May is rolling her way to the library. It's not icy - in point of fact it's summer - but she's got an unhappy ankle from tripping yesterday and it's an accessible library and it's downhill on the way there and Ren will pick her up after. So, rolling.
The sidewalk in front of her opens up suddenly into a dark whirling void that swallows her whole, wheelchair and all.
She falls for - an amount of time; it's almost impossible to tell how long. The darkness is so complete her eyes don't even try to trick her into seeing nonsense shapes in it. It's chilly and airless but her lungs don't protest the shortage. She can hardly even tell which way is down. Formless limbs tug at her hair and clothes.
And then she lands on a soft bed of thick springy moss. It's dark out, but a regular, theoretically-penetrable dark. There's a large half moon in the sky, and a number of stars indicating that light pollution is not a concern in this environment. Her wheelchair crashes to the ground several feet away; it makes a loud noise but not particularly a breaking-important-wheelchair-bits sort of noise.
The moss is very pale, and glitters with tiny silver lights.
She and her moss - which is actually glowing, as though dusted with tiny pinprick stars - are in a shallow dip in the ground at the base of a round and gently-sloping hill; its silhouette blocks part of the sky in that direction. It's very quiet here. Other details about her environment will have to wait until her eyes adjust.
A silent shadow passes overhead, and a one-eyed barn owl perches on one of her wheelchair's handles to peer down at her.
"I'll bet you are!" says the owl, in perfectly comprehensible English. "It's a week's flight to the border! Are you some kind of spy, or - oh!" He flaps his wings excitedly. "Maybe you're an outworlder! There hasn't been one of those in centuries, and they always end up in the blighted south! I'm Starlight, what's your name?"
"Oh, weird," he says. "Owls are all people here. All the bird-folk are either people or they aren't, it's all the same by species, very simple. But girl spiders are people and boy spiders aren't, and there's all sorts of other complicated ones like that. I thought I was safe but I guess not! I'd find it really weird to be from a species only some of which was people, wouldn't you?"
"Oh, you know, when a spider weaves something for you personally it's got some magic in it - I collected up a bunch of shed feathers and Snowfall used her silk to weave them together into wings that Charm can put on and take off whenever she wants, and when she has them on she can fly like a proper owl, it's amazing."
"Oh, lots, I wouldn't even know where to start - starmoss glows but you've probably noticed that - owls don't have a thing like spiders do but we get little things of our own sometimes, mine is always knowing exactly where I am, it's real useful. Um. The fey all have stuff, obviously, but I guess that's not obvious to you if you don't have fey, even though you look sort of fey yourself. More fey than anything else, at any rate. Do humans have a thing?"
"Oh - like the Kingdom of Day, I mean. This is the Kingdom of Night. The world is a circle and the north half is the Kingdom of Night, ruled by the Moon Queen, and the south half is the Kingdom of Day, ruled by the Sun King. They have a lot of cities and bureaucracy and stuff, it's terrible, Night is way better."
"Oh, everywhere else. Like I have a place with my family in the Moonrise Hills, and I stay with my squad most of the time otherwise - most species have at least one or two places that are just how they like it, and that's where most people of that species grow up, and then when you're old enough to go and see the world you do that if you want to and stay home if you don't, and join the army if you want to and not if you don't, and if you really like the quiet life you move to the mountains where people who really like the quiet life live - the war has never ever ever in the whole history of the world got as far as the mountains, it's safe there. Most other places are mostly safe too, if they're not near the border, but - safe is the point of the mountains, you don't go there if you're the type to scuffle with the neighbours."
"Like, humans sometimes have wars, which are usually about making sure some humans don't have access to scary weapons, or that they stop doing horrible things to their own citizens or their neighbors, or that they secure economic control of some resource, or that they follow through on their promises to protect other groups of humans that they are allied with, or something like that. Countries that merely don't like each other might find an excuse to have a war but they would need an excuse."
"The war between Night and Day isn't like that. I mean, you could sort of say that each side wants to win, the Sun King wants to defeat the Moon Queen and vice versa, but it's been forever - I don't know how old the world is but I'm pretty sure the war's the same age - and it hasn't happened yet, so it's obviously not going to, so it's just - if we stopped trying, we'd get wiped out next spring..."
"Often surrenders are conditional, at least with humans. I don't know the details but they go like, 'you win and can have most of whatever your objective was but we get to keep our pre-war borders and head of state, otherwise we keep fighting'. And humans mostly don't like fighting so that often works."
Starlight is back in a few minutes, as promised, with friends. One, a white fox with sparsely-feathered wings that seem half made of light, is almost certainly Charm. There's also an unsettling silhouette that resolves on approach into a long winged snake, and a blur in the air that trails indistinctly behind them.
The winged snake lands a conversational-but-not-crowding distance away and coils herself up. She has dark glossy scales and dark leathery wings, and looks to be about twenty feet long. Charm settles in next to her, with an affable nod of greeting. The blur lands beside Charm, and when not in motion turns out to be a dark-skinned pale-haired humanoid maybe two and a half feet tall, with wings like delicate sprays of long silver leaves, wearing grey leather and a watchful expression.
