"A moving speech?"

"Yeah. To the theme of, uh - 'I know it's not your month yet but we might have a chance this time, get up and join the fun already'."

"I may need more context."

"There are nine months in a year, each associated with an element. In the ordinary course of things, on the last year of the world each spirit wakes at the beginning of their own month, and we assist the creator in making the next world. But the previous creator was skilled enough and dedicated enough to write a world where there is an obvious place for each spirit to sleep, and when the place is obvious enough to be found ahead of time, it's possible to wake a spirit early. As long as it's done in order. Fire, Light, Air, Wood, Twilight, Water, Ice, Shadow, Earth. Is that the kind of context you were looking for?"

"Approximately. My world is really different so I'm missing things that will seem basic to locals."

"Why, what's it like there?"

"Spherical. Being eaten by magical byproducts. Not, so far as I know, periodically recreated. Devoid of spirits, sleeping or otherwise. Also we have fourteen months."

"Spherical? Like, the outer shell, or...?"

"We don't have a shell, we live on a sphere enveloped in air in an infinite or near-enough void."

"Whoa."

"What sort of void is it?"

"Vacuum."

Thoughtful nod.

"It doesn't usually come up, but outside the shell of this world there is void," he points down, "and chaos," he points up. "Perhaps it would be useful if I told the story."

Ravkesial gets a sort of sad, withdrawn look on her face, but doesn't protest this suggestion.

"You okay?" he asks Ravkesial.

"The story starts with the elemental spirits being free," she says. "It doesn't end happily."

"In fairness to the people who did this to us, their world was ending," says Telarin. "But I should probably start from the beginning."

"...okay."

"So," he says. "I don't know if there are or were other worlds, but this one - in its first iteration - began a very long time ago, and it was not nearly as pleasant and stable then as it is now. There were nine faces on the world's shell, and nine elemental spirits to go with them, but instead of being arranged in a single stable configuration like they are now, the sizes of the faces shifted over time. Sometimes they came in close enough to nearly crush the continent - at the time there was only one, floating in the middle of the world. We had no control over the shifts in that elemental balance. I speculate that someone must have thought we did. Because, after it became clear that the shifts were getting worse over time, after it became clear that the world was going to end, I woke up on the first day of the last year of the next world with this chain binding my heart."

He taps the disc on his chest, illustratively.

"They didn't tell us anything, but it's possible to reconstruct some of the logic. The world was ending. They couldn't save it. But they could create the means for it to eventually be saved. The cycle goes on, and although it's not strictly true that every world is better than the last, they are improving over time. They last longer, they offer better lives to their inhabitants. One day we will learn how to end the cycle, and we will have a world strong enough to go on forever. I hope it's this one."

"I don't know what they assumed about us, but unless they thought we were deliberately destroying the world for our own amusement, it can't have been worth what they did to us," says Ravkesial. "The chains bind us to the book, each by some part of ourselves that is important to us. They took Telarin's ability to feel emotion, and my sight, and Camalirea's voice, and Ilifalyr's memory, and Avasendai's hands... I don't understand how they could have known us well enough to know how to hurt us this way, and not known that we weren't the problem."

"...okay, is it time for me to mention that my magic system is based one hundred percent on destroying things?"

"It may be time for you to mention that," says Ravkesial. "Go on."

"Three basic themes - fire, death, annihilation. It has its small utility uses like cooking - via fire - or weeding - via death - or dusting - via annihilation - but it can get more abstract and more involved. I got here by applying destruction to the barrier between worlds on the presumption that there might be such a thing. Any use of magic dumps some nonexistence into a disappearance point; every mage is hooked into one. We were - mistaken about how fast we were nonexisting the planet. It's a sphere, the points aim down - if you go down far enough you hit magma and after that we couldn't tell how far, but we assumed the rate was constant, it's not, the points eat their way onward on their own in addition to the amount they eat from individual spellcasting and it's accelerating. One punched through the planet, annihilated half a city, there was a war, it got worse. Some of my friends are trying another more conservative option with more moving parts. I tried this."

"If we can't save this world, you could dump your nonexistence here. If we can, you could evacuate all your people. But I don't know if we'll have the substance to spare to feed your magic."

"Void balances with Chaos, seems to be the lesson of this story," says Riale. "You've got the Blade of the Void, I've got the Book of Creation, maybe I can - throw some chaos at your disappearance points and shut them up. But unless your world is dying a whole lot faster than mine, I think we need to get this one figured out first. It doesn't sound like this system was designed to have important parts taken out of it, and you're holding onto an important part."