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Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

There are conflicting stories about just how, exactly, the war broke out. Despite what voices ultimately prevailed in the political and military realms, the general population of the Mimikos was initially extremely adverse to getting wrapped up in another lengthy conflict, no matter how grave the existential threat. For two decades diplomats from the attempted to negotiate a peaceful solution, and short-lived treaties - permitting resource harvesting under strict conditions - were signed between Diakosi polities and many individual states. But ultimately both societies proved too disunified, at this stage, to come to any sort of universal consensus.

The official line from the Grand Alliance - though much contested, largely along political lines, by actual historians - is that the wyrmkin were the ones who fired the first shot. It's at least true that, in 1165 COVENANT, the Atelikos was invaded and strategic military and logistical sites seized in a surprise attack, killing a quadruple-digit number of civilians and marking the first lower-to-higher planar assault in history. But of course this framing assumes a special status for the Mimikos, where placing it in jeopardy constitutes an exceptional malevolence, while the rest of the Remaining World is fair game for anyone with a scepter and a questionable regard for their own well-being.

The facts as we know them are this: About 8 years before the war began, in 1157 COVENANT, various minor powers - now with a much better idea of the extent of the wyrmkin's civilization - began violating local prohibition and an unspoken agreement with their peer states to establish a second wave of colonies in more remote areas of the Diakos, taking advantage of its vast size and the relatively small population of the 'natives'. Illykrios, Nad-Illad, and my always-eminently well-governed ancestral homeland of Kutuy were the first, followed by many others. Eventually, the wyrmkin took notice (arguably provoked by increased military buildup and barely-deniable raids on border territories; the extent of both is again in dispute), and localized wars broke out. Among themselves, the governments of the wyrmkin almost universally signed a general defense pact, the Accords of Defiance, in 1161, while the colonists in turn increasingly began coordinating as a unified force. Long before the average person two planes up would have considered it so, the situation had already begun to resemble a conflict between two unified powers.

Whatever the truth, once the war had begun, things escalated very quickly. The Atelikos at large became a battleground, and once aerial forces began to be employed on the Diakos in response, things quickly became incredibly ugly. The wyrmkin responded to the bombing of major cities - failed attempts at leadership decapitation and demoralization interpreted as acts of open conquest as a result of cities built far more tightly and with interwoven function, a product of the Wyrm's low body temperature - with biological warfare against the Mimikos, and from there the tensions that in truth underlied the entire scenario, of the supremacy of the Covenant and the fate of homo sapiens at large, rose on a wave of bitter determination to dominate the entire framing.

And, in concert, the nature of the war shifted away from a conflict focused on taking and holding land, to one centered around the foundations of life on each plane: The great lamps, the biosphere, and connectivity to the Tower of Asphodel.

I'm no military historian, so I'll spare you the grisly details of the conflict itself, which lasted the better part of 20 years. I will say, I suppose, that for all the Grand Alliance has attempted to distort the truth, an equally untrue stereotype has emerged in counterculture, portraying the Wyrm and wyrmkin as edenically innocent, near-powerless victims who did not even really fight a war so much as they were murdered by a cold imperial power, some vision out of the New Kingdoms Era of tribal societies brutally subjugated by the great powers of Thalassa. For all they had changed, the wyrmkin were still scions of the Imperial Era, and did not miraculously lose any scientific or cultural knowledge. They were a modern society as much as any other, just a partially alien one, and when it came to total war, they killed millions upon millions of their enemies. The odds were never in their favor, but neither was the result a foregone conclusion. (A fact that has yielded generational wealth for no small number of alt history novelists.)

But I'm sure you're sick of me qualifying this, so let's get to the point. In the end, the Mimikos united. They defeated the hastily-built Diakosi fleet and drove them from the Atelikos, then painstakingly overcame their defenses at home over the course of almost a decade.

And then they ravaged the plane. They blocked out light from entire regions and sent them into eternal winter, bombed population centers into dust, and used the technology of the wyrmkin against them with plagues designed to separate symbiote from host. They cut the Diakos off from the Tower, preventing new births, and smothered the efforts to circumvent the need before they could come to fruition - or so, as conspiracy theorists will say, is the official line.

