「故事模式剧情详表 (移动版)」：修訂間差異

Another awakening, and her first.<br><br>Each one awakens in the world of memories with nothing in her head. She is no exception.<br><br>However, as light filters through her cornea the sensations that grip her are unusual. Her heart stirs first,<br>passionate, and she almost snarls at the building frustration. She grips the clothes over her stomach, and<br>thinks her ears might be deafened. Her eye squints involuntarily, and she realizes with that that she only has<br>a single eye rather than two. She feels around her face.<br><br> “Wha...? ”<br><br>She coughs, and pushes herself up. What she felt through her glove was something almost soft, surrounding<br>something very solid in the place of her right eye. She realizes she’s wearing gloves. Looking over her body,<br>she wonders why she’s wearing these clothes. She wonders next why she knows what clothes are at all.

She had been sleeping against a wall, and upon an inspection of her surroundings sees that there are three<br>others to make a four-cornered place around her, and every one of them is in extreme disrepair. Looking up<br>she sees that there’s no roof, and questions why it is she’d expected to find one in the first place. In fact, she<br>recognizes where she is... vaguely. She trudges along the wall she’d slept against until she finds one she can<br>step over. As she clears the bricks, she notices that they are entirely white. Looking up, she sees that it isn’t<br>only this wall, but the entire world that’s white. It is an infinite landscape of an old, defeated, human society,<br>or rather a pastiche of several societies. It’s bizarre... Moreover: it is bizarre she finds it bizarre. Why?<br><br>Before she even stumbles upon any reflective glass, she has already bet on tens of theories behind what<br>she’s seeing, and who she is. Even that she is alone, and that she doesn’t know her name, tells her much<br>about the potential truth.<br><br>And, over time, she finds more reason for one theory in particular.

She was born with conviction and curiosity. The world of white presents questions but no answers. Days<br>pass, and there are no answers within the ruins. Weeks pass, and there are no answers within the glass.<br>Indeed, the world is full of glass, taunting always with views of other, more vivid and varied places. Echoes,<br>imprints of something real, exactly the world itself, so full of what must be copies of human invention.<br>After two months, though it could be more, she feels she has seen enough to believe something, and<br>with confidence.<br><br>While atop a broken stairway someplace far away now from where she’d awakened some time ago, she<br>gazes at an undulating and segmented portion of the sky: a seemingly broken window to nothing, crafted<br>from over a hundred shards of Arcaea. She becomes sure of herself in this moment. She can bet her<br>judgment is the truth.<br><br>But it’s not enough, and never enough. It can’t be settled with speculation.

So she vows: this realm is a mystery, telling nothing and offering little, so she will solve it and find its reason.<br>As the only being of this realm, it seems, this will be her first duty.<br><br>And as she fully accepts the Arcaea...<br>So too do the Arcaea fully accept her...<br><br>...as a vast and seemingly endless archive, not only to be read, but to be lived through.}}

It’s early evening. Outside, the twilight amber flowing out from the sun tries to slip by without pause, but<br>the devices within the surrounding meadows catch and spool it, changing it to rays more similar to what<br>might be cast from the moon.<br><br>The party has a certain atmosphere. Though there are no eyes without the manor, the fact is that<br>maintaining an image is paramount to those of upper echelons. She knows this, all of this, innately. Sitting<br>in a darker place, with sunlight captured and held at ceilings and staircases presently beyond her reach, she<br>considers the implications of this knowledge in calm and in silence.<br><br> “Lavinia. ”<br><br>She looks up from her wine glass. The fiancé (dressed very well, almost stuffily, but in casual posture) is<br>standing before her.<br><br> “There isn’t actually wine in that glass, is there? ”<br><br>She looks at it through her one proper eye. She answers: “It ’s cider... Donovan. ”

“Good, ” he says with a smile, looking out toward the rest of the room. She looks at his expression blankly.<br>He smirks. ”Mum and the rest say a little wine is good... ” he says, glancing at her again. “It ’s a load of<br>nonsense, I tell you. Have you ever seen a drunk man? ”<br><br>She thinks, wincing. “I haven’t. ”<br><br> “Well then, let it remain that way. ” He chuckles, then turns away. “I ’ll go speak with Morgan. Join us<br>whenever you like. ”<br><br>She nods, and Donovan moves to their mutual childhood friend near the fireplace.

As always, images need to be maintained. The fire throws its light only a few feet out from the pit before the<br>threads of it are wound away, stored into lanterns on the floor. The rest of the room is dark, but comforting.<br>It’s a setting to relax within. A few lanterns above give just enough illumination for reading, seeing each<br>other’s faces, and the spread of carefully selected portions of food along with bottles of drink. Just outside<br>the room, through half-glass walls, an almost untame scene of wildflowers, stones, and streams is dimly<br>visible: wrapped in a midnight blue, almost like satin. There are twenty guests at the party, half in this room,<br>the rest in the halls or somewhere in other studies—perhaps the library. This is as much as she knows.<br><br>She drinks her cider, tastes it. She notes that it has a taste at all, not having had much experience with cider<br>herself. She recalls something about a better taste and sensation, but in the moment now she is compelled<br>to focus on the burn along her tongue. Overall: quite unpleasant. That is her determination.<br><br>She puts the glass down on the fanciful doily of the short table beside her. She sits, listens, and watches,<br>touching the flower petals blooming from her other eye rather absently.

She hears Donovan say, “But to think they’ve done so much already. When I first heard of the idea, I was<br>sure it wasn’t possible. ”<br><br> “Well, Charles is quite sure it is, ” says another of the guests—not Morgan, but Nathalia.<br><br> “Astounding, ” Donovan grants, running his fingers through the top of his hair.<br><br> “A whole entire world, made by human hands, ” he says. “Mankind is quite something. ”}}

Her eye had wandered to the flickering of a lantern, and now it seeks the expectant husband. She reaches<br>for her glass and takes a sip; it’s enough to make her remember why she had put it down in the first place.<br><br>The matter of a created world is only really a fickle fancy of theirs. They do not discuss it much. They do not<br>much understand it. What little they might have to say of true interest, she can’t, in fact, properly remember.<br>Irritating. At times, it even feels to her like they aren’t speaking at all.<br><br>The girl grows impatient. She stands and passes out of the sitting room into more lavish, more evening-<br>themed halls, passing rooms with which she’s familiar, but only vaguely. She explores, finding stretches of<br>unlit, pitch-black paths, and doors that seem to be locked though their knobs bear no holes for unlocking.<br>What doors are open show rooms of a few men and women each, chatting too quietly to discern. If they<br>ever notice her presence, they only look her way a moment before returning to conversation or rest.

She wants to go outside.<br><br>The manor has some technological sophistication to it, but is married to its ideals of old “class”. Yes, the<br>dimming canisters are curious, and the manufactured wilds are peculiar, but what interests her the most<br>are the light-transforming machines in the gardens. She knows of them, but has yet to see them firsthand.<br><br>In a word, she is “curious”.<br><br>The humdrum of a social gathering so often repeated that this day feels like a thousand identical others is<br>not something she wishes to dabble in long. Lives and creations are too fascinating to ever take either for<br>granted.

But as she approaches the doors to the front driveway...<br><br>As her fingers slip upon the wood of the grand handles before her...<br><br>She knows, innately, that there is nothing past there, nothing for her. In the entire world, there is nowhere<br>else she could be. Her place is not in the meadows admiring mechanisms, it is in the sitting room with the<br>husband-to-be.<br><br> “Outside” is only an idea. A fruitless, ephemeral concept.<br><br>That is not a favorable realization.<br><br>Dropping her hand she turns and stands below the chandelier, each of its shards showing an image of<br>somewhere else in the world, at this moment. Shifting, always, and speaking of places she cannot go.<br>Fading, almost celestial illumination hangs around the fixture, giving this place and that object a too-unreal<br>quality. Her eye, her lips, say nothing. She trudges back into the mansion, with a small fire of discontent<br>born within her.}}

It isn’t blood.<br><br>It isn’t anything.<br><br>The gentleman’s throat is cut in what should be an awful way... but the memory lacks a concept of what<br> “awful” would be. Instead of a shredded, vicious image, his neck now looks akin to torn and crumpled<br>paper. Inside is not “shadow” but “negative space ”: a void inside his body. The edges of the wound flicker<br>weakly with some white light, and off the blade of the knife she’d used to strike him, vibrant shards float<br>aloft... simply hanging in the air.<br><br>And Donovan can’t comprehend it. Many of the patrons, too, are in awe and horror of her act. People fall,<br>women faint, and Donovan reaches for his neck. Some men leap for her, pull back her forearm and hold her<br>at her neck. She grips the knife tightly, and with a dull expression stares into the husband’s bewildered eyes.<br><br>While she hardly struggles with the guests apprehending her, she spots behind Donovan a girl in absolute<br>hysterics on the floor. The sound of her voice becomes increasingly distorted, beginning to crackle and<br>fluctuate in volume. Already, then: the memory has broken.

This wasn’t how it went. Even the most time-changed memories could not be altered so. For a wife to,<br>unprompted, attack her husband this way during a moment of peace...<br><br>She’d hoped to provoke a reaction, and is thus satisfied by this result. Although a few of the other people in<br>the room are unfazed by the commotion, and some even seem to have lost their faces entirely, alteration of<br>a memory to this extent is a veritable first. This, at least, has been a success.<br><br>The world begins to crack, fractures appearing wherever she can see. Reality afterward looks almost<br>wrinkled from it.

She says to herself, “Making entire worlds for vacation... Surely there would be better uses for that. ”<br><br>She lets go of the bread knife and sighs, seeing how it can’t move from the space where she’d abandoned it.<br><br> “Not a peep about ‘memory’, ‘echoes’, ‘reflections’—importantly, not ‘glass’... ”<br><br>The room constricts.<br><br> “This was another worthless dream. ”<br><br>The planet divides.

