Mathématique: Astria Porta: Mathématique

“I saw the Pax Prometheana fail and fall.” Dr. Levant rasps.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges.

Text iteration: Despite the delay, witchingest hour.

Additional notes: At a certain point, I trust the insanity to speak for itself.

Dramatis personae: 

Elias Falkor………….….……Eli Wallace

Nyck………………………….Nick Rush

Camantha Sarter……………Rodney McKay

Commander Effect…………John Sheppard

Teyla Emmagen……….……Teyla Emmagen

Astria Porta: Mathématique

It begins with snow, falling in a shredded veil.

It begins with a raven, soaring through a void of mist and cloud.

The bird dives, and the world gains structure.

Far below is a skeletonized forest of dark trees, eerily still. The raven descends, skimming over unmoving branches, time-broken, stiff. Cold. The raven is the only living thing in this stone forest for as far as the eye can see. Winging through a web of cracked branches, it approaches a towering shrine, built in the form of an arc over a narrow chasm. On either end of the building, spires jut skyward, continuing the upward thrust of the cliffs that form the shrine’s dual base. In the driving snow, the outlines of the building are more suggestion than edge. At the boundary of the forest, the raven lands on a branch, slips on the iced stone that used to be a tree, catches itself. Settles.

Between the raven and the tower, a stack of gunmetal Serpentis Rings descend through cloud and snow. They fall and rise again like huge coins. When they go, they leave a five-man band behind.

Elias Falkor, storied Librarian with high dexterity and a pair of in-sleeve trick daggers for tight spots, stands before the Temporal Shrine. A cinematic wind tears his light brown hair from beneath the Diadem of Discernment that rests upon his brow. He sports a determined expression of thoughtful resolve. His shoulders, heroically straight, fill out his Jacket of Genius quite nicely, if he does say so himself. He plants Boots of Brisk on Promethean stone and rides out a subtle earthquake without losing his footing. “I love this part,” he says, as flakes of poisoned snow fall softly on the stone of the shrine.

Nyck, irascible Galactic Sprite with no last name (like Cher), twigs in his artistically disheveled hair, looks down at his Sandals of Speed and his peridot-studded Tendriled Tunic with its feathered epaulettes. “Why am I dressed like this?” His tone is less Sprite-like than one might expect, but hey. He’s a no-nonsense Professor of Whimsy. Sure, most Sprites are beautiful flower maidens who’ve become one with the Cosmic Weave after Much Study under a Full Moon, but you can find a crack Math Druid in a weird cave if you look hard enough. Nyck is pragmatic to a fault so of course he doesn’t appreciate all the Peridot Power that’s been painstakingly harvested and incorporated into his gear. Yet. He doesn’t appreciate it yet.

“My god, that’s a boatload of Peridot,” says Camantha Sarter, overpowered Promethean Technomage. She studies Nyck’s ensemble with a practiced eye, electricity playing over the Coronet of Capacitance that holds back her shock-blonde hair. She wears custom Amperage Armor of cobalt blue. It matches her eyes, and her Galvanic Greaves are dyed the same color. With the delicate lift of a hand she casts a Charge Barrier that blocks the poisoned snow before it dings anyone’s HP. “Effect, can you get a count on those stones?”

Commander JSM Effect, (first name “Commander;” last name “Effect;” middle name John Shepard from Mass) eyes Nyck with his Serpentis Augments. A plate of pale blue glass covers one eye; the other is slate gray. His hair is black and thick and spiked high. He wears svelte carbon-fiber armor. Despite his impressive appearance, he carries no weapons, having forsworn a life of violence after decades of wrongful servitude to a pantheon of false gods. “I’m blind to Natural Magics,” he reminds Camantha. “Teyla, can you see his full count?”

Teyla Emmagen, half-ghoul assassin, backed by the soft glow of snow falling on an emitting forcefield, studies Nyck’s gem-encrusted ensemble. She angles her head, and a sweep of flowing white hair cascades down her back. Her ghoul-toned skin contrasts beautifully with her crimson accented Ghastly Greatcoat. A gold Hedonic Headband (+5 charisma) matches the yellow of her eyes. The Sword of the Sundering Sea is strapped to her back, and her Bracers of Barrage are loaded with throwing stars. “I believe the total count is nine.”

“Nine?” Camantha says. “Nine? This kid is good.”