Assuming they submitted to the Covenant, the alliance (I'm using the term here despite the fact that the Grand Alliance still wouldn't come to its official existence as a political entity for another several decades, as the military structures it would inherit were at this point already in place) allowed humans the option of surrender, with all the rights outlined in the Planar Fellowship Accords following the Mmenomic War. But this tenet was applied, deliberately, without regard for the complexity of the new situation, and especially for the idea that another species could ever be sapient. I can speak confidently on this point because several rulings were made to the contrary in lower-level courts, only to be stamped out by governments-- Excepting Irenca, which did not participate in the war and remains extremely smug about this fact even in the present day.

The Wyrm themselves were to be eliminated root and stem, condemned as parasitic monsters that threatened the entire human race. And so the wyrmkin were put in an impossible position, made to either accept the violation of their bodies, the loss of much of their culture, and murder of their other halves... or to die.

Perhaps the Grand Alliance failed to fully understand their nature as beings, and of the symbiosis, until long after the conflict was ended - or perhaps they simply did not care, motivated by a cold, utilitarian desire to stamp out an unprecedented threat while there was still the political will to do so. History may never know the truth, except I guess it probably did in Dilmun actually, but at least I didn't know the truth in this particular moment.

In the end, for most, the issue was forced. Despite many communities fighting to the death, cities were occupied, and civilians forcibly converted back to baseline humans, with not all of them surviving the process. Much of the Diakos was rendered an uninhabitable wasteland, and even the regions which survived were rendered far harsher.

Those stripped of the Wyrm were... well, there's no nice way to put it. They were a destroyed people, many barely able to function mentally and universally unable to survive in their homeland bereft of their organ replacements. At the conclusion of the war, the alliance treated this as if was just more proof that symbiosis with the Wyrm had always been unsustainable and unnatural, and the survivors, or at least most of them, were forcibly resettled in the region now called the Settler's Coast at the far south of the Elysian Pangaea, which was previously uninhabited due to the climate difficulties at peripheral regions I mentioned earlier, but had become more bearable after terraforming efforts. An irony, I suppose, that the place the wyrmkin ended up was one of the same places that caused them to leave the Mimikos to begin with.

But after the war's end, the mood quickly shifted. No longer faced with any immediate peril, the Grand Alliance could no longer mask its motives as purely a matter of rational self-interest, and as the former-wyrmkin became part of society and could no longer be dehumanized, regret and guilt quickly set in. By the time the Old Yru Convention was signed, the world had already come to view the entire affair as a tragedy, and there was a public appetite to make some kind of - perceived - amends.

And so, the alliance made a token effort to restore society on the Diakos. Aid was brought to the few survivors remaining, and a measure of the resettled population - determined by a lottery system, as to not overwhelm infrastructure - were permitted to resettle and rebuild their homes, albeit without military autonomy. Bereft of the Wyrm, they were given artificial organs instead. And a few countries, a few tens of million of people, continued on, restoring their lost culture and way of life as best they could.

And... that's pretty much it. The Settler's Coast, through the passage of generations, became a backwater, somewhat embittered but ultimately normal modern country, while the Diakosi remained a peripheral simulacrum of a lost society that was slowly forgotten by mainstream culture. The utopia envisioned by Samium and his ilk was built, and the world moved on.

And yet. People did live there, and you did hear about their lives every so often, usually whenever media (news or fiction both) wanted to spin a tale of either otherworldly primitivism or startling poverty and/or tragedy, neither of which I suspected were particularly close to the situation on the ground. Occasionally you would see a somewhat accurate-feeling depiction of their traditions; their still-tight cities that were almost proto-arcologies, their strange food and drink, their collective grief-rituals that eclipsed even those of the Mourning Realms, strange and haunting. But it all felt like mere echoes of another world which could never truly be touched.

Ophelia was the first time most of us in the class had encountered someone raised in the culture, and of course we'd all been curious. But she'd always seemed reticent, more eager to talk about her training in Palaat or her religious background instead. Since her name was 'Ophelia' and not, I dunno, Xyavedd or something, I suppose I'd always assumed that her family had been closer to Mimikos cultures than her own, though there were always details that put that into question. She didn't really talk about her family at all, to the point that it felt obvious that something had happened.

There were a lot of things you could connect that 'something' to. Her presence in our class, despite her apparent lack of nepotistic connections. Her religion. Or what happened with her and Balthazar.

