"So to recap," Myra recounted as they hiked, "the enchantment core at the unnamed village was sabotaged, disabling the village protections and allowing the only place to burn down. Roc says he had the only key, but the investigator's report indicated that someone entered the building through the main door. No signs of tampering—"

"Though we don't really know how they determined that."

"Right. No signs of tampering, and the footprints indicated someone just walked in and out. The footprints didn't seem to match anyone in the village. Also, there was a mysterious visitor, and Roc had previously allowed them to visit the enchantment core."

"An obvious scapegoat," Iz said. "That stranger probably didn't even exist. The footprints were a false trail laid by Roc to pull suspicion off himself. The intriguing question is, why is his story so bizarre?"

Iz had had much the same opinion in the previous loop, and at that time, it had been quite reasonable. But now…

Does she really not see it?

"This was pretty baffling last time," Myra half-agreed. "But it seems pretty obvious now, right? Thanks to the curse on this place, he probably forgot most of the specific information about the village and the events that took place around that time. That's why so little of it makes sense."

Iz's sigh was loud and breathy through her gas mask. "You're still on about this 'curse.'"

"What do you mean, 'I'm still on about it'? Did you think I'd forgotten about it?"

"I mean, you followed me down here, and you don't seem very afraid. I thought maybe you'd put the whole memory anomaly hypothesis behind you."

"I 'don't seem afraid'? Did you not see me freaking out in that mist earlier?"

"Sure I did, but it was pretty creepy in there. Your reaction wasn't particularly noteworthy."

"You gotta be kidding me… So if it's not the memory-wiping, then what's your explanation for this so-intriguing question? If Roc is just covering for himself, then why would he claim to have the only key? Why wouldn't he just say the key was stolen?"

Iz was silent.

"But consider," Myra continued. "Roc's irregularities are easily explained by him simply forgetting various components. Roc says he only had the one key, but what if he simply forgot about everyone else who owned a key? Roc says that he visited the enchantment core alone. What if he actually had another villager with him? An assistant or trainee that he forgot about? Everything falls into place."

"Sure, everything falls into place if you posit this flatly nonsensical curse. Do we need to rehash how little sense it makes?"

Myra did not, in fact, want to rehash it, but she held to the same point she had made at the time: Iz hadn't believed in the time loop either. Her track record wasn't good.

"There's one easy way to explain Roc's absurd story," Iz said. "The universal explanation, which requires no assumptions, the single explanation that has been vindicated more than any other explanation in the history of this planet. He's lying."

The character of the groundlife was gradually changing. When a tree of such a massive magnitude falls, it invokes a change in the landscape. When so much ash and burnt wood covers the surface, it suffocates the ecosystem. The area was not dead, but it was a host to those organisms that made their home in death. Critters and crawlers were abundant, and everywhere, there were more mushrooms and mold, larger than any Myra had ever seen before. One such mushroom—the largest of them all, which towered over the girls—was found together with the first skeleton.

"I think we're here," Iz said. "This is where it all ended up."

They were greeted by a rotten and decayed welcome sign. How it had been arranged up top was a fact lost to time; here at the bottom, it was propped up by two adjacent trees, having slotted conveniently into their branches.

WELCOME TO ██████

The name had been scratched off.

◆

Most of the structures around her were not burnt; she wondered if they had survived the fire, and thus had been later abandoned by the few survivors, or if their support had given out before the fire had reached them. Hardly anything was recognizable as a building; most everything was just smashed together in a scrapyard of wood and metal and glass. The bridges were perhaps the most recognizable elements, and they were varying degrees of blackened and charred. Myra instinctively used the bridge remains as she traversed the wreckage, her boots caked in mud now accumulating ash to go with it.

Myra had become numb to death in some ways, but this was a new experience for her. It took her a long time to see why it agitated her so, why with each skeleton her brain made an instinctive effort to dismiss it only to find that it could not. It was because no matter how many times she looped, no matter how good she got, she knew she would never be able to save these people.

The two girls had been walking next to each other for a while, but neither of them was speaking. Finally, Myra broke the silence.

"Do you really think Roc did this?" she whispered.

"… I don't know," Iz said. "But someone did, and I won't let them get away with it."

The area was so large, and it was difficult to know where to start, but they kept their eyes out for anything abnormal. Pretty soon, something in particular caught Myra's eye.

"What do you think that is?" There was a shape in the distance, somewhat disconnected from the corpse of the city proper, something curved, like a parabola tilted over, and it was massive. Even as they approached, Myra couldn't tell what it was—it was a solid object of the aforementioned shape, its surface wrought of a dark metal. Its base was attached to a single, round building. The expected charring was absent, and it was in weirdly good shape for a building that had fallen so many kilometers.

"It's a reflecting telescope," Iz said. "See the shape? I bet there's a mirror on the inside. This must have been the village observatory."