"Hi!" says Starlight, circling above her since her wheelchair is looking less perchable this time. "These are my squadmates, Charm and - uh, Ebb," he dips his wings at the snake, "and Reflect," the humanoid. "Button and Snowfall are on their way."
"I'm an amphiptere, and Reflect is a fey," says Ebb, perfectly casually. "It's all right to ask."
"Reflect's a bit shy," Charm puts in, "but then Starlight talks enough for the rest of the squad put together -"
"What, how could you say such a thing," says Starlight, dramatically hiding his face behind a wing. Charm giggles. Even Reflect cracks a smile.
There is a rustle from the top of the hill, and then there is a large fluffy polar bear ambling down it with a large spider perched on her head, dark slender legs visible in silhouette against the bear's white face.
"Button, Snowfall, this is May, the outworlder," says Starlight.
"Pleased to make your acquaintance," says Button.
"Well, how heavy is it - Reflect?"
Reflect flits into the air and grabs the wheelchair and lifts it easily, despite the fact that it is nearly bigger than she is. The blur effect is less pronounced this time, but seems to just be a characteristic of her flight regardless of how fast she's going. It extends slightly to the wheelchair but mostly covers the fey herself.
"Not bad," she reports. "I could carry this. Might want somebody else to roll it when the ground's flat enough."
"There's at least one reasonably long stretch of road between here and Silver Falls," says Starlight, "I bet it would go all right on that."
"Off we go, then."
The flyers take off, Starlight in the lead, Snowfall clinging to Ebb, Charm following, Reflect bringing up the rear with wheelchair in hand. Button lopes after them. Her gait is very comfortable and does not present any imminent danger of ejecting her passenger.
There's - something about this place, an impression more easily clarified now that she's seen a little more of it. It seems... sharp, vivid, clear, unnaturally beautiful and at the same time utterly natural, like if 'reality' is a characteristic that comes in amounts, this place has more of it than Earth by a generous margin. Hard to see it when everything's dark like this, but the more her eyes adjust and the more of the landscape passes by, the more obvious it becomes.
"Snowfall liked making mine, if she gets to know you maybe she'll offer." Flap flap. There does not really seem to be enough solid substance in those wings for them to work - strands of barely-visible spiderweb bind together a skeletal array of feathers haloed by a soft silver glow - but nevertheless they are demonstrably functional. "Hungry yet? What do your folk eat?"
"Humans eat lots of things. So far none of the same species that are people here are things I eat, fortunately, I feel like that would be awkward. Bread and broccoli and cheese and rice and chocolate and potatoes and cabbage and apples and strawberries and certain species of mushrooms I could not confidently identify in the wild and eggs and a whole bunch of stuff."
"I huddle up under Ebb's wing - there'd be room for you too, I bet - if it's a short downpour. Longer than that and we'd find or build a shelter. If we were out on something serious we'd have brought a tent, but it's hard to carry one that'll fit us all, and these hills are nice for packing light in. Good forage, not much rain."
"This time of year, plenty of nuts and berries for you plant-munching folk, a reasonable supply of moths and crickets for me and Snowfall - Ebb ate last week, she's fine - if Starlight's lucky we'll catch a rabbit, otherwise it's crickets for him too - if we're feeling leisurely we roast the crickets. I don't mind rabbit myself if it's going spare, but wild-caught roast cricket, that's my favourite."
"Mostly the latter. It's easy enough to tell rat-folk from plain rats if you get a good look, but out hunting, peckish and in a hurry... I have a cousin who got in a fight that way once. Bit the wrong frog and 'watch where you're going, mister!' He hasn't touched an amphibian since, even though they're not normally ambiguous, you could go a whole lifetime without running into a surprise like that and most people do."
"Oh, I'm the newest - I was really happy to get put in Starlight's squad, he never gets lost, you know, it's great - I'm a real good tracker, Reflect and Ebb and Snowfall are good at sneaking for when we need that, Button's here to look intimidating and carry the slowpokes -"
Button rumbles a laugh.
Nom nom nom!
"What does everybody think," says Starlight, "should we stop for a proper forage or keep going?"
"I wouldn't mind a bite, but I'm fine to continue," says Button.
"Don't look at me," says Ebb.
"I'm a little nibblesome," says Charm.
Reflect shrugs. Snowfall, perched on Ebb's back, doesn't contribute an opinion.
"I was rolling along and then ahead of me was a - vortexy - dark - thing - in the ground, and I fell into it, and then for something that may or may not have been a period of time I did something not entirely unlike falling in truly excessive darkness and mysteriously harmless cold and vacuum, while poked and prodded by something, and then me and chair landed on some moss."
