The wind whistled in rolling gusts as it carried salt and the faint, briny smell of whatever deep-sea things churned up from below. The ship groaned with the strain, and the deck tilted beneath a heavy swell before righting itself. Overhead, the rigging creaked sharply as men shouted across the length of the vessel, adjusting lines, hauling canvas, and answering calls already half-swallowed by the wind.

Scarlett reached up and drew her shawl closer, pulling it tight around her shoulders to ward off an imagined chill that her pyrokinesis was already keeping at bay.

She stood by the quarterdeck, looking out over the water, watching white spray break off the waves while trying to fight back the boredom.

A deckhand drifted into her peripheral vision, tying off a coil of rope to a cleat as his gaze slid towards her. He lingered a little too long, inching closer as he finished.

“Cold, eh?” he drawled, flashing a smile that was missing just a couple of teeth too many. “An’ it must be dull, standin’ up here all by your lonesome. Pretty lady, what d’ya say to me—”

Scarlett raised her hand and flicked it towards him.

His smile froze with the rest of him as a sound like a hundred shattering vases resounded. The man—and the entire stretch of deck around him—flaked apart into thousands of colourless fragments, a mottled grey absence bleeding through the space he’d occupied like a wound upon reality.

Letting the Anomalous power settle back inside her, Scarlett turned back to the water.

She was getting sick of this.

It had been days. Literal days since she’d found herself trapped in this pseudo-Memory. The Other hadn’t bothered to help before disappearing, and she had lost all contact with Yamina, leaving her with no real way to get any information.

At first, she had tried plenty of things. She’d tried leaving the tavern. She’d tried calling out to Yamina. She’d even tried forcing the Memory to obey her through the Anomalous power. None of it had worked.

Yamina had warned her that this kind of uncharted magic could go wrong. Scarlett had accepted that much. Perhaps it was partly her fault, but she would have appreciated it if the wizard had at least bothered to explain exactly how it could go wrong — or what she was supposed to do if it did. Now she wasn’t even sure whether Yamina expected her to find her own way out, or whether she was meant to wait until someone managed to pull her free.

She’d originally hoped for the latter. By the end of the first day, though, she’d already had enough of waiting and started looking for a way to drag herself out instead.

Of all the possibilities she had considered, one had seemed the most sensible and likely to work. Which was how she had ended up stowing away aboard this ship as a passenger.

This Memory wasn’t like the ones she had grown used to in the Rising Isle, or the Echo where she had met Jahror. Those had been vivid, faithful impressions of events that had once happened, but they had also carried a real sense of life within them. This Memory’s scenes, however, only appeared to cover that first part. They were closer to crude reconstructions, interactive only in places, and far too brittle and artificial to truly respond to her. They were also far more jumbled.

For example, the tavern where she had first appeared had apparently been somewhere in Elystead’s Foreign Quarter. The moment she stepped outside, though, she’d found herself on some unrelated street in the Coins district. Follow that street for too long, and it either dissolved into a vast stretch of missing space swallowed by dark nothingness, or lurched and positioned her in another disconnected scene from some other part of the Coins or a neighbouring district. It was like walking through a map that had only loaded in halfway.

The same held true for the people. At first glance, they seemed no different from real ones, but given enough time, they would start to repeat themselves in loops, and too much interaction made them simply stare past her vacantly. Not that she could interact with most of them much to begin with. She was still only partially present here, and she’d noticed that those who managed to perceive her didn’t actually seem to see her, but rather some arbitrary stand-in. What conversations could be held were about as close to nonsensical as they could get from her point of view.

Altogether, it made for an increasingly maddening experience the longer it went on. Scarlett had spent a frustrating amount of time just trial-and-erroring her way to finding a ship leaving Elystead’s harbour and heading south along the Three Streams towards the Innisling Sea. Even then, she had half-expected it to fail the moment it reached the edge of the city.

Thankfully, it hadn’t. And so the last few days had been spent half-watching the empire’s heartlands slide by from the deck as the ship travelled south, catching intermittent stretches of river and countryside before whatever passed for continuity in this place failed again, leaving her staring into blank nothing until the scene managed to stitch itself back together.

But at least it did stitch itself back together. The man she had ‘deleted’ a moment ago would be back in an hour, and he would probably be harassing her again not long after that.