White blears and obscures, briefly flashing everywhere as the image is demolished. In a rush of every<br>remembered sound contained in that recollection, in that slip of glass, she stands with her eye shut until<br>luminescence and noise fade. She opens her eye to faintly glittering empty space, her mind twists, and after<br>another wave of effulgent pain she sees again the world with which she is both most familiar, and most<br>confounded by:<br><br>The world of white and ruins. The memory-shaped realm of Arcaea.<br><br> “I ’d had a good feeling about this one, ” she mumbles, watching the rotation of a shard just above her palm.<br>“But it wasn’t responsible for this world’s creation, and it was almost empty to boot. Hmph. If I can watch<br>them, let me remove them too... ”<br><br>She dismisses the glass, not looking as it returns to the space where she’d found it: a glinting, sharpened<br>river flowing above the ground. The girl named Saya stares off into the plain horizon, stepping forth while<br>touching her lip absently, and reviewing the events of the recent memory, comparing them all to the wealth<br>of a thousand others.}}

“In these other places, humans can act as gods. ”<br><br>That is what she learned.<br><br>The girl with a flower in her eye closes the book of that memory in her mind. It hadn’t been completely<br>worthless, only mostly.<br><br>It had frustrated her at first: the world she had visited was one she had quickly deemed frivolous, but the<br>frivolity revealed something important to her about the potential of mankind. Still... for now... that wasn’t<br>very important.<br><br>More than theories on “how”, theories of “why” compelled her onward. This had been another of her<br>journeys out through the ruins of the world in a scattershot hope of discovering that answer, or to even<br>brush against it tangentially. That was always her focal drive, but a secondary one had been made manifest<br>after she’d witnessed about two hundred of the memories.

“It didn’t have anything new for a potential reconstruction, ” she whispers, beckoning a shard from a nearby,<br>sparse stream of glass, “but I suppose it’s good that it had some sort of value. ”<br><br>She lets the gleam of the new piece catch her eye, and she scrutinizes the vision of the past it offers,<br>muttering absently, “Almost home... ”<br><br>She carries the fragment over her palm, crossing a bridge with which she’s become very familiar. On her left<br>is a haphazard pile of what once might have been cities, on her right is a chaotic mass of glass and stone —<br>recognizable as nothing. She marches the long way back to the place where she was “born”, uncaring of<br>how many steps it takes.<br><br>She takes however long she needs to reach and stop before a place of four fallen walls, between them an<br>immense sphere of shimmering crystal—an unfinished sphere broken apart, like a cracked shell. Smiles,<br>tears, deaths, and celebrations flicker in and out its facets. Flowers, plains, deserts, oceans... Animals,<br>people, technology...

She doesn’t know if she can recreate a world by piecing together memories. She doesn’t even know if she<br>can truly “connect” them at all by gathering them together like this... But she can try.<br><br>She squints lightly to the gleam of the new piece she’s brought. “Let ’s see how much you can show me, ” she<br>says aloud.<br><br>So it opens, and the girl fades into a new time. In short order, she sees a world brimful with artificial glow,<br>crowded by endless and nigh-infinite towers of man reaching through clouds of an evening sky, and dark<br>vehicles roaring through the air. An unpleasant atmosphere flows into her lungs. Cacophony fills her ears. As<br>she assumes an identity, assumes a new past, she looks on, unmoved. A hundred questions rise in her<br>mind... She will have them answered. No matter what that takes, no matter what needs to be done.}}

An endless day could be dull. Spending too long under an overeager sun—anyone would start to yearn for<br>a moon.<br><br>Even for her, that sentiment holds true.<br><br>"Eighty days of light?"<br>"Seven months of light?"<br>"A year... maybe..."<br><br>The white of the sky has once again broken through the cracks in the walls of this place she calls home,<br>and it seems her sleeping body had found the rays while rolling over the floor.<br><br>She grumbles, "Turn it off already..."

But still, she picks herself up.<br>Still, she rubs her eyes and stretches her arms.<br>She stands and finds the door, ready to face another "day" in the seemingly boundless world of Arcaea.<br><br>An adventure that hasn't always been a delight, and travels that haven't always led to discoveries.<br>Despite that, ever since she'd first awakened a tabula rasa, two things have always remained consistent:<br><br>both her heart and the sky have always been shining.<br><br>"Alright...!" she says under her breath. "Some exercise first!"<br><br>She holds out her hand before her and a section of glass flies her way.<br>Not memory glass—<br>Not "Arcaea"—<br>It is an ordinary, typical sheet, albeit a large one. When it spins close, she jumps onto it,<br>and immediately calls another.

The home she found is an old beach house on a lonely island apart from the abandoned mélange-cities<br>found everywhere else in the world. It's a beach without an ocean, houses scattered around its shores like<br>abandoned shells; and deeper inland is a field of strange, gigantic poles of white wood. The homes have been<br>picked apart over time, from within and without, in her tampering. Now she whisks away their walls and<br>windows to create a makeshift set of stairs —to make a racing track, and then a tunnel. She quickly leaps<br>and runs through the gleaming passage, if only to give her legs feeling.<br><br>All this took was a little acceptance. Days after awakening, it was a simple matter to make the world of Arcaea<br>bend to her whimsy.<br><br>But far below her, just above the sands of the phantom sea, something glints: something sparse and scattered<br>throughout the water.<br><br>Throwing a glance that way, she huffs a breath from her nose, and sports a weak smirk.}}

The glass beneath her feet bends so easily, but the peculiar glass—the Arcaea—has always been somewhat...<br>no, absurdly recalcitrant with her. In this world of memories, hardly any recollections will follow her,<br>and most can only be viewed or visited.<br><br>In an almost childish huff, the girl jumps from a crystal platform. Behind her, the structures she's made<br>all collapse, piece by piece. Before gravity fully takes her, she holds out her right hand, calling for the blanket<br>from her bed and swirling into it joyously. Then, she calls for something heavy, something soft. In a few<br>moments after falling, she is caught by a throne of indolence: a hefty, colorless armchair. Thus, she sits, <br>hanging in the skies above her home, half-gazing at tombstone horizons.

She exhales again; she's pleased, satisfied. Another successful lovely "morning" run. Still looking out to<br>the distance, her thoughts drift to less pleasant places: to questions about the size of this world, and what<br>else it might contain. Has she even seen a third of it? Even a sixteenth? It's a too-big place, and there are <br>too many assorted memories. As she rocks along the windless air, she lets her eyelids drop and she considers<br>that fact. It's some immense place; it's some old and mish-mash, jumbled place. She feels it probably can't<br>just be a world of wonders and oddities exclusively meant for her.<br><br>She opens her eyes to the bright sky again.<br><br>Somewhere, perhaps on the other side of the world, that sky is full of stars.<br>Under that sky, perhaps other girls are gazing upward and wishing for daylight.<br><br>The girl in red grips the front of the blanket wrapped around her shoulders.<br><br>Days without end mean it's always a new beginning, and no telling what a journey will hold.}}

A mischievous smile flashes across her face.<br><br>She stands in her chair and drops off the blanket, letting it fall toward the ground. As it drifts drown,<br>a wooden column launches up past it. She jumps from her chair and grabs hold of the new arrival by a short,<br>metal bar. With her feet planted against the column's side for security, she gives it a longer glance. It is a pillar,<br>she knows, used in other worlds to convey power and communications. She puts one foot down on another<br>bar below, and like that—with one leg and one arm free, far above the ground—she stands boldly on a broken<br>piece of an old world.<br><br>She gazes to the urban and suburban sprawl on the horizon one more time, and then turns her gazing upward.<br>She can't be sure how far flight will carry her: she knows she'll need a ladder to be safe.<br><br>The houses below, hers excepted, start breaking down even more. Panels, bed frames, armoires and windows<br>glide upward, and the debris she used and let collapse before is torn out of the sand. Everything begins to<br>amass, surely and steadily, into a defined structure. But the girl is not an architect. Her tower is ramshackle,<br>slowly building toward the heavens at odd, sharp, and often sudden angles.

Unfortunately, her island is not replete with usable material. After running out, she frowns halfway at her design,<br>feeling annoyed that it cannot even reach a kilometer into the sky.<br><br>Grumbling, she turns her eyes on the horizon again and lifts her palm toward it.<br>She concentrates, pulls... and nothing happens.<br><br>But that's only natural. That is of course.<br><br>As powerful and masterful as she may be, she is no god.}}

She drops her hand in defeat and decides it's time to renovate. Instead of a tower, a spiral set of stairs. <br>After an hour, and another hour, and another hour, and two more, her work is finally done and she is impressed<br>with the result. It still looks ridiculous, and more than a little haphazard, but this amalgamation, she is certain,<br>is much more sensible. She figures she deserves a pat on the back.<br><br>With the new formation complete, she wastes no time in beginning her ascent. One by one, step by step, she<br>rises with her armchair floating close by, ready to catch her should she fall. As the girl makes her way, she pulls<br>from the bottom of the stairs and sends those steps to the top. Soon after, she finds herself climbing an<br>ever-building, ever-breaking staircase. Through layers of fog, to the highest point.

The trip becomes a long one, during which she sometimes must have a seat or even sleep through the "night".<br>And, maybe after what would be four days, heaven comes within her sight. And she learns this: "heaven" is an<br>immense and impenetrable wall of clouds.<br><br>Her progress is halted when a step she sends from the bottom refuses to become the top, stuck on the fluff of<br>the air and unable to move any further up. She withdraws it and leaves it to hang beside her. And, with a <br>etermined gaze, she rushes her way up the final flight.<br><br>At the top, the girl fans the pieces, panes, and pillars out underneath her for more of a platform, and she lifts<br>her hands over her head—into the clouds. Here she finds that the white resists her touch, but still she pushes<br>on, standing on the toes of her boots to see through if she can.<br><br>And here, she finds, she cannot.