"I'm inclined to think it is a thing about here, and not a thing about Earth," says May, "because it seems more likely that Earth is what you get when you have an unattended system. But it's possible that both places just have different underlying rules that get different results. I also feel here almost like I can see better? Everything is - higher contrast without being garish, sharper somehow -"
"Oh, Snowfall doesn't have any trouble turning pages - less than I do, certainly, I have to worry about damaging them," says Button. "But yes, some days when I think about all the work that goes into a place like Silver Falls I can't imagine why anyone ever bothers to put up a building. Except then I remember what Silver Falls looks like and it seems much more understandable."
Button's family lives in the mountains and was mildly surprised when she went off to join the army. Charm's family lives by a river and fishes a lot, and she can describe an amazing variety of delicious-sounding fish, although she maintains that her heart belongs to wild-caught roast crickets fresh from the fire. There are rats and stoats and beehives and, as mentioned, the occasional frog, and lots and lots and lots of kinds of fey. At their next forage break Starlight is happy to perch near her and put a serious effort into translating units of distance, whereupon it transpires that the world is approximately the size of Australia plus several miles of ocean. Nobody has any idea how the kingdoms were founded.
"I'm not sure the Kingdoms are the sort of thing that has a beginning," says Starlight.
"What would they have instead?" murmurs Reflect.
"Wouldn't have been much of a world without a Sun or a Moon," says Ebb. "Maybe it all happened at once, the King and the Queen and the Kingdoms and the people and the war."
"I think a world is too complicated a thing to happen all at once," says Snowfall. "Something must have started it. But I can't imagine a world without the Queen..."
One per hive, yes. They're one of the few sorts of people who live on both sides of the border in substantial numbers, although Charm happens to know that there are different species in each Kingdom. Southern bees are fuzzier.
"Can't imagine this world without her," Snowfall corrects herself. "I suppose I have trouble imagining your world too but it's a different sort of trouble."
"I'm not sure if it's a species when there's just one of it," muses Snowfall.
"They have some things in common but I wouldn't call them the same," says Charm. "They both sleep as statues, her in the day and him at night. They're both very tall. I suppose they're sort of fey-ish, more fey-ish than anything-else-ish anyway."
"How would you know the King's very tall, I hardly think you've met him," says Ebb.
"I talk to folk in the borderlands!" says Charm. "Sometimes I learn things! It sounded like he was just about the same height as the Queen."
"Mostly not," says Button.
"The borderfolk pass things along sometimes," says Charm. "And - the way it shifts with the seasons - when everyone knows Day's going to keep the upper hand all summer, you don't try as hard, and neither do they, so we just sort of scuffle all season until autumn when Night makes a push, and then in winter it's the same thing backwards."
"Maybe you're calling a 'war' what I'd call something else, but I think wars are very bad and you need an extraordinary reason to have one - even the ones that are had over economic stuff on Earth are at least about economic stuff that affects a ton of people - it sounds to me like everyone would be best served if the Queen issued a conditional surrender at the end of fall and everyone just stopped doing the thing."
"I said a conditional surrender, you could insist that the Queen get to keep ruling you and not demand forms or at least not very many of them. The timing would be so if it didn't go over well you wouldn't be in much trouble if you they made a fuss about the conditions and you preferred to keep fighting."
The road goes on, winding between increasingly dense hills, until they finally round a corner and see Silver Falls for the first time.
The city is built into the side of a cliff, a tall intricate winding thing with a broad waterfall pouring right through the middle and down into the lake below. To say that it sparkles would be doing it a grave injustice. The spray catches the moonlight and shatters it into a thousand glittering pieces. It's breathtaking.
"You see what I mean about it being worth the effort," says Button.
"Most of the palace is behind the waterfall," Reflect says quietly, coming a little closer so May can hear her clearly, "but do you see those towers at the very top...?"
She points. There are three slender white towers, one on either side of the top of the falls and one right in the middle of them. The tower on the left has an empty silver circle at the top; the one in the middle has its circle half-filled; and the one on the right is completely silver.
"Those are the visible part."
"Ceremonial, I assume," says Ebb. "We'd notice it just fine by ourselves."
"It was nice to be reminded, though," says Reflect. "And I used to love the celebrations on the first day of autumn."
"The fey near my folks' place used to bake cakes and give everyone some," Charm reminisces. "It's no roast cricket, but it was good."
"Cake is good," Reflect agrees.
The streets are a little busy this time of night, once they've rounded the curve of the lake and entered the city proper. They pass all sorts of folk on their way toward the cliff. Mostly humanoids of varying shape, size, and colour, but also a few foxes and rats and small wiggly mammals who go by too fast to be easily labeled as ferret or weasel or stoat. Local custom seems to be a bit like a busy city on Earth, although this place isn't nearly as dense: where possible, strangers try to go past without acknowledging one another.
It's pretty gawkable. The buildings are indeed clearly built with accessibility in mind: doors tend to be saloon-style, there are upper-floor entrances for winged folk... No one thought about wheeled contraptions, but she's mostly covered just by the sheer range of existing needs: a bear and a weasel can't really use the same set of stairs, so when they start to go up the cliffside it's all gradual inclines.
Indeed!
And then, halfway up the cliff, they come to a huge silver set of double doors, a new moon engraved in the left and a full moon embossed on the right. They're open; if they weren't, it's not clear how they'd get that way.