“Yup,” Commander Effect says lazily, looking at the layer of poisoned ash building above their technomage’s glowing charge barrier.

Elias wishes he had time to expound on the peridot speedrun he’d done with Nyck’s character. (Because, yeah, it’s hard to survive early Astria Porta as a Sprite. Like, Dark Souls deprived-class hard. Sprites are NOT a popular choice for beginner players. [Or anyone.] Fortunately, Nyck is leveled enough to be virtually unhittable in straight combat.) Much as he’d love to regale his new team with the finer points of Night Fishing Star Bat Cavern or Plundering the Undersea Mines of Old Promethea, some Narrative Drama is about to go down.

“Shh,” Elias says. “This is important.”

Lightning strikes the Sidereal Spire on the near side of the Temporal Shrine’s chasm-spanning arch. It’s a massive, sustained bolt, blue-white and crackling. Charge flows from sky to shrine like it’s on tap, like Sidereal is pulling it from the clouds above. Camantha’s Charge Barrier shorts out with sympathetic energetics. Before she can raise it again, another bolt strikes the ground behind them. Another just to their left.

A cut scene begins.

The Doors of Order on the near side of the shrine grind open. Dr. Levant staggers across the threshold. He braces himself against stone and turns to the inlaid control panel next to the doors. His hair, damp with sweat, falls into his eyes. Bloodied hands scrabble to key in the commands to seal the shrine. “Stay back!” He looks desperately over his shoulder.

Elias Falkor doesn’t stay back.

He never would.

He’s loved Dr. Levant with his whole heart, right from the moment (he’d watched the first episode of Wormhole X-treme with his mom before she left for her late shift at the hospital, when she was sick with AZT, pale from crying all night instead of sleeping and) the archeologist had jumped in front of a squad of guns, his hands out, his sand-colored robes spread wide, and said, “You don’t understand,” like a plea.

And like a command.

Dr. Levant is a mentor. Dr. Levant is a role model. Dr. Levant is an icon. Dr. Levant is so different from the real life archeologist who supposedly inspired him (pushy, intense, full of strong opinions and squinty judgement). Dr. Levant is why Elias has taught himself math and physics and languages and a thousand other things that junior high and high school and MIT would never teach.

Dr. Levant is family, because Dr. Levant, too, had lost his dad and turned out okay.

Elias sprints through flaking snow toward the Doors of Order. His trick daggers slide from sleeve to hand. The Shrine doors grind their way shut. As the gap between the stone slabs narrows, Elias hurls his daggers into the inky dark.

They fly true.

Commander Effect, right behind him, seals Force and Homing Augments to each thrown blade.

It’s not enough.

It’s never enough.

Elias has been here over and over and over again, days of looped time, trying anything, everything he can think of to save Dr. Levant. He’s used the apex of every weapon class in the game against the   coming horror. He’s teamed up with Robyn Fretboard, Ghoul Technomage and Lord of Chords, who casts walls of flame, of ice, of sound itself to hold the coming monstrosity inside the shrine.

It always breaks through.

Dr. Levant never gets away.

With a deafening roar, the head of a Prismatic Drake bursts through the narrowing crack in the doors and wrenches them wide.

Its scales split the light. Slithering from shrine to snow, it’s a reflective, refractive blur the length and width and mass of a city bus.

Elias sees the hilts of his daggers embedded in its throat like studded jewelry.

The drake roars again, revealing row upon row of razor-edged teeth and two cruelly sharp fangs, dripping with iridescent venom. Each drop of poison prisms the white light of the winter landscape. Its shattered mirror scales steal the gray of the clouds, the white of the snow, the black of iced-over stone. Cruelly theatrical, it arcs its head toward the shrine doors and slashes at Dr. Levant with its fangs.

The raven in the tree cries like its heart has been taken.

Elias’s eyes sting with the tears that still surprise him even after a thousand variations on this very moment. He’s got a new crew. So much more seems possible now. He’s not the man he was when last he came this way. But the stakes, too, have grown. There can be no more passes. He has a job to do. A cypher set to unlock. A quest to progress. To finish.

Again, the raven cries. Full of grief. Urging them on.

Elias has killed the Prismatic Drake more times than he can count. He skirts its angry serpentine motion and angles away from his team toward the shrine.

The drake roars and bares its fangs. It stares at Commander Effect, weaving its head back and forth, like the Envenomed Vypers, its desert-world kin.

