The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

On that day, 19 years, 1 month and 23 days ago, I first encountered the demon.

But first, in the morning, I went to school.

My school in Itan was nothing like in Oreskios.

From the beginning, Itan had never been a particularly prosperous place. An island off the northern Saoic coast, it'd been an uninhabited rock for half of the Mimikos's history, being home to little more than seagulls and small mammals like foxes and mice. But during the Interluminary Strife, Kutuy, one of the founding splinter-nations of the Saoic Party, fell into civil war after the royal family attempted to bring the entire nation under their direct rule in response to the crisis (though whether it was a mere power-grab or a sincere attempt to reform the nation's infrastructure and weather the crisis is subject to historical controversy) and ultimately split in two. The majority of cities and towns formed the Omiwa Confederacy, while Kutuy proper was reduced to a rump state consisting of the capital and the surrounding river valley.

After the crisis, the Kutuyan aristocracy feared economic collapse or annexation into Omiwa as a result of their diminished position, and so set about expanding by any means they yet possessed. Despite losing almost their entire military under the disastrous command of Hikoimasu of Upinkay, they still retained their navy, which was second only to the Saoic Arcanocracy in the region, and so set about building trade links with Inotia in the east. To do this, they colonized several islands off the coast, one of which was Itan.

Kutuy is not, historically, a well-run country, and soon became so preoccupied with internal concerns that the new colonies never received enough investment to actually flourish. Itan had a population of only a few thousand until the Tricenturial war, when the Empire - having annexed all of Outer Sao - decided to use it as a staging post for their invasion of the Inotian Archipelago. The war dragged on for so long that many of the stationed soldiers, Saoic and Rhunbardic, started families there, and them and their descendants came to comprise the majority of the modern population of about 500,000.

After the war was over and the Dai League formed, Itan was made a semi-independent dominion of Kutuy. In the intervening years, post-collapse technology had advanced to the point where its role as a trading post was now more or less redundant. And so, in peacetime, it just... Persisted, despite not really having a role left in the world.

And like many orphaned, forgotten places, it languished in every sense, and responded by turning defensive and bitter. Before the revolution, there were two types of countries which tended to have Meritist governments. Either they were intensely prosperous, to the point that a majority of the population simply didn't care if people with no familial wealth were left to rot on the street, or they were intensely unprosperous,the ideology taking root as a result of corruption or misguided anger; the belief that things weren't the way they were because of choices made by the world's powerful, but because individuals were lazy and immoral.

In both senses, Itan fell into the latter category.

It's a strange experience to realize that you grew up somewhere poor. As a kid, you always see your home as the definition of 'normal', and media that depicts other, wealthier-looking places gets written off in your head as kind of a fantasy. When you actually go to those places, or just grow up enough to process the world properly, the bitterness of realizing you went through thousands of little unpleasant experiences for no reason other than the circumstances of your birth is palpable.

But at the time, I couldn't place what was wrong. Only that everything seemed harder than it should have been. The world too dirty, the air too thin and cold. The aches in my muscles too sharp.

And I only knew school as a joyless place. The building was grey, the food almost inedible. The teachers were aloof and seemed to only be going through the motions. And the other students were either apathetic or cruel.

"Oh, gods, what's that smell? You stink of shit."

"Woah, don't get too close. I don't want to get lice."

"They should make you change in a separate room."

"Ugly little bitch."

I'm sorry.

"What? Why are you talking to me? Little fucking pervert."

"You need to take this coursework seriously. I understand it might be hard at home, but if you keep missing deadlines like this, we're going to have to get your guardians involved."

"Oooh, you only got 41%? I'm gonna miss you when they put you in the retard class."

I'm sorry.

"I-I'm s-s-so so- so- s-sorry! Can't you do anything but apologize? Holy shit."

"They can't even talk properly! Fucking autist."

"You need to raise this issue with your foster parents. We don't want to jump to harsh solutions, but we can't keep providing supplies for you."

"You two need to learn to get along. Now, both of you, apologize."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

I'm sorry...

My memories of those days are actually sort of a blur. The brain I had was shitty at retaining information to begin with, and even at its best, the mind is disinclined to retain drudgery. Of course I haven't forgotten all the details; I remember the faded red of the second building's blocky exterior, which had once been one of the island's many military bases and had never fully lost that character, and the plastered walls of the interior, the paint peeling at the corners on the ceiling. I remember our over-packed classrooms with about 50 students each, and the metal desks that were always just a little too small. I remember a lot of vividly unpleasant events, and, of course, some actual lessons.

