Chapter XV26.II.2025

The bus was rumbling through the air. Gravity came into effect as it decelerated, gracefully increasing with little to no jerk. The sparkling blue beauty of the Great Western Ocean dissolved into cloudy gray haze as the horizon was shrinking and flattening. It was heavily raining - and unseasonably chilly - in the city of Flora Luminaris.

Tayne waited for them to pop out to the other side of the clouds, but they never did. The fog beyond was so thick she couldn't even estimate the speed they were going up until, at some point, noticing faint silhouettes of sharp needle shapes gracefully crawling by only marginally below. And before she knew it, frosted glass windows popped up swooping by, and the bus docked - sticking itself to a chamber crowning the two-kilometer spire of the Sundown Gateway Spaceport. Naia quickly eigenspaced all the bags and pulled the family to exit.

An oval-shaped room the size of an airball field met them with crispy fresh air and reverbating echo from everything up to their own steps, melding together into a stream of noise on the border of cognition.

Naia led them to the edge of the room, to the outwards-sloping wall-window of thick double-layered glass. The inner layer turned out to be cold to touch, but not to the point of freezing; in the middle it had some bean-shaped porous rocks poured on a wide stretch of floor between for presumably water absorption. But it was the layer beyond which drew Tayne's attention.

From the outside, the chamber was covered all around in beautiful interlacing fractal patterns of frosted ice. They were blocking a good chunk of incoming light in such a way that what little came through highlighted the swirls, creating a luminous gray-on-white ornament that Tayne could've admired for ages. She pictured the patterns moving and saturated with hue for a bit, glimmering through colors in swirls of metacosmic chaos...

...and then thought about something.

"Mom, why are we going here again? I don't see any elevators around."

"Well," - smiled Naia, distracting from their sweet chattings with their wife, - "i have a great plan."

"It's an insane plan!" - playfully objected Komi.

"Indeed, but it doesn't make it less great now does it?" - Naia's eyes quickly flashed a joyful orange, then they continued, "you see, the great circle is in Sunshine Gate Park and that's all the way across the bay from here, in the ancient town. We can of course take the Nexus, or a bus, or a million other things, but why if I can be the family's loyal transport? Yes, we're a good two kilometers up, but I've been perfecting my barrier scripts for decades, we'll be completely fine."

Tayne focused and thought for a solid minute. On one hand, that was more or less standard procedure: Naia loved to fly places and carry their wife and kids around, so any phobias of altitude she had were long dead under normal circumstances. On another hand, a two kilometer-deep dive did not sound like normal circumstances, and besides...

"Aren't you going to make a big ugly hole in the wall and decompress the entire building?"

"Not if we leave through a docking hatch; these places sometimes have small ones for amateur aircrafts. I've sent some of my microbots to scan the area, and if they don't find one, I'll see if i can convince the local system to let us through one of the main gates."

Fair enough.

***

Freefalling through the clouds were not, in fact, normal circumstances for all of the three, so Naia had to adjust their acceleration to not be so freefally before the tower even had time to disappear in the fog.

Komi was riding their wife on the back Propellerson-style, strapped to them with some cleverly conjured safety belts, while Tayne - for a third time in the last two days - was carried on hands. A freezing slush of rain pattered on Naia's barrier, each droplet exploding into a million specks of water dust and thrown out of the current by fierce winds composing it.

Naia homed in on the target right through the fog, guided by infrared vision - so when they finally emerged from the cloud, they were already halfway there. Tayne began curiously looking around despite the curtain of water somewhat ruining the views.

They were crossing a large bay - the Sundown bay of Flora Luminaris - and its coasts were drenched in fog all around, though not enough to obstruct the buildings. Towers upon towers penetrating the clouds were behind them; Tayne saw cities of the second decamillenium on the big screen enough times to know they were probably piled up into a spiky mountain crowned with the chamber they took off from.

And ahead, separating the bay from the endless gray ocean, was a strip of land - or rather, two strips connected with a dim amber archbridge - housing the older city: a shattered roof-and-street maze of a prehistoric town, amorphous spots and polygonal bricks of forests, parks and crop fields, and a good million village houses in a multikilometer-spanning patchwork of grids resembling a crystal rock under a microscope.

Several rogue towers were emerging out of the forests, decapitated and covered in moss, with orchards on the balconies, vines melting down the walls veiling ancient murals and of course fungi, fungi, fungi - signalling to Tayne "hey, this place also used to be mostly covered in archon mounds for billions but we took care of it".

A park they were targeting didn't have any towers - instead it had a shimmering crystal dome in the middle with some unsual, irrational geometry dotted around the sides. Only when getting close did Tayne realise the geometry was the constructor's pipe dream of a water collection system - and only at point blank did she saw that the whole thing was holographic matter, conjured on the spot to shield the masses below from pouring rain. Naia's barrier went through it with ease.

The park clearing below, featuring a lone coniferous tree and a broken marble arch - two pillars, rather - under it, was covered in a thousand hues of carpets and blankets and absolutely full of archons situated all around. There were several large circles amidst the chaos of listeners and a slightly smaller one, going all around the tree: this was the meta circle moderating the discussion, while other were parallelised and distributed subsections of it. Way, way more archons were participating in such instances of the Circle on the Cosmarium, and there were small orbs around capturing and relaying the happening there - though with an expected latency for cross-universe ping.

A familiar orange figure of Wiktori sat on the tree a good five meters above the crowd, monitoring and controlling the orbs, joined by another hierophant: the sky-blue figure representing Espher, the complex algorithm for calculations behind bending space, which helped the Department of Logistics to manage the network of cosmic gates. It wasn't immediately obvious why they were here, but if Tayne had to guess launching an invasion across half the known Metacosmos would probably require a good bit of that space-bending.

