The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3

Cosmic Jigsaw

Published 17 April 2026

Honourless learned the day they crash-landed in San Francisco that, by staring closely at the transient flickers in the translation glass, she can sometimes make out connotations of the word that it doesn’t otherwise signify—fragments of the mind that wrote it.

When she first parsed the tangle of scrawlings in that sketchbook, the halo of text around Moscow revealed cold and riverine written in her own language, from her own memory of Ghosting trips to the Spire.

Surely the place called Moscow is not much like the Spire, but the connection persists as she soars across the gaps between space and time.h1>Jigsaw

Honourless learned the day they crash-landed in San Francisco that, by staring closely at the transiently flickers in the translation glass, she can sometimes make out some of the connotations of the word that it doesn’t otherwise signify—fragments of the mind that wrote it.

Surely the place called Moscow is not much like the Spire, but the connection persists as she soars across the gaps between space and time, light as paper in a breeze by her lonesome, saying the name of Sanjaya Hartono as she descends into Artur’s world.

She bursts from the in-between and crashes onto the dust-caked wagon of some vehicle boxed in by cracked wooden walls. Her legs knock empty canisters over with a racket like drums. The air rolls in through the cracks, thick and hot.

Honourless groans as she props herself upright, peering out the cracks to see an expanse of red dust. If she were asked to picture the opposite of the Spire, this is what her mind wold conjure.

“Alright…let’s do this the long way,” she mutters, sweat already beading on the sides of her face. A little rummaging with her hands in the dimness finds her an electric torch sitting atop a can of paint under the fabric cover—similar to the ones she has seen Vesper’s compatriots use. Plucking it from its rusted cranny, she leaps to her feet, and back into Felix’s San Francisco.

Without her entourage, she can chain leaps together without breaking a sweat, though she forgets a few more names on the way. If any world has an Academy of Military Sciences like Artur’s, it would be the one in the other direction from their lodgings—Adelaide’s.

Stumbling to a halt on bare grey paving rock, Honourless finds herself on the threshold of a surly fortress with a plaque on the front wall. When she sweeps her lens over it, her heart leaps: it bears the name of her destination. This text does not flicker in the glass: its meaning is sure as stone.

In this version of Moscow, on the streets outside the Academy, the pavements are dressed in the colours of summer, not quite time for the snow to fall yet, but the chill tells her it may be soon.

The trees are waving gently, and she strings two more leaps together—one backward into Felix’s Moscow, where the sky is as grey and the walls are red brick, and then another forward—back into Adelaide’s world, landing in the vaults of a library where the shelves tower higher than her head.

The air is thin and cold here. The only sound is of feet shuffle through the aisles and pages turning, sometimes indistinguishable. Honourless picks up a book and makes a show of reading as she wanders through the maze, peeking over the page’s edges, until she finds herself facing a thick wooden door with a plaque that reads Limited Access.

Her eyebrows rise. Stepping backward to the closest shelf to put her book down, she inhales—and makes another zigzag jump, again via Felix’s Moscow, centring all her thoughts on the Moscow Academy’s Limited Access section. Like when she found Blackrain’s coronet, she skirts across the worlds and narrows in on the heart where the secret is housed.

She is in the Limited Access room in Adelaide’s Moscow. It is like an archival box in here, so dry that breathing starts to hurt. Only one light is turned on. Here, the books are sparser, but a large, forbidding door, featureless and black, stares at her from beside the counter. She waves the glass over it. A “secure dry room”…

A hop forward, a skip back. She is in the Academy’s dry room, and the interior is even darker than the door. She turns on the torch and picks up her scrying glass, stooping to scan the multitude of books housed inside a variety of glass cabinets. The selection here is narrow, and some of these tomes look older than herself. She sees ones about cities and countries with alien names. There are documents of military strategy and weapons research well beyond her comprehension. Records of secret operations in wars bloodier than she can imagine.

“Moscow Academy of Military Science, dry room,” she says. “A book by ‘Sanjaya Hartono’…” Even as she speaks those words, she squeezes her eyes shut and focuses on the concept of something she will soon forget, making the leap two worlds down.

