“Every so often one finds oneself in uncharted waters, be it on a battlefield in a conflict one never intended to become involved with or a social situation where all of the players and their standings are a mystery. The key thing to remember in such moments is that none of whatever dramatics are playing out are about them. They, whoever they are, don’t really matter. What matters is you.

Are two armies fighting over something incomprehensible? That’s clearly irrelevant since they should be fighting over you. Are people talking about things you have no idea about? Foolish lackwits, why are they wasting their time when what they should be discussing is you!

Absolutely no one will understand or appreciate the wisdom of this viewpoint on life, but that’s not your problem, it’s theirs, and one which you should at every opportunity encourage them correct.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame providing the keynote speech at the 132nd Commencement of the Imperial Diplomatic Corp.

It’s funny how otherworldly, screaming crystals at the heart of a monster aren’t the sort of thing people are inclined to run towards. In fact, as it turns out, exposing something which emitted that particular combination of stench and soul chilling wails was an excellent means of getting a large number of people to vacate the immediate area, the battle arena, and probably the Academy in general from what I could see.

I could respect the cadets having the sense to flee, but it seemed like the Imperial Knights should have been made of sterner stuff.

On the other hand, since we were getting an up close view of exactly what two of the Imperial Knights were made of, it was probably for the best that the others took off when they did. Given that they were bonded to the same sort of armor and weapon, I had to imagine that if they’d stayed all they would have been able to do was ‘be delicious’ as they fed more magic and gears to the thing in front of us.

With (nearly) everyone else fleeing, I made a desperate bid to reclaim my title as the ‘Single Most Foolish’ person on the field and started walking forward. Was my plan something only I could do? Probably not. Was I sure I could even do it in the first place? Mostly definitely not. Was I going to try anyways and hope for the best because I was sick of dealing with Imperial nonsense? Absolutely.

I took all of five steps forward, mind focused, heart set on my goal, before a hand grabbed my ankle.

“Where are you going?” Idrina did not sound well at all, croaking her words out at barely more than a whisper.

“To fix this,” I said. I didn’t add ‘or die trying’ because I wasn’t going to die. Not to something like this. There were a variety of other horrible fates which might await me, but death was not one of them.

“You can’t,” Idrina said. “It’s unlimited.”

I could see that she wanted to say more, but even those few words had cost her all the strength she had left.

“I know,” I reassured her very-likely unconscious form and resumed my march as the clockwork monster began rapidly reassembling itself from the damage Narla had inflicted.

As the monster regrew itself, it rebuilt the destroyed areas with plates of steel rather than anything like human tissue or muscle. 

Which meant I probably only had one shot at reaching the heart.

And it was not particularly interested in allowing a foreign body to jump inside its heart/

I chuckled as I broke into a run. In trying to kill me, the clockwork monster was behaving at least three times more rationally than the Imperials it was built from. In fact, if it wrecked the Academy, I might be willing to consider it a comrade rather than an adversary.

Except for how it was wailing.

A chorus of voices.

In soul shredding agony.

Whatever was happening to them, no matter who they were, was wrong and needed to stop.

I dodged a pseudopod of spinning gears and gristle, ducked a spray of flaming oil and tumbled over a dozen scything blades which erupted from the monster’s flesh.

All that left was a dive into the monster’s chest (not a phrase I wish to ever need to repeat) and the all too easy act of pouring myself into the copper colored crystal.

Real crystals aren’t known for being terribly porous or absorbent. Real crystals also don’t thrum with life or burn with an inexhaustible well of power. Each of those facts made the transition into whatever the copper colored crystal actually was distinctly unpleasant in their own unique manner.

Just touching the crystal was enough for me to feel it dragging me in. Passing through the solid outer layer though felt like I was being forced through a slowly shattering glass window. The living, beating hearts at the center of the crystal should have been left as dead long ago and it was from them that the horrible stench arose – life where life shouldn’t be, decay turned on decay. 

The power though was what almost dissolved me. It wasn’t my kind of power or even vaguely similar. If anything, the magic I felt crashing around me was antithetical to everything I was and there was just no end to it.

None of that was a surprise though.

In pouring myself into the crystal, I’d crossed a boundary between dimensions.

Those weren’t supposed to be stable enough to stay in any one place for long. Reaving Storms blew across the land, rather than sitting as unmoving portals to realms that could melt the world’s reality down, precisely because they were immeasurable and unpredictable things.

Or at least they were supposed to be. Within the confines of the crystal, someone had figured out how to change that though.

Instead of flying free (or closing up like they were supposed to), Inside the crystal the rift to another world writhed and burned and fought against a series of restraints that I could see but not even begin to understand..

What I could see though was that it wasn’t the rift which drove the unnatural magic from the realm beyond into my world. On its own the rift would have leaked magic, but it was so small that wouldn’t have been enough to save it from closing. There was something else that was casting the magic of the clockwork realm into my world, and I could feel that ‘something’s’ awareness take me in and swallow me whole.