"Really...?" she wonders aloud.<br><br>But in her moment of despondence, something catches her eye.<br><br>Out the corner of her right: a glint. In fact, a bevy of glints, dropping from the clouds after she's gone and <br>disturbed them.<br><br>She looks, to find a small crowd of perhaps twenty Arcaea—perhaps even more—coming toward her.<br><br>And the girl in red realizes.<br><br>In these sunless skies of Arcaea, standing on an invented ground, she has found the first group of memories<br>in this world which are inextricably attuned to her.}}

On the air, the fragrance of incense.<br><br>Resounding, the voices of townsfolk and children.<br><br>The atmosphere, light and fresh.<br><br>Someone's cooking—baking—and she can taste the savory scents drifting outside and along the streets.<br><br>Looking up, she finds a sun hanging bright in an empty and blue sky.<br><br>This is a new world of memory, and she basks in the sensations of it, remaining still to take it all in.<br><br>It's the memory of an artisan's helper: of a girl in the middle of an errand.<br>What sort of artisan was the helper an aide to?<br>The girl with the rose-colored hair hasn't grasped those details yet. But she isn't very interested in them.

This world—<br><br>"Just look at it...!"<br><br>—it's some sort of fantasy.<br><br>Mouth agape, eyes glittering, she looks absolutely everywhere. Overhead, colored paper and fabric ties rooftop<br>to rooftop, evoking the image of frilled power lines. But they give the impression of a festival, as power lines<br>they are most definitely not. The flagstone streets, red-stone houses, and chimneys spouting black smoke tell <br>her this is an old-day town, or perhaps city, she stands in now.<br><br>Stalls offering curious circle- and sun-shaped necklaces, talismans, and rings of charms dot the walkway, <br>beside other stalls selling figures of creatures she's seen before in libraries of other memories. The townsfolk<br>dress, she thinks, a bit similar to her: as if a parade is on, but not one too bombastic. It's a colorful world,<br>favoring the warmer colors of the spectrum, though splashes of azure decoration arrest the eye here and there.<br>As the girl starts to wander, she finds performances too, and troubadours teaching, warning, and entertaining<br>whomever might listen.

She spends some time during her wandering on samples of confections. More than some time, in fact:<br>as much time as she can without drawing suspicion. And as she wanders and samples, one brilliant red morsel<br>strikes her eye, and her heart, very much in particular. A strawberry tart, it's called.<br><br>She gets her hands on it with the apprentice's coin, takes a bite through its glaze, and with that she is certain of<br>this shining truth: this place is very lovely. It's incredibly nice! A fantastical world, and one with a notable<br>appreciation for the more sugary delights of life.<br><br>She finds herself particularly happy about this world of memory. Feeling zealous, she quickens the pace of<br>her steps, leaping forward, gasping, and spinning on her toes or heel as she turns each and every corner.}}

She must be careful not to run. She thinks, she really must observe every little part of this town closely.<br>Reading signs posted outside of square buildings, she learns that this is a spiritual place. It's a land that believes<br>in fairies and spirits; in gods, daemons, and youkai. The performers she sees are performing the "fantastic",<br>the "strange", the "impossible". Indeed, every one of them is absolutely certain that what they are performing<br>is magic: "casting spells" by igniting vibrant powders in their hands to flame, smoke, and clouds; "divining fates"<br>by speaking toward still pools of water and interpreting the ripples within; "communing with other beings",<br>they say, by manipulating lights before her eyes in a way she can't actually determine the mechanics of<br>in a glance.<br><br>This world is rich and full of belief: it is marvelous, wondrous, and all an unmistakable act.<br><br>While strolling down the quaint avenues, the memory itself slowly informs her that every part of this place is <br>truly performance, artificial, untruth. Deeply valued tradition, but absolutely not truth.

Yet when she reaches the city's outer limits (and the memory's, with any attempts to cross a small barrier<br>met with resistant reality)—when she gazes out to the verdant hills beyond the low and easy wood fence that<br>has stopped her; to the few but imposing old oak trees, and the clear sparkle of some distant lake... she<br>understands, somehow, why one might believe in something even with sound evidence to the contrary.<br>She herself comes from a strange world of flying glass; why deny the belief that a world like this could be<br>inhabited by trickster fairies? Why reject the idea of things surpassing nature and logic?<br><br>This is the memory of an artisan's helper, and the artisan is a so-called sorcerer who researches the existence of<br>fantastical things. As the help, the girl she is living through has long known that all his research leads to dead<br>ends. The purpose, she speculates, is not to really prove anything. It is to embolden one's beliefs and be better<br>for it.

Now the girl in red puffs a joking breath and smiles wistfully. That's a funny idea. With her hand on a post and<br>wind flowing through her hair, she spots what she knows to be an ancient forest west from here. This is the<br>memory of completing a simple errand, and perhaps that's why she is unable to travel too far.<br><br>But she's sure she will be back in another memory. She thinks this land of artifice, magic, and show very much<br>suits her, and that crowd of glass she'd come across at the top of the world of Arcaea reflected more facets of<br>the world than this within its other fragments. With a giddy feeling, she grips at the front of her dress.<br><br>It's truly incredible. The smile on her face starts to wriggle anxiously. Somehow, she has never felt exhilaration<br>quite like this before.}}

Twenty times? More? She's stopped keeping count.<br><br>"Al...right..."<br><br>With that whisper under her breath, she crouches in front on a chest made of unfinished wood, swiping her palm<br>across the top. A wave of dust rises off of it and falls to the floor. She unclasps the front and opens it up.<br><br>Today she is an archivist, exploring one of the old castles in the North, where they had lost land to flooding.<br>Thankfully, the papers inside this chest were spared from moisture by the chest itself. Hearing the creak of<br>ancient hinges, her partner calls from another room inquiring about her discovery. "Scrolls from the fourth<br>era," she answers over her shoulder. She takes one of them and unfurls it, revealing the history of her people's<br>dealings with the Unseelie.

Stories like these amuse her, especially as she tries to guess at what the previous generations might have<br>confused for fairies and the like in the past. Yesterday, while working as a storyteller, she had the pleasure of<br>recounting an old passed-down yarn of the teller's ancestors. Some forefather had once gathered a vast<br>treasure on a faraway shore. On the return across the lake a sylph rocked his boat with wind, and a passing<br>naiad capsized it with waves. Afterward, the two shared his fallen wealth. It was quite an excuse for a bout of<br>clumsiness.<br><br>But still, she knows it proves nice to think these creatures are around, malevolent and benevolent both.<br>When her day as an archivist is done and she's returned to the world of Arcaea to rest on the platform which is<br>now her temporary base camp, she visits the memory of a school instructor and teaches lessons and rules that<br>would keep any child or adult safe in a world replete with chaotic nature, sudden perils, and careless people.<br><br>The context of magic makes these lessons very interesting to impart and to hear. It really is just a joyous and<br>fascinating place, and she cannot stop visiting. Its people, whose faces become increasingly familiar between<br>each shard of Arcaea; its places which become engraved in her own memory throughout others; the sounds<br>and the sights, everything—

It's marvelous, and nostalgic.<br><br>When she's been to every other memory she could find in Heaven, when she's explored (as far as she knows)<br>every part of the land, she at last comes to a bustling, rambunctious festival day—or rather, a night celebration.<br>It is to give thanks to the gods of birth and harvest, and to dissuade darker spirits.<br><br>She spots the townsfolk named Lancaster and Shia, two gentlemen architects, and they've gotten on in years<br>from the last memory she met them. But they greet her with vigor and treat her to a candied apple, which<br>makes her happier than anything else. They point to the sky. It lights up in a show of a thousand brilliant colors.<br>To those gods. To life, and living it.<br><br>However, seeing such a wonderful thing… it doesn't strike her. Her heart does not swell; not with wistfulness,<br>nor the joy of new experience.

The memories were heartening; they were comforting. She'd spent months within them, and at times, she<br>would think, "I never want to leave." Still, she knew they had an ending, and she didn't want to see it.<br><br>Besides, the future cannot be found within memories.<br><br>She returned to the world of white knowing she may never visit those days again. Days gone are just that:<br>stories told and over, lives and loves finished.<br><br>She doesn't regret it. As she slowly descends to the surface, looking up to the clouds that had once called her<br>there, she knows every moment, every second spent in those memories was worth everything. It's like a<br>question she never asked has been answered, and so her heart is full.

The sky seems to be falling around her, all the pieces of her temporary home dropping faster or slower<br>around her, and in her chest, she feels a twinge of emotion.<br><br>Thus, the sky, the true sky above, begins to part.<br><br>Standing on a window platform, her hair whipping up past her face, she sees the glittering glass above is<br>standing still, and behind the pieces, a new night sky is entering her sight. One she's never seen before.<br>The clouds scatter and drop, disappear and dash away, as a sparkling void of shadows takes their place.<br>This velvet plane, reaching far and darkening, before a deep lavender wave of color spreads out over it,<br>swaying, glowing. The stars are out. The day is over.<br><br>Her heart aches.<br><br>She whispers a name, this name for the last time, and she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.

Her glass breaks through the final thin layer of clouds. The complex, graying landscape reveals itself, to its<br>farthest reaches.<br><br>She smiles...<br><br>She smiles!<br><br>This is her new life! She holds out her hand, knowing that someday, somewhere beyond that horizon, she will<br>find others who will take it. Someday, these hands will do something great.<br><br>Until then, she will look ahead.<br><br>Living in the present—in Arcaea.}}

The cliff overlooked it all.<br><br>At the end of the day,these who had abandoned the mortal coil left behind their souls like hermit shells for<br>other,new lives to take them.Their spirits ascended to the land's Pool,luminous and glimmering overhead.<br><br>Water-like spirits,almost formless;everything white and flowing into that vibrancy which bore through the<br>clouded sky.In the gray landscape that was her world,this sight-this unique,spectacular sight-was<br>something many could call a wonder.<br><br>To her,.it was ordinary.It was everyday.It was work.

