"Get out."
"No." Tarn ignored the command. He was not there to take orders.
"Once the tracking completes and the coordinates are synchronised, you're all going to be pulled through with me."
He knew he was working against time, that every second was critical. Distantly, beyond the bounds of the mindscape, he could sense the machine still building its power, deep below ground, it cycles increasing continuously - but to what point? He had to assume that whatever was going to happen was going to happen imminently.
They stood atop the parapet at the edge of the palace roof terrace, the aviary intact and beautiful in the centre. The sky was a warm orange-blue as the sun dipped towards the mountain horizon. Birds hovered, immobile, in the sky. The valley stretched out around them in every direction. Everything was stopped. Tarn couldn't imagine anybody seeing this, knowing this, and not being satisfied.
"What is it to be then?" Kraisa asked, stood next to him, no longer clad in armour and wearing instead plain clothes of a commoner. "You're going to try to take my power as well, is that it? Combine mine and Aera's powers?"
"No." He knew it didn't work like that. Knew it wasn't that simple. As with so many things, he didn't know where the knowledge came from, but it was there, sometimes surfacing at the right moment, other times not.
"This rebellion of yours should never have existed," she said. "I should have killed Aera when I had the chance."
"Instead, you banished me," Aera said, stepping out from behind Tarn in a manner which made no physical sense - but they were in the mindscape, where sense was a secondary consideration.
"He let you out of your cage, then? You must have been weaker than I'd realised, to let him overwhelm you like that."
Tarn took a step, off the parapet and out into space. He floated quite easily, as if standing on an entirely solid surface. The outer wall of the palace dropped away to the mesa, which in turn descended to the city far below.
"He dislikes cages," Aera said, the both of them talking as if he wasn't present. "The door was left open a crack. Not entirely by accident, I suspect."
"And you got him out of the machine rooms?"
Aera laughed. "Oh, no," she said, "that was a happy accident. A feedback loop. Sloppy networking on my part. It seems I inspired him entirely by accident. The explorer, though: I made him a path."
Turning his attention away from them, Tarn looked to the mountains, proud and impossible and indomitable. From here they looked very different than down on the valley floor. It occurred to him that the valley itself was not dissimilar to the shape of a battered crown, still proud though misshapen.
Then they were gone from the rooftop, instead finding themselves in a chamber within the palace. Kraisa lay on a bed, feverish - no, not Kraisa. Queen Anja. Another, younger girl sat beside her, dressed as a maid. She held her hands to the Queen's temples.
"This is you," he said, looking back at Kraisa.
"Her in another time," Aera confirmed. "Her previous body; one of many she's stolen over the years."
Kraisa snorted derisively. "Your 'humane' approach is hardly better. Getting their misguided permission before locking them away."
"This is when you did it," Tarn said. "Is she still in there? Like Aera was still in me? Kirya's real mother?"
"I'm her real mother," Kraisa snapped. "I raised her. My blood is in her blood." she took a breath, either unable or unwilling to conceal the truth any further. She glanced at Aera. "We don't have the same longevity system. Mine is based on reskinning. On my world empty vessels are bred specifically for that purpose. Here, I had to improvise."
He understood enough to be repulsed at the notion, and to also know that there would be no remnant of Anja left within. A sadness gripped at his chest, as he thought of having to tell Kirya.
"This is what led to the war in the first place," Kraisa continued. "Reskinning, possession, cell regeneration, hibernation - they all had the same goal, but we disagreed on the specifics."
"The promise of eternal life does strange things to people, as we discovered," Aera mused.
The world changed and then they were elsewhere, in the streets of Treydolain at night as bonfires burned and thick smoke blanketed the stars. Aera looked about her, as people thronged the muddied alleys, her face a portrait of disgust. "Why bring us here?"
"I'm not controlling it," Kraisa said, pointing at Tarn, "he's pulling us back." She looked uncomfortable, almost nervous, as if she would rather be anywhere but there, in that time.
Tarn trudged through the puddles, absently aware that his shoes remained clean and unsullied, and tried to move to a corner to see what was happening on the next street, where the flickering orange glow grew more intense. He was unable to get near, instead finding himself continually back where he began, as if restricted by an invisible tether, his movement abstracted as in a dream.
"You don't want him to see," Aera said, smiling sadly, eyes cast down.
"I've learned many new words," Tarn said, turning back to Kraisa and approaching her slowly. "They come to me in my sleep, or they used to. I don't know how I know things, but I do. Sometimes I don't know what words mean until the right moment." The smell of burning meat filled his nostrils, even in the oddly muffled sensory experience that existed inside this place. "Words that I'm thinking of now. Massacre. Mob. Pogrom." He took a deep breath, the air warm and thick and sickly. "Perhaps you could tell me what they mean."