The family's arrival threw a good bit of additional chaos into the mix. Naia haven't even touched the ground and the rounds of "hey, that's the first contacters!" already started circulating, diverting a fair bit of attention to them; their unusual entry method, of course, didn't help either. Tayne was suddenly feeling really awkward... and would've tried to disappear into the crowd were she not with parents.

Komi asked around, found where the task force was gathering and tuned in, while Naia went to present their thoughts to discussions behind invasion strategy and goals. Tayne though...

None of the issues on the field sounded like her area of expertise, which funny to assume she even had one. She was barely even of sufficient age to speak here, and speaking at all before gears that shift the whole of Cosmos - even when these gears casually sit in a park - was not something she pictured herself doing, like, ever. Local town circles maybe, planetary really unlikely, but not this.

She tried to go listen around to maybe hear anything, just anything, about Caithe - the rescue team is after her first, they should mention her - but to no avail. So she went to the very edge of the field, got some pancakes from the pancake registry and settled down under a tree. Stars she was so overwhelmed all of a sudden from all which was before her, the noise, the crowds...

...and then a starbell rang in the air, halting the noise in an instant. Everyone faced up looking to the arch, where Wiktori dismounted the tree and was now floating in the air.

"Global event!" - they proclaimed. - "Another scheduled report from the frontier team just arrived."

A quick minute later, with the metacircle passing the motion to hear the report immediately, whoever happened to hold its talking stick stood up, pointed it to the sky and pressed a button. The whole dome of arcane immediately blackened, and in a couple more moments - "chute, how do I turn on the glow on this thing" - a hologram appeared at the tip of the dome.

***

Step by step they were closing in on the fuzzy edge delimiting the known Metacosmos from the labytinths of the Great Outer Domain. They passed Anden 11 three hours ago - an hour being a measure of time entirely superficial to them, but native to the river of space they were uncoiling behind them - and were now firmly in the purple ring. Home to clots of horribly twisted space that leaked from the labyrinth in the constant fight against the current. Melted down and dissolved by frontiers of the metacosmic wind before they could ever reach the inner rings, here they were becoming more prominent by the step, fuzzing, obscuring and devouring any incoming ground-based observations.

By all predictions, the Starscape should have been hiding here, unable to drift any further after bumping into the irrecognizably twisted nonspace of beyond. Some theorised it should have began carving its own sphere of clean Metacosmos, worrying it'll float away through that, but all predictions showed such a process to take at least decades by its inner clock.

But it wasn't. If it was, they'd seen the outer wall by now.

Neither were the clots behaving in a regular pattern. Their distribution was supposed to be chaotic, noisy, but they formed a pattern, clearly swirling around something in a cyclopic tornado. Which the frontier team was heading right into the eye of.

Looking for answers, they dove all the way to Anden 12, up to the very edge of the known universe - and it wasn't looking right either. It was all smudged, squished, wavy, like someone threw a rock into it with unmatched speed and force. A reality-sized rock at that.

The intruders didn't just accelerate their ship - they somehow did it to their whole universe.

More like a bullet than a rock, it had torn through the maddening fabric of twists and thorns, pipes and vessels pumping nonexistance through the Great Outer Domain, and left a hole in the edge of it - half an anden wide, who knows how deep and blacker than black, leaking with slowly evaporating abyssal fumes of oblivion.

Extending the river of space, already the longest ever created, through possibly andens and andens of that would be far out of scope for modern day technology.

***

The message ended and Tayne got briefly blinded by the reappearance of light. She reflectively reached for her eyes and found her whole face wet of tears...

She heard about the great outer domain only a couple of times before - and got so horrified she never wanted to think about it again. It was seemingly a weird local anomaly surounding their bubble of metacosmos - nothing like that was ever found behind the Realm Door - and was only discovered in the last century or so, as no one before could have walked this far out. A rigid lump of trash, distortion and erasure of unknown scale, with unclear origins or function, it was really alien in the sparkling world of beyond. And worst of all it was as of yet painfully understudied.

And now that lump had Caithe.

Tayne stood up and walked forward without really looking around. Noise engulfed her from all sides, everyone talked without order, consumed by shock and frustration. The air was heavy all of a sudden, smelling like heavy rain and mud. Someone was loudly asking Espher about outer ring geometry. Someone was ringing a bell. Someone tried to stop her and ask if she was okay. Tayne did not care. Archons around were blending into an incoherent peripheral mass.

She looked for Komi for approximately two eternities, and finding - fell in on their laps and cried and cried for another two. Why. Just why. It wasn't fair. They were so close. What are they supposed to do now?...

"Tshhh..." - whispered Komi, ruffling their daughter's hair. - "We'll figure something out. No one's giving up."

"...but they said it's literally impossible..."

"They are only a dozen archons. Our Cosmos has a trillion. Even if we don't have a solution ready, we'll work our hardest to invent it. Everyone will."

"I always hated the outer ring," - Naia landed nearby. - "All of us did. The instant we make a good enough flamethrower to enlighten it away, we'll keep building the bridge. For light years if needed."

"...but Caithe..."

It could very well take years for a needed breakthrough. Everyone understood it. No one had a satisfying response. That was the worst.

And she couldn't help it in any way, either. She never could. She couldn't fight, she couldn't bend the metacosmos, she couldn't help advance the technology, and all relevant science was years of study above her general education...

It took her a whole evening to get out of this. Then another three days of crushing, immobilizing despair and doomscrolling, as the Circle was drawing to a close with no immediate results in sight. Only after these long days she revisited this last thought with enough rigor to think a step further.

She opened her mailbox with Lana and sent the following:

End of Act 1

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