"Any trembling on the left side?"her confr re asked from behind.She very slightly moved her head to see him<br>sitting on the ground.On his lap sat a wide,black,shallow bowl of water,used for lecanomancy,and from<br>the ripples inside it she could see that he'd just performed a divination.<br><br>She answered him lightly with,"No."Then she asked,"Why? Have you noticed something? ”<br><br>"It looks like the earth shook a bit,"he explained.<br><br>"Ahh..That's not good.Should l look closer?"<br><br> "Hmm...It seems like a fissure,"he said."Go take care ofit."<br><br>With a simple"alright,"she stepped off the cliff.

The density of spirits nearby slowed her fall.She found a pair of strings that were keeping ther blouse,<br>sleeves,and skirt taut.When she tugged them,they loosened and began to dangle;a shimmer emanated<br>from the cloth and her dress began to ruffle loudly.And as it did,it dulled the influence of the dead.<br><br>Once she reached the ground,she took her scythe from her hip,unfolded it to its full height,and after<br>turning it over,rode the underside of the blade in ftlight to her far-off destination.<br><br>To mend the fissure after coaxing out the souls trapped within it.<br><br>To return to the cliff,and watch for any other aberations.<br><br>She was to do this, and things tike it day alter day. Yes. that was her responsibility.<br>And,in time,her life would join the others.

In fact,that time has already passed.<br><br>It's long ago,gone.The world and life she once knew is now only a shapeless memory.}}

But this isn't what death was meant to be.<br><br>There was no mystery to it in her life:what happened to the dead was what happened.There was no "next<br>world",only that which you were born in,lived in,and died in.Something like heaven …hell…even purgatory:<br>these were moralists' tales which only seemed valid in the most ancient of times.<br><br>So what is this place? What is this mysterious realm that she one day awakened to? What might it be? What<br>might it be? <br><br>Well …does it really matter?

"Hm …"<br><br>She sits knees-up on top of a lighthouse,overlooking desert.White.White,and more white …and there,<br>glass."Arcaea"is its name.With her chin in her hand,she casts a languid gaze toward a bridge extending left.<br>She doesn't know where that one goes.<br><br>"Phew …"She exhales and stands,taking the scythe from off her hip.It doesn't work quite the same here,but<br>she can still utilize it for travel.Unconsciously,she brushes her bangs the other way.In doing so she grazes<br>the front side of her left horn with her fingertips.

Right …right.To this day,of all the memories she can find within the Arcaea …she hasn't found a single one<br>with any horned humans represented.

With these memories being really the only attention-grabbers in this world fashioned from glass,she's spent<br>quite a bit of time watching and cataloguing them.Keeping them,like records.And indeed,those records<br>don't even hint at her race having ever existed anywhere.<br><br>Her race is …Race…Race? Is that a safe assumption to make? Was she part of a"people"when she was alive,<br>participating in spiritual horticulture? Not that it maters now,but perhaps remembering more clearly will<br>unlock more of her old self..Something like that,anyway.<br><br>For now,it's time to evaluate which shards of glass have left the part of Arcaea she calls home,which have <br>remained,and which are new.She moves to step from the lighthouse,ready for her new routine.}}

It does still fly:the scythe.<br><br>

Sitting on the length of the handle as a witch might lackadaisically sit on a broom,the young woman rides<br>

down a broken,shambled street.The blade sits upright beside and behind her,shifting for every swivel and<br>

turn.Her movements are smooth and completely ingrained.<br><br>

As she goes,she looks upon a particular jumble oftlying glass.This one runs alongside and above the road<br>

like a river,and since her arrival it has not once lost or gained any memories for its flock.This being so<br>

peculiar,she checks it every day.Today,too,the memories that glint within each are all ones she has seen before.<br><br>

Unrelated,unconnected memories of play,song,sadness,strange machines both enormous and fast...<br>

It's really a rather eclectic mix,making the fact that they're seemingly unconnectedvey interesting.<br><br>

She looks for the memory that she likes the most.

Of course,finding a specific memory within a crowd is similar to seeking a needle in a stack of hay.<br>

But the one here-it likes her in return.<br><br>

A piece of glass breaks from the chain,and it approaches her as she glides on.She smiles faintly,lifting her<br>

right hand from her scythe so that the piece can come to rest over her palm.<br><br>

In it is the final moment of a small hand-crafted flute's creation.Making the instrument had been a labor of<br>

many minutes,hurs,days and months,but the carver who'd done it had condensed all his feeling into this<br>

single moment.It all came to this.<br><br>

He plays a note,and the tone makes him wince.Terible.<br><br>

But it does work.

Though this memory marked the end of an arduous journey,it also marked the beginning ofan even grander one.<br><br>

Such a curious position...<br><br>

Truly--and the others it shares a crowd with are special indeed.}}

That memory is precious.<br><br>

In fact,if it can be called"precious",more likely than not it has found its way to her at some point.Memories<br>

of first pets,of one's survival and another's sacrifice,of first words,of inspiring speeches,of important and<br>

private talks …Sometimes,when she is strolling or riding by, these significant memories will just begin<br>

following her.<br><br>

She doesn't mind.She likes that memories so special were kept safe in this curious place.That is a good<br>

thing,but there is something better.<br><br>

The world of Arcaea serves as an archive to memories of any sort.A memory of a toothache,a memory of a<br>

good meal,a memory of a horse ride,a memory of spilled milk.Whatever it is,if it was remembered,then it is here.

And it is really every one of those memories,along with those standouts among them,that shape a man or<br>

woman,she thinks.Not only that,but they seve as the only real evidence that a person ever was alive.<br><br>

Monuments and graves are erected in the name of memory,and as for the loss of memory …as she has seen<br>

within the Arcaea,that is something at times more tragic and difficult to accept than death.<br><br>

" …"<br><br>

She quietly comes to a stop,stepping down onto what looks to have once been a town square.Here,<br>

innumerable pieces of glass drift through the air.It's something like …well,the appropriate term for her<br>

might be a garden,though one with every"plant"brought in instead of grown natively.<br><br>

She tends to themall the same.These are the memories she has found in what she considers to be her<br>

"home"part of Arcaea.These specific shards are those which were not there when she first awakened.<br>

They'd drifted in.

" …Hmph,"she sniffs,absently taking stock of the pieces.They don't usually leave,but sometimes they<br>

wander off …<br><br>

And that worries her.<br><br>

ls there meaning in the Arcaea being in the form of something as fragile as glass?<br><br>

…Back in life,she learned not to ask many questions.}}

"Huh?"<br><br>Her gaze, still on the Arcaea above, is suddenly broken.<br><br>...Where did that come from?<br><br>Appearing on the shore of her thoughts suddenly, like a fair and gentle-seeming stranger, was that little fact,<br>in the form of a miniature memory.<br><br>She wasn't sure at first that it was even there, but as she thinks it over again and again... she's sure of it.<br><br>She recalls this. This... it happened.

Sitting under a pair of quiet old trees, the Soul Stream having gone down, and night having risen, she was<br>speaking with her confrère...<br><br>"You learn to think of it in this sort of paradox," he'd said. "You think of all life as precious, but at the same<br>time the drudgery leaves it all as just numbers. Higher numbers, lower numbers. It isn't like you stop caring;<br>it's more as if, if anything, caring so much sharpens you into someone who seems cold."<br><br>"But it's alright," he assured her, smiling weakly at the Stream. "Thinking too much about it will probably tear<br>you up inside. When you went to the Glen, what was the reason you gave for wanting to walk this path?"<br><br>She answered.<br><br>"See? That's what we all say," he replied, and she recalls how calming his voice had been then. "Just<br>remember that, and you'll be fine."

But there it ends. That's it. Her gaze comes back to the sharp air above her. Just remember it? Just<br>remember it. Remember it. It... Remember what?<br><br>"I... don't remember," she whispers softly, but each word, each syllable falls heavily off her tongue.<br><br>He had been absolutely right. Now she can feel it, building in her eyes: the dull, warm grief that comes with<br>sad revelation. A new piece of her memory has shown itself to her, but it is crucially broken, and without<br>answers to the questions it has forced into her mind, her heart is killed. The agony is nearly unbearable.<br><br>How do you put the pain of knowing you are not entirely yourself into proper words?

Under the cloud of glass, she shuts her eyes, bends her head, and puts the heel of her palm over her nose, the<br>underside of her fist against her skull. She won't cry. She can't let herself do something like that. To cry here,<br>at this, would open her to too many facets of reality she has chosen not to face. She sits on the ground,<br>sucking in her lips, tightening them.<br><br>She will not cry. Absolutely not. Okay?<br><br>So, gripping at herself and trembling in the world of white, the solitary reaper steadily breathes. She tries<br>not to dwell. She doesn't want to dwell. But, while calming herself, the thought can't help but occur to her:<br>that, if this is death...<br><br>...she would much rather have oblivion.}}

The break that occurred within her left her quiet... quieter than usual for what could amount to days.<br><br>The key element of that memory—the idea that one was better off not asking many questions —is something<br>that in her contemplation she realized she was attempting to adhere to all this time.<br><br>Her attempts, however, had been half-hearted. That taste of an old memory was too intoxicating to forget.<br>Indeed, she refused to forget—but having forgotten so much else… she'd realized she was a broken half-shell<br>of a person.<br><br>Forget it.