When Honourless lands in that darkened place, the stench tackles her like a beast. The rankness of death and dust pervades everything—even for one who has no fear of corpses, it is enough to make her gag. Then the cold pierces into her awareness, so frigid it burns when she touches the fallen metal shelves.

She flicks her stolen torch on, the beam blazing through the cobwebs and wreckage. An eyeless skull stares at her from atop its spine, propped against a collapsed bookshelf like a coatrack for cobwebs.

She points the torch overhead and sees that the ceiling has caved into a triangle, an avalanche of books lost under a pile of stones. There are only thin cracks of light from the outside, but whatever pierces through is dim and red.

Briefly, Honourless feels a cold sweat break out. She cannot feel what Vesper does, but she remembers Hong Yi’s warnings all too clearly. There is a wrongness to the colour of the light.

She sweeps her torch once over the wreckage of pages and spines, the tattered white sheaves scattered like snow all over the shattered ground.

Here a crumbling wall separates the hall from what was once a smaller adjoining room, now no longer solid, easily crossed.

She can tell it is the same dry room because of the rows of defunct cabinets, their glass doors smashed and caved under the rubble.

As Honourless creeps over the piles of rubble, her foot kicks a book. She glances down, sweeping her translation glass over their covers. Dark matter. Coups in the Kremlin. None by Sanjaya Hartono.

She kneels on the ground and routs through the dust and rubble, tucking the torch between her head and her shoulder. She nudges a bony leg aside, some of the rank flesh still decaying in the dusty cold.

For lonely hours, she picks through the debris on her knees. It almost feels as if she were born for this task. She spent two decades marking days on a tree, picking reptile bones bare of flesh. She could keep searching for a year if she so pleased, pushing shards of the wall aside to uncover ever more multitudes of books.

But this task does not take a year. Five hours into her hunt, with knees and palms scuffed, she picks up a metal rod off a book and waves the torch and lens over its cover.

And there is its author: Sanjaya Hartono, every character matching the shapes of the ones on the scrap in her pocket.

“I almost thought you would be harder to find,” she murmurs, dusting the layer of dust from its soft cover. The cold has preserved it, but even the cold could not keep all the mould from the pages. Orobelle will simply have to deal with it.

Orobelle smells Honourless before she sees her. Her stench permeates the air, becoming pudding-thick as she opens the door. Staring up at the gaunt woman clutching a mouldy paperback book in her hands, Orobelle suddenly wishes that she could rip scents out of her nose.

“Where in the Light’s name have you been?” she snaps.

“Searching for your book,” Honourless answers flatly, tossing the book at her. She screeches as it hits her, and her fingers recoil when she snatches the dusty, grimy cover with stains of old blood splashed across the words. “I know you won’t thank me, but at least leave me be.”

Orobelle draws her lips into a line. “Thank you,” she snarls. “Now take a bath, you smell like a graveyard.”

Dorian is beside her by then, almost on cue. The Duchess hands him the book with a two-finger grip. “Hold it for me,” she says, trading it for the translation glass he has brought.

“Of course, my duchess.”

Frowning as he rotates it to face her, Orobelle peers over the cover. A Critique of Theories of the Light. She inspects the half moulded author name to see it is the same as in the sketchbook.

“Dorian, could you clean the cover?”

“Certainly.”

It is short work for him. He rummages for one of her unused silk handkerchiefs and rubs out whatever mould he can find with a drop from her bottle of liquid sanitation. Then, giving a satisfied nod, he brings it back.

“Now, let me read it.”

Page by page, Dorian turns on command.

The cleaning has done little to remove the staining of mould on many pages, but even with the blotches obscuring segments of every leaf, it makes for riveting reading.

It begins with an account of falling down a tunnel, much like the one in World Three. It is, Orobelle realises quickly, not merely a critique of scientific theory. Her heart begins to pound harder with every opening paragraph of every chapter. She recognises every hypothesis it comments on, point for point. It is a critique of the Scripture of the Light—the definitive document of her powers as Knot of Worlds.

