"It's 1073 AE."

She stares at him.

It was 1066 AE before she fell into the Mists.

Seven years. At least. Seven. Possibly longer, because the Mists get weird with time, and this looks like it's a copy from the past. She doesn't think the Mists copy from the future.

No. No no no no no no no she wants to be back in the middle of grey mist again, she wants to be bored again, she doesn't—no.

It could be fake. The things he's saying are absurd, and she knows he's not real. The charr, overwhelming Orr? Ridiculous. Orr's as strong as Ascalon, that's why the Third Guild War isn't over and done with, even if the charr made it through Ascalon they'd be weakened enough not to get through Orr. The Vizier becoming a lich because of magic that destroyed the peninsula? Absurd. Insane. That's not how magic works, you don't accidentally become a lich.

She tries to write something, tries to tell him he's not real, but illusions are tricky. And she is emotionally compromised. She tries to form words, but the illusions shatter into violet glass and disappear before she makes it past 'You—'

And then she stares at her hands and doesn't... do... anything.

"Hey? You okay?"

    "We should go."

"—yes, Argo. If—if you want to follow us and continue talking I'll still be here, okay? But this is very important and I have to go."

She doesn't really care what the echo wants to do. If it wants to go away, sure, that's fine. It can do that.

Thoughts form in her head and she scrapes up some resemblance of calm. This is an echo. This is an echo in the Mist, and it can't help her. She needs to leave, and she needs to try to find another way out. She's wasting time standing here trying to get answers from a thing that is not a person.

This decided, she has the clarity of mind to manage an answer.

'You can't help me anyway. And I can't help you. I'm sorry. I'll go.'

"...okay. Good luck. I'll—try to return here and find you if I can." Onwards they go to this iteration of the loop.

"If I had any luck at all," she says, "I wouldn't be here."

It'd be smart to stay, to try and get as much maybe-information from these things as possible, to try and figure out if there is any way at all for them to help her. But she doesn't want to be here anymore. She wants to go home. She won't get that by staying here. She might not get that ever, but she definitely won't get that if she stays here and holds onto people that aren't real just because they're more interesting than walking around in mist some more. And she doesn't know how long this is taking. And she doesn't know if the loop is based on anything real or not.

She leaves.

The area surrounding the loop is also part of the jade sea, but it gets less and less defined the farther from it she is, boats no longer appearing and waves getting smaller and more regular.

Until eventually she's back to the hard rock and dead trees from before. Or perhaps it's somewhere else; at any rate it's impossible to distinguish any one place from anywhere else.

The direction doesn't matter.

She picks one, and then she goes back to walking.

The Mists are neither completely boring nor completely exciting. They are the space between worlds, the proto-reality from which all other realities emerge; Tyria is but one of the worlds in it, as are the gods' realms, the Rift and within it the Hall of Heroes, and countless others that humans in Tyria have never heard of. They're the raw matter from which worlds are made, and they borrow aspects from them once they exist, both feeding them into other worlds and just recording them forever in themselves. From the Mists, you can reach everywhere, but you are nowhere.

The vast unknowable space between worlds is, mostly, empty. But she runs into other things than emptiness; other stolen places, other looping echoes. A fight between a hero and an undead king; a stone colossus, trapped by cultists performing a dread ritual; a submerged city, krait and largos fighting over treasures hidden within; a war between soldiers wearing long robes invoking spirits of the past and humanoids afflicted with some horrible disfiguring disease. Sometimes they move, and loop; sometimes they are still, only the undying structures with no life or liveliness to tell the story of what one did day-to-day there.

There are, she'll find, other people there, as lost or perhaps more than she is. They're rare, much rarer than the pieces of stolen reality, and most of them too far gone to really interact with her.

There are, she'll find, demons there; mishmashes of creatures from many worlds, fleshy creatures with too many eyes and teeth, beasts that are made out of concepts and whose reality is given more form by knowledge and fear, things that were never meant to be, anywhere, but by the very nature of this unreality come to exist. If she's smart—and lucky—she can avoid their attention. She does not want their attention.

This is not fair. This is not right. If the universe were fair then she would not be here. She doesn't deserve it. No one does. Death is a mercy compared to this. If she had her way, all of the Mists would burn and the space between worlds would be gone. This is stupid, and would probably break all of reality, but 'wandering in the Mists' is a torment that should not occur to anyone. Especially not to her.

Fortunately for her, spite is quite the motivator.

As she figures out relatively (as things in the Mist go, anyway) quickly, the necromancer from the first looping echo wasn't lying. Or false. Every time she finds someone she can question about Orr, they're either from the far distant past, or they agree with him. The charr invaded Orr, and Orr blew itself up. Her parents, having lived in Arah, are almost certainly dead. No resurrections, either, what with there being too many people for anyone to possibly sort through in the window available for a resurrection. They died never knowing what happened to her. They probably still don't, and they wait for her still in the Underworld. Everyone she ever knew and ever loved is dead. It's just her, alone in the Mists.

Well, all right then.

Her regrets get discarded like the rubbish that they are. She no longer has the patience for them. So what, if she wasn't quick-thinking enough to avert or avoid the disaster that got her here in the first place? She has not lost. Not yet. So what, if she doesn't know the way out of the Mists? She has forever. She will find it. So what, if everyone else that she meets is either not a person or crazy? She isn't. Not yet. Her loved ones do not know where she is and must think the worst possible fate has occurred to her, and in a way it has. But in another way, it hasn't, because the worst possible fate is the one she's running from. Despair. Hope is a bitter pill to swallow, but she takes it with every stubborn footstep, every comforting echo she turns away from. Maybe she's chasing a fool's errand, maybe it's impossible, but at least that's better than never having tried at all. Step (She will get out), step (She will get out), step (She will get out).