“Don’t look!” Elias shouts, but the Crystalline Curse has taken hold.

The Commander’s boots seal themselves to the stone underfoot in a lattice of faceted spars.

Teyla Emmagen sprints for the drake. She moves like death itself, like snaking water. Her white hair flows behind her, laced with poisoned snow. She draws her sword, and, as the blade comes clear from its scabbard, it brings with it the sound of crashing surf. “Camantha!” She calls, like a command.

Blue-white lightning crackles from Camantha Sarter’s upswept hand. Current sparkles in her hair, in her eyes, and over her cobalt armor, cutting a brilliant contrast with a world of softly falling snow. She catches the drake with her torrent of charge. Volts and volts pour over its conductive scales, freezing it into contracted immobility.

Enraged, the drake shrieks and shudders in the streaming bolt of power, trying to break free.

“Commander!” Teyla shouts.

Frozen in place with crystal crawling up his ankles, Commander Effect mimes a gun with his weaponless hand—two fingers extended, thumb pointed at the sky. He aims at the space between Teyla and the writhing drake. The blue plate glass in front of his right eye glows with his running analytics.

A stair of compressed air rises in front of Teyla Emmagen, marked by the way it catches and holds the falling snow on the planes of its steps. Above the drake, she sprints along a ghost platform, limned with snow. She reaches its end and leaps.

Camantha kills her stream of charge and the spectral stair of snow dissolves in a gust of wind.

Teyla lands on the drake’s broken-mirror back. She lifts the Sword of the Sundering Sea.

Commander Effect aims his gunless gun and fires a Piercer Augment at her upraised blade.

With a sound like crashing surf, Teyla drives her sword into the spine of the drake.

The monster shrieks. Its jaw snaps. Its spine bucks.

Teyla leaps from its back, bloodied sword in one hand, poisoned snow dusting her crimson-lined coat. Commander Effect uses a Momentum Augment to pull her clear of the drake’s serpentine death throes and the dangerous edges of those sharded mirror scales. She lands with an acrobatic roll over snow-covered stone and turns to take in her handiwork.

Her bloodied sword steams in the cold air.

Holy crap.

But Elias can’t linger on his team’s skill. He hesitates, watching Commander Effect only long enough to confirm he’s dissolving the crystal climbing his calves with the liquid green of a Solubility Augment. When Elias is sure his team is in the clear, he sprints for Dr. Levant.

He skids on ice-covered stone and scrambles to the archeologist’s side. Deep fang-slashes in the man’s chest well with dark blood, but it’s not his wounds that are killing his mentor. Elias has healed the injuries before, scoured the known world for phials and magic stones that can knit any wound, cure any poison.

And still, he dies.

Dr Daryl Levant, Humanity’s First and Best Hope, Realmwalker, Unsung Hero of Trigara, touches Elias Falkor’s cheek. “You got my message.” His hand falls away, leaving a bloodied streak on Elias’s skin.

“Yes.” Elias thinks of the glowing envelope he’d received after completing Astria Porta: City on the Sea. “We all did.”

Commander Effect drops to his knees beside Elias. The plate of blue glass in front of his eye glows with Serpentis Analytics. “He’s bleeding out, but there’s more to it than that. An energy signature, maybe?” he asks softly.

“Listen,” Dr. Levant rasps. “I don’t have much time.” He pulls in a ragged breath.

Teyla and Camantha position themselves behind Commander Effect and Elias. They stay quiet, waiting for the archeologist’s last words.

“The Promethean Empire was vast.” Dr. Levant mists and glows at his edges. His hair is full of snow. His eyes are wet with tears. “Sophisticated. Pluralistic. Tolerant. Beautiful.”

“I know it was,” Elias says, tearing up himself.

“All that came after—the Empire Serpentis, the Grand Ravening—was built upon its bones. Ideas, peoples, architectures, even carven stone—” Dr. Levant presses a hand to the iced-over stone beneath him, “—yield to time. But everything leaves a trace on the world. An imprint.”

In the distance, a raven calls mournfully.

The Astria Porta theme, beautiful and haunting, swells from the world itself. From the frozen ground and the stone forest.