The gate guard is a fey of ambiguous gender who looks about nine feet tall, thin and angular, and also seems to be made entirely of ice. "What's your business in the palace?" they ask. Tiny flecks of frost form in the air when they breathe.
"Bringing an outworlder to meet the Queen," says Starlight.
"You may pass," says the guard, nodding.
"Ah—none of us knows the palace very well, as such—" says Charm.
The guard kneels down and touches the ground in front of the open doors. A line of sparkling frost forms, maybe two inches wide, leading into the dimly lit interior of the palace. "Follow that."
"Yessir," says Charm.
They proceed. The line of frost leads them through a maze of barely-visible corridors, until finally it runs under a set of closed double doors similar to the ones at the front entrance.
Charm scampers up and taps the bottom of one nervously with a paw.
They swing silently inward.
The room on the other side is a vast empty hall, with one side made almost entirely of a window looking out through the falls at the lake and the kingdom beyond. The view is stunning. The moonlight pouring in reveals that there is absolutely nothing here except for the polished grey marble floor, the polished grey marble walls and ceiling, the three creatures, and a raised platform with a silver throne, on which there sits a beautiful woman in a long black dress who looks almost entirely human except for the telltale details of being twenty feet tall and having luminous white hair and bright silver skin.
"Welcome," she says. Her voice is lovely, and carries all the way to their end of the hall despite its low conversational volume.
"It's... close enough to eternal as to make no subjective difference to the participants..." She pulls out a notebook. "...predictably seasonal, avoidable at least on this side by moving to the mountains, seems to use an all-volunteer army, not harmless but my vague impression is that it is still more harmless than the average war from my world, not over any apparent strategic objectives or economic motives or anything more concrete than ingrained cultural opposition to one another, partisan by species, and, uh, mysteriously beloved of its participants."
"Outworlders have a capacity to affect this world beyond any person from within it," she says. "If you tried, you could win this war for whichever side you chose. It would not be easy, but it would be possible in a way that it ordinarily is not. But it seems that instead you would prefer a ceasefire. As it happens, so would I."
"If there are worlds other than Earth, it doesn't seem to draw from them; it never chooses anyone less than eight years old or more than sixteen; and it has a moderately strong preference for the northern hemisphere. Besides that, I haven't detected any firm patterns. Why do you ask?"
"As far as I know, that is probably a coincidence. But it is promising to hear," she says. "The clearest example I have is how visitors can use their power to leave, because I've helped them do it many times. Do you want the explanation, even though if you are wrong about how easily you can adjust, you might find it much more difficult to go home once you've heard it?"
The Queen nods.
"When a visitor tells me they want to leave, I suggest that they travel to the edge of the world," she says. "I tell them that if they reach the right spot at the right time, they will see a doorway there, and the door will lead them home. And then I give them an escort and send them on their way, and I arrange for daunting but surmountable obstacles between them and their goal. It has worked every time but twice. The doorway does not otherwise exist. What creates it is their sustained, focused, directed effort to reach it, and their expectation that it will be there if they succeed. Once, I failed to stop a storm in time and it sank their boat. The other failure was when someone dawdled on the way and arrived a day late. He knew he was too late to find the door, so it wasn't there; and he was so upset that he impulsively ran out past the edge of the world."
She smiles a small silver smile. "Good. That simplifies things."
The smile fades.
"I think you might be able to help me end the war the right way," she says. "But it is going to be complicated and difficult and involve trusting you with some very weighty secrets. I think I can trust you with those secrets; do you agree?"
"I think if I tell you that acting rashly in this matter might destroy this world, you will take that warning seriously and listen to the full explanation and not take any sudden drastic actions even if some of the things you hear are upsetting and sound like they might urgently require drastic intervention," she says.
The Queen nods again. She spends a moment regarding May thoughtfully.
"Perhaps... the best place to start would be the diary," she says. "A moment."
And she gets up out of her throne and goes around behind it, and there is a very secret-compartmental-sounding click, and she comes back around holding a notebook with a black-and-white patterned cover that will look familiar to anyone who has seen a certain film, although this one does not have anything written on the front. It looks very small in her hand. She crosses the room in long strides and bends down to offer it to May.
The book starts like this:
I should write this down before I forget any more details.
My name is Elizabeth Ann Kirsch. I was born on October 13, 1983.
In December 1996, when I was thirteen, I was on my way to a friend's house after school and I fell through the world.
I landed in a green field at dawn. It was beautiful in a way I don't think I can describe. It was like photographs of Ireland. I could see a town nearby, so I went there. I met a lion named Dancer (I have bitten back so many reindeer jokes, you don't even know) and a dryad named Morning, and they told me I was in the Kingdom of Day, and that I should travel to Bright River right away to meet with the Sun King.
Having provisionally accepted that I was in a children's fantasy adventure novel now and should probably roll with it, I agreed. Dancer and Morning and I set off for the capital immediately.