A shout rose from somewhere near the bow. Then another, taken up and passed along the deck. They didn’t sound particularly panicked, but they were clearly drawing attention to something.

Scarlett turned her head slightly, looking towards whatever had caught their notice.

Far to the south, the otherwise clear sky had changed. Dark clouds were massing along the horizon, growing denser towards their heart, and a long band of them stretched in from the east as though being dragged towards the same point.

She let out a slow breath.

Finally.

Another half day on this ship and she might have gone mad. She was pretty sure that if she’d been here in fully corporeal form, she would have spent half the voyage bent over the rail trying to keep her stomach from leaving through her throat. The constant rocking and the dead monotony of the journey had only further reinforced why she disliked the water.

She looked for a moment longer at the gathering clouds in the distance, then paused. Her expression darkened as relief gave way to irritated realisation.

…That was still very, very far away, wasn’t it?

Worse, the ship was almost certainly not heading that way. It had no reason to. It would keep going west instead, probably towards Voneia.

Which meant this was where she would have to get off.

A quiet sigh left her as she started climbing over the railing, letting her shawl slip loose and dissolve into the wind, the vague sensation of the clothes she wore shifting into something more comfortable to move in.

The ship lurched just as she stepped one foot over the side, but before she could fall, the water beneath rose to meet her, lifting into a flat surface that bore her weight without complaint. It lowered her gently to the sea, white foam churning against the small platform while she glanced back at the ship already leaving her behind.

No one on board noticed she was gone.

She turned, orienting herself towards the distant storm on the horizon.

Then she started walking, because there really wasn’t much else she could do. She had already tried using the [Eternal Flameweaver’s Athame] to teleport, but it didn’t work in this Memory. It only opened into more of that non-existent darkness.

The sea was actually pleasant enough when you weren’t trapped on a vessel, all things considered. The surface shifted beneath her feet in long, slow rolls that rose and fell with the waves, but her hydrokinesis compensated easily enough, and after a while she stopped noticing the motion altogether. It was almost like walking on a treadmill.

With nothing better to occupy her, she let her mind wander. Sometimes to useful things, sometimes to nothing at all. Being able to actually move her legs proved far better for passing the time than simply idling on the ship. That tedium had grown so unbearable that, at one point, she had seriously started trying to remember and mentally recite all of Rosa’s songs, including some of the more indecent ones.

It took a long while before she even started getting close to the dark clouds. She didn’t even bother keeping track of time, though she did briefly have the idiotic idea of trying to calculate the distance from what she remembered of basic geometry, only to realise with mild horror that the clouds might rise so high above the horizon that she had no reliable way of judging how far away they actually were.

For all she knew, they could have been literal days away.

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Thankfully, she did notice the distance closing as she walked. She suspected the unstable nature of the Memory had something to do with that, because at times the waves seemed to stutter around her, and it felt as though she might have stepped from one scene into the next. It was hard to tell for certain, though, and there were no visible breaks of dark nothingness.

Regardless, she was more than relieved when she finally reached the first of the dark clouds, after far longer than she cared to think about. She didn’t even mind the stronger winds or the rougher waves that rose around her, nor the flickers of lightning that crackled in the pitch-black clouds further ahead.

The storm deepened as she pressed onwards. Her surroundings also grew darker, and she had to start relying on her pyrokinesis to light the water directly beneath her while using the intermittent lightning as her guide forward, but she didn’t mind that either.

The only thing that she did mind was the small, persistent unease at the back of her mind that whispered about something in the depths beneath noticing her and rising, but she dismissed it as unlikely. If not even the people here could properly interact with her, she doubted there’d be some wandering leviathan lurking under the waves solely to trouble her.

She had reached the outer edge of the storm, where the winds began to grow strong for real, and the waves were violent enough that she had to actively calm them around herself, when she finally spotted her destination.

Caught in the recurrent glare of lightning, a black spire of stone rose among the waters, ensnared by storm clouds that twisted towards its crown from all directions.

The Forgotten Tower.

This was the solution Scarlett had arrived at when trying to work out how to escape this place. The reasoning was simple enough. This Memory was unstable and incomplete, so if there was anywhere in the world she might find a natural way out, it would be here, where the Material Realm was thinner and more distorted than anywhere else. And since this was also the place where she was in the real world, she thought that might help as well.

