The conversation found its lighter register in the way that conversations find their lighter registers after significant things have been addressed: not through the significant things resolving but through the space between them becoming habitable. They had covered the serious architecture — the Old Epoch, the madness, the Earth question, the current threat landscape. What remained was the texture of two consciousnesses that had been finding each other interesting for the past two hours and were now in the space where the interest had identified itself but had not been named.
Azzu asked him about the Blue Fog World.
He described it with the specificity that characterizes descriptions of places that have become home: the fog's breathing quality, the table with its marks, the thirteen chairs and the ten that were still empty, Nirvonis at the head of it being progressively more human in increments that were both fascinating and slightly alarming, Eva in the corner reading the archive with the focused stillness of someone who has decided that understanding everything completely is the closest available substitute for safety.
"You describe them like family,"
she said.
"They are. Nirvonis is something like a parent in the way that a geological formation is something like a parent — you were formed from it and it has opinions about you but the relationship is more cosmic than familial. Eva is closer. The compact between the three of us has the weight of something foundational. I don't have a better word for what she is than: the person I trust most in any universe I have been in."
"And the others. Ascen, Aurora."
"Ascen is a ten-year-old with two civilizations of scholarship and more damage than anyone his apparent age should carry, who is currently in the Restricted Archive learning the theoretical framework of Necromancy with a founder-angel who has decided he's an investment. I find him genuinely good. Not good in the abstract. Good in the specific sense of someone who has had every available reason to become bitter and has decided to direct the energy elsewhere."
"You care about him."
"Yes."
"You don't say it the way most powerful beings talk about those below them."
"How do most powerful beings talk about those below them?"
"Like assets. Or like subjects. Or like the way very large things talk about very small things — with the fondness of something that knows it could step on them and hasn't."
Amiss was quiet for a moment.
"That's not the relationship I want. I want the kind where the caring goes in both directions and neither party could tell you with certainty which direction it's going in at any given moment because it's been running in both directions for long enough that the directions have stopped being distinct."
"You haven't had that."
"The physicist had a colleague. Not quite that. Something adjacent."
He stopped.
The thought that had been forming — a specific memory from the physicist's life, a specific person, a specific quality of a relationship that had been real and had ended with the multiverse — had begun to surface. He could feel the edges of it, the way you feel the edge of a dream that is becoming accessible. The colleague. A building they had both worked in. A specific evening. The quality of a particular kind of friendship that forms between people who are both looking at the same very large question from slightly different angles.
Azzu said:
"Are you all right?"
The memory dissolved.
It dissolved the way that memories dissolve when something in the present is more vivid than the memory, which was what was happening: Azzu had leaned slightly forward in asking the question and the lean had brought her amber eyes into direct attention and the amber eyes were, at this proximity, significantly more present than any memory he was in the process of forming.
He looked at her.
"Yes,"
he said.
"I thought you went somewhere for a moment."
"I was starting to. I'm back."
She looked at him with the reading running.
"You don't think about where you came from much, do you."
Amiss considered this.
"I've been in motion since the first second. There hasn't been a moment where the present was quiet enough for the previous things to surface clearly. I have the memories. I don't think I've fully processed what I've been doing with them."
"The physicist."
"The physicist, yes. And whatever was before the physicist. Nirvonis, the previous multiverse, the sixty-five divine pathways that are compressed inside a small blue sphere in a pocket of fog outside this universe. There's a very large amount of previous and I have been exclusively present."
"Is that by choice."
"I don't know yet. I'm beginning to think it might not be entirely by choice."
Azzu looked at him with the full attention of someone who has just received a piece of information that changes the map.
"What does that mean."
"It means I'm going to ask Nirvonis a question when I'm back at the Blue Fog World that I should probably have asked earlier."
She nodded. He filed the question in the cross-reference queue and let the present moment have its precedence.
* * *
They talked for a long time.
The secondary dimension did what secondary dimensions do when their primary inhabitant has been in them for a significant period: it shifted its temporal character relative to the world outside, so that the length of the conversation inside did not correspond precisely to the length of time that passed outside. Hours inside the cave might have been hours outside or they might have been less, depending on the specific properties of Azzu's secondary dimension, which was not a subject Amiss had yet fully analyzed.
He was not finding this a problem.
They talked about the Ertyla's three moons — the Red Moon, the Greenish Blue Moon with its angelic human populations that had been thinned by the Abyssal God, the White Moon that had become a water world in the span of twenty days. Azzu described the White Moon's transformation with the quality of an eyewitness account: she had seen it from this solar system's perspective, had watched the Ice Lava erupt from the crater and the implosion and the subsequent transformation, and her description was specific and strange and added three new items to the panel's cross-reference queue.
She asked about what it felt like to be outside a universe and come in.
He described it with the honesty he brought to accurate descriptions of things that were difficult to describe: the membrane, the specific sensation of crossing through it, the way the Blue Fog World had felt when it was the only reality available and how the universe below had felt like impossibly much after two months of the fog's manageable scale. The specific quality of Ertyla's Ether-dominant surface Ather arriving at the moment of descent: organizing and warm and very alive in a way that the Blue Fog World's compressed-ending atmosphere was not.