“Wait, someone new is here?” the voice which spoke was functionally indistinguishable from a god. It came from everywhere around me and was loud enough to fill an entire universe.

“Yes! And she’s not bound!” It didn’t seem like the universe should be big enough to allow a second voice of that scale to exist, and yet the color of their words was so different from the first voice that it had to be someone else speaking.

“Is that possible?” the first asked.

“Well, she’s a hell of a lot bigger than us, so maybe?” the second said.

Bigger? I’d definitely heard that word but my mind refused to embrace it in any manner at all. To be fair though, in addition to the very concept of anything being bigger than the bodiless voices, there was a lot of other distractions I was struggling to deal with.

I thought there’d been more than enough gears jutting out of the clockwork monster, and I’d been correct. No monster, or anything else, needed as many gears as the monster had been riddled with. Given the universe that it was linked too though, I was at a loss to understand why it hadn’t been spewing forth even more.

Everywhere around me, machine components seethed. There were pistons and escaping gasses which drove the turning of gears, hammers and belts, and blades and spikes of all sizes and shapes, with everything appearing in every material imaginable and all of it stretching not just out to the horizon but endlessly off into space, beyond even the farthest stars

What should have been pure, predetermined perfection though was nothing but a cacophony of destruction and chaos. Gears failed to turn against one another and were twisted and shattered, only to form back into near shapes which, as often as not, still couldn’t fit their assigned place and were broken anew.

“I don’t think she can see us,” the first voice said.

“Maybe she’s newly dead?” the second said. “That would explain why she’s so huge.”

“I don’t think that can be it,” the first said. “We saw those two new ghosts get sucked into the maw a minute ago. They weren’t anywhere near as big as she is.”

“True,” the second said. “So the question is how do we get her attention?”

I looked around, trying to figure out what sort of colossuses the two voice might be, but only the endless turning and breaking vista of gears was visible.

I tried to move away from the right to get a better view and I shattered.

Which was bad.

Not painful.

Painful would have been reasonable. Instead what I felt was entirely unreasonable. 

I hadn’t tried to move. I’d tried to turn. But I wasn’t right. I didn’t fit. So I had to break. Then I could be put back together. Put back right. Not like I was. Like it had been decided I should be.

A lot more gears broke as that thought tried to imprint itself into my mind.

“Uh, what is she doing?” the first voice asked, fear creeping higher over each word.

“She’s, uh, she’s…I don’t know,” the second voice said. “It doesn’t look real though, or…”

“Or it’s a different real,” the first voice said.

I wasn’t quite sure what they were talking about but it wasn’t a big leap to guess that it had something to do with how I was shifting through the machinery that was trying to bury me and tearing every bit of it that I could get my hands on to pieces.

What? I didn’t like that dimension. I still don’t.

“She’s a…she’s a caster? Here? As a ghost?” the second voice said.

“I don’t think so,” the first voice said.

“She’s not a caster? Then how is she doing all that!” the second voice asked.

“No. I don’t think she’s a ghost,” the first voice said.

“Not a ghost, not going to be one either, not here, not today,” I said, growling the words out as I shifted through forms that were still capable of speech.

“YOU’RE ALIVE!?” the second voice was loud enough that it shook me into goo. That sounds worse than it was since I was in the process of shifting wildly to escape the grinding gears, but it was still more than a little disconcerting.

“Quieter, please?” I asked, pulling myself together and squirting through a rapidly closing gap in the gears.

“Seven Stars! She can hear us!” the second voice said.

“You are louder than a tornado,” I said. “How could I not?”

“We’re what? No, wait, that doesn’t matter. Can you free us?” the first voice asked.

“It’s why I’m here,” I said. “But I have no idea where you are. You sound like you are literally everywhere.”

“We’re trapped in two jewels in the central mechanism,” the second voice said.

“One of these bits of machinery is central to the others?” I asked. It made sense that one would be but I was staring at billions or maybe trillions of different pieces of machinery which were all in motion and all becoming more hostile to me by the second.

“Yeah, can’t you see it?” the first voice asked. “It’s the big glowing one in the center.”

I wanted to ask ‘the center of what’, but I knew they wouldn’t be able to answer, and I knew why.

We weren’t seeing the realm through the same eyes.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Seventeen months, six days, four hours, and thirty six minutes,” the second one said, confirming what I suspected.

No one has that accurate a sense of how long they’ve been trapped somewhere. Not unless the realm they’re a part of is axiomatically one of precision and defined values.

“Can you keep talking,” I said. “I’m going to do something to help find you but I need to hear your voices to make sure I don’t get lost in the process.”

“Uh, what should we talk about?” the first one asked.

“Tell me about yourselves. Who are you? How did you get here?” I was legitimately curious to hear the answers to those questions, but far more importantly I needed an anchor for what I was going to do or I was likely to run face first into one of those ‘not dead but wish I was’ fates.

“My name’s Hanalee,” the second voice said. “And I died about four years ago in a Reaving Storm.”