“The solution to one problem, in my experience, is often the precipitating factor in the next one’s origin. No matter how clever a trick you devise, there is always some angle to it which will catch you unawares. It’s enough to convince one to never bother with trickery or problem solving at all but that would be unconscionable! Better to be cast out with the trash than to forfeit our place as the architects of our own fate!”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame, face down drunk in a nameless alley and lecturing a rat which happened by.

I was going through a lot, literally a lot since an entire universe seemed to be doing its best to crush me into dust, so I wasn’t sure I’d heard Hanalee correctly.

“You died four years ago? How did you wind up here? Is this where your magic comes from?” It wasn’t easy finding moments when I could take a form that had both a mouth and lungs to be able to form those words, but Hana seemed to be able to follow me nonetheless.

“No, I hadn’t found out what my magic was yet,” Hanalee said, her voice still filling the cosmos to its farthest extents.

“Me either,” the first voice said.

“I thought souls went somewhere else after they died. Somewhere beyond the Transcendent planes?” 

That seemed to be the common wisdom on why even the strongest healers couldn’t raise the dead, though I suspected asking Doxle for clarification would probably be a good idea, assuming I survived the Clockwork Cosmos trying to squish me.

“We were elsewhere,” Hanalee said. “They did something that pulled us back to here, and then they locked us in these crystals.”

“They pulled you out of heaven!?” I hadn’t even bothered much with any of the religious practices in the Empire. Grammy said they were all parasites and tyrants and I hadn’t seen a lot to convince me otherwise, but I was reasonably sure that most of them consider a soul’s final destination to be sacrosanct and beyond the reach of anything mortals could meddle with.

“We weren’t in heaven,” the first voice said. “And we weren’t in hell either. We were,” he stammered for a bit. “Elsewhere.”

That was both theologically profound and something I absolutely didn’t have time to worry about.

“Who are ‘they’, and what did they do you when they got you here?” I asked.

I needed their answers, their dialog to help me stay focused on who I was, but, much though I wanted to, I really couldn’t wait any longer.

Before anyone could answer, I started to change again.

This time I wasn’t running away though.

I wasn’t even trying to survive.

What I was attempting was much harder than that.

Letting my flesh turn to metal and my mind sink down into the click-clack-click of the machinery around me, I tried to fit in.

It is difficult at first.

To hold rigid and not change.

To be one small, undifferentiated piece of a whole so vast I couldn’t even be said to exist within it.

I yearned to change

I yearned to become something, anything else.

This was not who I am.

This was not what I am.

No.

It was not.

But it was what I must be.

In that moment.

I hated it.

I hated it more than anything.

This was a terrible plan.

I wasn’t supposed be there.

I couldn’t help them.

I couldn’t help myself.

I was being infected by the world.

I was.

I was.

I was turning.

I ticked.

I was turned.

I turned others.

It was what I did.

It was what I was.

I shattered.

I was weak.

I was not what was needed.

I shattered again and was reformed.

I smiled!

I changed!

Perfection was not attained.

I was not metal.

I was weak! Gloriously, deliciously weak!

I shattered again and again, stasis refused over and over because I was not what was needed!

“Can you still hear us?” Hanalee asked.

“I can,” I said, opening eyes that were lenses of glass ringed in copper. 

I was turned and I turned others, and in turning I heard a voice I could finally understand.

Intruder, it said.

Yes, I replied.

Destroyer? it asked.

Repair, I replied.

Perfection? it asked. 

No. I can’t restore make things perfect. Perfection is anathema. I am anathema to you.

Destruction? it asked.

No. Repair. Intruder removal.

Leave.

With the other intruders.

You are one.

They are two. Hidden. Encysted in gems. Changing you.

Cannot see that.

I can.

And I could! In assuming a form that connected me to the Clockwork Cosmos, I’d been able to bridge the gap between us so that the whole world around me looked different.

On one level I was still aware that the entire cosmos was filled with nothing but machinery. Where the gears allowed passage though, I could see, peering through what should have been solid physical structures as though they were as transparent as air.

In the center of the sphere I was standing in the rift back home lay. The sphere was so vast that the rift was more distant than the moon, but if I dropped my current transformation, if I stopped acknowledging the Clockwork Cosmos’s laws, I knew it would be easily within reach. 

Opposite the rift, at the end of a long hallway, a tall column with various embedded jewels lay.

I glanced back and forth between the Dimensional Rift and the Central Control Mechanism and tried to puzzle out how I could be standing on the inner surface of a sphere when I looked at one of them and at the end of a long corridor when I looked at the other. I felt a tug in my mind as I tried to work it out and saw that understanding did lay within my grasp. I simply had too many memories showing me what real things looked like in my human universe for me to give myself over to the Clockwork Cosmos enough to grasp the deeper parts of its essence.

Fortunately I didn’t need to. Not to save Hanalee and her companion. All I needed to do was walk down the corridor and pry their gems loose from the central mechanism they were tied into.

Unfortunately, someone didn’t seem inclined to allow that.

“Sorry!” Hanalee said as machinery began to tear itself loose from the walls and ceiling, reconfiguring into a thousand fatal tools for the world to hurl against me.

“This is us,” the first voice said. “We’re doing this. But we don’t want to.”