"Oh, wow," Myra gasped, looking at the device with a renewed awe now that she knew what it was. "I mean, I knew they were into astronomy, but… I guess I see now how a memorial ended up in Shera's magazine."

"That indeed," Iz said. "Do you want to poke around? We might be able to find some more intact writing in here."

Myra did want to poke around, if for no other reason than to tell Shera about it later. Maybe they would need to try harder to find a way to get her down here.

Myra spent the time-loop-optimal amount of time checking that the building was safe to enter by probing it telekinetically. It was pretty simple—she just applied force to the surfaces in about the same way as she would if she were walking around inside, and thus made sure that this wouldn't cause it to collapse.

It had probably been magically reinforced, once upon a time. That enchantment was long since spent, but it had at least enabled the building to survive the fall—or its landing, rather—and now it was standing of its own architectural merits. Thus, they decided to go in—they didn't bother with the door, obviously, just teleported right inside.

It went without saying that they couldn't actually use the scope. It was damaged, probably relied on aura quantities that weren't available, and the trees were in the way. Still, it was a lot of fun to pretend to use.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Iz had said she wanted to find writing, and writing they found. The observatory contained a single bookshelf, which was flat on the ground—Myra and Iz carefully uprighted it to see what was inside. Myra pulled open a box of thin booklets, each labeled with some three-month period. "Ooh, journals." She flipped through one.

"Anything neat?"

"Looks like they were doing some collaboration with an imperial university to study the Quasar Worm… that's kinda cool." She closed the book and looked at the cover again, then furrowed her brow. "Huh."

"What?"

"These only go up to December of '10," Myra said. "Did we get the dates wrong? I thought the fire was in the winter of '11–'12."

"Shera said her missing magazine was from January of '12," Iz confirmed. "And that's consistent with what Roc said, too."

"Maybe Shera's magazine was printing about it for the anniversary or something. And maybe Roc got the years mixed up?" Could it be another consequence of the memory curse?

"It would have been the most traumatic night of his life," Iz said. "Not a chance he'd forget the year it happened."

"It could be because of the curse."

"And how would that work exactly? What object would you throw into the abyss to forget the date of an event, but not the event itself? No, the reason for Roc to get the date wrong would be if he's lying."

"What, you think they hid the fire for a whole year?"

"… No, I mean, what if Roc never lived in the village at all? It would be difficult to forget the year you torched your own home to the ground. It would be much easier to forget the year of a minor subterfuge operation." Iz sighed. "But honestly, we can confirm the dates again later. No use jumping to conclusions. The books could just be elsewhere." She started walking back towards the main part of the village. "Anyway, if there isn't anything else here, we should keep looking around."

"Yeah, all right. Just a sec." The other girl might not have even heard her—she was already teleporting out.

Myra was staying behind because she had a compulsion to check something. She combed through the backlog of journals. There was a specific date she was looking for, in August of '06. Eleven years ago.

Tonight, there was a most fantastic occurrence. So fixated was I on a different part of the sky, I had no idea for some time, but there was a commotion outside, and Kari fetched me. In the Herrestia region, or as my collaborators would call it, the "swampbear constellation," there was a bright star, brighter than anything I had ever seen in our sky before, save of course our sun or moons. No—that understates it. Tonight, it was brighter than even Altina.

Kari and Lukai had thought it was some kind of comet. It was nothing of the sort, it was a supernova—

The supernova was what she'd been looking for—Lukai's cameo had been a surprise, but it also wasn't that strange in retrospect. He had said, after all, that his godfather had been a stargazer, and while the journals in front of her had nothing to indicate the author's name, Myra thought it was very likely Roc, as Iz herself had theorized. There's no way he's a liar, Myra thought. His whole life, his hobbies, his friends and family, were all here. He wouldn't have done this.

◆

"If I have my coordinates right," Iz said, hedging unnecessarily since of course she had them right, "we're right below one of the few remaining structures from the village. My guess is that this is where they come to dump their crap, so I hope we can find more clues here."

Indeed, before them was a large pile of junk, but it was sitting out in the open rather than buried under the rubble, and its contents were so miscellaneous and unrelated, that it seemed unlikely that these things had been all in one place before the fire had started.

They combed through the debris together. Most of the items looked personal to someone, though they meant nothing to Myra. There was a portrait of someone. There was a teddy bear. If anything belonged to Lukai, it wasn't obvious. The work was a depressing slog, but Iz was determined not to retire empty-handed, and the girls had their extra-senses about them. Without both of these things combined, they might have missed the smallest and most important clue.

That clue was small and metallic, buried several centimeters into the dirt. It stuck out in their extra-senses only when they had moved and examined and debated every other piece of junk in the pile.

It was a key.

"Well, a key is definitely interesting," Iz said.

"Look, it's the exact same kind of key we use for any of the older buildings on the platform. Maybe it was a key to the enchantment core!"