It was a good thing she spotted the Tower when she did. For reasons she didn’t quite understand, even if other forms of exhaustion didn’t seem to affect her in this state, her mana reserves still did, and they were beginning to drain at a much more noticeable rate the more she had to fight against the storm.

Now that her goal was in sight, it couldn’t be more than a dozen or so kilometres away at most. She’d paced herself until now because she hadn’t known how much farther she would need to go, but that didn’t matter any longer.

The water beneath her shifted, rising as it began to drive her forward. It started slowly, then gradually built in speed, accelerating as the winds tearing at her increased in force. A barrier of water surged to protect her, and she fixed her full attention on the dark tower ahead.

The raging maelstrom only grew worse the closer she came, and as she neared the base of the tower, she saw that the sea funnelled downwards in a vast whirlpool while lightning thundered all around her, striking the waves and the shapes moving within them. Yet none of it touched her.

Stopping at the edge of the vortex, she gazed up at the tower.

She let the water beneath her sink, and instead, a single step rose before her as she placed her foot on it. Keeping the barrier intact around herself, she shaped a stair from the water and climbed towards the Forgotten Tower.

Soon, its wall stood before her, and she let the barrier split as she placed a hand flat against the age-old stone, weathered by unending storms across countless generations and yet still standing.

Usually, the Forgotten Tower wasn’t a place you could simply walk up to and enter. Not in the game, and not in this world. But this Memory wasn’t entirely stable, and Scarlett had thought of a way that would probably work.

The Anomalous power surged inside her, gathering towards her hand. It rarely found the opportunity to be released, and it had been eager for every chance she had given it. The stone before her quickly began to flake away into mottled grey.

Scarlett braced herself.

Her thought was that she could use this either to tear a way into the Tower itself, or to break the current ‘scene’ and force herself into the neighbouring one, which was hopefully inside it. As long as one of those worked, she could—

She blinked.

The crash of thunder and howl of wind were gone, replaced by the soft touch of a mild breeze, distant birdsong, and the feel of grass beneath her feet.

She glanced down.

At least it looked like grass, but the colour was such a deep, saturated green that she wasn’t even sure she was seeing it right.

She turned slowly, taking stock of her new location. Above stretched a dark, indigo sky with no visible sun, the light instead seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. She stood in a small clearing surrounded by tall trees with strangely warped proportions, their trunks too narrow and their tangled crowns hemming the space in like watching walls.

The abrupt shift had caught her off guard, but it didn’t take long for her to realise where she was.

The Wandering Realm.

That…probably made sense. The Forgotten Tower was a kind of crossroads between realms, after all. If what she had done was break into a scene of the Memory adjacent to the one she’d been in, then maybe this was exactly where she should have ended up. From her own body, she could at the very least confirm that she was still in the Memory.

The question now was where exactly in the Wandering Realm she had ended up. There were a few possibilities, based on what she knew from the game.

Just as she started going over them in her head, she heard the laughter.

A child’s. Sweet and echoing, it came from somewhere among the trees, close enough that she should have noticed someone approaching.

Every part of her tensed.

She didn’t move.

The laughter came again, from a different place this time. It skipped around the clearing, sounding first from one side, then another, then from somewhere that felt impossibly close.

Then it stopped.

Scarlett turned.

A mask filled her vision. Violet, yellow, turquoise, and red swirled across its surface in smeared, vivid patterns. It was larger than her head and hung upside down in front of her, the absent mouth made all the worse by the thin white eyes, half-lidded as though in lazy amusement.

It floated at eye level with her, and above it hung a patch of darkness shaped roughly like a small, childlike figure, though its details shifted when she tried to look at them directly. Around them, spreading in a ring, the green grass had turned the colour of old bone.

Without meaning to, Scarlett took a step back. Her heel found different ground, softer, but she barely registered it. Her attention was fixed entirely on the being in front of her.

That was Juham.

Which meant she was inside the Forest of Consciousness.

Her hands rose on instinct. Mana and Anomalous power flared together at once, readying to defend her even as she prayed she wouldn’t have to.

She had become strong. There was no doubt about it. But she was inside the Idol’s own domain. Beings like this were almost impossible to kill there. It was the same reason a proper Vile had never been slain within its own Blaze by a god or anything but another Vile. Creatures like these were, for all practical purposes, one with their realms.