The scripture claims that the Knot of Worlds was once unanchored, but now cannot hold unless attached to a human being. I must say that the idea that a single individual can hold the universe’s existence in balance is absurd. That is not to mention the even more absurd notion of the Cores. How should the sum of eight consciousnesses reduce the strain on such a Knot of Worlds? It makes no physical or even metaphysical sense.

I am not suggesting that the Scripture is wrong, and in any case, I would rather no one wagered the existence of the multiverse on the supposition of the Scripture’s unsoundness. It is true that the sentient, self-aware human psyche is a very powerful thing; the existence of Travellers alone proves it. But is their purpose really to preserve existence? Why so convoluted of an arrangement to ascertain so important of a thing?

There must either be an explanation I have yet to remotely comprehend, or it is all a grand fraud, and I cannot say which one frightens me more.

It is like peering at her own heart, watching its veins and chambers distend. She is drowning in a vertigo that does not fade even as she closes those moulded covers.

“Dorian…” she mumbles. “See to it that Honourless is ready for the retrievals.”

“Of course. How shall I do so?”

“Ask her.”

It is easy going for Honourless for the next four days: dinners of meat and salad, mornings sleeping well past sunrise, forays out into the city funded by the change she has wrung out of Orobelle with the help of Dorian’s pleading.

For the sake of the tenuous trust between herself and the duchess, she does not Ghost without asking. One more bleeding month and I’m out of here.

All too quickly, it is time for the rescue, or so she refers to it in her mind. There is some satisfaction indeed to knowing that she may hold Orobelle's plan hostage if she so pleases.

But lately, Honourless finds herself with a growing complicity in the project. It is more than just knowing Orobelle is her only pathway to acquittal. It is, she must grudgingly admit, that she cares for these lives that the duchess has gathered under her command. They are a mess. They are lonely. They are trying their best. Herself included.

They lean on her, and she leans on them.

This is what she thinks as she launches herself across the breach into the world beyond, readying herself to find what she may.

Vesper, Marcia and Felix are seated in the mezzanine gallery of the Astonia’s tea house with a singularly opulent meal laid before them. “High tea” is insufficient to describe it; there are truffles with the cheese and the souffle is dusted in gold flakes. The house itself is all glass and carved hardwood, crystal lights hanging from every corner.

Despite her distaste for the shameless excess, Vesper cannot complain about the tea, which is smooth as silk and fragrant as the leaf with which it was brewed.

“What do you think?” Felix declares, taking a sip of his own cup.

Marcia bites down on a cracker with cheese and a halved olive. “Better than the food in the villa of Gaian.”

“Gaian?”

“The emperor's son in my time.”

Vesper chuckles. “Better food than an emperor's son offers. Are you quite sure you aren't a lord, Mercer?”

Before Felix can answer, there is a cacophonous crash of wood that tears the quiet in two, a few screams erupting in its wake. From the air, a tangle of limbs and clothing quite ill suited to the setting collapses from the air, bangs an elbow against their table's wooden edge, knocks an empty chair to the ground, and crumples to the chequered tiles beside it.

“Honourless?” gasps Marcia, and she is right: from the pile pokes Honourless’ head, and then she untangles herself from Marcia’s chair leg and groans, rubbing her elbow. She mumbles something, which Marcia interprets for the table: “She says it's time to go.”

“Surely not,” gasps Felix, gesturing at the spread before them. “We have only just started.”

Marcia turns to Honourless. “He wants to finish the meal. You know, very exotic food. He's paying an arm and a leg for it. And I will say…” She picks up a cheese knife and a cracker and slices another piece. “It is quite excellent, try it.” She hands the cheese-laden cracker to a gaping Honourless. “Oh, don't forget.” She picks up a half-olive and places it on top.

Honourless spares a moment for blinking, then takes the cracker and puts it whole into her mouth. She chews and swallows in a matter of seconds and grins, speaking again.

“Does she care to join us?” asks Vesper, and Felix nods his assent, gesturing at the chair facing him.

Honourless does not complain one whit as she seats herself with them and begins partaking of the meal. It is a pleasant half-hour indeed, with all the boons of good company: conversation, humour, and the distinct sense on Vesper’s part that some jokes are flying over her head.