“I saw the Pax Prometheana fail and fall.” Dr. Levant rasps. “I saw it. Inside the shrine. They fractured. Lost their way. Split their strength. Half wanted to push ahead. To break barrier after barrier with their technology, their minds, their literal bodies.” A tear trickles from one hazel eye. “Half wanted to settle. To build. To work with their hands and hearts until they gave out. They never came to accord. They suffered a meta-rational failure on a cultural scale and the galaxy descended, slow and stepwise, into a Hobbesian war of all against all.”

“Save your strength,” Elias whispers into the pause he knows will be there.

“But,” Dr. Levant gives him a spectral smile, weak and glittering. “There were hedges built. Safeguards against destruction.” He coughs and swallows blood. “Wouldn’t we do the same, if we saw the end coming?”

Wordlessly, Elias nods.

“Cautelæ mathématique.” Dr. Levant slips into Promethean.

“Mathematical hedges,” Commander Effect translates in a breathless whisper.

“There are nine,” Dr. Levant continues. “Seek them out. Solve them. Retrieve what they conceal. Everything depends on it.”

“You got it, boss,” Elias whispers, tears in his eyes as Dr. Levant glows brighter.

The snow turns pure, losing its poison.

The theme music is low and mournful.

The scene cuts to the ash colored raven. She alights from the iced stone of a petrified tree and glides toward them on a gust of snow and wind. Her wings stream with the same glow that comes from Dr. Levant. She soars in, just over their heads, and lands on the archeologist’s chest. Gracefully, she dips her head to Elias.

Around her neck, she wears a tiny silver key.

Respectfully, he retrieves it, and deposits the Temporal Shrine Key in his inventory.

“There’s a world of history inside the shrine,” Dr. Levant rasps, blood on his lips, light in his eyes. “Enough to get lost in. Don’t make my mistake. Stick to the math. Find the Cautelæ. It was too late for the Prometheans. Maybe it won’t be too late for us.”

Elias nods as the raven spreads her snow covered wings and launches into the sky, riding the afterglow of Dr. Levant’s departing specter.

The snow falls.

The Astria Porta theme plays once more, then fades to silence.

“He is dead then?” Teyla asks softly. 

“He’s Walking the Realms now.” Commander Effect looks to the sky. “But he’ll be back.”

“‘Course he will,” Elias says.

He takes a moment to gather himself, then rises. He strides through falling snow and approaches the massive head of the Prismatic Drake. He retrieves his daggers from its throat and reequips them in their sleeve-sheaths, then rejoins his party before the Temporal Shrine. With snow in their pale hair, Camantha and Teyla strike him as epically beautiful. Commander Effect studies the iced-over blood Dr. Levant left behind, and the plate glass in front of his eye glows a pale blue.

They’ll make one hell of a four-man band.

Hang on, huge problem: they’re supposed to be a five-man band?

Where the heck is their No-Nonsense Professor of Whimsy?

The thought seems to occur to all of them at once.

Elias turns from the threshold of the Doors of Order to scan the landscape.

The snow falls thick and soft on the silent land. On the stones of the Temporal Shrine. On the corpse of the Prism Drake. But—

At the edge of the Stone Forest, an extraordinary transformation has taken place.

Two iced branches have broken their petrified casing to find each other. To fuse and twine and grow into a perfect lancet arch between a pair of straight stone trunks. In the negative space beneath the grafted branches, a mirror reflects the thickly falling snow.

At the margin line between the world and its reflection, Nyck stands, his back to the rest of the party. Snow gilds the deep green feathers in his Evasive Epaulettes. His gauze-thin Cloak of Change flutters at its hem with small gusts of wind. His attention is drawn upward, toward the crosspoint of the transformed branches.

A second raven sits at the apex of the arch. She’s dove gray with pearl-tipped wings. The color of mist in the early morning. Full of presence and promise.

In all his passes through a thousand different efforts to save Dr. Levant, Elias has never seen a second raven. He’s never heard of a second raven. Not in all his research. Not in any conversation. His heart beats hard with excitement and with hope. He lives for twists like this. The opening of door after door, each more magnificent than the next.

“I’ve never seen a porta like that.” Charge sparkles restively over Camantha’s cobalt armor.

Commander Effect remains silent. The glass over his eye glows bright enough to give the nearest falling flakes an aquamarine sheen.

“Is it a porta?” Teyla questions, her keen gaze fixed on the otherworldly arch.

“Unclear.” Elias starts forward, leading the way.

