Chapter 1433

Randidly floated in the in-between space for a while, wondering what message Yystrix had left him with this movie. Then he released a breath and set everything around him into motion.

Welcome, Yystrix’s voice said lightly, before her a strange purgatory where her breath no longer shaped words. Instead, Randidly could only hear the sound of her breath leave her body as he sat in the total darkness of her memories. There were pauses between the breaths, but there was never the sound of an inhale. It was only an intermittent exhale, as though Yystrix was a balloon struggling to keep its last bit of buoyancy within its form.

Randidly hesitated but ultimately didn’t respond to the strange, depressing release. He settled himself within the dense web of Yystrix’s memories and didn’t attempt to wander from where she was leading him. He allowed himself to be pulled forward as a last act of respect to the callous and cruel woman who had shaped him.

Gradually, light began to emerge in the surroundings. In real-time, the world around them was calibrated into existence. Randidly found himself sitting in a room with light blue walls. The material of the walls caused Randidly to tilt his head to the side; it seemed to glitter like metal yet also was vaguely see-through like a crystal. It was exactly the sort of rare material that would have Sam transfixed.

Welcome to Hallohm. The ancient home of my people. Yystrix announced. The holy land of energy beings. Heh, in fact… it would be accurate to say that we looked down on the wider universe and the flesh beings that inhabited it. To us… to my people, this land was everything.

The cradle, the home, and the grave...

It was also clear that Randidly was seeing from a perspective that was not his own. The small body he possessed, which he assumed was Yystrix’s, heaved itself to its feet and slowly waddled toward an open passage. As she moved, Randidly was struck by the strangeness of what he was seeing. Around him, aside for the crystal walls, almost everything was blurry. What Randidly assumed to be furniture was just a vague bulge along the sides of the room. It was only those walls and the open passageway that had any definition.

My apologies, Yystrix voice continued in between exhales. Even my memory has degraded with time. No amount of training or Stats can stop that. I considered leaving this out, but… I think it is important to see. Everything started from this. The tragedy began here.

From the passageway, Yystrix’s small form entered an area that completely blurred, as though it was a watercolor painting that was rained on before it dried. Only after squinting did Randidly hazard that it was some sort of stairwell, although Yystrix didn’t ascend. She continued forward, clearly knowing the path even if the area around them was bleeding into itself.

There was another clear passageway and Randidly found himself in a wide-open area that was clearly an arid highlands. The dirt beneath him was almost bright orange. Before Randidly could scrutinize the blurry plant life scattered in the vicinity, Yystrix wheeled around and looked up at the building that she had just left. Randidly’s eyes widened as he saw a giant crystal tower that stretched upward toward maroon clouds. It seemed to have no end, each floor clearly possessing a wide window and an elaborately carved stone ramparts around the edge.

The Tower to Heaven, Yystrix whispered. The crowning Jewel of Hallohm. It houses the entirety of my people. It possesses 512 floors, one for each of my people. It is a hierarchical building; those at the top have lived the longest. Those at the bottom… well, they were born later. I was just born, and thus I live on the bottom floor in this memory.

All my people experience this. The sense of loss and wonder… the abrupt existence… and then this Tower, piercing both the ground and the clouds...

Even while the metal-crystal Tower to Heaven remained the same, the surroundings began to blur and warp. Yystrix’s voice continued to explain. There are two types of individuals in my population. The first and the last. Generally, it is very simple to separate individuals into these two categories.

As I told you previously, life energy is constant amongst my people. We must give of our own lives in order to bear children. Typically, a couple will each give half of their lives to form a child. So they have two children: the First and the Last. The First is raised with the guidance of the parents. They become our historians, our great philosophers, and our most respected leaders. They bear the weight of tradition on their shoulders.

The Last… well. They are born alone. They have no guidance except occasional kindness from the community. But they are also the sources of growth and innovation within my people’s community, in so far as my people were willing to change at all. The horrible loneliness the Last feel, those feelings of envy that eat them up when they see the First’s supportive parents… those are purposeful acts. They are designed to isolate us. The historians spend our childhood telling us how meaningful that suffering is. How strong it makes us.

Why, then, did I never feel strong? Heh, but then again… was isolating you not the first thing I did to you?

The tower receded like an ocean time, its bright blue materials gradually fading into sky-blue and then pale grey. Into that void, a slightly larger Yystrix was sitting on top of an orange rock outcropping, looking down over a narrow ravine. The figures were still blurry here, but the memory degradation had settled to an acceptable level that no longer made Randidly dizzy to look at it. And as he examined the surroundings with a finer comb, he saw the forms of Yystrix’s fellows.

There were two in the ravine below, standing across from each other. They had humanoid shapes, but as Randidly looked at them, it seemed like the outer skin of their bodies was translucent. The main meat of these beings was the waves of light that flowed within the confines of their skin. They were, in fact, oddly beautiful sights. The one nearer to Yystrix was a soft blue color, mixed with bursts of deep green. The other was a pure, bright yellow.

Between them was… a chessboard. At the two figures’ gestures, blurry pieces moved. There was definitely a game being played below, but it was also clear that Yystrix’s memory didn’t place much emphasis on it. Sometimes the moves of the blurry pieces seemed contradictory and Randidly couldn’t tell if it was due to rules he didn’t comprehend or that Yystrix didn’t bother to fact check her own memory.

