"You're going down into the abyss."

"I'm going to the ground."

Well, sure. The ground really did exist. Probably. But it was supposed to be incredibly dangerous, blanketed by a mysterious fog that Myra now had good reason to believe could erase memories and maybe things from existence. She had never considered just going down there.

"Did you forget about the fog?" Myra asked.

"No," she said, putting on a gas mask. "That's why I brought a gas mask. Do you want to come?"

"I—Iz how are you even—you can't just parachute down, the trees are in the way. You'll just end up caught in the branches twenty meters down, is this some kinda joke?"

"Myra, what's my specialty, again?"

"Spatial manipulation?"

She smirked.

"I'm sorry, I'm… not seeing the connection."

"I'll just twist the space enough to open a path through the branches."

"Okay…" All right, that was pretty smart. "How are you gonna get back up, then?"

"Who says I need to get back up? It's a time loop, right?"

Her expression was so deadpan that Myra almost bought it.

"No, really, how are you gonna get back up?"

"Teleport stick," she said, pulling one out of her pocket to show her. "I set a waypoint up here—"

"But—"

"—and I know how to extend their range," she finished before Myra could raise her objection. "You just have to stabilize the tether. Mountain climbers do it so they always have a way to safety, this is just the same principle going down instead, you just need to reverse the polarity of the elevation-offset equilibrizer."

"And—"

"And I stocked up on spare aura crystals." She pointed to her backpack.

"Okay, okay," Myra gave in. "You thought this through—wait, where the hell did you get all this equipment?"

"I picked it up before we left Ralkenon."

"All this? But your suitcase wasn't even that—oh."

She smirked again. "So do you want to come?"

"Of course, I do," Myra said, heart starting to race with the anticipation of an upcoming adventure. Adventure! When else would she get to go somewhere like this but in the time loop?

"You're sure the gas mask is safe, though?"

"Inspect it if you want." She handed a spare to Myra, and Myra confirmed that the gas mask looked like a gas mask. It was rune-enhanced, at least, and it had a spare aural supply, which was reassuring.

"I got them from the university," Iz said. "They have very high safety specifications."

That was good enough for Myra. "All right, let's go," she said.

There were still the logistics of actually getting down to figure out. Myra figured she was good enough at teleportation now that she could just teleport—the only problem was that she'd be going in blind. The plan, then, was that Iz would parachute down, confirm it was safe, and send up a signal for Myra with coordinate information for her to teleport to. There was no easy way for Shera to follow them—they briefly discussed the idea of pairing her with Iz—but Shera didn't seem to want to go anyway.

By the time the mercenary group started to wake up for the day, Iz and Myra were ready to set off. Iz vanished off the edge, the parachute opening up just as she disappeared between the branches, leaving only behind a shimmer that was the remnant of her magic.

Ten minutes later, Myra received the arranged signal, a teleported note that just said 'come check it out!' together with the precise elevation Myra needed to go to: around six kilometers down. Myra made sure her gas mask was secure and followed through.

◆

The world was purple.

It would have been pitch black if not for the light that Iz had already conjured, but it was purple, a thick hazy purple. Myra could see well for about twenty meters, and poorly for another twenty after that. The ground really did exist, a flat expanse of dirt and grass and unrecognizable plants with delicious-looking berries that Myra swore not to touch. Thick, sturdy roots curled and twisted everywhere, spun off of the trees that extended vertically into infinity.

"Well, is it what you expected?" her friend asked. Myra couldn't see her face behind her mask, but she was weirdly chipper and upbeat.

"What's up with you?"

"That was a lot of fun," she said. "That should be an actual sport."

"Space-manipulating sky-diving tree-dodging?"

"Yeah. When this whole loop thing is over, be sure to tell me how much fun this was."

"Well…" Myra said, looking around again. "What should we do now?"

"We look around, of course."

Iz had an itinerary, and she knew which direction she wanted to go, so she went. It wasn't an easy hike, but there wasn't any immediate danger, and it was mostly a matter of stepping over the ground obstacles and not tripping. The area they were in was pretty flat, too, which was a boon. There were very few animals, though they saw a chorus of frogs croaking an interesting tune, and in the distance, there was a dull moan that Iz theorized was a gloombeast. However, it never approached them.

"I'm glad you came with me," Iz said as she moved carefully around some dense forest floor flora. "I wanted to talk."