As they approach the border of the forest, the supernatural barrier gains detail: the shrine, the land, the monster’s prismed husk, each falling flake of snow are reflected in a perfect mirror. The stone trunks of the trees and the arched branches are carved with a pattern Elias recognizes: an stylized rendering of the logistic map. 

x_n+1 = rx_n(1 - x_n)

He’s seen this mathematical design before. Not in this dream world of snow and glitching time, but in his real and waking life. It’s etched into the halls of Atlantis itself. It waterfalls down sliding doors and decorative barriers.

As he leads the other three toward Nyck, Elias is startled to realize that what seemed a perfect mirror doesn’t reflect Nyck, his twig and flower hair, crowned with snow. It doesn’t reflect Elias’s flake dusted jacket, Teyla’s gold eyes, Camantha’s gleaming greaves, or Commander Effect’s night-black armor. 

Overhead, the raven watches Nyck.

No one speaks.

With a soft cry and a flutter of wings, the raven descends to land on one of Nyck’s feathered epaulettes. As the bird settles on Nyck’s shoulder, the mirrored surface of the lancet arch frosts into a white sheet. With a soft chime, the layered ice shatters to reveal a narrow passage into a different landscape.

Elias, astonished, gazes down an aisle of living, ordered trees, planted in rich and furrowed soil. The trees are wreathed in mist, but along the enchanted lane the snow melts to nothing as it falls, creating a tunnel to a world where winter holds no sway.

“What do you think?” Nyck asks.

“I think,” Elias says, “you should go first.”

Nyck steps through the stone arch. The rest of the party follows. The transition from the world Elias knows to the new landscape is a strange, slow blend. Beyond their neat row of trees, he still sees a disordered forest of stone. Overhead, snow falls. But it doesn’t reach them. Not here.

“This is an orchard.” Teyla hovers a hand near an apple on a low-hanging branch but doesn’t touch the fruit. “Well maintained, but—” she trails off, examining the line of trees. The one she stands beneath is in its prime, spangled with green leaves, its branches laden with ripe fruit. The tree beyond is hung with the snow of small white flowers, not an apple in sight. Further along the row is a tree with golden leaves, red apples scattered at its base.

“This whole planet is time-glitched,” Elias warns. “Everyone scan our surroundings. Look for names. ‘Names are some of the most important words there are’,” he says, quoting Dr. Levant.

They each turn a slow circle.

“I got nothin’,” Commander Effect says. “I mean, other than Mab.”

“Mab?!” Elias repeats.

“Nyck’s raven.” Commander Effect gestures toward the bird still perched on the Sprite’s shoulder.

Mab looks reproachfully at Elias. She caws, and with her call, she makes herself a member of their party. There’s no sixth slot in their mechanics for her to fill, but Nyck’s name changes to Nyck & Mab.

“What?” Elias breathes, grinning.

“Nice.” Commander Effect tries to stroke Mab’s head, but she ducks, flutters to Nyck’s opposite shoulder, and caws, offended.

“Raven’s got taste.” Camantha eyes Commander Effect with disapproval. “That’s a MYSTICAL BIRD. Don’t try to pet it. Were you raised in a BARN?”

“I was raised in a creche.” Commander Effect blends danger and petulance like only he knows how.

“And it shows,” Camantha replies. “Mab is a queen. Obviously. Pay your respects.”

“Sorry, m’lady.” Commander Effect gives the raven the hint of a bow.

Teyla, a thousand times more graceful, drops into an arcane Ghoul variant of a curtsey, deep and low, one leg drawn behind her like a dancer.

“How do you know she’s a queen?” Elias asks Camantha.

“Don’t they teach Shakespeare to kids these days?” Camantha asks. “There’s more to the world than Astria Porta and math.”

Commander Effect rolls his eyes.

“Quite right,” Nyck says, piling on with Camantha.

Elias ignores them and tries to get his bearings in a new landscape. One that, by rights, shouldn’t be here at all. He’s never heard of Mab, the gray and pearl raven. He’s never heard of a misted orchard analog shading into a Petrified Forest like bleeding watercolor paint.

He’s never heard of any of this.

He worries it has to do with Nyck.

He’ll never say this out loud, but Nyck is definitely the reluctant Gandalf of Elias’s shire-bound life. He’d been destined for an eternity of tutoring students in Boston libraries before Nyck showed up, memory-free and stirring up exciting trouble everywhere he steps.