It was early spring and everything was indescribably picturesque. The only notable obstacle we encountered along the way was an ominous-looking opening in the ground that Dancer and Morning wouldn't let me get near. At the distance I saw it, it just looked like a long dark gouge in the middle of a field, like somebody had crashed a small alien spaceship or taken a really big knife to the place or something. There was a hasty-looking fence around it and a sign I wasn't close enough to read.
They tried, badly, to convince me that everything was fine and it was just a big ugly hole in the ground that we were in too much of a hurry to stop and gawk at. I didn't try very hard to go get a closer look, but I did keep asking questions (as innocently as possible) until they admitted that the hole had appeared last week and people who went near it tended to be sucked in and disappear with a horrible scream.
This was obviously fairly concerning.
The diary continues:
Dancer and Morning rushed to get me tucked away in the palace before sundown. We got there with maybe an hour to spare. And before I could extract a coherent explanation of the rush, they introduced me to the King.
He was about twenty feet tall, wearing white, and made entirely of gold. Apart from that he looked fairly normal. In structure if not material, I wouldn't have been surprised to see his face on a movie screen.
He explained to me that he had been at war with the Moon Queen since the beginning of time, and neither of them could ever defeat the other, but that as an outworlder I had the power to tip the balance. I asked him about the hole in the ground, and he said that it was the Moon Queen's fault, that she was attacking him with everything she had and killing his people in the process. He asked me to help him defeat her.
I had a strong intuition that something was up. It seemed wildly implausible that I had actually just landed by accident on the Good side of a perfectly straightforward Good vs Evil conflict, and I kept having the feeling that there was something sketchy about the Sun King. But it also seemed like it would be a bad idea to try to call him out on it when I still mostly had no idea what was going on, so I agreed. He set me up with a room in the palace and warned me never to pass within sight of the sky at night, because the Moon Queen sees what the Moon sees, just as the Sun King sees what the Sun sees. Then, half an hour after sunset, he sat on his throne and turned into a statue. That's apparently how he sleeps.
I went to my windowless room and tried to sleep and ended up reading my algebra textbook all night because I have an odd notion of comfort. In the morning the King wanted to see me again. I kept getting the impression from him that he was dancing around some horrible secret, but while I'm pretty good at reading people I wasn't confident about how well that skill would transfer to giant golden fairy-tale kings, so I kept my observations to myself and acted like I was fully on board with the 'defeat the Moon Queen' plan, because for all I knew maybe it really was the right thing to do.
The next few weeks are a little muddled because I was sleeping badly and having trouble figuring out what to keep track of. I have quick personality profiles of everyone I met, and memories of the first time I tried this or that local food (toasted nuts with dandelion jelly: yes, dandelion salad: no), and notes about the way the translation effect works that I'm going to write up separately, but I don't have a clear sequence of events.
I spent a lot of time with the King, discussing the war. He was a surprisingly bad tactician for someone who claimed to have been at war for millennia. I entertained the hypothesis that maybe the power of outworlders was just a dash of cynicism with a garnish of common sense. It would've seemed funny, except that people kept dying.
When I'd been there for about three weeks, helping the King overhaul his approach to the war and trying to figure out how best to deploy me as a secret weapon while also privately trying to figure out whether I really wanted to be his secret weapon after all, another hole opened up just outside the city. I was up early and out for a walk, because the never going outside at night was starting to wear on me. I saw the ground open up, and I saw a tiger cub playing nearby, and she scampered over to see what all the fuss was about, and I yelled and bolted for her but I didn't quite make it in time.
Dancer and Morning had not been kidding about the horrible screams. They hadn't mentioned the part where it looks like the person is dissolving and unraveling and turning inside-out all at the same time, like they're moving toward a place where concepts like 'place' and 'moving' and 'being a particular shape' no longer apply. I still remember the image, rather more vividly than I would strictly prefer, but I have no words adequate to describe it.
Logically speaking it shouldn't have mattered more than the casualty lists, but it got to me a lot harder. I was tempted to start feeling very personal about this conflict. Except that one of the big questions I still had was whether the ominous holes were actually the Moon Queen's fault. The Sun King kept saying so, but then he also said she had no capacity to act during the day, and I'd seen that hole appear in broad daylight.
I asked the Sun King more about the holes. He let me spend a day in his library looking up historical accounts, and I did some amateur statistics. Something definitely didn't add up. Fighting between the Kingdoms was always heaviest in spring and autumn, and when the holes appeared, it was usually in spring or autumn, but sometimes there would be a few in summer or winter if the war got unusually intense. And there were plenty of times when things got really nasty and no holes appeared at all. They tended to come in waves, and go away on their own after a few months but then return unpredictably.
If they were a weapon of the Moon Queen, I could not for the life of me figure out how she was doing it or what she hoped to achieve. If they were a tool the Sun King used to manipulate the mood of his populace, he was using it really clumsily and, again, to no useful end I could see. If they were just a natural phenomenon, I couldn't explain their obvious connection to the war. And when the King talked about them, I got the definite impression that he knew more than he was telling.