"'bout what?"

"About—ugh." She put her arm around Myra's shoulder. "I'm not good at these kinds of conversations. I'm trying to be as useful as possible since I know that I probably act the same way every loop, whatever I do in this one must be multiplied. That is, if I'm a helpful good friend in this loop, I'm a helpful good friend in every loop. That's why I'm saying this."

"Okay…" Myra was waiting for Iz to get on with whatever it was.

"I'm worried about you," she said through her gas mask.

"You don't need to be," Myra said. "I'm getting the hang of this looping thing, I think. Internalizing that I can do anything I want. That's why I'm here."

"Yet you haven't seen your father."

"That's not something I want to do, though."

"Myra, you've been in this situation for over a year." Her voice started to rise. "How long are you going to put it off?"

"Put off what?" Myra asked, raising her own. "For what purpose should I ever have to talk to him again? I don't care about him anymore. Things have been weird between us for years, anyway, since he married a woman barely four years older than me."

"Is that true?" Iz asked. "You never acted like that before. Remember when he visited last year? You were so happy to see him."

Myra didn't say anything.

"I worry that you've been simmering about this for over a year, that you've forgotten what he was really like. You just see what's in the papers fresh off the incident and you've had nothing else to contradict the horrible things being said. I guess he never tried to contact you either?"

"I was happy to see him last year because he didn't bring his wife. And actually, he does, he sends me a letter mid-month."

"What does he say?"

"Fuck if I know. I don't want to see whatever shitty apology he has in store."

Iz sighed, but then she said, "See, that's exactly what I mean. You haven't even checked, just got an idea in your head and reinforced it for a year."

Myra didn't say anything to that. The girls walked a long way mostly in silence. Iz had found a few spells for navigation that didn't require the Common Library, and as capable mages, they were able to make good time, despite the significant distance they planned to cover.

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Their first stop was the point directly below the bridge nadir.

"This must be him," Iz said.

Lukai was a grisly sight, his corpse misshapen and bent in all the wrong directions, puffy and bloated from the passage of time, parts of him smashed or ripped open, exposing innards that Myra didn't want to see. Several meters away, his notebook was half-buried in the mud.

"This is—this is what he should look like, right?"

"I'm not a forensics expert, Myra," she said, pulling a thick textbook out of her backpack. "That's why I brought this."

The book—a mortician's anatomy reference—had a helpful overview of a body's decomposition process, animated in ink with a timeline selector in the margins of the page. "Did you also grab that in Ralkenon?" Myra asked.

"Yeah, of course," she muttered, looking back and forth between the body and the book. "I mean, yeah, he looks about what we'd expect," she concluded. "We should check his pockets and everything."

"What are you looking for?"

"I don't know. Anything suggesting he's not who he seems to be."

Lukai didn't have anything in his pockets other than a standard-issue set of keys for the murk bogs' compound. Myra inspected his left shoulder, where she found the implant from which he had detached his prosthetic arm. The area around it was heavily scarred, with blackened tissue taking up much of his chest and back.

Myra was now passingly familiar with prosthetics from her brief time as Professor Bandine's apprentice, but she didn't recognize the particular design on Lukai's shoulder. Bandine's designs usually mimicked human anatomy fairly directly and thus had a quality that was very, well, organic. Lukai's implant was mechanical, primarily bronze, and with interlocking gears and ball bearings. Something in the intricate craftsmanship was familiar—it reminded her of the telescope workshop in the murk bogs' basement.

"I mean, this all seems to check out," Myra said. "If he lived in the village, he probably lost his arm in the fire."

Iz nodded. "I agree." She put her hand to her chin. "Come on, we still have a lot of searching to do. Let's go see what all they've chucked off that platform over the years."

◆

The bed graveyard had a population of six. One was fresh, its wood and wool not yet rotted by nature; the others, at this point, could hardly be recognizable as beds, just soft mush decaying into the ground. Clothes and other belongings could be found scattered around as well.

"Well, this is about what I expected to find," Myra said. "It's a dangerous organization, so you expect a handful of deaths over the years. I just wasn't sure if they'd all be done like this."

"We don't know if this was everyone. Did you ever ask the murk bogs about their casualty rate?"

"No. They'd just say it's zero or something, right?" Wait—no, that's not right. "Actually, Geel's records did have a few labeled as deceased. Maybe… a dozen or so?"

