I looked at the whiteboard in annoyance and threw a marker at it, but since I hadn''t bothered to aim it pinged off the corner and skittered across the intricate tile floor of the Nokarash, the "hall of desks" in Erathik. Bells pealed out in the courtyard, and a faint murmuring of conversation drifted in from the next room - although I knew that if I went looking for the source it would always be one more room away.


    The whiteboard had started as a list of goals, but three weeks in to my imprisonment it felt like it was taunting me.


    I''d started counting on the eighteenth - the day after making the deal with Hammersmith - since that was the first full day I had access to the training room and, by extension, my memory palace. The remaining time almost broke down into nine of the six-day weeks they did here, with just a few days left over. The day before Brinkmar was in alignment would presumably see us either preparing or traveling though, and obviously the day of didn''t really count. In addition to my goals, I had a section on the whiteboard for each week where I could document how stir-crazy I was feeling. It was an old therapy thing that I''d never followed through on, because at the time I was still in my "fuck you I''m going to sneak out the fire exit instead of even pretending to listen" phase.


    It painted a bleak picture. At the end of week one, I was giving myself a freak-out score of two out of ten and was honestly pretty proud of that. No panic attacks, and I''d only even gotten seriously antsy and started planning escape routes when it was late at night and I couldn''t sleep. The anxiety ticked up to three when I did try to plan an escape though, because I didn''t actually know how the hell I could manage it especially since if I was seriously thinking of doing anything Barick the human threat detector would presumably shove me back into my room. But week two was way worse, and here at the end of week three I was sitting at a very uncomfortable seven point five. I wanted out.


    I just had to keep distracting myself.


    Hugh kept me busy most of the day with combat training, exercising, and strange quizzes where he would describe a situation and ask what I would do before explaining in detail precisely how that would get me brutally killed. I kind of enjoyed that part, but the rest of it was wearing thin and I was starting to really hate Hugh - I would have hated him even more if his ruthless training routine wasn''t clearly working. I was, in fact, starting to feel like a badass.


    Even so, with so much time dedicated to fighting and working out I had made very little progress towards my goals other than figuring out what they were. At first it seemed like a silver lining that some of them had uncertain dependencies or had limited time I could work on them per day; it meant I didn''t really need to worry much about priorities. I''d chip away at everything, mix things up as I got bored or burned out or ran low on mana, and just see where it got me - after all, I had nine weeks to kill.


    But as I''d worked, it seemed like I always ran out of either time or mana before I could make any real progress. Worse, just to add insult to injury, one of the few experiments that had gone well had also fucked me over. I could now consistently fuck with the flow of time in Ematse, and it was driving me crazy. Before, I''d managed to tie the speed of time to someone else in close proximity to my body - it was flaky, but it worked. With no time shenanigans going on around me it had taken some playing around, but I''d finally gotten it down enough that I could spend about five minutes of prime-plane time to experience three hours of memory palace time.


    That was enough to blow through all my mana, and at the rate I was recovering it that gave me about eight hours of extra time per day. At first I was thrilled - surely there were people out there that had dedicated resources to having time-out zones in other planes, places where you could duck in for a few hours to get a week''s worth of work done. Even if mine was more limited, it was a super valuable resource. And then I realized the problem.


    I was already stressing out about being trapped for nine weeks, and now it was going to be more like eleven because I was tacking on eight extra hours every day. Using my mind palace was supposed to be a helpful break, but it wasn''t enough of one to make up for adding that kind of time. I''d hop into the healing pod, either to heal an injury or just deal with the aches of over-exercising, spend a few hours working on my projects, and then go right back to Hugh''s training. Thirty-two hours a day, give or take. It was... bad.


    I''d also tried using the time differential in combat with Hugh, which was a mixed success at best. I could see things in super slow motion and react to Hugh''s attacks with impossible speed, so that was nice. The end result, however, was that he still kicked my ass while I also pulled half the muscles in my body and got way more injured when he chucked me at a wall. The problem, in a nutshell, was that my mind was seeing everything in slow motion but there was still a strict limit on how fast my body could move; when I tried to force it, my muscles tended to damage themselves and then I also was manually controlling myself in a way that prevented me from reflexively reacting to being hurled at the scenery.


    Someday I wanted to unlock the ability to apply altered physics from other planes to the area around my body, which in this case would mean having a bubble of faster time - but my upcoming potential was all spoken for since I''d decided I needed to learn more about the fate threads. I didn''t have the potential to unlock use of those yet, and even if I had I wasn''t satisfied with what that helpful entity on the other side of my Dumines was offering. I just couldn''t articulate why.


    It was possible I was just being picky as part of going stir crazy.


    I opened a door back to the main area of my mind palace and shoved the whiteboard through, since leaving it in a temporary area like the reproduction of a building in Erathik might cause it to vanish when I left. There was one obvious thing on the list for me to work on, which I''d been putting some hours into every day. It didn''t require me to spend any potential, it was useful, and it was frustrating as hell. Was it too much to ask to be able to instantly gain every useful skill in the world without putting in any effort?