"I mean—" Iz tried to run a hand through her hair before she remembered she was wearing a full head covering. "That could be a key to anything."

"Well, if it's a key to something on the platform, we might be able to figure out what."

"All right, throw it in my bag."

And that was it for the search.

"… So what do you think?"

"We need another source of information," Iz said. "The enchantment core would be ideal, but as I understand it, the building was dismantled. I had hoped that would be a lie, that we might find it down here… but I think we can rule that out about now. We've gone over the whole area."

Iz looked at the overhauled junk heap with a forlorn expression.

"You know…" Myra said. "I can think of an interesting place we haven't checked yet."

Iz looked up. "Are you talking about the three buildings that are left up there? Because I already checked, there're three old houses up there but they're emptied out."

"Actually… I was thinking we could snoop around Roc's workshop. I mean, Shera and I did a pretty cursory search before, but you seem to think he's hiding something, so maybe—"

"You wanna go snooping around again?"

"I don't want to believe Roc's hiding anything, but…"

Iz nodded. "I should have thought of it. We should really give the whole platform a deep search. But let's start with Roc's workshop."

◆

Myra never thought she'd be so relieved to be so many kilometers above the ground. She was exhausted and hungry, but Iz only let her get a quick snack because she wanted to investigate Roc's workshop right away. Myra had entirely lost track of time—they had done a day's worth of hiking, and the sun had already set.

The night meant prime sneaking hours, but more importantly: the night meant a strong astral channel, information aura, and the book spell.

She decided to search for (the Unkmirean word for) 'fire,' and her heart sank when she immediately got a hit in an odd place: under the floorboards.

Iz didn't say anything, but Myra could see the intensity in her eyes. She waited patiently while Myra pulled a thin trunk out of the dark hiding place, while she examined it for traps and slowly worked on the mundane combination lock.

Of course, there are a lot of reasons to hide something like this, Myra reminded herself. It doesn't have to be incriminating.

When she got it open, there wasn't much in it. There was a small, buttoned-up leather pouch, and below that, a dark green file.

Iz went right for the file. "Fucking jackpot!" She could barely contain her excitement as she flipped through it. "Myra, I think this is a copy of the investigators' report!" The other girl tried to shove it into Myra's hands. "God, we should have done this first—"

"Just a sec," Myra said. She was investigating the pouch first. "There's a key in here. The pouch is labeled, enchantment core main door."

"Is it identical to—"

"I'm checking, I'm checking." It didn't take Myra long to line them up. "Yeah, these are absolutely the same." Myra was washed with relief. "This proves it, right? There was more than one key the entire time. There was no mystery to begin with, but then Roc threw away the extra keys, and then he forgot about them. Then there was only the one key left, and now he can't remember any other key ever existing, leaving his whole story a contradictory mess!"

"Or he threw it away, and lied that he didn't know about the…" Iz trailed off, scrunching her face in confusion.

"C'mon," Myra said. "You said yourself, his story is bizarre, especially if he's trying to cover for himself."

Iz just scowled and shook her head. "I'll figure it out." She continued pushing the file Myrawards. "Tell me what this says. You know I can't read it."

"Yeah, yeah."

It was a copy of the investigators' report, all right. The first few pages contained a report on the deaths and survivors.

"Does it have a date anywhere?" Iz asked. She was still bothered by that little inconsistency.

"Uh… no, sorry. Just give me a sec… Okay, so, it lists 16 survivors, including Roc and Lukai. Roc said there were only 13…"

"Yes, yes," Iz said. "He's probably not counting Lukai or 2 others who died later." You know, we can check that. We could interview him before Lukai dies—see if the number is 14.

"Uh, I don't recognize the other names," Myra went on.

Next page.

This page was about the spread of the fire. It was pretty complicated, but most of the details didn't mean much to Myra.

Next page.

This was the footprint analysis.

"Anyway, the footprint analysis is basically exactly what Roc told us. It looks like someone walked in and back out."

Next page.

"Fingerprinting and DNA analysis," Myra said. "Uh, the DNA section is blank, I guess they didn't find anything…"

She sucked in her breath as she read the last note on the page.

"Myra?"

We recall two facts:

(A) According to Roc's testimony, he entered the enchantment core building together with the 'masked stranger' exactly 4 days prior to the catastrophe. Roc says that the stranger touched things in the room at that time, and furthermore that he was bare-handed at the time.

(B) The rune cabinet had a safety such that it would only open if touched with a bare hand. These are easy to subvert (note: this is a safety mechanism, not a security mechanism), but our analysis indicates the cabinet was never opened abnormally. Therefore, the cabinet handle should have the culprit's fingerprints on it.

We thoroughly searched the doorknob, all surfaces, and the rune cabinet for prints. On both the doorknob and the cabinet handle, we identified prints going back at least 3 weeks. Across all surfaces, we only identified the prints of two individuals, both survivors of the ██████ fire: Roc and Lukai.

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