And, right now, Nyck is treading the halls of an enchanted city floating on an alien sea. A city that lights up for him. A city that tries to talk to him so hard it overwhelms the technoswag glued to his head. And now, in this setting, on those same Lantean over-the-air data networks (so responsive to Nyck that they knocked him out for half a day), the five of them are running a massive, beautiful, intricate game.

Seems like maybe it’s not a coincidence that something new is happening.

He’s not sure if the rise in his heart rate is excitement or fear.

That’s when it hits him. 

“Guys,” he says, but the word is too soft to cut through the banter between Camantha and Commander Effect.

Only Teyla looks at him. She tilts her head in wordless invitation.

“It’s too quiet,” Elias says.

“How do you mean?” Teyla asks. 

“There’s—” he hesitates, feeling foolish, feeling anxious. “There’s no soundtrack.”

“Commander,” Teyla says, sharp and hard and loud, like she’s instantly understood the implication behind Elias’s words. When he looks over at them, she gives Elias an encouraging smile.

“There’s no soundtrack,” he says, more confident.

“So?” Camantha demands.

“There’s always a soundtrack with an environmental change. This place should have a musical theme. Even if it’s a recycled one. More than that—it’s not just that I’ve never seen this place. I’ve never heard of this place. Not a whisper. Not in any forum. Not on any message board. So unless you guys programed something special into your Lantean Mod—” he trails off.

No one speaks.

The possible implications vibrate between them, unspoken.

“Only you could see the name of the raven.” Camantha looks at Commander Effect and her words land like a hammer.

“I could see it,” Nyck offers.

“Oh,” Camantha says weakly. “Even better.”

Mab watches Elias, her dark eyes shining.

Commander Effect steps between Mab and Elias, putting himself in the center of their little band. “Our hard RPG rule,” he says softly, “turns diamond. From this point forward, no immersion breaks. None. Do it and you’re out. Out of the room, out of the game, out of the circle of trust. What happens here stays here. Everyone got that?”

Teyla nods gravely.

Nyck lifts a hand in a half-shrug of acquiescence.

Uneasy, Elias gives Commander Effect a sharp nod.

“Dammit,” Camantha mutters. “Fine. You creche-grown idiot.”

“Elias.” Commander Effect gestures him forward. “Lead on.”

“Maybe you should—” Elias begins.

But, “Lead on,” Commander Effect says, and points into the impossible apple trees.

As they move deeper into the orchard, ordered rows of fruit-bearing trees appear ahead and to either side. The alternate landscape spreads like a fan, until misted orchard is all they see in every direction. Fruit and flowers and golden leaves hang like jewels in row upon row. The snow is gone. Every so often a ray of sun pierces the mist.

Far ahead, at the vanishing point of their aisle of apple trees, a tree comes into view. Its trunk is massive. Gnarled. It knots around itself the way yew does, after hundreds of years.

Mab launches from Nyck’s shoulder and soars ahead.

They follow.

Even with his Diadem of Discernment, the landscape remains stripped of name.

Elias doesn’t like it.

As they approach the tree, he sees it’s not a yew. Not an apple tree. Its leaves are serrated. Half the tree hangs with red berries, its leaves crisping and turning. Half the tree is green, dotted with small white flowers. Its wood is dark. Rope-like cords of thorn create a gnarled throne where a giant sits, bound to the chair with massive thorns that pinion his wrists and ankles. Orchard on orchard backs him, an endless field of endless fruit.

The giant’s visage is lined. Careworn. His skin is weathered, suggesting a deep continuity with the tree that imprisons him. His beard is gray and neatly trimmed. His robe suggests a clouded sky. Dark ichor seeps from the the wounds in his feet and hands. It crystalizes into quartz-edged cuffs and pools into resin-lined ridges in the bark of the tree that holds him.

There is no cut scene to explain his presence. No cinematic sweep of strings and winds.

“Mab,” the old man sighs, his voice an ancient whisper that recalls the trickle of rain into streams, the running of streams into rivers, the gathering of rivers into lakes, the draining of lakes into seas. “What have you done?”

The raven caws and circles overhead, then perches on the back of the titan’s thorned throne.

Commander Effect looks to Elias, his blue analytic plate shining in world of mist and fruit trees.

“Forgive us,” Elias says, beginning with humility, as Dr. Levant would. “But who could resist a blooming orchard in a labyrinth of stone and death?”