Felix pays at a counter girt by gold-leafed pillars, as he promised to. Then, taking Honourless’ hands in a tight ring, they leave the teahouse and all of New York behind, a little sorry to go, but quite satisfied, nevertheless.

Screeee! Sirens are wailing across the water. Specks of red and blue flash in their peripheral vision.

“Left!” Hong Yi yells. “Turn left, they're coming from the right—”

“For the last time, it's port and starboard!” Artur answers, but yanks the helm far to port as the white vessels jet towards them.

“There’s more! Oh my god, oh my god,” Hong Yi gasps as a flock of police jetskis swarm from either side. Adelaide is curled up on the floor, the supplies carrier repurposed as a sick bag. The boat makes another lurch, spinning to face the open horizon once more.

“This will be easier if you don't shout like that!” Artur roars.

“I’ve never been on the run from the law before!”

“Me too!”

Then there is an explosion of fabric—a shirt and cargo pants and long scarred limbs. Like a phantom, Honourless materialises in the cabin. She takes one look about, and her eyes widen when Hong Yi pounces and hugs her arm, saying, “Please, Honourless, get us out of here!”

“She's here? Good!” The jetskis are gliding inward across the waves, their sirens blaring on the wind.

Though Honourless cannot understand a lick of Hong Yi’s words, she seems to get the message once Artur kills the engine and the boat skids to a crawl. Like vultures smelling carrion, the police swerve towards them, their helmeted heads bobbing as they plane over the waves.

Honourless takes a dizzily swaying Adelaide’s shoulder, then extends the arm Hong Yi is already grasping to snatch Artur’s hand.

“Asith,” she declares, and they wink out of Adelaide’s universe, leaving an empty yacht behind.

Artur, Adelaide, Hong Yi, and Honourless land in a pile at the door to the San Francisco City Hotel. All at once, the screams of sirens, the chug of the yacht engine, the gush of waves—all are replaced by the click-clack of wheeled carriages and the clanging of machinery on the piers.

They look at each other and grin, and then laugh, Hong Yi dragging the other three into a celebratory hug before Honourless clears her throat and points into the lobby.

There is no time to await the elevator: they dash up the stairs, still hopped up on adrenaline, bursting into Orobelle’s room.

Marcia, Felix, and Vesper are already there, looking almost a world away in disposition—pensive and in easy conversation. “Oh, there you are!” Vesper declares, rising from the couch—only to be tackled with a hug from Hong Yi. “Blimey, what's the matter?”

“I thought for sure we were going to get rounded up by the cops!”

“Cops?” Vesper gasps.

Artur pokes his head over Hong Yi’s shoulder. “We stole a boat.”

As Vesper’s eyes widen, Hong Yi bursts out laughing, clutching his forehead. “Oh, god, it's a long story. How did you go?”

“Other than the stab wound and the overpriced cabs, pretty well.”

He steps back. “Stab wound? Hello?”

She chuckles sheepishly. “It wasn't the worst I've had. And Marcia patched me up in a jiffy. She really is something else.” They both cast a meaningful glance in her direction, but she is still talking to Felix and Adelaide.

“Well, I can't wait to catch up. For now, I think I need to stretch my legs, we've been on a boat for five hours.”

“I’ll join you,” says Artur with a clap on his back. “A walk is good.”

Vesper folds her arms. “And you could explain how you wound up on a boat for five hours.”

As the trio begin to stroll up the hallway, Hong Yi says, “It was a lot more than five hours, actually. So, the whole thing started on the street in the city of Dalian…”

When Adelaide reaches the top of the stairs, she leans against the wall and draws a huge breath. She follows with glazed eyes as the rest gather in Orobelle’s room, their voices rolling over her. All she wants right now is a seat…

A seat presents itself, in the form of the room couch. She stumbles towards it and drops onto a corner of the upholstery.

“Ah, Adelaide,” says Marcia from her right. “Did I say your name right?”

“You can call me Addie,” she mumbles.

“Addie. Are you well?”

“No,” she replies, leaning back against the leather cushioning, head sinking in among the tassels of the throw blanket. “We were on a boat, fleeing from the law. It was going really fast.”