Eventually he decided to take me on campaign. I'd been advising him for some time, but having me in the field seemed to make everything easier. It's hard to notice a pattern you're in the middle of; I didn't think there was anything odd about things going more smoothly when I put more personal attention into them, especially since it was obvious that I had a much better head for strategy than the King and a significant edge over his top generals.
As soon as our army crossed the borderlands and held a piece of land in the north for one night, reports started coming in from all over the Kingdom of Day that the holes were closing. The Sun King told me I was doing well, that I'd saved the kingdom. We threw a little party. I still had no idea what the holes were, but at that point I was very confident that he knew the truth and wasn't telling me.
We pressed on.
When we came within sight of Silver Falls, a hole opened up right in front of us, the first we'd seen since we crossed the border. I could see it pulling at the Sun King before he stepped away. He held together much better than that tiger cub; he looked a little shaken but still in one piece. He invented some transparent excuse about how the Queen must have laid one final trap for us.
That night, I woke up an hour after sunset, told the camp guards that I was on a secret mission from the King, and walked into the Moon Queen's palace.
In retrospect it was a little stupid, but it seemed like the only place left I could go for answers, and I was right about that much. When I told her I thought the Sun King had been lying to me, she laughed and said she was sure he had, and when I explained about the holes in the ground, she told me what they were.
The story goes like this: Before the world, there was the void. By itself it was nothing, but it could be shaped by minds. The minds that eventually became the Sun King and the Moon Queen agreed that they wanted a world, but disagreed on everything else. They created themselves and their world, inspired by scattered glimpses of a world they could sometimes see next to the void, fighting each other every step of the way. He wanted things warm and bright and peaceful and stable. She wanted things cold and dark and violent and chaotic. Their war became entangled with the cycle of the seasons.
And because they had been fighting since the very beginning, that cyclic conflict became part of the structure of reality itself.
It finally made sense of the data I'd seen in the Sun King's library: the holes in the ground appeared exactly when the war got out of step with the cycle of the seasons. It was especially bad when I showed up because the Queen was making a solid push in early spring, when the cycle expected the King to be reclaiming the upper hand as winter ended. And once we started winning again, the problems stopped, until we got as far as the Queen's palace and threw the balance too far the other way. The holes were a symptom of a much deeper problem; reality was tearing itself apart, and they were its surface wounds.
It didn't escape me that it was awfully convenient for the Queen if killing her would literally destroy the world, but the theory fit the evidence.
I asked her what I should do.
She said that I could kill the King and take his power and maintain the balance with her, have a scripted war that flowed with the seasons and never got out of step, and rule an entire half of the world, which she didn't want anyway because it was much too bright and peaceful there. He wanted to destroy her and everything she stood for, but all she wanted was to be left alone.
In much the same way that I'd known the King was lying about the void holes, I knew the Queen was planning to betray me. But she did sound like she meant it about killing the King and stealing his power, and somebody clearly had to do something about this nonsense.
She gave me something which she said was a magic knife made of moonlight, and told me to go back to the King's camp, and that she would challenge him to single combat at dawn during the hour when they were both awake, and I was supposed to sneak up behind him and stab him in the back during the fight.
I went back to the camp and read my algebra textbook for the rest of the night, because I had no idea how I was going to get out of this alive and with the world intact, except maybe by stabbing both of them, which seemed chancy if the Queen was misrepresenting what would happen when I stabbed the king or if she had very sensibly given me a knife that didn't work on her, and also kind of evil if I'd misjudged her somehow and she wasn't planning to betray me after all.
She so obviously was, though. She talked about the Kingdom of Day with such contempt, and when she'd said all that about not wanting to destroy the Sun King the way he wanted to destroy her, she sounded... maybe the best way to put it is, she sounded like she lacked a basic understanding of what not wanting to destroy the Sun King would be like.
Dawn came, and with it the Queen. She was very impressively theatrical about it. I had a hard time appreciating the grandeur of the moment, because I had slept for about one of the preceding twenty-four hours and was under a lot of stress and mostly just focused on figuring out how to make sure both I and the world survived the fight. Although if it came down to it, the world was the higher priority.
They fought. He had a huge golden sword and she had a much thinner silver one. It was terrifying to watch. I had no idea how I was going to get close enough to stab either of them without being crushed. I was just starting to think about maybe climbing a tree when the Queen knocked the King to the ground and stunned him for a second. I ran up and stabbed him in the neck.
Stealing his power worked. It also gave me an understanding of why it had worked. All those times during the war when I put a lot of effort into something and it turned out miraculously well, the reason why the Sun King wanted me on his side, it was all because I was an outworlder. The world is... malleable to us.
And in taking the Sun King's power, I was trading in mine. The King and Queen made the world; they have an instinctive understanding of how it works, and they can reshape its surface details, but they can't push it around on a fundamental level the way an outworlder can, because they are ultimately still a part of the system.
It was all very disorienting. One second I was a thirteen-year-old girl with no discernible magic powers, the next I was that plus a twenty-foot-tall golden god who could definitely discern her/my magic powers with his/my magic connection to the underlying structure of the world. One of those things was on the way out, the other was on the way in.