But it's the feelings I've retained the most. The sense of dread every morning as I realized it was a school day. The lonely dullness as I watched the teacher's speak from my seat near the back, shifting in discomfort as I begged for time to pass. The desperate fear and anxiety at lunch as I tried to avoid anyone and everyone. The sharp pain in my chest every time something bad inevitably happened; the shame, the impotent frustration, the bitterness.

And above it all, the sense it should've been different. That this shouldn't have been the life I was given. That the world was wrong.

The human soul is always in flux. Though most don't think about it consciously, everything that happens in life, great or small, accumulates on it like coins on a set of scales. Getting a nice compliment about your work. Stepping on a piece of dog poop. A friend telling you how much you mean to them. Saying something stupid and embarrassing yourself in public. Getting a wonderful gift. Having your heart broken. Watching a beautiful lamprise that reminds you of better days.

Success in life is ultimately about establishing a positive feedback loop. With enough good, you can endure the bad and retain energy for self-improvement. With self-improvement, you can learn new skills, make connections with others, and grow as a human being, sidelining the bad altogether and thriving.

On the other hand... If you don't have enough good, then you can be stuck forever, like a spider circling the drain. As are all things in the cosmos, it boils down to mathematics.

But at the time, I didn't think about it that way.

At the time, I believed in stories more than facts. I believed in a story where it was possible for me to be saved.

It'd been an okay day; I'd done better than usual on a mock exam, and no one had bothered me. I left school and headed down the wide, worn-cement streets, eventually coming to one that ran alongside the coast. My foster home was deeper in the city, but I wasn't going there today. For once, I was looking forward to the evening ahead.

There was no public transport other than the automatic carriages, which cost luxury debt I couldn't afford, so I had to ride my bicycle for a good twenty minutes to reach our meeting spot. The Great Lamp was in my eyes as it descended towards the rim of the Mimikos on the distant horizon. Itan was a place that, depending on the lighting and weather, was normally either beautiful or hideously bland and flat. But on that day it was somewhere in-between; the lamplight breaking through heavy clouds intermittently and making the sands and rocks sparkle, even as the grey covered the roof of the world.

Finally, I came to it. The edge of the street where the path from her school led to her own route home. To a bench, where she...

...

When I was 10 years old, the revolution broke out.

I was just a child, and so didn't absorb a lot of what was happening except through the lens of how adults reacted. Still, I remember that no one thought it was a big deal at first. Everyone treated it almost like a sports event; a spectacle of Ysaran politics that had nothing to do with Saoic life whatsoever.

However, it soon became clear that a camel's back had broken. Within weeks, the riots started. You started to hear about people dying every day even in the Dai League. Not long later, the League's government condemned the Old Yru Convention and sided with the revolutionaries and Mekhi, threatening secession if they didn't back down on their decision to crush the provisional government. For the first time in centuries, it felt like war could genuinely break out between the major powers... And that Oreskios, which opposed the ultimatum delivered by the Dai League, could tear itself to pieces.

My parents were absolutely terrified. When you're poor, it feels like the wealthy have the whole world spinning around in their hands like some smug master juggler, but it actually takes surprisingly little to make them shit themselves. When someone has lived their whole life never knowing serious opposition, they're often really quick to become convinced of impending mortal danger at the slightest hint of it.

It was decided that my mother, little brother and I would all go to live with my father's mother in Itan until the situation blew over. I didn't really process that Itan was quite poor until I'd lived there for several years; a lot of wealthy families owned summer homes there, and they'd formed an almost parallel community to the rest of the island, with its own services and amenities. I'd gone to a tiny private school with only a hundred or so other students.

It turned out that I was going to be there for a long time. While the 'civil dispute' in a strict, army-vs-army sense was formally over after just a year with the signing of the Summer Compromise, what people called the revolution in the present dragged on for years, lingering like an infected wound. Insurgent groups refused to stand down, and sectarian violence raged cities across the continent. I would be an adult before things finally calmed down completely.

It'd been a strange time of my life. I'd cried and cried when we'd first arrived, and missed all my old friends tremendously, even though I could still talk to them over the logic sea. But... In the end, it was nice enough. If a little boring...

However, despite that social separation, there was still some overlap. And I lived there for a whole six years. Inevitably, I became friends with some kids in the other part of town. One day, I'd been hanging out with one after school when they'd had to go home early. My grandma wasn't coming to collect me for another hour, so I'd gone for a walk on the beach.