I faded back into the machinery, my thoughts overwhelmed with the demands of purpose. Fight. I turned so that we could fight.

Fight the intruder.

Who was me.

I shattered again and came back to myself once more.

As I did the assault resumed.

“Can you stop? For just a moment?” I asked, relying on natural dodging and shapeshifting to buy enough time to hear the answer.

So of course it turned out to be one I didn’t want to hear.

“No. We can’t. We bound by more than the crystals,” Hanalee said. “They put something into us. Like rules that we have to follow.”

“What happens if you break them?” I asked, still hoping there was going to be a peaceful way to resolve this.

“What happens if you break gravity?” the first voice asked.

I sighed. Of course it was those sort of rules. The magical kind. The kind that Hana and her companion would destroy themselves on long before they managed to make one even budge a little.

Can you help? I asked, shifting into resonance with the Clockwork Cosmos again.

We see them now. Through you. But we cannot help, the Clockwork Cosmos said. Their laws are not ours. 

Which meant I simply had reach them on my own!

It wasn’t simple.

I took the sort of wounds which would have killed all of my housemates ten times over and when I the reached the Central Control Mechanism I burned the moment I touched it.

If it sounds like I was having a miserable time of things, then I’m failing to convey how much worse than that it really was.

The absolute worst part though? It wasn’t the Clockwork Cosmos trying to kill me. I could respect that. I was a poison inside it, my very existence a corrosive force that it simply couldn’t tolerate. 

No the worst part was the set of glyphs someone had inscribed on the gemstones which housed Hanalee and Roldo. The moment I touched then (with my burned and sliced hands), the damn things tried to eat me.

“That’s not us!” Roldo said.

“It’s why we’re stuck in here,” Hanalee said. “But what is it doing to you? You said you weren’t dead?”

“I’m not,” I said, grabbing onto a nearby spinning gear to help drag me away from the gemstones. It didn’t exactly work, but the force pulling me away did keep me from getting drawn in any further.

“These things can’t absorb humans though,” Roldo said. “They’d eat the handlers who’ve been coming in to check on us if they could.”

“Handlers?” I asked, trying to a.) keep my arms from being ripped off and b.) not lose my grip on the gear which was keeping me from being absorbed by Hanalee’s gem.

“Yeah. There are humans who come in here and do things with the Control Mechanism. They’ve been changing what we can do. What we have to do too. We’re not, I don’t know if we’re people still,” Hana said in a voice that was so much smaller than my own I barely recognized it as hers.

“You smell like people to me,” I said through gritted teeth, struggling fruitlessly to pull free of the gem. 

I considered morphing back to being a gear. The gems obviously weren’t absorbing their surroundings, so a gear would be safe from them. Or it would be if they didn’t already have a piece of me to tug on the rest with.

“We smell?” Roldo asked. “But we’re inside these things. There’s no air getting out at all.”

“I have a really good sense of smell,” I said and finally admitted to myself that my grip was simply not strong enough to pull me free.

It was however strong enough to tear a couple fingers off my hand.

In theory, I knew I wasn’t going to miss them. I grew them back before the pain really had time to register. What did worry me was the idea of leaving any bit of myself behind in a realm where I absolutely was not supposed to be.

“Okay. That sucked. It looks like I can’t touch those things,” I said and mentally kicked myself for missing the obvious answer. “If only I had some kind of tool that would let me pry them loose and maybe break them open so you could get free and not bother this nice cosmos with your whole icky existence thing.”

Will these help? The nice cosmos asked as a pair of long handled pliers landed in my outstretched hand.

I’m sorry we can never get along, you seem like a fantastic place, I said, hefting the wonderfully sturdy pliers to make sure they weren’t going to eat me too. I can at least do this for you though.

When dealing with weird magical artifacts, pliers, it turns out, are a really good idea. In place of ripping off body parts and a desperate scramble for freedom, it took me about twenty seconds of work with the pliers to have the two gems ripped off the Control Mechanism.

“I don’t want to leave anything here,” I said, trying to imagine the kind of damage an alien thing like the Control Mechanism could do if it ran amuck.

With the gems removed, it slowly powered down.

And then got devoured by the Clockwork Cosmos.

Which was great! Problem solved! 

Well, probably solved. 

Of course it did raise one tiny additional issue.

“Where did the rift go?” Hanalee asked.

Because, of course, it had closed completely. It looked the path home had been held open by the machine which I had just stripped of protections and allowed the realm we were standing into reduce to scrap. Not my best move, but given my limited options I was not going to beat myself up over it.

Not when I had a whole cosmos ready to do the work for me.

Apologies, the Clockwork Cosmos said as it resumed trying to erase me from existence.

No, no, I understand, I said, racing to get to the point where the rift had been. If I was going to have to tear open a new rift it seemed like the best spot would be where one had just been.

I still maintain that was a good theory, especially since I didn’t know that dimensions tend to ‘heal’ the wounds from rifts to be stronger than they’d been to prevent a repeat performance.

“We’re going to get dissolved!” Roldo said, and given the trouble I was having breaking a path back to our world I couldn’t say he was wrong.

“We might be able to help with that,” a new arrival said.

I turned to face our rescuers and found myself face-to-face with someone who was wearing almost my exact features.