“Oh, they never did agree with me either, boats,” Marcia says, laying a hand on Adelaide's forearm. All at once, like a puddle evaporating, her head begins to clear. Only then does she notice her companion watching attentively with an emotion she cannot identify. “You could probably do this for yourself, too. Hong Yi told me about your abilities.”

“I guess I could? It would be slower, but…”

“Addie!” She hears Felix before she sees him, and by then he has descended to a crouch beside her. “Are you all right? You look worse for wear.”

“I just got off a horrible boat ride,” she mumbles. “We were fleeing the coast guard…”

“Fleeing the coast guard! And I thought we got up to no good.”

Marcia smiles. “Oh, Felix, don't be so polite, come sit with your darling.”

He rubs his forehead. “Marcia, please—”

But Marcia sidles away to make room, tugging on Adelaide's arm so she does the same. “You could use the rest yourself, no? After the stabbing?”

“Marcia! Don't—”

Adelaide's eyes go very round. “You got stabbed? Where?”

Sighing, he lifts his chin and pulls down his collar to show her where the scab is streaked across his skin. “I ruined a good shirt is what I did.”

She reaches out to steady his shoulder, leaning to look. She sees him swallow. It is worse than any wound she has sustained before, the skin inflamed around the injury. “Oh no, that looks bad,” she murmurs.

Felix shakes his head. “Marcia assures me it is only a scratch.”

“Could I—help you fix it?”

“You could?” he breathes.

Out of the corner of her eye, Adelaide sees Marcia shoot her a grin. “Yes,” she exclaims, then her voice shrinks. “I want to get used to doing it. I know what I’m capable of, I've just been afraid. To use my powers on anyone but myself.”

“Then I would gladly be your subject,” Felix answers with startling steadiness.

Shivers take over her body, and she looks away in case he can read her feelings from her face.

“Well, you are in capable hands,” Marcia says. “Perhaps what you need now is to retire to your room.”

Adelaide and Felix exchange a fleeting glance. “Perhaps Marcia is right,” says the latter. But Adelaide is first to rise.

For the entire walk, her thoughts ramble in circles. What possessed her to suggest this? Was it Marcia’s encouragement? Was it the sight of him after ten days apart? Was it the terror at seeing such a wound? He can do without healing—assuming she can even pull it off.

Whatever the case, they make it to the hotel room without Adelaide crumpling into a ball. They slip through the door, then she stops just inside, and Felix carries on inward, turning to look at her. “Where do you need me?’

“Oh—on your bed—should work.”

He uncomplainingly sets himself down on the edge of his bed, watching her as she arrives beside him. “If I may be so rude, could you explain how this will work?”

“Well…” She, too, lowers herself onto the bed as he reclines. “Did you know that all your cells have almost exactly the same genetic content? Your skin, your bones…every tissue has the blueprints to become every other, to make every material in your body. Because of that, I can return the healed skin to its original form.”

A curious smile slips onto his face. “That is slightly beyond my comprehension, but consider me astonished,” he murmurs. She reaches out shakily towards the fading wound, but flinches before her fingers can meet his skin. “What’s the matter?” he asks.

“I just—don't want to hurt you.”

“You need not do anything you fear,” he replies. “But I have seen how you have changed yourself and I have perfect trust in your skills.”

Felix’s gaze burns through her face. Adelaide cannot keep looking. When her fingers finally meet his collarbone, he draws a sharp breath, and so does she. “Sorry, did I touch a sore spot?”

He shakes his head. “Not at all—please carry on.”

Her fingers press on the pinkness around the scab. She finds—and it is easy to tell because she knows her own wounds—that the healing scar has done its job of staunching a breakage in the skin.

Her fingers press and probe, finding different parts of the wound. It is like reading a tale aloud, changing the way the words are said, softer or louder, impassioned or morose, except the words signify the colour of hair, the age of skin, the speed at which it consumes the nutrients in blood.

Again, he is a book wide open for her reading, but this time she is writing her notes in the margins. Touch by touch, she changes the expression of the scar tissue to be more like the neighbouring cells. A lump is forming in her throat, from shame and guilt and rapt exhilaration.