Well, obviously, if somebody dies in the field and they can't recover their body in order to chuck it off the edge, they can't do their big ritual.

"Hm," Iz said.

Their next task was to make a full loop around the perimeter of the platform looking for anything that might have been dropped off the edge. It was hard to search thoroughly, and in fact, since they had gone all the way out to Lukai's corpse and back, she realized the fog was much denser near the platform, and in the very center there was a much thicker cloud that the fog actually seemed to emanate from, drifting slowly outwards. That area would be, she realized, directly below the well, and they hadn't discussed exploring it yet—it gave Myra the creeps.

It was a while before their search turned up anything. There was an interesting trinket here or there—a pistol, a sword, a radio—but for a long time, there wasn't much to find.

Eventually, though, they stumbled upon another large cache of junk, one that couldn't be missed. The centerpiece was a large icosahedron, large enough that Myra and Iz could have comfortably fit inside it, a triangular mesh of silver rods with inscribed runes.

"Well, this is something," Iz said. "Myra?"

"On it." From a cursory inspection, it was clearly made to produce some kind of illusion. The specifics escaped Myra, though it involved lots of small, bright lights, but it was hard to tell for sure because some of the rods were missing. They certainly wouldn't be able to run it, too much essential content was gone. She explained as much to Iz.

"Should we assume this was built by Lukai?" Iz asked.

"Probably? I guess they tossed it off the platform with everything else."

Iz shook her head. "No, look at the way the foliage has been growing around it. This has been here for a long time." (It was pretty obvious once she pointed it out.)

"Do you think it's important?" Myra asked. "It looks to me like it's something he built for fun and then… threw away for some reason. I mean, look at the other stuff."

The icosahedron was far from the only arcane object lying around. Caught in the grass nearby, conspicuous due to its bright colors, even in the obscurity of the fog, there were a handful of small cube-like pieces. Myra recognized them immediately: they were pieces of a puzzle cube, which must have shattered into pieces when it hit the ground.

It was a common challenge posed to young runecrafters—to carve runes into the cube surface to make it self-solving. It looked like Lukai had solved the challenge, though again, Myra couldn't find all the pieces so she couldn't try it out.

There were a few other trinkets besides that, there were a number of books: some fiction, a couple on advanced magic and mathematics topics, and even an artbook full of fantastical drawings. As with the icosahedron, all of it appeared to be rather old, and the artbook even had Lukai's signature in it, erasing any doubt about who it had all belonged to.

"Why would he throw all this out, though?" Myra wondered aloud. "These drawings are so good…" There must have been a clue in all his ramblings…

"Nonetheless, it does seem to corroborate his story," Iz said, sounding perturbed. "He's been with the murk bogs for a while." Myra didn't understand it, but Iz seemed determined to catch Lukai in some deception or lie. "What we really need if we want to learn anything is more text. Surely someone's thrown a secret document or two over the edge at some point. Can you cast your book spell?"

Myra tried it. "There's not a smidgeon of information aura down here," she said. "The outer elements barely penetrate the canopy, let alone all the way down here." That's awfully weird, though, isn't it? Myra wondered. If there was one element you'd think would be essential for memory magic, it'd be the information element. But then, mages' understanding of the elements was far from complete. The information element itself, so newly named it wasn't even official yet, was a testament to that.

"I suppose you didn't bring an elemental crystal—"

"I mostly just brought crystals for space and light, so no."

"Then I can't cast it."

"We don't want to find specific text, though," Iz pointed out. "Any piece of paper would do. Can you modify the spell?"

"I don't know how to do that."

"Just do what you always do, but set the information input to zero. Do it purely with wood aura. That should correspond to the empty text. Or explain the whole spell to me, and I'll do it."

Myra didn't need to explain the spell to Iz. She knew how to set the information input to zero. The spell felt really weird that way, like the sensation of pretending to lift a weight when you weren't really holding anything, but it seemed to work. The range was really poor, blocked by the fog, but there was no dearth of the wood aura that she needed, so she pushed the spell as hard as she could. Between Myra's efforts, and some more wandering around, they were able to find a couple of pieces of paper stuck in a hollow log. They were crumpled up into a ball—as you might do when throwing something out.

Their find had been somewhat ruined by its long exposure to nature. The pages were ripped and caked in dirt, and the contents were nearly unreadable—but not quite. It was a remarkably lucky find; having been caught where they were, the papers had been protected from the rain and wind over the years, and because they had been balled up, they hadn't been separated.

