Empyrean Bastion, Nadir Gateway | 4:51 PM | First Day

"I can't help but notice," Kam continued, after a few moments had passed, "that we seem to still be breathing."

I stared down at the hole, squinting just to make sure there really was no faint, reflective sheen between where we were standing and the space beyond that might indicate glass or a barrier, or if there were any anomalies with the view itself that might expose it as artificial. But, by every metric I could judge, it looked real.

"That... is funny, yes," I said.

Everyone stood there for a few moments, stunned by the surreality of the sight. Eventually, Ptolema, with an expression that straddled the line between curiosity and bafflement, stepped back into the area we'd just left for a moment, and retrieved a small chunk of debris from the ground. Then, stepping forward, she craned back her arm--

"H-Hold on," I said, turning in her direction. "What are you doing?"

She paused, seeming surprised by the interruption, and looked in my direction. "Uh, I was gonna throw a rock in there."

"Why?"

"Well, to see if it goes through, or stops, or whatever." She seemed confused by my line of questioning.

"But isn't that... Uh..."

Isn't that what? I thought to myself. Dangerous?

Well... Yes.

But why would it be dangerous, now that I was thinking about it? Assuming the laws of physics weren't just taking a break, then it was either an immaculately-calculated optical illusion or the product of an extremely fine-tuned enchantment, and neither of those would be threatened by something like a pebble. After all, if it was the latter, it was already holding steady in the face of a million times the pressure. And if it was the former... Then, well, it followed that there was nothing to break.

I couldn't think of a satisfying answer.

"Nevermind," I said. "Go ahead, I guess."

She shrugged, then flung her arm back again before, with characteristic athleticism, tossing the stone. Rather than hurling it straight down, she threw it horizontally, like you would if you were trying to skim a rock across the surface of a lake. It wasn't until the surprising result that I understood why she'd done this. The object passed through the hole without issue, but then, instead of losing momentum and dropping straight down, it continued on sideways in perpetuity, eventually becoming an indistinguishable dot that vanished amidst the black void.

In other words, anything that passed that threshold no longer under the influence of the bastion's artificed gravity. Not just a barrier, but a selective one. Whoever had done this had to be an incredibly accomplished Enchanter and Aetheromancer.

"Oh, wow," Ptolema said, "I wasn't expecting that to actually work."

"My goodness," Kamrusepa said, her voice becoming more intrigued now that she'd had a little time to process the situation. "If this is real, then... We must be right at the very bottom of the bastion. I had no idea we'd traveled that far down in the carriage and the elevator-- Look! You can see the Aetherbridge, there, too." She pointed.

My eyes followed her finger. Sure enough, off to the left, I could see the narrow, four-spined structure we'd left behind an hour earlier stretching downward towards the surface of the Mimikos. In fact, after a few moments had passed, I could make out one of the lifts descending, and then the area surrounding it blur before it flickered out of existence.

"Remarkable," Kam continued, wide-eyed. "How has no one noticed this place? It must be in plain sight from the exterior."

"They could be using some kind of illusion on the other side to conceal it," I suggested. "I can't imagine people would be giving the area a close look very often."

"You might be surprised," Ran said. "A group of arcanists inspect the outer walls of the whole structure once a month, to make sure there isn't any damage or anyone smuggling goods in from the Duumvirate. They'd definitely have noticed something like this."

"In that case," Kam said, "the order must have permission for this from the bastion's administrators?" She clicked her tongue. "Well, that or they're paying off leagues of people-- Though of course I'm not suggesting something so untoward," she quickly added.

"They'd need to do more than just pay people off," Ran said. "If we really are at the absolute bottom of the bastion, then there shouldn't be any gravity in this whole area to begin with. The runes they use for it are built into the floor about two thirds of the way down from the surface-level. That means this whole area would have had to have been enchanted separately... And to accomplish that, you'd need to take half the floor apart and reinforce it with bronze, so it could serve as a foundation for the gravity without cracking under the strain."

"Good heavens," Kam said. "I knew their resources were considerable, but..."

"What if this place already existed, and they just appropriated it?" I speculated, interrupting her as she trailed off. "You said the hall we were just in was rumored to be made by one of the original builders, Ran. Couldn't they have been the ones responsible for the artificed gravity?"

"I thought of that," Ran said, "but anything done in the Mourning Period probably wouldn't feel this consistent. It's almost indistinguishable from the upper levels."

That was true. Back the Empyrean Bastion was constructed, Aetheromancy was still in its infancy, and primarily functioned by crudely imitating techniques that used iron from the Imperial Era. It wouldn't have been able to produce a result like this.

When the Ironworkers had rebuilt reality following the collapse, they hadn't been able to do so perfectly. Other than the absence of iron, other natural forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism in general, could only be imitated rather than reproduced. This had caused many problems in the efforts to rebuild civilization, even up until the present day.

"Putting aside the gravity, how is any of this even possible?" Mehit asked, frowning at the sight. "What you said earlier... Can the Power do things like this? Keep the air in and stop us all from being pulled out into the void, even when there's nothing between us and it?"

"Nothing we're seeing is that complicated conceptually," Kam said. "I'm no expert, but one could certainly create a shield that would contain air but allow the passage of solid objects. Another enchantment could preserve the pressure and atmosphere." She held the side of a finger to her mouth. "But it must be wasting an absurd amount of eris to keep it all together. Far more so than an enclosed environment. I confess I'm rather curious to the specifics. She looked behind her. "Ran, would you--"

"Yeah," she said, not waiting for her to finish. "Sure."

Ran reached for her waist and withdrew her scepter, which she'd received during her graduation from Saoyu University. Like most things from the Arcanocracy, the design avoided frivolity, largely just looking like a plain, ivory rod, with the exception of a violet ribbon tied to the head that denoted her status. She held it in front of her.

Ran always spoke the words to her incantations with a kind of methodical firmness that, though still swift, was distinctive to her among our class. It was a reminder to me that, unlike everyone else here, she was not a 'natural' when it came to using the Power, but rather it was a skill she had cultivated over years of hard work.

"How the hell do you do it?" she asked me, in the back garden of my parents estate, close to a decade ago. A birdbath that my mother had bought on an impulse and then left to be overtaken by moss floated in the air before us, a product of a demonstration I'd been giving her a moment earlier. "It's like you open your mouth and the words flow out like water. How do you never mess up the pronunciations?"

"It's not as though I never mess up," I said. " But it's just... Always been easy, for some reason."

She shook her head, looking at me almost resentfully. "For me, it's like my tongue is made out of lead. If I lose focus, even for a moment, it falls apart. It's miserable."

"Why do you want to do it, then...?"

She looked at me, with the same expression in her eyes as when she'd first learned the truth about me. "Isn't that obvious?"

A n o m a l y - D i v i n i n g"...