She is once again guiding vagrant memories to the square today; trying to make this into routine, which will<br>turn to habit, which will turn to nature. Perhaps tedium can rescue her from the cavern always lurking just<br>under the surface: the tar pit of miserable feelings endlessly calling to her. Better oblivion, she thinks<br>sincerely, than to feel—if feeling means only grief.<br><br>And, while conducting the shards of Arcaea, one catches the light of the sky in such a way that she is<br>reflexively bidden to look at it. Without thinking much of it, she brings this shard close.<br><br>The reflection: a crouching, slouched child covering something off the side of a road with her hands.<br>Outside her hands, ants shy away, though they seem clearly interested in whatever she's hiding.<br><br>The reaper gives the memory more of her attention, and finds that what the child is hiding is a wounded<br>jade beetle. After a moment of contemplation, the girl scoops up the small thing in both of her hands and<br>stands up.<br><br>That's all.

The young observer is motionless for a moment, but then she smirks.<br><br>That's such an... absolutely pointless memory.<br><br>Did the beetle recover? How long did that child live for? How long did she hold on to this memory?<br><br>Stupid little thing...<br><br>The girl chuckles.<br><br>It's ironic, isn't it... Remembering something had made her forget why she believed she was here.<br><br>Arcaea is a world of memories. Of the dead? Of those still alive? Who can say? Regardless, it keeps old<br>stories that anyone could forget. Past expiration of mind, body, monument, or land: however it works,<br>Arcaea steadfastly keeps all.

The girl is alone. She has no confrère here, and she was given no reason to do anything when she woke up.<br>But that doesn't mean that she was to do nothing.<br><br>She is here, now. Her old life is over. That's it.<br><br>But doesn't she still have control? She still feels responsible. She doesn't remember the answer she gave, as<br>to why she sought to be a tender of souls, but whatever it was... something tells her that the broken her of<br>now would give the same reason as the complete her from then.<br><br>There is no telling what will happen, ever.<br><br>Lives and memories can vanish in a second… but not here. Her memories may be lost, but these will not be.<br>"Tender of Souls" to "Tender of Memories"; she thinks that has a nice sound to it.

She kept expecting there to be more people here.<br><br>She wasn’t sure why. All around her was a white wasteland, filled with nothing but faded, ruined buildings,<br>bereft of all life—all except for her.<br><br>In these few days since waking up in this place, without any recollection of what happened before,<br>she walked quite far and explored what she could. The tattered structures did little to answer her questions.<br>Each of them was empty... and while she found the architecture itself familiar, she seemed to have no<br>memory of when she’d learned their names, their shapes, their functions.<br><br>Time and again, that was the idea she’d come back to: knowing “what”, but not “why”. It could be the idea<br>was just a distraction for her, something to ponder in favor of the more obvious, weightier things regarding<br>this world—and inside herself.<br><br>She had to say, though: this was certainly a bizarre and bewildering place.

She pulled her guitar’s strap tightly over her shoulder, and the questions returned. Where had she gotten it?<br>Why in the world was it with her? Despite having woken up alongside it, she couldn’t answer those questions.<br>She only knew to pluck the strings to make sounds, to hold the strings over the frets to create others.<br>To strum them in time, to create rhythms, melodies, chords, harmonies.<br>More than that, it was almost... comforting, when she held in her hands.<br><br>But why? No, she did not know why. Why didn’t she?<br><br>The sand around her—eroded over eons by water. No water here. No liquid, even. How was there sand?<br>Walking. She knew how to do that. Why? She had no answer. She never had any answers.<br><br>For what it was worth, was any of this knowledge even “memory” at all?<br>Was she “remembering” these things? Had she “forgotten” other things?<br>It seemed to her she had amnesia, but was amnesia this... selective?

Knowing things, but not knowing why that knowledge existed within her, had her deeply and fundamentally<br>upset. It made her feel like an incomplete person. Like someone had removed her skin and muscles and<br>bones and placed them into some false container, but had forgotten to put in all the other important things,<br>leaving her hollow, forgotten.<br><br>She hated not knowing.<br><br>A kaleidoscope of questions shifted and rotated in her mind. She forced herself to focus on all the sudden<br>and overwhelming turns and angles. But answers? Again, no. There were no answers.<br><br>During her barefooted expeditions (she decided early on to keep her shoes looped around her neck, since<br>the large heels were inconvenient for the terrain) she’d learned next to nothing. In fact, the more she saw,<br>the less she felt that she knew.<br><br>She hated not knowing. She knew so many things about what was around her, and yet she felt like she<br>knew nothing of herself. So much of what she saw was baffling nonsense—not least of all the glass wandering<br>through the air for seemingly no reason. Glass that showed her other people, other times, other worlds.<br>Reflections, resonating in the oddest ways. Reflections, she thought, which were undoubtedly familiar.

Yet the familiarity was but a feeling. The glass never showed her in their reflections.<br>These were not scenes of a remembered past.<br>These were not memories... or, at least, they were not hers, these Arcaea. Nothing was hers.<br><br>Deep down, her emotions shifted. With that shift came a growing sense of concern, of being out of place,<br>of confusion, of faint loneliness, of something crucial being missing somewhere inside her.<br>And she didn’t like it one bit.<br><br>She started walking again. Walking always seemed to help.<br>It let her focus on what was around her instead. On what was outside.}}

But she could only ignore that creeping feeling for so long.<br><br>Eventually, she sat down on a relatively smooth chunk of stone and anxiously ran a hand through her hair.<br>Looking back, she could see a long set of footprints through the faded sand, stretching all the way to the<br>horizon. How was it possible there was this much sand? She was starting to get sick of it.<br><br>After a moment’s thought, she brought her guitar around and held it, again, in her hands.<br>And there it was again, instantly: that comfort. It was like... a reassuring parent, or a friend.<br>She sighed. Really, that was all that she needed to keep going.<br><br>Without thinking, she began to hum a tune. Her fingers strummed the strings, their quiet, tinny chords<br>adding that precious harmony to her melody. She could remember how to walk, and she could remember<br>how to play. It brought a momentary smile to her lips: how both of these acts came about as natural as<br>breathing.<br><br>Her lips turned down again a moment later, however, losing their humor. Words were coming to her<br>tongue, her teeth, her lips, wanting to be added to this song. At first they were scattered, whirling,<br>trying to form a complete, sensible picture.

And so, dressed in black and scarlet, she sang—in this world of white:<br>this colorless and seemingly infinite cage.<br><br>Gradually, her words gained volume. Her feelings roiled within her, wild, building in intensity.<br>These instinctive words weren’t new, nor were they old and forgotten.<br>They were always with her, and now they were clawing, screaming their way out of her chest.<br>Just speaking them wouldn’t be enough. They needed to be shouted, roared so that they resounded in<br>the furthest corners of this dead world. She yelled them as loud as she possibly could.<br><br>It just seemed like the right thing to do.<br><br>She shouted about confusion. She shouted about the unknown, about the bleak landscapes, about the<br>bounteous memories in tiny glass shards flitting past for brief moments before disappearing again.<br><br>She shouted about—<br><br>Fear.

For that one critical moment as she played, she realized what she’d been feeling, deep down.<br>This empty world, her empty memories...<br><br>They terrified her.<br><br>Who was she? What was this quiet place? What was going to happen to her? What HAD happened to her?<br><br>But she already knew that she might never know. Not here.<br><br>Her voice broke for a note, but she pushed past and forced her lungs, should they exist, to their limits.<br><br>Her fingers flew madly across the six strings.<br>She could hear it vividly in her mind, the power, the weaving together of rumbles, screeches, and vibrations.<br><br>A storm of her soul and of music—a tumultuous undercurrent rushing beneath her lyrics along with the<br>simmering dread, growing into a powerful heat, which reached her eyes as well.<br><br>But somehow, in some way she couldn't pinpoint, it made her feel a little better.<br>A little less confused, a little less afraid.

After a time, the echoes of her shouting faded out. A few final plucks with her right hand, and she dropped<br>it from the strings, her work finished. Her song vanished into the bright sky, the evidence it had ever<br>happened now residing within her near-empty memories.<br><br>She put her other hand to her eyes and rubbed them, shivering, refusing to look at the heavens that had<br>taken her song away.<br><br>But then she gave a laugh. It surprised her. It was an honest laugh—and the smile of a job well done.<br>She wiped her hand on her dress and sighed to herself.<br><br>Man, she hated this place.}}

The world was no less confusing now—no less intimidating, no less empty, no less merciless.<br><br>But now, she felt like she could deal with it.<br><br>She couldn’t be sure, but she could have sworn that fear was something she was familiar with.<br>She knew things about it—how it could make your legs weak, how it could make you run away,<br>how it could prevent you from making decisions, how it could control you.<br>The fear of the unknown. The fear of failure.<br><br>And she could only assume it had been instinct that had led her to play that song.<br>Maybe she’d done it before. Maybe she’d shouted through her fear before, in much the same way.<br><br>Maybe she had. At least, now she felt like she could handle it.<br>She had a firmer grip on that twisted little emotion now.<br>If she wanted to stay sane in this baffling world, she needed to keep it in check, keep it from controlling her.<br>But it would always be there.

She exhaled, then turned in her seat and carefully put her guitar aside, laying it onto the stone.<br>Then she heard a soft clink.<br><br>A small cloth bag had fallen out of her inside pocket to the stone sticking out above the sand.<br>In it were several needles, a little pair of scissors, a thimble, a few spools of thread, and a measure.<br>A sewing kit. It had been with her when she’d first woken up. She could only assume it was hers.<br><br>When she’d first found the pouch, it had just confused her. She knew what it was for, but had no clue why<br>she was carrying it. Each of the accoutrements within was, of course, “known” to her, but like the guitar<br>she carried with her... it hadn’t come with any helpful little notes explaining where it came from.<br><br>But now, when she reached down to retrieve the pouch, upon seeing her sleeve, she froze.<br><br>She... knew, didn’t she? How that sleeve was made. She knew the stitches, she knew all of the folds.<br>She knew the exact colors. She knew those threads were in the sewing kit.