As Adelaide does her work, Felix closes his eyes. Then she starts to notice it is not just the skin around the scar that is reddened now, but the rest of his neck and his face. Her fingers recoil and she cries, “Are you alright? You shouldn’t be having a reaction.”

At once his eyes snap open. “Y-yes. I'm feeling perfectly fine. Don’t you worry.”

There isn't much left of the wound, and nothing has yet to go wrong that she can identify. She presses her finger to the one part where the scab is still clinging, and translates that, too. Blood roars in her ears.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. She isn't supposed to do this. But she is allowed to. No, she can do this. He allowed it.

Retracting her hand at last, Adelaide sits back and lays it on her lap, blowing out a long breath through her lips. Felix brushes the scar, jolting out of his recline. “Oh!” he exclaims. “There's barely anything left.”

“Do you feel okay?”

“I’m delighted! And curious—to see what else you can do. Not that I would inconvenience you to perform further, er, demonstrations.”

He says this with such enthusiasm that her body lights up like a pyre. “T…thank you. I guess we are done here.” She makes to stand, but is halted by his hand tugging on her wrist. Her gaze flies to him. “Was there something else?”

“No,” he answers with a tender smile. “I just wanted to say…Adelaide, you never cease to amaze me.”

“Felix—I—” Longing pierces her heart, a sensation she's growing familiar with. She thinks of Hong Yi’s words. And Marcia’s. “I’m—feeling so many things right now. And I’m not sure what to do about them.”

That is not how she meant for those words to come out. “I’m sorry,” he answers quickly. “I didn't mean to…”

“Don't apologise!” Adelaide bursts out, mind scrambling to piece words together. “The feelings are good! But also confusing. I’m fine! And I'm happy I could help you. And that you were alright with me trying my powers on you.”

To that, he beams again, squeezing her wrist gently. “Addie, you are welcome to heal me whenever you please.”

It takes Adelaide seconds to realise she has stopped breathing. She wants his hand to stay right where it is, clasping hers, but she does not say that. As he lets go, she finally rises to her feet and begins to shuffle away dizzily.

At the door, Adelaide casts a glance over her shoulder. Felix is still sitting on the bed’s edge, watching her go.

She is starting to understand what it means to find someone beautiful. She wishes she could keep looking, because looking makes her feel lighter, as if she could do all the things she never could before.

Perhaps the next time, she can let that feeling buoy her towards honesty.

This time, she simply tears her eyes away and leaves.

Felix waits till the door has clicked shut before sinking back into his mattress.

These past few weeks, something has been the matter. Something’s been the matter with him. He has been saying far too many things he should never say, making bold propositions that any self-respecting man of his ilk would sooner die than utter.

There is a proper method to this. There are protocols and scripts and social mores.

But then again, perhaps all normalcy was flung out the window when he met Adelaide in her gilded prison on the top floor of a future laboratory and fled with her under his wing.

Even on the day they met, with her hair all disheveled and her eyes rimmed with tears, he thought her quite beautiful. But he quickly put that thought away. She had lived alone in a room for years. She needed time to reacquaint herself with the world. And he was going to go home to his own universe without her eventually.

But now, none of that is true.

“Well, what's the matter with that?” he mutters, turning onto his side. He sees his coat hanging from the door hook, the butterfly hairclip and cat keychain still looped into the button hole.

For those dreamlike weeks, he began to lose himself in the intoxication of being free and unknown. It ignited in him a startling courage—to do things wrong, to make a laughingstock of himself, to say foolish and brazen things in the slim hopes that…

Already his home world is sinking its hooks into him, and this drowning shame is just about all he can feel in his solitude.

He cannot be letting his whims rule him like this. What would his father think, his mother, the man on the street?

No, he will deny himself. Adelaide deserves no less. He is capable of good manners and self denial…

Felix wraps his arms around himself and closes his eyes in the gauzy afternoon warmth. But he falls asleep picturing Adelaide sitting quietly beside him, and she is there walking in his dreams, too.