The titan smiles, but doesn’t speak.

“You got a quest for us, old man?” Camanatha demands.

Still nothing.

“Speak, honored elder,” Teyla tries.

Still nothing.

Commander Effect uses an Impetus Augment to nudge Nyck to the front of their group.

Good idea.

Elias backs up a step, leaving Nyck nearest the old man in the tree.

Dry as the chalk of a desert lecture hall, Nyck says, “Did y’want something?”

“Mab tells me you’ve undertaken the quest for the Cautelæ Mathématique,” the old man intones.

“An’ what of it?” Nyck asks.

“Despite its temporal arches, its geometric mysteries, it’s fiery galleries…it’s half a quest,” the titan rumbles. “Its completion yields nothing.”

“What?” Elias breathes. “Half a quest?”

“The Cautelæ are ancient concepts,” the titan continues, “but you limned them with the logic gates that make them work in this subtlest of worlds, this photonic gauze that starts and stops and flows with whispered charge.”

“Here we go,” Camantha mutters, looking between the titan, the raven, and Nyck.

Commander Effect silences her with a wordless glare.

“You’ve lit the Midnight Lamp,” the titan says, severe and magnificent. “You’ve drawn a spectral host to the veil between two realms. I am but the first to tell you that the quest for Cautelæ is mathematics without meaning. There’s more to Promethean Hedge Magic than the picking of locks. There’s what they seal away.”

“Seal away?” Nyck echoes.

“In all your explorations of the galaxy, in all your use of the stolen underpinnings of the technology powering the Empire Serpentis, have you ever once encountered a lock?”

“No,” Elias realizes.

“There’s a genetic requirement,” Commander Effect offers. “Some items require Promethean genetics to use.”

“Such things weren’t built in the spirit of exclusion,” the titan says, with a suggestion of reproof. “It’s their so that their technology might know them. Surely you’ve come to understand as much.”

“There are trials,” Camantha says, defiant and blue-limned in a world of green and gray, white and red. “Trials of spirit. Tests of character.”

“Functional passwords. Not locks,” the titan corrects. “Dr. Levant is aware of only half your quest.”

“What’s the other half?” Nyck asks.

“Light-drenched living hedges conceal deep shadows. In addition to solving for the Cautelæ, you must learn their context. You must learn the corresponding Anathemata Mathématique.”

“Mathematical anathemas.” Elias shivers.

“Yup,” Commander Effect says softly, speaking to himself. He raises his voice. “We’re in,” he tells the titan, quick and decisive and speaking for all of them.

The titan nods his approval.

Mab alights from the throne of hawthorn and settles herself on Nyck’s shoulder.

The massive hawthorn drops its berries, sheds its leaves. The flowered half of the tree loses its petals, bursts into fruit, and it, too, dies in a slow temporal wave. The orchard surrounding them strobes through a vertiginous summer-fall-spring-winter cycle over and over and over. Apples form and fall. Leaves flake away and don’t return. The trees silicize and die and freeze.

The titan slows and stills and turns to stone.

Elias takes a breath. He looks at his companions standing in a half circle beneath the memory of a living tree. This is not the world he knows. This is not the game he knows. This is a blend of myth and life with stakes he can’t imagine. Stakes, maybe, he’ll never understand.

“I’m up for this,” Commander Effect says quietly, looking at Nyck. Looking at the raven on his shoulder.

Nyck nods.

“I’m in,” Elias says, because this is what he’s always wanted. The secret dream of his heart is for life to hold a candle to the stories humanity tells of it.

“I, too, am ready,” Teyla says.

“Like we need another problem of this magnitude,” Camantha grumbles. “But fine. Sure. I’m guessing we’re not telling Woolsey about any of this?”

“Who’s Woolsey?” Teyla asks.

Commander Effect gives her approving look. “Exactly. For now, what happens in Mathématique stays in Mathématique.”

They weave back through the Stone Forest, slipping between the trees single file. The snow on the ground untouched by their footprints, but Elias knows the way. He returns them to the clearing, using an occasional glimpse of spectral spires of the Temporal Shrine to set his course.

At the tree-line, they save their progress.

Before pulling off his headset and shutting his computer, Elias takes one last look over the dead land.

The night ends with snow, falling in a shredded veil.

It ends with a raven, perched on Nyck’s shoulder.