"I think I know what this is," Myra said, looking at the first page. "This is a page from Geel's personnel files, where he keeps records on all the murk bogs. I mean, it makes sense he would throw those out, too."

"Yeah…"

"Sorry, I know you were hoping for something more illuminating."

"Well, let's look at it closely. Maybe there's something."

The file belonged to a man named Frosses Durka, a specialist in long-range scrying. (That position was now taken by someone else, a reserved woman named Lorna whom Myra had only met once.) On the whole, it looked pretty consistent with most of the pages she had rooted through Geel's files before.

The second page was a bit different. "This is just… another page for the same guy?" It was differently colored, and it was much sparser in content, with nothing but an accounting of salary payments. There was a box for 'notes,' but it was frustratingly empty.

"Well, at least we've got a new name," Iz said. "Maybe we can look something up on him later."

"Hang on, these payments contradict the salary on the other page," Myra said.

"Say what?" She snatched the papers out of Myra's hand.

"See, look. The pay was like 50% higher…"

Iz's eyes flitted back and forth between the two pieces of paper, her expression ravenous. The mention of a contradiction had something inside of Iz, and she was now fixated on the discrepancy like a bloodhound on its prey. "So this is like the rest of his records you saw in Geel's office," she repeated, waving the first page around. "And this page is different." She waved the second.

"Yeah…"

"Heh."

"Iz, what are you thinking? What does this mean?"

"He was being paid for something covertly."

"You mean… he was a double agent of some kind?"

Iz clicked her tongue. "Perhaps." Then she stuffed the pages in her bag, her eyes still very intense. "Come on, it's time we check out whatever's below the well."

She was done with the perimeter of the platform, evidently, because without another word, she set off hiking towards the point that was directly under the platform's center. Towards the dark cloud that they had been circling for some time.

"Iz, wait!" She hurried after, nearing tripping over a fallen branch. "Iz!"

The fog became darker and darker. Despite the appearance from the outside, there was never any well-defined 'boundary' at which they were suddenly 'inside' the cloud—there was only a gradual decrease in visibility, a slow-creeping chill in the air, until at some point Myra realized just how closed in they had become. Myra grabbed Iz's hand lest they get separated, and she struggled to even see where they were going. Even her extra-senses were blocked by the fog, and it was all she could do to make sure that in each step they weren't about to fall into a pit of quicksand or another hazard.

"Iz, I don't like this area, it's—" It was dark, she could barely see beyond her nose, she couldn't even properly see Iz who was only two arms' lengths away. "Iz, the fog's getting really thick—"

"We're fine with the gas masks," she said. "I've been sensing the efficacy of the mask since we got down here, we're still safe." But as their voices were increasingly becoming muffled, Myra could barely hear her, and this did the opposite of reassuring her. She clutched her friend's hand all the tighter.

"Here we are," she thought she heard Iz say.

"Iz, let's get out of here."

She couldn't see the end of her own arm.

"Iz?"

There was no response. She felt her chest go tight.

"Iz!"

Out of panic, she yanked her arm. Iz appeared, her masked face nearly colliding into her own.

"Myra, it's all right. It's just fog." It was still muffled, but her voice was clear.

"Right. Yeah."

"I got what we came for." That was a relief to hear, and Myra let Iz lead them out. She didn't really know why she'd gotten so worked up—their hands had never even come apart, she'd felt her there the whole time. Nonetheless, she hadn't liked it in there at all, and when they were far from the fog nexus, in the medium-dense fog she'd spent most of the day in, it felt like she was standing on a bright, sunny beach by comparison.

"Damn it, Iz…"

"Sorry, that place was creepier than I thought it was going to be. I got what I wanted, though." Myra finally noticed she was holding something—a corked bottle of the amorphous gunk which continued to defy classification in Myra's limited chemical vocabulary.

"Iz, you could have got that from the well!"

"I wanted to see what was down here for myself," she said. "We'll compare with the well later, make sure it's the same substance, that the bucket isn't actually pulling from a secret compartment or something."

Myra sighed. "Sure."

Iz deposited the bottle in her pack. She stretched, pushing her fingers back and cracking her knuckles. "All right, one more stop, right?"

It was time to go see the remains of the village.

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