I regretted, in this moment, never really considering any of this all that deeply.

"Did you see all of the paintings?" she asked me.

"Um," I said. "I think so. Ptolema showed me four."

"...then you saw the scene in the courtyard, near the statue," she spoke slowly. "Their faces destroyed, hung up on the statue like... meat on a rack."

I nodded. "Y-Yeah."

"When it happened, we were inside, on the second floor... the building above us right now," she said, and pointed up in a gentle motion. "But we heard the screams even from there. We heard Theodors begging for mercy, and Kamrusepa--" She flicked her gaze towards the door. "--choking as the life was extinguished from her."

"And... you know that was me?"

She nodded, but didn't elaborate further.

I bit my lip. "That's, uh, a little vague," I said hesitantly. "I mean, we encountered people in my loop who were killed the same way-- Anna, Mehit and Lilith. Strung up on top of something weird, in their case it was in the hidden bioenclosure library. And Durvasa's body - or, well, maybe his body - was torn to pieces. And I'd stayed with the group the whole time during that."

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

For just a moment, Ophelia's expression shifted into a furtive look that might well have been pure contempt, but within a second it was gone. She said nothing.

She thinks I'm lying, obviously. Wonderful.

"...that was only one of the many things of that nature which happened that night," she said quietly. "In the kitchen, we found Ptolema cooked alive. Seth at least died mercifully quickly, but Bardiya's death was the worst of all. Half torn apart with telekinesis, then buried alive underneath the logic engines."

My face paled a little. This really did sound much worse than any other loop I'd heard about, assuming she was telling the truth. Still, I tried to stay focused, clearing my throat. "...what I mean is, do you have any proof that it was me?" I hesitated as I realized this phrasing made me sound like the villain in a crime drama. "Uh. I'm not trying to deny it. I just want to understand."

She closed her eyes for a moment. "You gave me something stronger than proof."

I frowned. "What?"

"A confession," she stated simply.

"You mean, I confessed to murders?"

"You confessed to everything, at the end," she said, her tone distant. "The final painting..."

"...you mean, the one of the monster?" I prompted.

"Monster." Her lips parted in a way that for another person might have been precursor to a laugh or giggle, but for her only gave way to an unsteady gasp. "The others died one by one, at the end. The lights all went out, and the Power couldn't be used. We were left to wander alone in the dark, not even knowing the nature of the one who pursued us..." Her eyes wandered for a moment, but then she fixed her gaze on me. "We tried to escape down here, but became separated. Myself, Lilith, Mehit, and Ran. I found myself in this room."

"That's why you wanted to meet here?"

She nodded, just slightly. "When I arrived, the place was a ruin. Shattered boxes and items practically ground to dust. There was nowhere to hide except... behind this." She inclined her head towards the statue. "And so I did, waiting there for almost an hour. The air was growing colder and thinner. We'd been told the life support was failing. I'd believed it a trick, but at that point, with everything lost... Anything felt possible."

After she stopped for another few moments, I prodded: "And... I found you here?"

She took a breath, her eyes falling. "I heard a sound," she said. "A scraping, scratching... and gasping, every so often. It made me think of a person being buried alive, crushed within a coffin. At first it was quite distant, but it drew closer and closer to the door. And then I heard it open, and a faint red light was cast on the wall..." She stood up suddenly. "Get up."

"Wh--"

"I'll show you," she explained. "Get up."

I hesitated, then rose from my seat slowly. We stepped behind the statue, where there was a half-meter long gap to the rear wall, just barely enough that it looked like I could sit down without it being extremely uncomfortable.

Ophelia herself stepped back. "The light cast long shadows across the room... including from the idol of Eshk, which towered above me as I sat there."

Suddenly, an orange-red glow - the sort of thing you'd expect from an emergency light created by a scepter, only at the weaker frequencies to save as much eris as possible - filled the chamber, from the direction of the doorway, making me jump slightly. (However horrible the vibes in the room were, I had to remember it was impossible for me to die. Well, unless this exact sequence of events was somehow the one the Lady had talked about, but that seemed like it would be awfully specific.) As she said, a shadow fell in the shape of the genderless god, its long and ethereal body rendered short and squat, the scales and length of rotting wood it carried rendered as only abstract shapes, two blunt weapons in each too-thin arm.

"And then..."