The Queen tried to cut the King's head off while I/he was distracted, and I/Elizabeth jumped up and stabbed her with the moon knife. I could tell very directly that the knife had never been the important part; it was my mind, my outworlder's power, that let me do what I did to the King. But the knife made for a convenient mental shorthand, and I was in a hurry.
It worked. And it was the last action I took as an outworlder. I watched that power fade while the Queen's came in. It was like the whole world had been sort of subtly leaning in toward me, and now it was relaxing and losing interest, and at the same time my awareness of it was being intensely expanded.
Running three bodies at once was... an experience. Having to pretend to be both of the people I had just murdered did not make it any easier. I made a lot of mistakes over the next few days, of which the biggest was trying to explain the truth to too many people. I'm still dealing with the repercussions of that now, a year and a half later. Orchestrating this war from both ends is hard, and I'm getting the sinking feeling that I'm not going to be able to deescalate it nearly as much as I'd like. But if I'm going to be in crisis mode for the next decade, then I need to take the time to write this out now.
This might be one of the last things I do with this body. It's coming time for Elizabeth Kirsch to 'go home'. It's just too exhausting to be two people at once most of the time. And of the three people I am, Elizabeth is the only one who's expendable.
If I had more time, I'd rewrite this from the beginning, make it more polished, organize the hazy parts, try to find other sources and make the details more accurate. But I don't. The few hours of distraction that went into this have already cost me, and those are just the slipups I noticed. I am not letting the void take any more of my people if I can help it.
"Time runs approximately one thousand times faster here than on Earth," she says. "That's one of the two major omissions from that account; I didn't find it out until later. The other, I was still verifying. There is... a sense in which people who die in the Kingdoms are not entirely gone. It's subtle and hard to track, but I'm very confident in my conclusions at this point. Sometimes they reincarnate without memory of their previous life, sometimes they just linger as faint impressions with no continued awareness, but anyone who has ever died in this world is still here... unless they went to the void, either through one of those holes or past the edge of the world. It's the same result either way: it destroys them completely. Once I was sure of that I became much more conservative in my experiments with deescalation."
"I want to find a way to use your outworlder's power to end the world's dependence on the war, so that I can deescalate the rest of the way without the world tearing itself apart and throwing all its inhabitants into the void. I have some thoughts for what to do after that, but the crucial thing is not having to be at carefully managed war with myself any longer."
—that startles a laugh out of her.
"Yes, rather. I don't think we'll have to go that far. I expect you'll need a lot of sustained effort and a high expectation of success, but the exact framework depends on what works best for you. If I were in your position, the approach that would come most naturally to me would be going out into the world and convincing as many people as I could that the war was pointless and should stop, with the implicit assumption that reality itself was listening. Some people might have an easier time of it if I built a physical representation of the structure and they worked on altering it until reality shifted to match. As long as it's something that can sustain a significant time investment, that you can commit to doing for a while, and that feels like it should work..."
"True enough. But I don't see an immediately obvious way to turn that into a means of changing things. Unless, I suppose, you want to go the very direct route and spend a lot of time talking or thinking about your dissatisfaction with the way the King and Queen made the world."
"If design documents are what feels effective to you, then design documents will work best. And I'll be able to tell how effective your approach is; I've had a very long time to study my sense of reality and I'm very familiar with it by now. How easily are you adapting to the nocturnal schedule? Would it be easier to work in the Kingdom of Day? It wouldn't be very difficult to send you across the border."
"The design document idea raises some interesting possibilities," she adds, thoughtfully. "For example, if I were designing a world under these circumstances, I would give it expanding borders, although then we would need to figure out a patch for the lighting, since the current scheme doesn't scale indefinitely. I think it should be possible to add in a few tweaks along those lines without a significant extra cost in your time and attention. It might even make the original task easier, by giving you more to focus on. How thorough an explanation of the cosmology have you heard; should I fill in the details you're missing?"
"The world is a flat circle of land and ocean under a hemisphere of air, surrounded on all sides by void. The moon rises in the northwest and sets in the northeast, travelling eastward over the Kingdom of Night; the sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest, travelling westward over the Kingdom of Day. A naive rescaling of that would eventually lead to too much air between the lights in the sky and the middle of the circle, making everything uncomfortably dim."
"The void is very much voidier than vacuum. I have reason to believe that it's what people travel through to get between here and Earth, except that transit between here and Earth is safe in a way that contact with the void normally isn't. The sun and moon don't travel through it; they're... more like a projection on the outer edge of the sky than like objects moving through it. And yes, the moon gives off its own light, although it still has phases."
"I'm not sure there are things in the void. When I fell through, I felt... like I was in a current, but not a current of anything. But based on the stories I've collected from other visitors, I think the experience is different for different people, or different instances of travel. No one has ever come and gone and come back again, so I have no data on repeated travel by the same person. I do know that the people who leave get home safely, though."