Her only real edge was that she could still use Anomalous power here.

Juham spun in the air, the mask righting itself as its half-lidded eyes settled on Scarlett and its small dark body swayed loosely beneath it. That same sweet laughter drifted out again.

There was something in the sound that Scarlett couldn’t quite place. Something she tried not to dwell on, yet it pressed in across the clearing all the same, crowding against her as though the whole world threatened to fold inwards, reduced to this tiny patch of ground while everything beyond it fell away into darkness.

Juham drifted half a pace closer.

Scarlett tried to take another step back, but her foot wouldn’t move. She looked down and found her boots planted among half-buried wooden masks. Thin, pale things layered over one another like fallen leaves. Her heel had sunk into one of them, and now they had shifted around her foot, overlapping and pressing in from every side.

A fire sprang to life above Scarlett’s right hand. Grey-white Anomalous energy coiled above her left. She snapped her gaze back to Juham, preparing—

Everything stopped.

A charged lull settled over the clearing.

Juham’s mask tilted upward.

Scarlett’s gaze followed it.

In the sky above them, a single massive eye watched them both. Its deep blue iris was strewn with tiny lustres, as if it was hiding the stars of the night sky within it, and the elongated pupil at its centre was threaded through with strands of white like lightning, drawing towards whatever it beheld.

It was truly massive. Impossibly large in a way that didn’t make sense when she tried to hold it in her head. It covered the whole sky, and yet Scarlett could still take it in all at once, as if it hung only just above the clearing.

Its attention was fixed on Juham.

A peal of children’s laughter rang out, and the half-lidded eyes on the Idol’s mask slowly closed. Then Juham glanced once at Scarlett before rolling in the air to hang upside down again.

The next time Scarlett blinked, the Idol was gone.

Her foot was free, too, and the clearing had returned to how it had looked when she first arrived.

The eye above shifted its focus to her.

Scarlett met its gaze, holding herself still.

Then she remembered it.

This was the same eye she had seen once before in Abelard’s Doll Mansion. An unknown Idol peering at her through a tear into the Wandering Realm.

“...Did you know I would be here?” she tried asking.

The eye didn’t respond. Just like the last time she had seen it, it merely watched her. The only thing she could tell was that it wasn’t hostile.

Something shifted in the air around her. It wasn’t invasive. More like a hand carefully placing something into an open palm. A warmth settled against her shoulder, vague and incredibly slight, barely there.

She glanced at it. It was just a smear of light. Nothing more. It rested against her like it belonged there, but she had no idea what it was.

When she looked back up, the eye was already gone, and the unnatural sky above had returned to its previous indigo.

“Wait—” Scarlett began, but when she blinked again, her surroundings changed.

She nearly stumbled as her foot came down on solid stone. Looking around, she recognised that she was inside the Forgotten Tower now, in the very chamber where Yamina had performed the ritual that had sent her into this Memory. It stood empty, save for a single indistinct figure at its centre.

She couldn’t make out the details, but even so, she knew it was her own body.

That Idol had brought her exactly where she wanted to go.

She glanced at her shoulder again, seeing that same vague light there, then turned and approached her body. Stopping in front of it, she reached out a hand—

The instant her fingers touched it, her vision lurched, and she found herself on her hands and knees as reality hit her like she’d stepped out of a warm bath into winter air.

She pulled in a slow breath and held it.

“Scarlett!” a voice cried out.

Lifting her head slightly, she saw Kat hurrying towards her, while Fynn pushed himself up from the floor nearby.

Kat reached her first, catching hold of her arm and helping her upright. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Scarlett said, letting herself be pulled to her feet, but her eyes went straight to her shoulder. She stilled when she saw that what had been resting there was no longer just a vague light, but a thin, luminescent figure.

It was no bigger than her hand, a tiny humanoid figure with long limbs, sharp edges, and translucent wings of pale blue-white light. Its outline blurred softly into the air, and somewhere within it shimmered the same star-like lustre she had seen in the great eye. Perched on her shoulder, it watched Scarlett curiously with two tiny points of white light for eyes.

[Sprite of the Fey (Unique)]

{A token of a debt owed and a debt due. The powers of an Idol flow through this sprite, carrying its will}