But any further connection escaped her. She could easily draw conclusions based on logic,<br>but her mind still felt closed. That cruel disconnect between knowledge and experience... It was agonizing.<br><br>Now, though... Now she wouldn’t let herself be overwhelmed by the fear caused by that disconnect.<br>She would recognize it, use it. So what if she didn’t remember? What mattered was that she knew.<br><br>A concrete goal would certainly help, though. She didn’t have one yet, but maybe, in time, she could find one.<br><br>A grin crossed her face as she started off again, still thinking of the kit which had just made her shiver.<br>Pretty convenient, huh? She could at least keep her clothing intact on this inane journey.<br>And with that thought... her outfit certainly wasn’t practical, but it was hers, and she wouldn’t<br>give it up for the world.<br><br>Yes. It was hers.<br><br>That, her guitar, and her sewing kit—in this wasteland of memory, they were all hers.<br><br>Knowing that helped a little, and a little help could go a long way.

...A few steps later, something below her caught her eye.<br><br>Footprints in the sand...<br><br>But they didn’t belong to her.<br><br>Crossing her path, leading off to the left, they were definitely a few sizes off.<br>She stared the way they headed, and saw that they disappeared behind a few gentle hills.<br><br>Another genuine, familiar grin crossed her face.<br><br>Huh...<br><br>Maybe she’d had an audience after all.}}

A dark garden betwixt forest and flowers.<br><br>A silver web glints in a corner of glass. Well, is it glass? More likely it ’s stone, but this particular world<br>operates more strangely than any other. Reality bleeds in from elsewhere, through floating shards that<br>fill the air, projecting colorful memory into lands of ruin and white. Now there are pillars of amethyst,<br>glowing from a light beneath that fills the entire floor.<br><br>She sits in a fanciful, pale green chair, before a small and pale-green table, her hand atop her suitcase<br>which rests beside her. She drags her finger down the leather of its top. There are no other people here.<br><br> “We should leave, Alice. ”<br><br> “No other people ” —but there is at least one other person.

He ’s here, holding tea as he often is, having again prepared it when her eyes were turned away.<br>She lays her palm on her suitcase.<br><br> “You hear that? ” she asks.<br><br>He tilts his head, listening closely before replying: “I hear nothing. ”<br><br>Lifting her other arm, she rests her elbow on the table, slouches forward, and props her chin up<br>with her hand. “That’s right, ” she says, “in this one... or these ones... it ’s quiet. ”<br><br> “And what should that matter? ”

“When was the last!? ” she slightly raises her voice, telling him with its tone that she finds his question<br>absurd. “Silence and a pleasant view... Look at the gardens, Tenniel. This landscape is... handsome. ”<br>She picks up her hand from her suitcase and indicates the dark wilds fading in and out before them,<br>and to the sky-blue flowers dotting the shade.<br><br> “I, ” Tenniel starts, gesturing toward himself with his teacup, “am handsome."<br><br>Her brow twitches at the gall.<br><br> “Shut, ” Alice starts, gesturing toward him with her hand, “up."<br><br> “Terribly rude. Awfully rude, ” he notes. She shakes her head, grumbles, and leans back in her seat.

Precisely how long has she been stuck in this world, unable to travel to any others?<br><br>Forever, the ward Tenniel has been with her, steadfast in his claims of “I cannot be apart from you."<br><br>However, that largely proves itself to be a pain. She looks at him now. A black and orange butterfly<br>flutters past his eyes, and after it passes he looks into his cup. Then, he tosses the cup ’s contents<br>to the ground, having not drunk even a sip of it. A very, very usual habit—in fact, consistent Tenniel<br>behavior.<br><br>He opens his mouth, not to lap the dregs, but to speak. “We really should go, ” says Alice,<br>preempting him. “That’s what you want to say, isn ’t it? ”

“If you understand, let us take care, ” he says.<br><br>And she listens to him. He never seems, she thinks, entirely without reason. So she stands and follows<br>him to the white horizon. The memory fades around them as they pass. It melts and drips, all, into<br>nothing. All except the butterfly, which flies along at her shoulder. For now, Tenniel watches it again.<br>But it will fade, too—<br><br>All memories do.}}

So, what is this place? And what is “real”?<br><br>This is true: she once walked between worlds.<br><br>She still does. For her, this is an aspect of life as normal as eating or drinking, not that she has had need<br>of either since finding this latest realm. In the past, before Arcaea, it was countless how many new places<br>she ’d seen, how many strange plants and people she had found.<br><br>Fantastic creatures, magic too, everything one could ever imagine: she has seen it, and recorded it.<br>For... an “inter-dimensional ” encyclopedia? Whatever it was (it seems to have been lost).<br>The nature of the work keeps her profession fresh, certainly, but...

This world really is terribly unique. The memories of further worlds dance into this one, and not as mere<br>images, either. You can hear the other places... smell the foreign nature... taste from these memories,<br>and touch them as if they ’re real. Therefore it begs the question: what is real? In a world such as Arcaea,<br>she feels that is a very important question to ask.<br><br>If... it can be experienced fully, but only for a limited time, is it an illusion or is it valid?<br>Well-traveled though she is, nothing in her memory tells of a world like this. What is the purpose of it?

So she asks her companion: without flare, without context. “So... what is reality, Tenniel? How can we<br>know that here is real? ”<br><br> “It’s real, ” he says, as he casts tea from his cup, “because every sense of yours ‘knows’ that it ’s real.<br>Why do you wonder about artifice or illusion? Why do you question even what you can touch with your<br>own hands, Alice? That should be enough. ”<br><br> “Fine, ” she replies with finality. It is worthless when he gets like this.<br><br> “If that is over with, look there, ” he says, and he points to the ground. They had wandered into memory<br>of a campfire, and Tenniel ’s tea had doused the flame. “How the devil does that work? ” he asked.<br><br> “You’re asking me? ” replies Alice, incredulous.<br><br> “I’ve ruined their party... ” mutters her companion.<br><br> “The memory will fade soon, so there ’s nothing to be glum over, Tenniel. ”

“What we see is real, Alice. And when you stop looking at something, does it cease to be? Of course it<br>doesn ’t. That fire has ceased by my hand, though. ”<br><br> “You need to stop spilling tea everywhere. ”<br><br> “I will leave an apology. ”<br><br> “No one will see it! No one is here! ”<br><br>Tenniel smirks while whipping out a pad and pen. She groans, and tries not to smile herself as he writes.

It ’s a moment that reminds her why she never questions his company. But, it ’s a moment rare of late.<br> “Of late ”, she thinks...<br><br>In the beginning... was it different?<br><br>She ponders for a little while, but new scenery distracts her as they walk. She forgets to wonder.<br><br>And the day goes on.}}

Never does he really “lie”.<br><br>He knows what he knows, just as well as one knows to draw breath—though he doesn ’t need to breathe.<br><br>Or that one knows to feed, though he needs no food; to drink, though he needs no water.<br><br>Or, to remain at her side and shelter her, though...<br><br>...There is a raw and almost perfectly unshakable comfort in reality.

What exists is what you see and sense. Knowing that what you see and sense is real means that is the truth. <br>Having truth puts the mind at ease. Without it, with unknowns, you open yourself to fear. Or to, perhaps,<br>what is worse: truths you do not need to hear.<br><br>Truths that will damage you. To know you aren ’t capable of everything you wish to be capable of.<br>To know that there is an end, that it is inevitable. That truth, and truths like it, can make a person truly suffer.<br><br>But, he does not lie.

It ’s true that “he” has always watched over her.<br><br>It ’s true that “he” has always given her freedom, and guided her into places that were exciting, new...<br>different.<br><br>That was real. That is.<br><br>He wants nothing more than her smile.<br><br>But with heaviness inside where a heart should be, he knows that she is seeking something more: beyond<br>what can be seen.<br><br> “...You hid that? ” he asks, as she presents him a flower from the garden-memory they had left.<br><br> “You know, I love its color... pale... ” she reveals, gazing upon it fondly. “It’s like the skies we see in other<br>worlds, ” she asserts. “What’s its name? ”<br><br>He knows.

“I don ’t know, ” he says. “It will vanish, surely, as everything does. There is no need to keep it, Alice. ”<br><br> “...Perhaps no need, but I like it, ” Alice tells him, and he already knew this. “I think that it won ’t disappear. ”<br><br>His gaze drifts away. With no rhyme or reason, he dumps his tea. He also knows this very well:<br><br>She is right: it won ’t. And that concerns him most of all.

He tells her, “Do as you like... Alice. ”<br><br>And she playfully fires back, “I will! ” as she slips the flower behind her ear. With pompousness, she<br>declares: ”You can ’t decide how I live! ”<br><br>Tenniel taps his chest and gazes at nothing.<br><br>How unfortunate...<br><br>She is entirely right about that as well.}}

The world shifts and blends fantastically, fascinating her always. Tenniel, however, never seems very<br>thrilled by it.<br><br>Therefore, as they leave the scene of a horrific fire spurred by flying machines, the last burning wisps of<br>tragic memory trailing behind them, Alice confronts him with a question: “Have you no passion at all, <br>Tenniel? ”<br><br>To this, he smirks and says, “I never suffer, no. ”<br><br>To this, she looks at him dully.<br><br>He must have something in that tied up chest of his. With that in mind, she tries to catch any sparkle in<br>his eye, any breath cut short, any sort of pleased look—as he looks upon pleasant things.

