcohol and a picture of one of the dukes from some dustbin someplace. I fancy throwing fireballs at their faces suddenly.”

“That’s a very un-empress like action,” Iseult giggled.

“Bite me! They deserve far worse,” Sannae scowled. "And will get it, if I ever lay hands to any of them."

They watched as the three made their way away into the mists still talking quietly about the politics of their reality.

“It seems that this touches on the truth of this mountain somehow?” Sana mused as she skimmed the transcript.

“I wonder what happened to their great endeavour…” she added, thinking out loud as they watched them vanish into the afternoon haze.

Her sister rolled her eyes. “Well... given we’re here sat looking at bits of what are presumably some other reality? Or something very like it. Not to mention we have been watching this space reorganise itself on a disturbingly regular basis. Then there's the colossal ruins we saw on the first day we got here and the not so subtle hint that bits of them are scattered all over the Yin Eclipse mountain range…”

“Or under it,” she chipped in wryly.

“True… Or under it,” Sana said looking into the surrounding chill fog. “I think it’s safe to say it did not go as intended.”

“Yeah… Yeah... I know it was a stupid question,” she smiled wanly. “It deserved a stupid answer.”

“And yet,” Sana muttered. “Saying it out loud helps a bit I guess.”

“…”

They both stood there contemplating the stones for a while.

“By the way…” she said, turning to Sana.

She was still replaying that conversation in her mind and had just realised something. “Did you notice that she said that formation/array managed to turn wood into something called a ‘croissant’?”

“I did catch something to that effect,” Sana glanced back at her. “Isn’t that one of those funny breakfast things they ate by the lake, with the jams and cheeses?”

She nodded, and ran a hand through her hair, as much out of nervousness as anything. “You don’t think it would be possible…"

They both looked towards their rock shelter and its pile of spiritual herbs and timber along with various other bits and pieces.

“What if it’s just as inedible as anything else?” Sana frowned.

She pondered that point.

-It was a good one, she had to concede.

“If it was just changing rocks here I'd agree, but those things came with us, so theoretically if we use them, it might turn stuff into more things from our side?” she said, trying to sound hopeful.

Her sister stood in silence for a few moments before sighing. “At this point, we really have nothing to lose by trying do we?”

“No. No, we do not,” she agreed glumly. “We have been here for almost two months now...at least two months. Our food is gone, our water is depleting and our fasting pills are dwindling. If this place was going to relinquish us it would probably have done so before now.”

"When you put it like that," Sana scowled.

"Sorry..." she shrugged. “It must be something about this place."

"Never make a joke like that again," her sister said shoving her over into a pile of snow.