Another shadow rose up behind it, half covering it, making its arms instead appear as wings. Then they fell, as if its body were melting.

"I knew, then, that they'd found me, and that my only choice was to fight," Ophelia continued. "Since I saw the light, I thought that perhaps the Power suppression had ended somehow, but I wasn't certain. So I took my scepter in one hand, and a sharp piece of debris I'd found in the other, and waited to draw close... and then I turned."

I turned myself, half expecting to see the scene from the painting faithfully recreated as I did: The bird-spider creature staring at me venomously, cast in deep shadow. But instead she was just standing there, staring at me with the same dark yet not-entirely-present gaze she'd held for the majority of this conversation.

"You stood there... In that costume," she stated simply. "You'd brought Mehit and Lilith's body with you, like grim trophies. Butchered." She gestured a little to her rear, roughly towards the mid-point of the room. "I couldn't tell it was you at first. I tried to fight back, but it was as though you could use the Power when I couldn't. I think perhaps something had been done to my scepter, but I couldn't say. I was disarmed, you wanted me powerless... I'm not sure quite what the order of things after that was, but I remember I yelled, asking why you were doing this, what you were. And that was when you took off the mask."

"I..." I hesitated. How were you supposed to make someone who already distrusted you this much afford you so much as a single grain of good faith, make them doubt their presumptions for even the briefest of moments? Maybe 'grain' is a good word for it, actually. Trust, or really any sort of interpersonal compassion, is sort of like a plant. So long as there's a tiny sprout, it can be carefully nurtured even from almost nothing, built back up from near-total destruction. But if there's nothing but dirt, then you could pour an ocean's worth of water on it and nothing would ever happen.

...I mean, not a literal ocean, because that would be salt water-- Look, you understood what I meant.

"Are you certain it was me?" I finally said, even though I was almost certain of the response I'd get. "If it was that dark, and if it wasn't clear if the Power was suppressed or not..."

"It was you," she replied with grim certainty. "You were very close by the end, close enough that even an illusion wouldn't be enough." She inhaled heavily. "You told me everything... that you were the one that had killed everyone, and how you did it. How you had your grandfather's notes for what was going to happen to the sanctuary, what would shut down and when... How you managed to kill Seth right before our eyes." Before I could interject, she continued: "When I tried to ask you why, you told me that you thought we were all monsters. That you were happy to make us suffer, and wished you could have made it even worse. That it was a tragedy that you couldn't, that I..." Her eyes averted. "You laughed. Over Lili's corpse, her whole throat torn right open. You laughed."

I was speechless. This didn't make any sense. It didn't make any sense at all.

Like I said before, I could see myself having killed several of the others under certain circumstances. If something happened to Ran, then obviously a repeat of my response to Theodoros wasn't out of the question, and there were other reasons, too, that felt too shameful to admit. To be honest, if someone found out the truth about my nature - maybe by eavesdropping on myself and Samium somehow - then I really couldn't say what I would do to prevent the secret from getting out. There were also many things I believed the me-from-200-years-ago capable of if she were convinced it would somehow contribute to restoring my body's original identity. In the back of my mind, I'd assumed it would be something along those lines that had also been capitalized on by the real killer to make me look like the mastermind behind the whole thing.

Maybe, even, if I really believed the absolute worst of myself... After getting the news from Samium, if Ran wasn't around, and something else happened that undercut my identity in a way that pushed just the right buttons, I could imagine a possibility where I fell into a depressive fugue, enacting some kind of murder suicide on a vague pretext of revenge against the Order for their association with my grandfather, or maybe not even bothering with that pretense. That felt extremely unlikely, maybe even a million to one chance-- But I could picture a world where it happened.

But what Ophelia was describing... I couldn't understand it whatsoever. What could possibly convince me to hate my entire class, and the Order, so tremendously after such a short span of time? What could I think they did that was that bad, that I'd kill a little girl and think it was funny?

"Why did I think you were monsters?" I could only ask. "What happened?"

"You're still denying it...? That you know anything?"

"I-- Yes, I'm still denying it! None of this makes any sense!"

Again, she looked something close to revolted by my denial, which was so much worse than just being outraged. "...no, you didn't explain yourself," she stated simply. "Though, I can't imagine any reason in this world that would justify treating people that way."

Neither could I! That was the problem!