It was then that I saw someone there, digging through the rocks. It was sort of a pitiful sight. They were up to their knees in dirt and seawater, and their hands were an angry red. Their face was flushed like they'd been crying.

And I...

....

It's disorienting, to try and think back on it now. It's not so bad to just have two sets of memories from the same time, especially since Shiko's usually feel a little more foreign and muted; more like a really vivid drama than something that really happened to me, or maybe a fantasy so clear it straddles the line between the real and the unreal.

But recalling the times we were together is more difficult. Memories, rather than being literal recordings of events, are more like echoes of personal cognition. They have a texture to them informed heavily by one's physical and mental state, and a bias that grows more and more intense over time.

Recalling the exact same event twice from two different perspectives feels a little like standing between two tall mirrors. It can put me in a feedback loop where the different parts of my mind contradict each other, and futilely try to reconcile and arrive at an absolute factual and emotional truth, a dissonant process which gives me a headache. Sometimes, it can even be hard to remember where certain feelings came from at all.

It doesn't help that a lot of said memories also make me really sad.

So it might be a little difficult to recount this accurately. Try to bear with me, alright?

I, as Shiko, waved cheerfully as I saw my other self approach on their bicycle from the corner of my eye.

I, as my other self, waved awkwardly back as I slowed and stepped down to my feet.

We said hello, and then headed down the road towards her grandmother's house. My chest thrummed with excitement at the weekend ahead. My thoughts were still occupied with the echo game scripting contest a few friends of mine had entered on a lark, and the trigonometry supplemental exam I had coming up in a few weeks. Oh, and I was supposed to talk with Iwa about this costume she'd designed for a play at her school. This was before she'd become obsessed with becoming an actress, and when she still wanted to be a fashion designer instead.

That was still bitter too, in a way.

"Sorry for making you walk," Shiko said, with an apologetic smile. "I forgot to bring my bike today."

"It's, uh, fine," my old self said. "I don't mind walking..."

"How was your day at school?" she asked cheerfully.

"It was okay, I guess," my old self replied, glancing to the side. I didn't want to come across as strange or depressing, but at the same time, I didn't really want to think about school at all.

Shiko nodded, a weak smile on her face.

At the time, I'd believed that I'd been hiding how miserable my life was from her from her pretty well; I never talked about anything painful or difficult, like being bullied, or my experiences in foster care, or myriad other subjects. I wanted her to see me as an equal, for us to just be ordinary friends. After all, if she saw some huge gap between our lives, she'd be more likely to leave me behind.

But this was child logic. Of course, people form an understanding of others not just through what they talk about, but what they don't talk about.

"Did you get much homework, this week?" she asked. "I can help you get through, if you like."

"N-No, it's alright," I said, shaking my head awkwardly. "I'd rather just hang out and do it when I get back home. I don't have any other plans, so..."

"Well... Okay," she said hesitantly. "Oh, I was meaning to say. If you'd be interested, my friends from school and I were talking about doing a group on Thursday afternoons, now that exams are coming up. You can come along, if you like!" She laughed a little, scratching behind her neck. "They're not into quite the same stuff as us, but they're not weird or anything. I'm sure you'd get along."

"Oh." My face flushed. "Yeah, maybe."

"Sorry, I don't mean to be pushy."

"No, not at all!" I replied quickly. "I-- I mean, I really appreciate it."

She nodded, still with a gentle smile.

We walked along the coast for almost a half hour. It wasn't spring yet, so evening still drew in quickly. The world was already cast in a tint of red, glimmering on the gentle ocean.

We eventually made our way back to my... Rather, Shiko's neighborhood, passing by expansive beachside homes, all with large sections of the surrounding hilly woodland as their personal property. There was barely even a street here any more, just a rough cobbled path raised up above the sands. Still, if one looked carefully, all of it was obviously maintained to look as scenic as possible. Naturally, the whole coastline of Itan was rocky, but here the sands had been broken down into fine and soft powder using the Power, creating an uncharacteristically nice beach. The bushes were trimmed to frame the path rather than obstructing it. Some distance into the woods, a second path allowed for carriage access.

I processed next to none of this at the time-- My mind was stiff and rigid, and lacked intellectual curiosity for anything except for what it had already defined as important. All I knew was that it was nice, and that it made sense that someone like Shiko would live here, instead of where I did.