This horrible place may not have her. It will not take her sanity, and it will not take her will, and without those it will never get her.

She talks to echoes. When the echoes allow for it, she assists different sides in their conflicts just because she can. Because she enjoys it, and nothing else. There doesn't need to be another reason. She learns and theorizes and watches history play out through a thousand broken mirrors, and she keeps on living with herself. Maybe the things she has learned will never get used, maybe they'll die with her, but then she'll arrive at the Underworld and have so much to show for it. Or maybe she won't, and all she'll ever have is the knowledge that she fought. Maybe that's enough. She steals laughter and wit and fun from this damnable place. She is—beautiful. Terrifying. A creature that has walked through the Mists and will come out sane. She is not so arrogant to think that her mental fortitude is infinite, but it doesn't need to be. It just needs to last long enough to get lucky. Just once. Or maybe it's really a thousand times, but what does she care? She has forever, which in practice means 'until her sanity gives out.'

Her sanity takes a very long time to give out. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe her flavor of insanity is 'I will do the impossible.' To be honest, she's fine with that.

She walks on.

There's another echo. Echoes start in a myriad ways but this one is reminiscent of her first one: the non-sound of her footsteps changing. It's still rock, but it's different rock, and the light slowly turns red. Red crystals start dotting her landscape, some of them mere glints on the ground, some jutting out taller than she is, sharp points threatening the now-present ceiling.

Interesting. She walks further into it, wondering what sort of place she's stumbled onto this time.

It's a cave, it's very definitely a cave. The next change in features is floating rocks—from pebbles to boulders, some of them sporting more of the red crystals. The mist starts thinning again and she can see a person in the distance, fighting what seems to be another person, this one made entirely of lightning and as tall as two adult human males.

"Why is it always fighting," she wonders to no one in particular. "You'd think sometimes there would be something for important and historical tax implementation."

She proceeds towards the person and the lightning person, idly wondering if this is going to be one of the ones she can talk to through illusions, or if there will be nothing for her to do.

The person dodges a lightning bolt, and three spheres of red light are floating lazily in their general direction. The presence of a Flesh Golem betrays this person as a necromancer, in another parallel of the first echo she saw. The person is wearing a fairly interesting choice of armour set but it doesn't seem to be hindering them any. They are wielding a scepter in one hand and a long sharp-looking knife in the other, but they quickly and dexterously switch to a long two-handed staff which they use to cast a chilling effect on the lightning person.

And then the mists dissipate completely, the lightning person looks directly at Vetareh, the necromancer shouts "Look out!" and his Flesh Golem tackles her out of the way of a lightning bolt that hits the exact spot she'd been standing on.

What the—?

There's a rush of sensory experiences. Tiredness and temperature and wind and proper sound and the air in her lungs and she's not in the Mists anymore. She takes half a second to adjust, then huffs a little laugh. She did it. She actually did it.

Which of course is precisely when she's tackled by a Flesh Golem.

"Figures," she snorts.

She scootches out from underneath the Flesh Golem, because this is a bad place to be, much as she appreciates the quick save. She dumps a hex on lightning person; she is very sure about whose side she is on, here. Somehow she expects the necromancer will like the effects of it. Then she gives a sharp whistle. C'mon, lightning guy, do that lightning thing again, she dares you.

It tries, just as the necromancer makes an arcane symbol appear under the creature that makes it move way slower.

"No," she informs the lightning person in a bright cheery tone, and interrupts the lightning thing.

"Thank you for the save, by the way!" she calls to the necromancer. It just seems polite.

"Welcome!" he calls back before closing one fist and making a creature made of shadows with six eyes appear out of thin air. It actually looks quite adorable.

The necromancer grunts as he casts another spell but immediately makes another large symbol appear on the ground below the lightning person and as the symbol disappears the humanoid visibly falters.

Aaaand hex. This one's a delicate but potent little thing that would be disrupted by the lightning person actually managing to do anything, but somehow she thinks that it will have some trouble. Would lightning person like to be so foolish as to try to cast anything?

Not quite yet! Lightning person does nothing visible but the spheres of red lightning start moving towards Vetareh. The necromancer makes a further symbol appear below them, and after a puff of black smoke they start going away from her. "—hey, thanks for that," he says when he notices that this is the third spell that he's cast much more quickly than normal. He switches to the scepter and knife again and points the scepter at lightning person, making skeleton hands emerge from the ground to pull and scrape and punch lightning person.

Now lightning person tries to cast.

"You're welcome!"

She waits for the right moment, and—interrupt. "Still no," she informs the monster sweetly.

Then her second hex goes off and the monster experiences violet colored regret.

It staggers back, and a plague of ethereal green spirit locusts is dropped on its head.

And then the necromancer is covered with dark green shadows and he instantly teleports towards the lightning person and does a series of things a bit too fast to follow and the lightning person suddenly fizzles out.

Well, that's a thing she hasn't seen before. She raises her eyebrows slightly. Okay necromancer, calm down, no need to show off too much just because she's a lady.

"Was that the only one?" she affirms, because she really needs to get that out of the way before she attempts to do anything else.

The shadows around him disappear, and he removes his mask to reveal a handsome if unnaturally pale face with a thin scar from a cut to his right eye. He has one earring on each ear, both of them gold with a bright purple spherical jewel in the middle. "I hope to Grenth it was. Are you alright?"

His minions rejoin him and stand in formation behind him.