No, the emotional aspect wasn't the only issue. Even assuming a conspiracy where literally everyone at the event besides me was secretly part of some kind of baby-murdering cult, Ophelia had said I'd claimed to have access to my grandfather's notes on the Order's plan. That literally hadn't happened. So unless I was lying, there had to be some other explanation for this. An imposter. Maybe, for some reason, the Order had produced some freakish reproduction of my body in the same way they had for Linos, and was making it do these things, coming up with some vague explanation that made me appear as monstrous as possible.

Or maybe... no, it was better to work within the constraints of what I understood to be possible. I mean, that was one of the rules, wasn't it? There couldn't be some fantastical technological explanation for this that defied every fact I understood.

Anyway, there was one detail that could confirm it wasn't me beyond all doubt. Because in spite of saying all that I did still doubt, a little bit.

"...and Ran?" I asked. "Did I kill her, too?"

"Everyone else... you said that you'd killed them," Ophelia replied haltingly. "But I didn't see."

"Oh." I glanced downwards. "R-Right."

Well, great.

This was no good. If I disregarded the shock factor, the description of events she'd just given me offered almost nothing in the way of actual clues, just a few snapshots. As Kam and I had been talking about, something had to be different at the root that had made her loop so radically different, and if I was going to determine that, I needed more substantial information.

But how could I get her to offer it, like this? Her face was red. She looked just about ready to walk out again.

Put yourself in her shoes, my interpersonal reasoning said. If she came here at all, she wants some kind of catharsis from you. How can you best give it to her without outright lying in a way that will cause problems down the line?

I didn't really understand Ophelia as a person, but it felt like being direct would probably be better.

"I-- I'm sorry if I've disappointed you, with this," I said. "I really am being honest, but, uh, still. I can tell you wanted, well... catharsis..."

At this, she just shook her head.

Okay, maybe not that kind of direct.

I bit my lip, thinking. "Ophelia, is there any way I can convince you that I'm telling the truth?" I asked. "That I really don't know what you're talking about? I was never even privy to any private information from my grandfather. He wasn't close to the family at all."

She considered this for about five seconds. "In that case, let me see your entire life," she said, in an aloof tone that suggested the notion was absurd. "If there really is no motive, nothing at all, then I'll accept this is an impossible misunderstanding."

I cringed. Obviously I couldn't do that, but now the situation looked even more circumspect.

"I-- That's... maybe we could..."

"You won't do it," she said, a subtle tremble entering into her voice for a moment. "Of course you won't."

"You're asking me to show you my entire life! I have some sense of privacy!"

"You're shameless," she hissed.

This was really bad. I didn't feel like there was anything I could say. I'd got lucky with Kamrusepa and Ptolema, but if this was how the majority of the class, then this whole idea would go from however ridiculously long a shot it already was to no shot at all.

Don't get carried away, the logical part of my brain said. You're letting how much you hate being seen in a bad light muddle your priorities. It doesn't matter if she likes you, remember? Just that she works with you.

Right, right. Obviously, this whole element was a distraction.

"...look, you can believe me or not believe me, I don't care," I told her. "But Kam's right. I know you want to solve the Manse, and things here are obviously moving... well, it's not exactly breaking the sound barrier." I flattened my brow. "And even if it was, you're competing with everyone else here to see your vision realized, aren't you? If the truth started getting close, how realistic do you think it is that you'd be first through the door?"

She shook her head. "You don't know anything about life here, or what we've agreed among ourselves. You're just repeating lines that Kam's fed you, infused with... with your own low cunning."

I ignored this line in favor of repeating lines that Kam fed me. "We can give one another an advantage that almost no one else has. No one remembers when I was last in Di-- In this world. The Stage. What I know could reveal some pivotal piece of information and change everything."

...actually, now that I thought about that again, couldn't that kind of put me at a huge disadvantage, doing things like this? If I shared what I knew now, before having any understanding myself, it'd be infinitely more likely the other party would figure things out first. Was Kam scamming me with this whole idea? One thing at a time.

"And you expect me to believe your account would be at all truthful?" She looked at me piercingly. "We can't Spectate what happened at the conclave. All we have is trust for one another."

I opened my mouth, thinking to contest this--

But then I had a thought.

"...hold on a second," I said, and closed my eyes.

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