As Shiko, I had a little more of a critical perspective on it. It was artificial in a way that felt tacky. My, uh-- Her grandma always complained about how when she'd grown up here, this had all just been a row of little fishermen's houses, and she'd had to basically build a new home from scratch on the instructions of the neighborhood committee that'd sprung up a little under a century earlier. If it hadn't been for Shiko's dad financing it, she would have been forced to sell the land.

The house had turned out pretty well, at least. Three stories tall, and built in a mixed Saoic and Rhunbardic style, with a thatched roof and wooden walls that altogether gave it a rustic feeling. Everything about it felt open, warm, and comfortable in an effortless way.

The first time I'd visited, I'd been afraid of breaking something valuable. But after well over a year, I was starting to get used to it.

We stepped up into the porch, and Shiko rang the bell. A few moments later, it slid open, and we were greeted by the smiling face of her grandmother, her red hair loose and hanging over her shoulders.

"Oh, finally made it back, huh?" she said, her tone playful. "I was starting to worry you'd got hit by a wagon or something."

"Grandma, you know I forgot my bike today," Shiko said flatly, already stepping into the building. I followed quietly behind her.

"I'm just teasing." She looked at my old self. "Nice to see you again, kiddo. You doing okay?"

Kiddo. It was one way to avoid it.

"Uh, yeah," I said. "Not too bad."

"Good good." She hummed to herself in satisfaction. "Lemme take your coat."

She reached over towards me. I flinched just a little bit by instinct, but quickly relaxed, hopefully before she noticed me acting strangely. She lifted the heavy brown woolen cloak from my shoulders and placed it on an adjacent coat hanger. Meanwhile, Shiko placed her schoolbag in a little space at the bottom of a nearby cabinet, taking a few textbooks.

Even her books looked cleaner and better-kept than mine, down to the handwriting in which she'd signed her name. Utsushikome of Fusai.

"What've you two got planned?"

"Not sure yet!" Shiko replied. "Probably just to watch some dramas and maybe play some echo games."

"Wasting your youth screwing around, huh?" Her grandma chuckled. "Before you head up, you should know we actually have another guest over."

A small knot formed in my stomach. Shiko frowned, looking over at her. "Another guest? Why didn't you tell me? "

"This was last minute. You know they're having that meeting in town with the government people from Daixue about the infrastructure reforms?"

"It's hard not to know," Shiko said. "It's been messing up the traffic all week."

She said that, but I had no idea what was being referenced at all. I barely had any perspective on the wider world to speak of. I didn't read the news, or even go anywhere except for school and stuff like this.

"Well, a friend of your grandpa is here as a consultant. But they've only got a handful of nice boarding houses on the whole island, and apparently they screwed up and overbooked, so he didn't have a place to stay. So he asked around, ended up talking to your mom..." She gestured dismissively. "He's in the kitchen if you wanna say hi before dinner."

Shiko shrugged. "Okay." She looked to me. "You wanna head up to my room?"

She asked because she knew I was shy.

"No, it's okay," I said. "I'm kinda thirsty, anyway..."

"You sure?" she asked, taking off her shoes. "It might be a little awkward."

"Yeah," I said. "I don't-- I don't mind."

I don't want to let her get into something else without me,I thought. It's easy for her to get swept up. A whole hour could go by.

"You should introduce yourself too, kiddo," Shiko's grandma said, and slid over to give me a more mischievous look. "They're actually kind of a government bigshot, so always good to make connections, y'know?"

I stared at her for a moment, pretending to understand what on earth she was trying to get at, then nodded weakly.

We headed down the left hall, which had a long set of windows also overlooking the beach, before arriving at the kitchen. Like everything else in the house, it was ridiculously large. There was a huge open space before you even got to the kitchen part,in which a round wooden table was placed, with room for six people. This wasn't even where Shiko's family had dinner; it was specifically for breakfast.

It really is strange, because so much of this stuff seems completely normal to me now in a way it probably shouldn't. But at the time, it really did feel like I was trespassing. That I'd somehow slithered my way into a place I didn't belong.

Anyway, that's not important. What's important is that, seated at that table, was a man. He had a light brown complexion, and was dressed in a formal black and white dalmatica that he wore oddly casually, with the fabric allowed to slide a little down the side of his shoulder. He was bald, and had a long, well-kept black and grey beard.

He looked old - older than almost anyone I'd met in my life at the time. But there was an energy in his dark eyes. He looked up at us from a newsheet he was reading as we entered.

"Good evening, sir," Shiko said, with a respectful bow."

"Ah," he said, with a pleasant expression. "You must be Utsushikome."

"That's right," she said, nodding.

"I've heard a little bit about you from your grandfather."