Yystrix widened her view, looking side to side to see the broken whole of the ravine. And Randidly saw that there were dozens of these boards up and down the wide crack within the rock, filled with blurry figures facing off. Then Yystrix looked back to the light blue and yellow individuals directly below her outcropping.

As I have told you previously, my people believe we are descended from the Shallah, beings who truly were pure energy without form. In comparison, you could say that my people are energy… suitably contained and corralled. That wild freedom we were once blessed with was lost.

Due to the horrible betrayal of the Nether people, we were stripped of that freedom and forced to leave Eden. Yet now with the perspective of age, I see how strange the arrangement became. The two energy races settled on a single, extremely small world. The Aether below the Tower to Heaven in Hallohm and the Nether next to Sinkhole, in the badlands. We stayed and we fought, generation after generation.

There was always a certain cold war going on, where the people of Aether and Nether would periodically meet and clash. People might die in combat, but we would carefully gather their life energy and create more children while mourning their abrupt passing.

Yystrix released another long breath. But did we ever think to leave? Of course not. But perhaps… perhaps there was something special about those locations for our people.

Either way, the constant presence of the Nether pushed most people into frantically played wargames. This was our only real hobby, as well as training for combat. I found it… less than compelling. Our historian was often disappointed in my lack of interest, but… I was a Last. For every one last that innovated for the Aether beings… a hundred disappointed. This just cemented in his mind that I was a placeholder; a cup to hold life energy until I grew tired of life and gave myself to form children.

Gradually, as Yystrix was speaking, the details of the game below them came into sharper focus. Specifically, a certain piece simply shaped like a pillar became so clear that Randidly vaguely sensed image energy emanating off of it. Of course, this wasn’t a real phenomenon, but much more likely the effect of how much importance a powerful individual like Yystrix placed on the piece in her own memory.

A wildfire of meaning raged around that pillar of orange stone as it sat in one of the small squares on the chessboard. Randidly could see the thousands of connections that spread outward, moments in the future that Yystrix would someday attribute to this pillar at this moment. The memory around Randidly began to shudder as it tried to withstand that heavy meaning.

The blue figure gestured and a blurry piece lifted off the ground, floated forward, and crashed into the side of the pillar. The pillar swayed and then toppled over, hitting the ground and cracking into several pieces. Even as the two figures spoke to each other with blurry words that Randidly couldn’t understand, he followed Yystrix's gaze. Her eyes were locked onto the shattered pillar, looking at the glittery silver-grey ore revealed in the heart of the pillar. The shaking of the memory grew worse.

Crack.

I was quite inspired by that destruction. The memory around them physically shattered, and suddenly Randidly (who watching through Yystrix) was back within the tower. At this point in time, she was slightly older and living now on the 93rd floor of this slightly creepy building One of her rooms had been converted into a workshop and Randidly saw a blurry figure filled with red light waiting expectantly while Yystrix was carving a piece for him. For the first time in my life, I saw how something that was less than whole could be beautiful. And as it turned out, the rest of my people shared that aesthetic.

Essentially, every one of the 511 other individuals living in the tower wanted to have me carve their wargame pieces. The historian wanted an official set for the Grand Arena, which was where the yearly wargame tournaments was fought. And then, as though as an afterthought, the priest mentioned that his son wanted to commission some pieces as well. For a wargame rule ‘variant’.

The vision in front of Randidly shifted. Yystrix was walking along what appeared to be a dried river bed with high stone walls on either side of her. As far as Randidly could tell, everything in the area around the Tower to Heaven was some variation of red or orange. Even the clouds were maroon. The furthest thing was the brown, scrubby plants, but his overall impression was that this was a barren land filled with swirling dust.

If not for the light blue sword of the tower thrust into this ground, it would be an entirely dead place.

After a few more minutes of walking, Yystrix walked around a bend and into a memory that was perfectly clear. Again, this was a place heavy with the image of what was to come. Whereas the pillar had raged with wild flames, this memory was cold and sticky, like the scales of a tuna pulled out of the sea. There was something strangely claustrophobic to the pulses of images in the surrounding air.

And standing in a particularly flat area of the river bed of the memory, surrounded by misshapen lumps of stone, was an individual. As opposed to the bright colors of most of the Aether people that Randidly had seen, this one stood out. His light was monochrome; he was filled with waves of white and grey, interspersed with thin lines of black.

The figure walked forward. “Hello, I’m Elhume. It’s nice to meet you.”

The area around these two rapidly compressed, as though a wrathful god was squeezing the edges of the memory and crumpling it into a ball. The body of that cold tuna stretch and contort into a python that squeezed that moment to a pulp. The orange highlands and the dusty river bed and the maroon clouds and even the Tower to Heaven were folded over, drawn and warped by the weight of this meeting.

Elhume spoke about the new rules he wanted to make for the wargame, but to Yystrix, those words were blurry. Instead, she was mesmerized by the black arcs that spun in his chest as he spoke. They were only the slightest portion of his light, but they caught the eye. They rippled like colored ink dropped into water. They seemed to dance as he spoke.

The surrounding rumbling grew louder as the fist that squeezed this memory tightened. The chill intensified. Randidly couldn’t help but feel apprehensive as he felt the destructive power of the image that was annihilating this place. But finally, Elhume’s words came back into focus. “...add some spice to the wargames, don’t you think? By the way… where do you get your inspiration for your carvings? They really are something.”

Yystrix shrugged. “I guess… sometimes you need to take something away to make it beautiful.”

If only I hadn’t told him that, Yystrix continued to exhale, her existence continuing to dwindle.