    I had learned how to package up concepts from the collective consciousness, but shoving them into my own head wasn''t as easy as I had hoped. I could reach out and poll the Common Local Understanding for what ''red'' meant, and I could make a template for it, but I couldn''t insert that understanding into my own brain - and what I really wanted to do it with was far more complicated than just a color. That was one of the reasons I''d been trying to spend time in a divination-perfect memory of Erathik; I wanted to see if I could absorb the language via divination.


    So far no luck, and because Comprehension had a focus on language and there would be a hundred thousand people in the area that all spoke it, that should in theory be the easiest thing I could pick. I felt certain I could make the template in person, even if implanting that knowledge into myself might be beyond me at the moment, but if I could do it to old memories? That would be unbelievably useful. It was staying on the whiteboard for sure, it couldn''t hurt to practice a little each day.


    It was hard for me to get into the right mindset, because I was too distracted by my need to get the hell out of the... prison? Fortress? Facility? I still didn''t know what it was actually for or which plane it was on, and had only seen a tiny bit of it. I reached out for the Common Local Understanding and realized I was pinging it for the concepts of freedom, or escape, of travel. Ugh. I tried to shift my thoughts, and felt myself start to...


    Did I fall asleep? Had I slept in my mind palace? I was low enough on mana that I had to drop the time difference so I''d have a little for my evening activities, and was holding a brass keyring with a single key on it. Huh. I felt... better. More relaxed. I was down to a two or three on the panic scale again, like zoning out while poking at the collective consciousness had centered me or something. I wanted to take a closer look and maybe unpack the keyring to get a better idea of what I''d put in there, but since I was out of mana I might not have time to put it all back and that could leave me back in a shitty mindset until tomorrow since our day was almost done.


    Sighing, I opened my eyes in the healing pod and climbed out. Physically, I felt great - if I''d tried to work out this much on Earth I would have done more harm than good, but with the frequent magical healing I was building muscle wiping out exhaustion as if I''d had a day off between every round. The pod was way better than the platform I''d had in the wagon, and probably guzzled mana; I imagined Hammersmith getting a mana bill at the end of the month and losing her shit. Really, if I understood correctly, it would be a report from someone in charge of maintaining and replacing mana batteries somewhere in the facility which was... pretty close to getting a bill, right?


    Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    I practiced throwing knives - my magic ones were gone but my swifly growing muscles were embedding them deeper and deeper into the targets - and then threw my last one at Hugh just in case he had let his guard down. He hadn''t, which meant the knife dropped straight down and clattered on the floor.


    "That was a lazy attempt," he said, "which tells me that you are becoming bored again, yes?"


    Every time he decided I was bored he would add some new challenge, and they all sucked. "Hugh, it''s been three weeks of non-stop fighting and working out. Of course I''m bored. But I''m bored of that stuff, so adding more of it isn''t going to help. I''m feeling less... squirmy... right now though, so maybe just give me some more time to work in my mind palace?"


    He chuckled. "Such an amusing name you''ve given it."


    "It''s a... memory technique, from my old home. Some people imagined a house or something and pictured information they wanted to remember being in some specific place. I tried it at some point, but it didn''t really work out. But this is similar, since it looks like places I know and my memories are stored there."


    He nodded. "I never was able to guess where you came from. You said it was not Agiodyne," that was - apparently - an island where a lot of the demigods hung out, "or anywhere on Calnon, or the moon, or any of the planes. I am running out of places to guess, yes? Hmm. Today... ah! Monduhile. It must be."


    "I''ve never heard of it, sorry."


    "From an ancient tale, about the creation of the world. The gods found an endless space, and in it a dead world. It had no magic, and yet life somehow survived there. Life so determined that it could exist without mana, without the touch of the gods, completely on its own surrounded by the void. And the gods saw humans there, without the spark of true life and magic. Hollow shells, struggling to survive, devoid of soul or mind. Out of... pity, or curiosity, or some unknowable desire of the gods... they took some and breathed magic into them and found that the creatures could hold it, and could possibly learn to use it. And so they created the planes, to find if these pathetic animals could adapt to a world with magic and learn to wield it.


    "Of course, even if the story is founded on truth there should not be any left on that barren rock. The gods would have collected them all, and any left behind would surely have died off over the ages without magic. But... if some had returned, some forgotten expedition, they could still be there. It would explain your lack of knowledge about the planes or magic, yes? I have not often thought of Monduhile, but I would have sooner had we completed our trip to Theramas together."


    "Oh yeah? Why is that?"


    "They have an orrery of the planes there that references it. Most visualizations of the planes put the prime plane at the center, yes? But the one in Theramas, it has a boulder at the center to symbolize the dead world the gods pulled us from."