Shiko didn't react, but internally, she was wondering what on earth he'd heard, exactly, since she'd barely met him.

"My name is Samium. He's an old colleague of mine from when we were younger." He looked towards me. "And who are you?"

I hesitated.

𒊹

Inner Sanctum Underground | 2:36 PM | Third Day

Well, saying 'everything' went white isn't quite accurate. Specifically, the image of the arboretum did in my minds eye. It wasn't completely sudden - for a fraction of a second, it grew brighter and brighter until it would have hurt to look at if I was seeing it physically... Before the transmission suddenly cut completely off.

It's silly, but for a second, I wondered if it was my fault. Like I'd somehow broken it on account of being clumsy and inexperienced with the interface.

These suspicions lasted about 3 seconds, after which they were dispelled by the ground abruptly deciding to throw me into the air. The world shook like a volcano had just erupted, accompanied by a ferocious thumping sound that made by teeth clatter, like the heart of the world itself was palpitating. I fell from where I was sitting and tumbled down a few steps, landing on the side of my arm.

It was more or less over in just a few seconds, and no one was seriously hurt - even if, for a frightening instant, it looked as though Linos's chair might tumble down the stairs - but there was a moment of sheer panic nonetheless. Kamrusepa shot to her feet and snapped up her scepter like she was a deer that had just heard a gunshot. Ezekiel lurched downward like he was trying to take shelter from an explosion. Ophelia shrieked as she was woken violently from her sleep, falling out of the bunk.

Even Anna turned sharply around, her focus broken completely for the first time all night.

"Aaahhh! Ahhhhhhh!" Ptolema cried out, trying to grab on to something stable, but mostly ending up grabbing Ran, who leaned away in discomfort.

"What the hell was that?!" Seth cried out.

Fang smiled wildly, and let out a strained laugh. "Wo-oooh, welp! If we're about to get hit by something, it was nice knowing you guys!"

However, nothing further happened. The tremors quickly died off completely, the only indication of a crisis being dust descending from the ceiling.

"E-Everyone try to stay calm!" Linos called out. I wondered how many times he'd said that over the course of the night, now. "The security center is reinforced to withstand any attack!"

"Even the fucking ground giving way?!" Ezekiel objected.

"Even that!" Linos clarified. "It's held in its position by the Power!"

"Isn't the Power being suppressed right now...?" Ptolema questioned.

"Oh." He blinked. "You're right. I-- I suppose it's not capable of withstanding the floor giving way, then."

"Deeply reassuring, mister Melanthos!" Kam said flatly, anxiety obvious in her tone. There goes his 'grandmaster' title. "At least it feels like it's stopped-- For now."

Anna advanced a few portentous steps away from her work towards the logic bridge, only for her expression to transition to one of extreme annoyance as she realized for the first time that we were blocking the stairs. "Stop babbling about nothing," she demanded. "Someone check the logic bridge and find out what happened!"

"I think we know what happened, your ladyship," Kam stated firmly.

Wait, we do?

"Yes," Mehit said, rising sharply to her feet and stepping back over to where her daughter was seated. "I take it everyone saw that."

"Kinda hard to miss," Seth said. "I don't think I've ever seen an explosion that big in my life."

"E-Explosion?" I stammered out.

"From the Nittaimalaru," Ran explained. "Or maybe somewhere else in the Arboretum. It looked like a bomb went off."

"A bomb is an understatement!" Ptolema declared. "That was nuts!"

The white light...

"Miss Hoa-Trinh," Linos called out, his tone terse. "Is the golem still operational? Do we still have eyes on the scene?"

"Give me a few seconds," she replied quickly. "The intensity of the light has fucked up the lens. I need to try and re-calibrate it."

"Regardless of what you saw, someone still needs to check the system for structural damage," Anna demanded. She was gripping the scalpel-like engraving tool tightly enough that it looked like she was on the brink of stabbing someone in the throat. "We could still be in mortal danger."

"I'll get right on it," Linos said, wheeling himself towards the logic bridge.

"W-What's going-- Going on...?" Ophelia stammered out fearfully, approaching the rest of our group.

"Something blew up! We might be about to die!" Fang explained, in a tone that made it genuinely hard to tell if they were excited or in a state of hysterical panic. "It's crazy!"

"We're not gonna fucking die," Seth affirmed with annoyance. "Don't say things that are gonna scare people."

"Are you alright, Lili?" I heard Mehit say from the top of the stairs. "It's alright. It's alright..."