"It must have been overwhelming,"
she said.
"It was excellent. I'm a physicist. New variables are what I live for."
She looked at him with something in her expression that had the quality of a word that she had not said yet.
"You said you came here to find the second End Frequency. And you found me."
"Yes."
"And now what."
Amiss looked at her with the expression he had when he was thinking about something that was outside the standard category of what he thought about. He had the panel available, showing him the current operational parameters: the Inheritors' two-week window, the Blather Cult's three-year ritual timeline, the Necromancy development back at the palace, the Blue Fog World meeting in two days, the Earth question in the cross-reference queue, the SMC integration of the compound Sealed Artifact, the Chaos Elemental conversion running on Azzu's absorbed Internal Madness.
He looked at all of this and then he looked at Azzu.
He said:
"You're welcome to stay in the Super Mini World while you calibrate. The concealment is solid — your divinity-stripping of the Old Gods and the secondary dimension's hidden-in-a-grassland-full-of-dangerous-animals quality have kept you safe for forty years. If you want to come to the palace before you're ready to be in the main world, there are people there who I think you'd like and who would find you genuinely interesting."
"Ascen would find me genuinely interesting,"
she said, with the smallest hint of amusement.
"Ascen would find you professionally fascinating and would have fourteen questions prepared before you finished introducing yourself. Aurora would find the Old Epoch's political structure operationally relevant to her current work and would ask you things that nobody has asked you in forty years. Eva would read your weight before you sat down and would tell you something true about yourself that you haven't named yet."
"And you?"
Amiss was quiet for a moment.
He started a sentence.
He stopped it.
He started a different sentence.
He stopped that one too.
Azzu was watching this with the specific attention of someone who has been reading beings for millennia and has just encountered a pattern that is both extremely familiar in its general shape and entirely new in its specific expression: a very powerful being having difficulty with a very human problem.
She waited.
Amiss looked at the secondary dimension's changed sky, which was not the purple-red of the Inner World but the specific warm quality of a space that had been reformed around the absence of grief. Then he looked at the roses. Then at the butterflies, which were doing what butterflies do, which was to be entirely unconcerned with any situation that was not directly related to the flowers they were interested in.
He started another sentence. Got further this time.
"I would find you —"
He stopped again.
Azzu made a small sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to it.
"You are the being who absorbed forty years of Internal Madness from a Concept God-adjacent dragon while maintaining a conversation about the fifth fundamental force, and you are struggling with a sentence."
"The madness was a technical problem. This is a different category."
"What category."
"The category where System Blue is not helpful because System Blue is very good at finding the gap in other systems and not particularly experienced at being the system with the gap."
She looked at him.
She said, with the quality of someone who has decided to be kind about something:
"I know what the sentence is, Amiss."
He looked at her.
"You don't have to finish it if you don't want to. But I'll tell you what I hear in the half-sentences, and you can tell me if I'm reading it correctly."
"Go ahead."
"I hear someone who came here following a frequency and found that the frequency was connected to a person rather than a concept, and is discovering that this distinction changes several things that he had previously considered settled about his own situation, and is not sure yet what to do about the changed things, but is not unhappy about them."
Amiss looked at her for a long moment.
"That's accurate."
"Good. I'm also going to tell you what I found when I read you."
"I thought you needed eye contact for that."
"I've been looking at you for two hours."
He was quiet.
"I found: no malice, as I said when I woke up. Genuine curiosity. The specific quality of someone who is present in a way that most beings are not, who is not performing presence but actually here in this room with this conversation. Humor that is precise and a little disorienting because it arrives from angles you don't expect. And underneath all of that, something that I haven't felt from another being since the Old Epoch — not since before the war, not since before the Drago Sphere, not since I was young enough that the world had not yet decided what I was."
She paused.
"Someone who arrived in front of me and found me interesting rather than threatening or useful."
The secondary dimension was quiet with the specific quality of quiet that happens when two people have said the true thing and the true thing is taking up the space that words usually occupy.
Then Amiss said, with the quality of someone who has found the gap in his own assumption that this was a situation he didn't know how to navigate, and has entered it:
"I would like to take you somewhere. When you're ready for the main world. Somewhere you haven't been in forty years that isn't connected to any of the things that happened in those forty years. Somewhere with food and light and whatever constitutes pleasant ambient conditions in a world you haven't seen the current version of. I realize this is a somewhat unusual proposal given that we've known each other for approximately four hours and one of those hours I spent inside your Internal Madness, but I find that I don't want to wait for a more conventionally appropriate amount of time to have passed."
Azzu looked at him.
Something moved across her face that was not the progenitor-sense reading or the composed management of an internal state or the specific warm amusement she had been deploying for the past hour. It was something she had not put on her face deliberately and was there because it was there: the full, unguarded quality of someone who has just been asked something that they want to say yes to.
She said:
"You absorbed my forty-year Internal Madness on the same day you met me and then asked me on a date."
"Those events occurred in that order, yes."
"In approximately four hours."
"Three hours and forty-five minutes, but I take the point."
She was quiet for a moment. Then, with the quality of someone arriving at a decision that they have been moving toward for most of the conversation:
"Yes."