“So it was no fluke after all,” the King uttered, his spirits visibly lifted as unworldly hues and five or six different outfits pulsed over his form.

  “For hollow vessels to be this vivid… You must admit, dear, the snake-mouthed sorcerer was right once again,” the Queen said. Irritation twitched through the King’s face at the positive mention of the Wizard, but this time, it wasn’t enough to break his good mood.

  “Interloper, if you would, move the vessel into the circle,” said the King, holding out a hand to make it clear he was addressing Krahe. At his words, a circle of nine pillars rose from the ground, blank versions of the mural-bearing pillars that had marked Krahe’s approach earlier.

  Krahe willed it to move, and the sphere of Zhah-Rhan-Thule rose above her, hovering into place. No matter the angle of observation, it always appeared as “a dark moon being devoured by the sun it is eclipsing.”

  The instant the vessel reached its designated position, the King of Many Colours swept his arm leftward, moving the vessel to the Queen’s side of the throne room, across from Y’Alha’Zor. With each gesture, the grin on his face grew, and so did the definition of his form and the liveliness of his movements. Manic now, his arm lunged forward and he began drawing a glyph in mid-air, formed from oily, virulent light, as if tearing a gash into the already-thin reality of this place. It was a triangle with circles at the points, clearly patterned after the symbol of Phlogiston. With each line he drew in the air, the stone floor followed suit; a trench was carved out of it; it was a trench in the truest sense, wide and deep enough for Krahe to stand within it without seeing outside. Y’Alha’Zor and Zhah-Rhan-Thule respectively were placed within two of the circles at the triangle’s points, with the empty circle glowing before Krahe. This of course didn’t make sense spatially; the triangle had sides of equal lengths, therefore Krahe stood too close to the throne and to the two vessels. And yet, this was the truth. Krahe stood “a few dozen steps from the throne,” she stood “within direct sight of the royal couple,” and yet the throne room’s spatial dimensions distorted to accommodate this impossible glyph’s existence without simply moving Krahe further, and all this without her noticing it take place, simply because the King of Many Colours had willed it. Somehow, the straight lines connecting the circles were arched. It made no sense, but this, too, was the truth.

  Nothing up until this point had gotten to her, but for some reason this casual denial of basic spatial logic made goosebumps run down the back of her neck, despite the fact she had experienced similar things in virtual environments. It was simply different here.

  The King continued, completing the sigil of Phlogiston, placing the plus-sign shaped cross such that it pointed to the throne alcove. The trench moved with his finger, burrowing beneath the altar of the scales and the stairs to the thrones. The cross itself didn’t form an open trench, but instead rose from the ground as an altar right between the thrones, its dimensions of tens of meters somehow fitting between the thrones in open spite for the fact that the thrones were separated by a gap of no more than three meters. A shallower channel ran through the cross, funneling towards a hole downward into the rest of the sigil. Krahe couldn’t see this all taking place directly; she learned it directly from beholding the King drawing the sigil into thin air. Just from that she could vividly picture the physical structure, including its flagrant defiance of euclidean spatial dimensions. The mere consideration of what would happen if she tried to approach the thrones was enough to provoke the sigil. With a single flare of invisible magenta that washed over her with the gentleness of a spring breeze, the sigil imbued into her mind the knowledge that she could walk forever, traverse thousands of miles, and yet never move from her designated position, because the ritual had started the moment the King had deemed it so, and none of the participants could move from their rightful places until the ritual was either completed or halted. She could forcefully halt the ritual, but unless she decided to toss aside the fruits of this venture, she was stuck for now.

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  Alongside this knowledge also came the awareness of what the sigil was and what it represented. It was the Threefold Sigil of the Lesser Heterodox Cycle

  “I had intended to ask of you the provision of a sigil suitable for three subjects and two ritualists, but there is no need for that any longer. I quite like this sigil of yours. It shall suit our purpose, with a small adjustment,” he said. Another gesture, and a second cross altar extended from the empty circle at the triangle-point that faced Krahe. Once more, she did not move, she was no further from the throne, space itself distorted to accommodate this change.

  “First, you shall manifest that tar-stained thing and place it within the empty circle, that it may complete the Cycle. Second, you shall take in one hand thy shard of the guidestone. Third, you shall offer of yourself to the ritual, using that very hand; not an offering of blood, but of whom and what you are. Simply will into being the same intent behind the epithet by which you previously identified yourself before us, o Murderer of Murderers. That which you give, I shall match in equal measure, and thereafter add another ounce of my own flesh to balance the scales.”

  Just as before, thinking about the actions described elicited a response from the burning glyph, transmitting the necessary knowledge directly into her mind, almost as if it was a failsafe in case verbal communication failed. The glyph’s mind-impulse made it abundantly clear that the third instruction was similar in principle to the test of conviction she had undergone before the three saints guarding the relic-vault; the difference was that instead of conviction, this depended on the “weight” or perhaps “volume” of her identity and history. Even with direct thought-transmission, it was still this vague. Considering the trench and everything else, at least the “physical” mechanics of fulfilling the request were straightforward enough. The thought that the “liquid history” must run down the guidestone fragment kept repeating in her head, a blinking warning.

  She didn’t expect a sudden waterfall; after all, the totality of both her lives equaled a bit under forty-four, while the inhabitants of Zastreon could live for centuries, if not longer.

  First, she willed Barzai to manifest in the form of the Executioner’s Assistant and willed the giant to walk into the circle. Barzai obeyed, but turned his head to point his beak towards the Queen, who raised a hand to cover her mouth as if she was witnessing something truly scandalous.

  Then, grasping the guidestone in her left hand, she used one of its edges as a visual aid to “cut” herself, forming a small fissure in the palm of her astral body’s right hand. With only swirling void beyond it, the fissure resembled a Wound-like Grin, only without any teeth.

  Approaching the edge of her side’s cross-altar, Krahe held out the guidestone fragment over its edge, keeping the palm of her cut hand closely to the stone. This was the only posture that silenced the nagging warning-thought in her head.

  Finally, she centered herself, and took the brief time that she had not been given previously to fully center herself and dredge up a more complete sense of self-identity. She was a Murderer or Murderers, that was true, but she was also many other things. In the end, putting it into words wasn’t the point here, so she simply dwelt on her own identity, on the path she had walked thus far and the path she had yet to walk, and allowed this reflection upon the self to spill out. She had held back her thoughts up until this point, trying to rein in her wandering thoughts as best as possible, and now she wasn’t just not restraining them, she was doing the opposite. Every thought passing through her head was pulled along by the current of introspection and reminiscence, and with it, a river of pearlescent blood spewed out of her hand wound. It wasn’t as if an artery had been cut; an entire river’s worth of ichor spilled into the cross-altar’s channel, somehow fitting inside the meter-wide diameter of its channel, and it flowed into the ritual glyph’s trench just as swiftly.

  The King of Many Colours cast off the mask of self-control; laughing like a madman, he bit open his own wrist, and bled himself of iridescent-black in equal proportion.

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