All considered, none of the documents returned by Orobelle's colleagues are presented particularly well. The book from Dalian is conveyed to her as a series of images on a singularly irksome device. Despite the comments from the creature behind the glass threatening her patience at every turn, she eventually makes it through all forty pages.

The book from New York has been translated in the pages of Felix’s journal from a reading by Marcia. But it is an incomplete transcript—there are gaps where Marcia seemingly did not understand what she was reading.

Studying the three texts takes the rest of their stay at the City Hotel, and the pursuit begins to resemble the solving of a jigsaw—leaping back and forth from screen to ruled lines, from mildewed paper to glass.

She is starting to recognise something—something that grows increasingly plain as she revisits each text. All three of these works must have been written by the same person, for they all effect the same rambling, narratively didactic tone, and their contents interlock, like a conversation with oneself.

Sanjaya, Victor, Shanying, the author may go by many names, but they are all one and the same—a man who has wandered the worlds across so many years. For all that time the Queendom believed only three worlds existed, this man was seeing multitudes of them, though perhaps his truths fell on unhearing ears.

All three books, though short, are dense like scripture, each detailing sweeping metaphysical concepts that Orobelle can only just grasp by the tips of her fingers. In Moscow, Sanjaya is the youngest. There, he reports on the scripture of her world, her Queendom, in the time of Liminelle—three centuries ago. He talks of finding a Tunnel between Worlds One and Five, and thereafter begins to write of the religion she knows to be her own.

He discusses at length the potential energy stored in memories and sentiments, like the potential for motion kept in wound-up clockwork dolls. The fact that such abstractions of thought can compel human action signifies a kind of force, he claims—working against the universe's natural trend towards chaos and disorder.

“That force must relate to the Knot of Worlds. But what is the connection exactly?”

Orobelle shudders. Does she want to know the answer?

In New York, Victor is older and more world-weary. His musing begins on a clear night, where peering into the depths of space raises the question of what lies beyond the bounds of the multiverse. He theorises that there cannot be nothing, but whatever is there must exist in strange configurations in relation to the universes. For the Knot of Worlds, he says, is an entity that must transcend the universes—yet it is attached to a single physical being, taking a singular corporeal form in one particular spacetime.

In Dalian, Sanjaya is decrepit with age. In the document housed in the Sect’s archive, he develops his thesis on the Force of Will, as he calls it.

It is not merely a figuration: it is “the sustenance for being, the cause that organises matter against entropy, and all things that possess free will must be wellsprings of it. And this ‘will to be’ is perhaps what they call the Being in Suna’s land…”

Suna? This is a strange series of books indeed, for it is her first time reading this name.

“…the very universe’s force of will, flowing through all things, which brings the world to order, which accretes matter and infuses the elements with life…”

Orobelle has never learned of any religion other than the one into which she was born. It is the power of the Light—she has been taught—which her own power relies on. The way Shanying writes of Force of Will conjures in her mind the flash of a cold hall, a blurred aroma of sea salt on incense, the crinkle of book pages beneath her fingers. These words threaten to overwrite that memory…

“…Perhaps this is what they call the Light in the Queendom, and any number of other names in other lands…”

Her pulse accelerates, her eyes widening with every word. It has always felt like her duty—to know why the universe is the way it is. Kneeling with her mother on a marble pew, she peered at the faceless god and the stars carved into Her robes and felt, for once, unafraid. All that terror she had inherited, just to be the future Queen, melted away beneath the attention of that faceless deity.

The Light made the multiverse, then made the Knot to hold it together. Does Sanjaya know her, too?

Orobelle shakes her head vigorously. This isn't why I am reading these books. Clearly, whatever their villain is planning is of a cosmological nature, needing the Knot, and involving the eradication of pain.

Surely this villain, whoever she may be, could not be planning to change the face of the universe herself, and yet it is the only possible conclusion.

How can one person even dream of achieving that?

“It's all a farce,” Orobelle mutters. Still, there is a dreadfulness to it all—that this is the nature of this stranger’s plan, and that her body should be a centrepiece to it. Without an entourage, she feels light as paper in a breeze, crying the name of Sanjaya Hartono as she descends into Artur’s world.