One day—if time can be so divided in a world where night never comes—they come across the memory of<br>an old workshop.<br><br>There, she decides to hatch a little plan. In a rare moment of Tenniel ’s distraction, she hides away from him,<br>carefully, behind a door. When he realizes he ’s lost her, he glances back, forth, and there mutters, “Alice...?<br>Well, you must be nearby. Never mind it, never mind it... ”<br><br>From her hiding place she watches him step past dusty tables and stools... until he reaches an easel, upon<br>which is a canvas. He checks the surroundings, finds a piece of charcoal, and sits at the stool before the<br>blank sheet. And, he sketches. The ticklish joy from “teasing” him begins to fade, and she instead observes<br>him steadily.<br><br>That ’s right...<br><br>When she first woke up in this world...<br><br>Tenniel would often change their hats. He would tease her and be sure to always ask what she wanted to<br>do. He also recited things—poetry, prose—very often. He oriented her, when she was so disoriented by waking<br>in a caged world. He was sillier, delightful.

But... rather quickly... he stopped all of that.<br><br>The Tenniel she knew now wore a mask. It had almost become his new face, and so she ’d forgotten...<br><br>He did like art, didn ’t he? He used to remark on it whenever they found memories of galleries...<br><br>Now he sketches his surroundings, adding to them a teacup sitting on the floor before the canvas instead<br>of a stool. An invention of his own, not a part of the scene.<br><br>She remarks from behind the door, “That’s very nice, Tenniel. ”<br><br>He slows to nothing, and rests the charcoal back where he found it. He glances over his shoulder.<br><br> “It’s only an imitation, ” he says.

“But you imagined that, ” she says, pointing toward the sketch, “the cup. ”<br><br> “...It is imagined, yes, ” he admits. “...But I believe you likely have a better imagination than me, Alice. ”<br><br>He smiles, again.<br><br>And she replies, “Don’t let it bother you, Brother. Your technique is impressive, and comparing it to my<br>flawless mind is— ”<br><br>And they stop, and meet one another ’s eyes, as they both realize what it is that she just said.}}

“... ‘Comparing it to your flawless mind, ’ what? ” he asks.<br><br> “...Tenniel... ” she addresses him.<br><br> “My name is no verb. Where precisely is this comparison going? ” he teases.<br><br>But, Alice insists. “Tenniel! ” She shouts, stomping into the room. “You know why it is that I called you that,<br>don ’t you!? ”<br><br> “It is my name, ” he replies.<br><br> “‘Brother’? ” she answers, baffled.<br><br> “Tenniel, ” he confirms with a smile.

“Not that!! ” she yells, balling her fists and stomping again—now once in place. “Are we... family!? ”<br><br> “I like t— ” Tenniel begins, turning ‘round on his stool. He looks self-satisfied, and obnoxious, but before<br>he can say what it is he ’s thinking, he thinks on it again. He holds his tongue, and grimaces as he turns his<br>eyes away.<br><br> “You’re shutting up, then? ” she accuses him. “I knew I was right...! I noticed it... Only lately you ’ve been<br>like this. ”<br><br> “Handsome? ” he tries. “No, that ’s always— ”<br><br> “Tenniel, I am being quite serious, ” Alice tells him coldly, cutting him off.<br><br> “Quite seriously, ” says Tenniel, “I would like to end this conversation. ”

“Because it worries you? Mysteriously? Why? ” Alice persists. She steps further into the room, angrily<br>telling him, “‘Brother’, I called you, and I said it quite sincerely. What could that be for? You ’re not<br>unaware, Tenniel. Not unknowing. You ’re very obvious in that regard. Now, I insist! I insist that you tell me! ”<br><br> “I would rather not, ” he growls.<br><br> “Tenniel! ”<br><br> “Just leave it alone! ”<br><br> “I’m a grown woman. I can handle unpleasant words or truths! ”<br><br> “It isn ’t that simple! ”<br><br> “You aren ’t my parent! ”<br><br> “He may as well have been! ”

With a foot forward, the glowering Alice stops, her eyes set on Tenniel who is standing now. She processes<br>what he told her, and asks, only, “...What? ”<br><br> “Ah... oh... dear me, I said it, ” Tenniel speaks in a near whisper. His eyes shine a moment, and he bends<br>his head so the brim of his cap might hide them. “No, Alice... I am not your brother. But I remember him. ”<br><br> “...Go on, ” Alice bids, resolute.<br><br>And her companion fishes from his vest: a shining shard. A piece of Arcaea.<br><br> “A memory? ” she asks. And Tenniel replies:<br><br> “Yours. ”<br><br>Alice is silent. She looks at the shard between his fingertips and waits.

“I don ’t understand this world, ” he says, “but I know that memories project into this place because of you.<br>None do the same for me. I believe... given what recollection I was born with... Well, though it was rather...<br>scattered, from the myriad of shards around you where you were first sleeping, I strongly remembered ‘him’.<br>I ‘felt’ as him, though my head is... certainly a bit strange. ”<br><br>He smiles before going on to say, “What I knew made me wish for nothing but your ignorance. ”<br><br> “...I will be fine, Tenniel, ” Alice speaks to assure him.<br><br>A light falls from his face to the floor, scattering in a minuscule splash. He tells her, with a fluttering voice,  “I <br>might say that you aren ’t. ”

Nonetheless, he extends the shard to her.<br><br>She takes it.<br><br>In the glass, she sees a curtain waving before a window. Daylight.<br><br>She feels a hand falling down on her hat. Tenniel ’s sleeve obscures his face.

“If you look there, ” he says, “I know you will understand. Also, Alice... ”<br><br>She grips the shard before answering, “Yes? ”<br><br> “I am surely just an imitation, but would you— ” he stops. “Would you... ”<br><br> “Yes? ” she prompts him.<br><br> “...Take care, ” he says, “and stay safe, Alice? ”<br><br> “That doesn ’t follow... You ’re an imitation, you said... ‘An imitation, but ’...? ”

“...Hmph, ” he makes a light and dismissive sound as he takes his hand from her hat. Or rather, he takes<br>her hat from her head, and replaces it with his own. Turning before she can glare at him, he tells her,<br>“I’m an imitation, but listen to me just this once. That ’s what I was going to say and nothing else, ” he lies.<br><br>She does not push, and instead looks into the glass, activating it.<br><br>But, as color swirls around her she hears the young man say—<br><br> “Right, an imitation can ’t ever have their wishes heard. ”<br><br>But before she can ask him what he means, she enters a familiar place.}}

She finds herself in something unremarkable, and even a little dull. It is a hospital room with white walls<br>and ceiling. To be precise: a patient ’s room—a quiet room, with monarch butterflies fluttering outside the<br>open window. And, to her surprise, in the moment she recognizes the place, memories she hadn ’t realized<br>she ’d lost rush into her skull.<br><br>That there was a park outside.<br>That the nurses were friendly and kind.<br>That the weather always seemed perfect.<br>That she nearly always lived here.<br><br>She feels overwhelmed, trying to sort it all, but before she can even begin she hears footsteps behind and<br>turns. There is a person there, at the door, with a hydrangea in hand, presently dressed in a thin and open,<br>hooded sweatshirt. He wears a T-shirt beneath that, looser slacks over his legs, simple and comfortable<br>shoes... and his face. She knows his face. This man is a man who looks like Tenniel.<br>“His” name, however, is...

“...Cedric. ”<br><br>From the bed by the window, a weak voice calls out.<br><br>The young man passes her by, politely nodding as he goes, and he moves to the waking patient. She<br>doesn ’t have to see the golden hair, the thin frame, nor the kind face to know: of course, it is her.<br>This is her memory. Her name is Alice.<br><br>Cedric puts the flower he bought in a vase. A true bouquet of them sits beside her original self.<br>He pulls over a chair and sits down beside her. He has no tea in his hands, nor does he ask for any.<br><br> “Cedric... ” the girl repeats, groggily, as she sits up in bed. “I thought you were at the studio today. ”<br><br> “No, not there. And I work on my own time, Alice, ” says Tenn—... Cedric. It sounds like him.

“How are you? You ’re alright? ”<br><br>They both look at her, and smile.<br><br>The words had just come out of her without thinking. Well, she could barely think, for what it was worth.<br>A new world of truth, here to process, and it seems that as an observer in a place of one part of this<br>memory she merely recited what was said at the time automatically.<br><br> “Have you been writing? ” asks Cedric.<br><br> “Have you been drawing? ” asks the sickly girl, grinning in light mockery.<br><br> “‘Have I been drawing ’, ” he echoes, looking to the ceiling and then rolling his eyes.<br><br> “You came here! ” she fires back with a laugh. “I swear, I thought you were busy! ”

“Three pages I finished, ” he answers with pride and a smile.<br><br> “Good! ”<br><br> “And you ’ve got no pages? ”<br><br> “I’ve written! I ’ve written plenty! ”<br><br> “Then let ’s see it, then. I ’ve this other book, too... ”<br><br> “‘Lright! ”<br><br>The girl reaches to a cupboard beside the bed. She keeps her notebooks and utensils there, as well as a<br>tablet she could probably use more often. The young man fishes out a tome from his bag. Right... it never<br>had been traveling, had it? It was always written stories... told tales... dreams.<br><br>They begin to share. Laughter, teasing.

Four days.<br><br>In four days, all of this ended. They both believed that, if not forever, she had at least three hundred and<br>sixty-five. She didn ’t get to see him in the end. In the early morning she felt a pain and faded.<br>Then, nothing. She remembered hearing them yelling to call. That was it.<br><br>Tenniel knew this.<br><br>The memory is long. She feels it. It encompasses these last days, but she doesn ’t want to see it.<br><br>Strong though she is, facing such a thing terrifies her. No part of it can change. Her health was always<br>failing, they were always alone, and he couldn ’t be there: the end. Dreams and stories... can ’t become real<br>by wishing.<br><br>She leaves the memory while they ’re smiling. She doesn ’t remember if it was their last time together.<br>She doesn ’t want to know.