People seemed really shaken, and it wasn't difficult to understand why. Every time we allowed ourselves to relax, only for our illusion of safety - of the ordeal being more or less over - to be brutally shattered, it weakened our fortitude, both individually and collectively. I felt the irrational, fearful part of my brain dominating more and more. I wanted to scream and fall into a deep sleep at the same time.

"Alright," Ran said. "The quality is a lot worse, but... I think I've got it working."

"The rest of you take a look," Linos spoke, distracted. "I need to focus on analyzing sanctuary on a more structural level."

"Right," she replied.

I reached out to clasp Ptolema's hand, and the image flowed back into my mind.

The quality was much worse. Far from the oversensitive rainbow of surreal over-saturated colors from radiation and impossible transparency that we'd had earlier, the view from the lens was now muted and blurry. Suffice it to say, if there was anything the others had missed analyzing the side of the building, they weren't going to find it now.

However, this felt less important when contrasted with what we could see.

The arboretum was completely destroyed. The Everblossom was reduced to little more than a broken, crater-like stump, pieces of its strange glowing tendrils scattered in all directions. And the bioenclosure itself - despite the walls being feet thick and reinforced in every manner possible - was completely shattered, with barely even any of the glass at the base intact, and the damage to the ground having completely eradicated the plantlife, even the trees reduced to nothing but splinter-dust.

"Oh dear gods," Kamrusepa muttered. "What could have done this?"

It was a silly question, in a lot of ways, because all manner of things could have done it. Even if the sheer destructive power of what had just taken place surpassed it to some degree, Hamilcar had come close scarcely an hour ago.

The better question was how,or maybe why? Was this a product of the Power? A limited use of the sanctuary's self-destruct system...?

A thought came instantly to mind, but Ptolema voiced it before I had a chance to.

"If whoever is doin' this can do that... How come we're still alive?"

But before anyone could reflect on the issue further, we heard that portentous sound again.

The shrill whistle of the logic bridge, echoing from the top of the stairs. Linos and Mehit, who were both standing in close proximity, turned their heads sharply, while the rest of us winced. Well, 'winced' might be something of an understatement - Theo looked like he was on the verge of having a heart attack.

"The culprit," Ezekiel snarled.

"Guess we should have seen that coming," Seth said, with a dark and anxious snort of laughter.

This time, because Linos and I - and perhaps some of the others, if they'd never broken their own connections? - were still attuned to the logic bridge, it rang only once. Then, without warning, the image of Aruru standing in the darkness appeared once again.

"Good morning, sinners," the golem said, in its usual synthetic, emotionless tone. "Once again, the master wishes to convey his congratulations on making it this far. This has proved a deeply entertaining game, and one which has surely brought great pleasure to the gods..."

"Of course," Linos said, rubbing his brow. "Of course, it wouldn't be over so simply."

"I-It's already starting," I said. "The message."

"Welp!" Fang said, sitting up without a moment's hesitation. "Guess we better see it!"

"This is obscene," Kam hissed, glancing to the side. "The gall of something like this."

Strange way to phrase it, considering the serial murders.. I wasn't the only person to think so, as I Ran give her a funny look, too.

Ophelia didn't move to touch the logic bridge, practically receding back to where she'd been sleeping, pulling her arms together... And Lilith obviously couldn't touch the bridge, either.

But one by one, everyone else did.

"...and we have progressed to the second and final stage, hearkened by the demonstration of power you have beheld. Both Divine Beasts now stand at attention, ready to fulfill their ultimate roles. The time of judgement approaches as swiftly as the drawing of the night," the mechanical voice continued. "As a reward for your diligence, the master had decreed that a premonition is to be delivered of the obstacles you must next overcome."

"They must be talking about what the system is going to do, now that it's become unpredictable," Seth said gravely.

"Unpredictable?" Mehit asked. "What do you mean?"

But there was no time for anyone to answer.

"To begin," the voice stated, "at the turning of the hour, the master shall begin to strip away that which empowers life, depriving of each of the god's gifts, one by one."

It raised its hand, and suddenly, the image expanded beyond the golem for the first time. Standing around it were the statues of the eight Dying Gods, but not the old, dilapidated ones found around the sanctuary. These ones looked like they were wrought of steel, and shone with menacing grace.

They towered over the scene, and almost seemed to reach out of the imaginary-space of the logic bridge and into the real world, their deformed faces staring down at our group coldly.

"First, he shall withdraw the gift of Hetu, Queen of Earth Unto Dust," the golem declared. "The air which you breathe."