    I remembered that. It was enormous, and Katrin had used it to explain the planes to me in more detail. Huh. Harmid had mentioned some creation myths being a possibility for Earth, and it did seem to meet the requirements I''d set forth - no magic, and not one of the planes.


    "Honestly, Hugh? That might be it. We don''t call it that, and it''s far from barren, but... could be that the gods collected people from there to make this place. It would explain a lot, actually. But nobody there knows about this place, or at least almost nobody."


    He looked thoughtful. "Can you show me? You shared a memory with me, before."


    "Yeah, not a problem. I''m low on mana but that doesn''t take much so long as I''m not doing any divination shit or fucking with time. I can''t do the divination thing there anyway, since the planes don''t overlap with it. Normally I''d keep it secret, but Hammersmith already knows a fair amount so... it might even be better to have someone not in the Empire know. You have to trust me on some stuff though, you have to... it would be really fucking bad for people to try and invade. My world would win, Hugh, and I like it here better."


    A bushy eyebrow raised all the way up. "You think some people from a dead world would defeat this one, when they have no magic?"


    "Yes. I mean, as long as they could establish a... I don''t know the imperial word for ''beachhead''. If they had a secure place to invade from, a portal you couldn''t get to and close easily. That would probably be the hard part for them, especially if people popped in from other planes to attack. But their regular soldiers would obliterate yours, and their weapons would probably overwhelm your magical barriers, and then... well, they''d learn magic after a while."


    He looked skeptical, so I just held out my hand.


    I decided to give him the same first view as Katrin, and we stepped out onto the observation deck of the Empire State building. Unlike Katrin, Hugh held it together. He just walked around for a bit, examining the view, and then nodded. "I see," he said, "and this is... just one city?"


    "I mean it''s a particularly big one, but yeah. There''s... I don''t know how to say the number of people. It''s too big, I genuinely don''t know if there''s a word for ''billion''. It''s like..." I did my base six conversions as best I could. I wrote it down, it was three hundred and forty, followed by ten zeros. I handed the paper to Hugh. "That''s how many people there are on this planet. I think, if I did the math right. But I''m pretty sure I did."


    He stared at the number for a long time, and then looked out across New York again. "I see."


    It was the most subdued I''d ever seen Hugh be.


    "Listen, that''s some heavy shit. Let me show you some fun stuff, or we can go to a memory of Erathik and you can take me on a tour and teach me some words."


    He nodded slowly. "I will not speak of this to anyone, for the time being. I will have to discuss it with the Primarch, but I will focus on the danger that the Endless Empire might seek to access it and encourage a treaty that requires both governments to maintain secrecy and not send any... exploratory missions... without protections in place for both worlds. But in the meantime, I realize now I have neglected an important tool in our training."


    Oh no. "No, Hugh, this is where I go to relax."


    "And now it can be where you go to practice skills we cannot in the training room, yes?"


    "Hugh you suck. I''m not a machine, I can''t do this all day every day."


    He nodded. "Not yet, you cannot. We will fix that. You are tangled in destiny, Calliope. I will see you become strong enough to sever those ties, should you wish."


    I perked up. That... wasn''t what I expected him to say. "Huh. Okay well... I do like the sound of that."


    "I thought you might. Now, let us go to Theramas, so you can attempt to scale the walls of the fortress. Then we will assess your swimming, your knot-tying... ah, and we can practice wilderness survival!"


    At least it seemed like the next six weeks would have some variety to them now. We didn''t have enough time to actually do all that stuff, but I popped him around to a few locations until he''d found some he wanted to use the next day. After that I booted him out of my head, and prepared to go back to my room for the night. I updated the whiteboard, and prepared to do my evening trick - it was one of the other goals I''d actually accomplished in the past few weeks. I picked a book I wanted to read, tucked it into my shirt, and clutched it as tightly as possible.


    "This book belongs with me," I muttered, "It''s part of my outfit. It''s an accessory."


    I stepped back to my body, and we left the training room. As we did, my mind and soul were snapped back into me by the wards - but I prevented my mind from fully overlapping with my body. As it had a few times before, my mind ended up floating alongside my body as we walked. I''d noticed, that first time in the library, that my mind had still been wearing clothes like it was in Ematse. And so, logically, it could bring other things with it.


    We made it back to the room and I carefully had my mind pull the book out and hold it open. I could only see it while my thread sight was up, but that had been taking less and less mana. I had at least another hour before I was completely drained. It would have been easier to just be in my mind to read, but for whatever reason the way to use the least mana was to leave my consciousness in my body and have my mind stand there all blank-faced and hold up the book, turning pages. It was creepy as hell, and reminded me of the other stray version of me that was wandering the halls of my memories with an equally blank expression.


    If I lost concentration too long, my mind would drift back to overlap my body and the book would be gone when I made it pop out again. Not the clothes though, so maybe there was a way to make things like the book more permanent with practice. It was already on the whiteboard. I settled in and watched as my mind turned to the page I''d left off at.


    "Six more weeks," I said to myself. "I can do this."