"This is why the machine rooms were necessary," Kraisa said. "It solved the problem with minimal bloodshed. Better the machine rooms than more of this." She waved a hand at the scene around them, as a group of men were led past and out of sight, their wrists bound by rope. Their skin was darker than most of those Tarn had seen in the valley, other than Tranton.
Then they were gone, the city replaced with the inside of a dim warehouse, filled with odd contraptions that were slowly spitting out sheets of marked paper.
"I think he's on to you," Aera noted.
Walking to a box containing a stack of such papers, Tarn looked down. It depicted a caricatured male figure, with dire warnings written around the edges detailing the threat he posed to society. An unfamiliar man stood near one of the printing devices, where he held and was examining the result. Although the man's face was new to Tarn, he could feel what lay within.
Tarn held up a hand, demanding silence before the others could speak. "All of this," he said, slowly, the concepts straining at his inexperienced understanding of the world, "it was to make some people hate some other people?"
Aera and Kraisa, stood next to each other, stared back at him without replying. In that moment they seemed oddly similar.
"Why?" he prompted.
"Because it always works," Kraisa said, shrugging. "Create fear. Blame someone else. Doesn't matter who it is. They'll believe it every time, as long as it points the finger away from themselves."
"But why do it?"
"I needed control. Leverage. This is the best control mechanism humans have ever discovered, and it also happens to be fast and convenient. Hatred is a lubricant, if you know where to apply it. It got me into power and removed Aera from the valley."
He had the sense of drowning; that so much suffering was borne on the whims of these two, and their never-ending conflict. Kraisa and Aera were two sides of the same sword, spinning end-over-end, unheeding of who or what they might damage.
They shifted again, the locale immediately different yet familiar, as if they had always been there, as when a dream flits from one notion to another. Lush green grass covered the steep slopes of the hollow in which they found themselves, and in the deep hollow was built a tall, imposing structure, all spires and glass and carved stonework.
"The cathedral," Kraisa said, her voice softer than usual. "I think I'd almost forgotten about it."
"Where is this?" Aera asked, moving over the grass, touching her hand to the tombstones that peppered the grounds. She was similarly tethered to Kraisa, unable to stray too far.
"Somewhere else on Evinden," Kraisa said, "I forget the name of the place. While you and Hadrael were busy fighting wars with Odrim all over this world, I was here." A soft, choral melody could be heard from the large wooden doors to the building, which were slightly ajar. Tarn wondered at the names - he'd heard them before, seen them referenced in the museum at Aviar. "I thought I might stay here until the end, but then I heard stories from travellers of a great valley discovered to the east. Icen Lagonia's valley, they called it, and I recognised their descriptions."
Aera nodded. "Which is what took you there. You'd found ground zero, after all those years."
"We should have worked together. Instead, you followed me there and ruined everything."
"The time of working together was long gone, even by then."
"Stop," Tarn said, holding up a hand. "You bicker like children."
"You're right," Aera said, frowning. "She's trying to delay, to keep us here until it's too late."
Spreading her arms wide, Kraisa smiled sheepishly. "It was worth a shot." She locked eyes with Tarn. "Where next, boy?"
They were in the air, high above the ground, perhaps a mile high, descending with not inconsiderable speed. Wind buffeted against them and, above, a shimmering, elliptical shape of the same colour and material as the membrane enveloping Lagonia was shrinking, folding in on itself until it vanished entirely.
"What was that?" Tarn asked, unconcerned about their continuing fall. The impact would never come.
"One of the portals," Kraisa said. "The machine malfunctioned. It spat us out all over the world at random, and transported the complex to where you now find Lagonia. The fusion of the original laboratory site with what was already there caused the ruction that led to the creation of the valley. The conflation is what generated the rich source deposits. It's not a valley, not really. It's a cross-dimensional impact crater." She stared at him with disdain. "Not that you would understand."
"We were never supposed to be here," Aera said, "but we were desperate, and we had no time to run full tests. Corners were cut."
The ground rushed up to meet them, vast and golden, dunes undulating to the horizon, and then they were in a room unlike anything Tarn had ever seen. Every surface, every material, seemed alien and unknown: smoother than anything in Lagonia, even inside the palace. The closest comparison was to the architecture of Aviar, which itself had seemed a step removed from the real world. Flat, glowing boards were everywhere, displaying rapidly changing information, while people dressed in white clothes operated them hurriedly. He knew that Aera and Kraisa were here, albeit in different bodies. Through an enormous pane of glass he could see into a chamber lit by the blue luminescence of a sphere similar to the one beneath the mesas.