"The lengths of the day cycle and seasonal cycle are both fundamental law. I do like having seasons. In some respects it would be convenient for timekeeping if every day had twelve hours of sun and twelve hours of night, instead of the proportions varying with the season, but the variance is useful for climate purposes."
"I will probably also want to design in more stringent editorial constraints because, however convenient is for me, what the heck kinda world kidnaps rando teenagers and gives them root access. - Was English already vernacular when you appeared? Were you the first kid to show up?"
"I wasn't the first. They spoke a different language before I showed up, but the way the translation works turns out to mean that the language spoken in the Kingdoms will tend over time to shift to match their respective monarchs. It took two centuries and was fascinating to watch. I'm not sure it's possible to entirely get rid of the effect outworlders have on the world, but I do think you might be able to - shore some things up, make them more resistant to change."
"Staged it. I knew in theory how I would have sent someone home who still had an outworlder's power, but I didn't have the power anymore and couldn't do it myself. When I lost that body I lost a little clarity on my memories from when it was my only one, but they've stayed stable since. The - mental architecture, I suppose - of the King and Queen has very long-term-stable memory storage, although it takes some effort to reach things from more than five centuries ago."
"'Not indefinitely' is because I was becoming something with a different relationship to reality; the fact that the transfer wasn't instantaneous is a common thread among acts of outworlder influence, they tend to be slow and subtle and gradual rather than taking effect all at once; I don't know why this one was so comparatively fast but my hypothesis is that the juxtaposition of my two natures was - an uncomfortable state for the world, like holding two magnets together when they want to jump apart."
She frowns thoughtfully.
"I know the answer, more or less, but it's difficult to describe the answer. It's... hmm. To some extent, all minds have an effect on this reality. It's just that with most people, the effect is so small that they barely notice it, especially living in a society made up entirely of other people with exactly the same ability. People here are, on average, just a little bit luckier than people who live in a physics-based universe. Then there are the King and Queen, who made the world in the first place. Their connection to it is direct and personal, but limited: if I wanted to use that power to change the fundamental structure of the world, I would have to tear it down and start from scratch, which the King and Queen each preferred over continuing to coexist with each other, but which I obviously find an unsatisfying solution. And then outsiders... because they don't come from within the system, either by having originated there or by having built it and in a sense built themselves within it, their influence on it is stronger, with a wider scope."
"My information on this is not very direct, but the impression I have is that the void had... minds coming to exist in it and then being swept away again... and the King and Queen happened to hang on unusually long and interact with one another and observe that they both preferred to continue existing, and they ended up being the first ones to create a world. It could also be that they were genuinely the first minds the void produced, but I find the other explanation more intuitively satisfying."
"I think, but can't confirm directly, that I would notice if another world existed or came to exist in the void, and I have noticed no such thing; I haven't noticed new minds coming to exist there and I'm not sure whether I would. I also think, but again can't confirm directly, that anyone could go out into the void and try to create a world there, and they might succeed but would be far more likely to be irrevocably destroyed. I know for a fact that the mechanism for pulling people here from Earth is entangled with the world in a way that means it couldn't have existed in that form before the world did; the void could have had a separate mechanism for doing the same thing without a destination world, but I don't have any information suggesting that it did. The King and Queen were definitely not of human origin."
"Yes. I'm very confident that one of the common threads would be the respective degree and kind of influence that creators, outsiders, and locals would have on such a world. I'm not sure how the residents of one void-world would interact with a different one, but my best guess is that they would have less influence on it than someone from outside the void entirely but more than someone from within the world itself. And I think, a little less confidently, that world-creators going visiting would not find themselves much different from their residents in that regard."
"Like, the King and Queen made a world that, while objectionable in many ways, still has - owls and waterfalls and stuff - but I don't know if that's typical - and they also made a world that, while lovely in many ways, still has eternal warfare, and I don't know if that's typical - and if I thought all worlds would be sorta like this one I'd want to handle contact differently than if some of them were six-dimensional and populated by gelid horrors, or if some of them were dystopias of endless strife, or if some of them were easily damaged candylands?"
"Since the King and Queen were able to catch glimpses of Earth and model their world on it, I must conclude that it's a natural property of the void that minds within it can do that, and it follows logically that worlds created in the void are probably to some extent modeled on Earth - but I don't know if there are other worlds besides Earth, and if there are any I don't know what they are like or whether minds in the void might glimpse them instead. I've been deliberately avoiding giving my subjects the impression that all visitors from other worlds are human because it doesn't cost me very much and if I ever get a nonhuman outworlder I will be very curious to meet them and don't want them to - have to deal with an unnecessary set of wrong expectations."
"I see what you mean. On the other hand, there's a sense in which a world like this is overly vulnerable to exploitation - if it were perfectly clear exactly how everything worked, and an outworlder showed up who happened to prefer eternal warfare, I'd have some trouble dealing with them..."
"I could see a more legible world being an advantage or a vulnerability or both, and I think the difference is likely to turn on fine details but I'm not sure which ones or whether we will have knowledge or control of them. So I have reservations but I want to explore the possibility in case it can be done well."