You will die. You have died.<br><br>Standing in the memory of the workshop, this is what Alice remembers.<br><br> “Tenn — ” she starts, looking up.<br><br>But Tenniel is gone.<br><br>And there, the memory fades. She can guess... As he ’d said, he was only an imitation, and with the truth<br>revealed, his time was up.

Alice stands in the void of Arcaea, staring forward with unseeing eyes.<br><br>And everything screams at her at once.<br><br>This “plane” is false. This “body”: a shell. The “memories” were distorted.<br>Her “life” was not hers; her life ended with no arc, no culmination, no brother beside her.<br><br>You are alone, Alice.<br><br>And you died alone.

Alice eventually finds herself on her knees, her gloved fingers dug through the earth.<br><br>She feels very cold. She wants to cry, but tears wouldn ’t come.<br><br>She feels...<br><br>She feels.<br><br> “It’s real,<br><br> “because every sense of you ‘knows’ that it ’s real. ”<br><br>Tenniel ’s words reflect in her head.

She looks at her hand, and she sees it.<br><br>She pulls her glove taught, and she feels it.<br><br>She takes the flower from her hair and hears it. Smells it. She opens her mouth over the petals.<br><br>What is reality? Is it what you see? What you taste? What you touch?<br><br>If that is so...<br><br> “Alice” is dead, and Alice is alive.<br><br>And if Tenniel was a memory, then he must remain as well.<br><br>In reality, she knows herself to be a wanderer of worlds.<br><br>She made it here, didn ’t she? Regardless of the “truth”.<br><br>And if that is so... there is a way out.

She ’ll find it.<br><br>The way back: to the one who cared for her the most in life.<br><br>And for the other...<br><br>If she cannot find him again on her journey, she knows a fragment of him will be there with her,<br>remaining in her heart. Perhaps she ’ll start making and never drinking tea. The thought... makes her<br>smile and laugh once again.<br><br>Alice decides then and there, feet on the ground and holding the shard of “truth” between her fingers:<br>even if she may always look forward, to the horizon that marks a new way...<br><br>...she will never, ever, forget what brought her there.}}

A moonless night blanketed the forest, trying to smother the fires blazing throughout its sprawling<br>verdure and the village nestled within.<br><br>Crashes and screams. Horrible sounds from horrible shapes, dark against the flames. For some, the<br>smoke-filled air was inundated with panic, driving them to run as fast as their legs could carry them.<br><br>She, however, felt enveloped in something now familiar to her: an unadulterated thrill of battle.<br><br>Her obsidian-colored sword glinted as it cleaved another of the shadowy figures. They were shaped<br>like malformed beasts, running on all fours yet fighting dexterously on hind legs. Her cut severed<br>its shoulders from the rest of its body?but before it could hit the ground, the body dissipated, as<br>though becoming smoke, before rising into the air to join the smoke from the fire.

Save for how the beasts appeared to materialize from the smoke of the forest blaze itself, she didn’t<br>know much else about them. There was little to distinguish one from another. For all she knew,<br>killing one would simply send its essence back into the clouds, only for it to come back again as<br>though nothing had happened.<br><br>As she stabbed her ornate blade into another of the shadow-beasts, she spared a glance behind her.<br><br>The villagers were nearly through the forest to the safety of the advancing forward line of some<br>nation or other.<br><br>She needed to protect them?needed to let the thrill within her run its course.<br><br>She jumped, spanning almost a field’s length in a single leap, long hair fluttering behind her, to<br>behead another beast as it raised a smoky claw to gore a fleeing farmer.<br><br>The short, muscular woman paused her escape for just a moment to offer a gesture the<br>sword-wielder wasn’t familiar with?perhaps a sign of gratitude?before scrambling away again.

It wouldn’t be much longer now. No matter where she found herself, no matter how advanced the<br>world’s technology and no matter what the philosophy of its people, she always had one objective:<br>slay, slay, slay?until, presumably, the enemy was gone.<br><br>Finally, the last straggler from the village made it to the line of spear-wielding soldiers. She could<br>see from here the sweat on the troops’ brows, the fear in their eyes… but she could see the<br>determination in their postures as well.<br><br>Letting down her sword at last, she exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she’d kept, knowing what<br>was to come next. She felt the weariness hitting her quickly?and, once again, sooner than the last<br>time.<br><br>The world around her began to fracture, as though it had merely been a projected image made of<br>glass. She closed her eyes and smiled an empty smile. Slowly, she let the pale light engulf her...<br><br>...and welcome her back into the world of Arcaea.}}

Mir did not know her name, and if she had any memories from before this dead world to<br>remember, they were lost to her now.<br><br>A glass shard?the one that had pulled her this time?briefly spun around her before shooting<br>away into the distance. She knew from experience she wouldn’t see it again. They were called<br>Arcaea?their name a fragment of knowledge from her awakening of which she did not know the<br>origin?and they seemed to show other worlds in the midst of certain situations.<br><br>She couldn’t touch the shards, but they could act on her. Over a dozen times now, they had pulled<br>her inside, bringing her into those worlds and situations, with the apparent reason always the<br>same: to defeat?no, to crush her enemies underfoot.<br><br>Inevitably, each time, there would be those unable to fight behind her... though the idea of<br>shielding them paled in comparison to the driving, blood-racing thrill of the fight.

She was skilled with this blade she had woken up with?wherever it had come from. And something<br>told her that she was too skilled. She could clearly do things that others in these worlds couldn’t.<br>In fact, even her enemies didn’t pose much challenge for her in person-to-person combat. The true<br>challenge, she was learning, was in the protection of others.<br><br>But when she was in the fray, such concerns meant nothing to her. She reveled in the battle?let the<br>mirth of violence course through her.<br><br>That mirth, however, seemed to be draining from her more quickly after the fact, leaving naught<br>but emptiness and exhaustion that took what felt like hours, if not days, to restore. And it seemed<br>to be taking longer and longer each time.<br><br>The absence of adrenaline led her to ponder these other worlds she was being tossed into. Even<br>what had previously seemed to her to be fact, that these were other worlds at all, didn’t feel quite<br>right of late. It was almost more like... she was being shown images, ones that for some reason she<br>could act within. The answer was obvious, she sensed, as though she should have known it, yet it<br>was just beyond her grasp...

Tired, she hefted her sword onto her shoulder and took a look around. White sand, as far as the<br>eye could see. A desert, drained of its color, mirroring how drained she herself felt upon returning to<br>it. The trail of footprints behind her were exactly as they were before the “spiriting away ”. Without<br>any wind, it was impossible to tell how much time had passed.<br><br>Not that time seemed to have much meaning here.<br><br>Another calling. Everything turned white again.<br><br>Abruptly, she stood somewhere else. Fields charred brown, smoke in the sky, makeshift fences<br>erected on land and trenches dug into the ground.<br><br>She looked around, suddenly exhausted. The callings had never happened this close together<br>before. And where were the weak ones?that throng of faceless actors on the stage, pointless yet<br>also perhaps the sole reason for being thrown into battle? More importantly, where were her<br>enemies?<br><br>Where was her fight?}}

War.<br><br>Mir had experienced battle before?but never war.<br><br>She now watched people kill one another with deadly efficiency, run for their lives in fear, engage<br>in feats of true heroism, engage in displays of utter dishonor...<br><br>Every way she turned, she found those weaker than her. Innocent, terrified faces, and all too many<br>of them young. They would see her, then look away, as if recognizing her only as a hallucination, a<br>trick of the light. She nonetheless tried to protect them. They would then run to their deaths.<br><br>Every way she turned, she found enemies. Soldiers leveling weapons at disarmed foes. Terrible<br>armaments, disassociated from humanity, delivering death faster than she could have ever believed<br>possible. She destroyed them, and then more would appear on the other side.

She jumped to yet another group of people, blue uniforms fighting against red, before making a<br>quick judgement and taking down the red ones. Behind, those people she had just protected were<br>wiped out in an instant from a strike she hadn’t seen coming.<br><br>Fading.<br><br>Vessels soared overhead, raining pure destruction down upon the lands. The vessels bore the same<br>insignias as those in the blue uniforms. Their fire swiftly took so many lives. Were they the true<br>enemy?<br><br>Taking a deep breath, she swung her arm back. After a mere moment’s pause to take aim, she spun,<br>hurling her sword into the air with a shout. The blade screamed upward at the small formation?<br>then tore through them, sending wild oranges and reds scattering through the firmament.<br><br>Then she saw the people jumping, and realized her mistake. White flared above and behind them,<br>and their descent slowed?parachutes? But they were easy targets against the red side’s weaponry.<br><br>The thrill was fading. Quickly.

Exhaustion crept back in.<br><br>And with it, despair?hopelessness at this situation over which she seemed to hold no power.<br><br>Indecision?the uncertainty of knowing what to do after the errors she’d made, and of who it was,<br>exactly, she needed to defeat.<br><br>Fright?the fear that her decisions would lead to something even worse.<br><br>The thrill was gone.<br><br>It felt like a trusted partner had betrayed her. Left her in her moment of need. She reached out with<br>her hands, searching for it. It had to be here. She had no fuel without it. Nothing to give her the<br>strength to take another step.<br><br>Unable to find it, eventually she, like those wounded soldiers, fell to her knees.

Hours passed. The raging battle was now dwindling, leaving behind the true horror of warfare.<br><br>She put her hands over her ears to protect herself from their moans, their yells. She shut her eyes<br>to block out the sights and smells.<br><br>It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault, she told herself.<br><br>And yet... it was, still, her fault. She surely could have done something, she thought. She could<br>have changed something?anything to prevent this.<br><br>When she tried to think about what she could have done, however, she found she couldn’t.<br><br>And that process repeated, as it had done the last dozen times. She felt her nerves fraying, panic<br>setting in.<br><br>Eventually, her surroundings whitened, and she was sent back into the world of Arcaea in the same<br>manner as all the other times.