"The final moments," Kraisa said. "Remember this, Aera?"
"We thought it was going to work."
"It was going to end the war."
"Perhaps it did. We just weren't there to see it."
"Come with me," Kraisa said, leading them from the control room and out into a long, grey, reflective corridor. It was a covered walkway, with windows on either side. She pointed at what lay beyond. Tarn gazed through the glass at a dusty, scorched landscape, where swarms of people could be seen engaged in combat, using far more intense and destructive forms of the skills he had recently learned. It was a horrific light show of his full potential. "They were at the gates," Kraisa said. "It was our last chance. It didn't work."
More questions were raised than answered. Tarn was acutely aware of the clock ticking away in the back of his mind, and at Kraisa's efforts to distract, but he could also sense that a truth was close - perhaps not a final truth, but part of one.
"You've been trying to get back this whole time," he noted.
"In retrospect it's clear that we should have continued to work together," Kraisa said, "but that alliance had always been tenuous. When it all went wrong and we ended up on your world, those bonds didn't last. The old wounds opened up faster than I expected."
"It's been seven hundred years," Aera said quietly. "What do you really expect to find if you go back?"
Kraisa turned on her, rage in her voice. "Perhaps it did work and we won. Perhaps it didn't and we lost, but even then I could get back and help whoever has survived. It's never too late. Either way, I'd be home."
Tarn nodded, knowing that he had what he needed. He knew then, from witnessing their behaviour and from having Aera lodged in his mind for weeks, that they had always viewed Evinden, Lagonia, the Headland and everyone who lived there to be somehow inferior, or irrelevant. This was not their world; everything they had done here was a means to an end, with the people of Evinden a resource to be plundered like any other. He'd never had a home and had only ever glimpsed broken facsimiles of such a concept. To Aera and Kraisa it was very real. They'd corrupted the notion to motivate them through centuries of cruelty.
He closed his eyes and focused on the task at hand, manipulating the environment such that it was no longer a direct manifestation of Kraisa's memories. He extinguished the lights in the corridor, bringing the walls in closer from either end, until they stood in a small box, barely large enough for the three of them. A single window remained, looking out on a frozen diorama of war.
"What is this?" Kraisa asked.
"I could leave you here forever," Tarn said, "and I could put Aera back into her own cage. But something I've learned is that I don't like cages, for myself or anybody else."
"What, then?"
He tugged at the tether between them, which had been keeping him anchored to her memories. Now that they were no longer intrinsically linked to the memory the tether had slackened, giving him purchase over it. He severed the link to himself, as he had always done, and then passed his end to Aera. Using skills that were still largely a mystery to him, he connected Aera and Kraisa together, then took a step back.
"Leave. I don't care about your war, or your justifications, or your motivations, or what might have been and what was. I want you gone from my world." He turned to Aera. "And I want you gone from my head. I sense that your hands are just as dirty, even if you keep them looking clean. But I can't justify locking you away in that mental prison."
"Exile, then," Aera said, pursing her lips contemplatively.
"You'd allow me to go home?" Kraisa said, seemingly unsure of whether to sneer with derision, be thankful or treat the offer with distrust.
"You both get to go home," Tarn said, "but you'll have to learn to live with each other. Or not, but either way it won't be my concern."
"What if I don't accept? What if I don't want her in here?"
"Then you can remain in this box, forever looking out the window at the end of your world." Tarn's face was grim; this didn't feel like victory, though it did feel like progress. "This will make lots of people unhappy, including my friends," he said, "but it'll end it. You won't be going back with the valley. That stays here." He tapped his head. "Remember that I have your knowledge up here, still. I unlock more all the time. After you're gone, I'll keep working. Know that if you are ever tempted to return, you will regret it."
"I'll hold her to it," Aera said.
Kraisa laughed. "Do you still think you can trust her?"
"No," Tarn said, shaking his head, "but I know that neither of you are suicidal. And you're both very aware of what I can do."
"We'll have to co-inhabit her body," Aera said. She shrugged. "I've got used to it; it's not so bad. Perhaps we can curb each of our worst impulses."
"It sounds appalling," Kraisa said, "but if it means I get to go home, then fine." The corners of her lips turned down into a half -smile, half-grimace. "You should know I think you a fool, though, Tarn. If I were in your position I would not give you this chance."
"That is why you have lost," he said.
The world reset and they were back on the parapet at the edge of the palace roof, the valley of Lagonia sprawled below, its sun-drenched beauty almost overwhelming in its majesty.
"You had this," Tarn said, indicating the vista with his hand, "but you could never see it. This could have been your home. You ignored it. You used it. You don't get to do that anymore."
Then he blinked, the mindscape collapsed, and they were back in the real world.