We’re approaching the blinking light at the very bottom of The Cellar. What is it? Not even Shiori knows. It is, at any rate, our best guess for the location of The Heart, that thing which ‘powers’ this tower.

“So, this Arekusa woman… hired Felix? And Aidan?”

“That’s right. The fact that she precipitated the construction of this vault… Not even The Lighthouse knew. That’s who I’m with. We’re pretty small-time next to The Clocktower though. And no one ever knows what those swine are up to.”

“Swine, huh? You must really hate them.”

“Most sane people would,” Shiori sighs, as if her freestyle through the dark ether needs a little more effort now that she’s thinking about something upsetting. “But most magi aren’t sane. I’m pretty normal comparatively, actually.”

“Crazy.”

“Isn’t it? They’re the norm in this abnormal world.”

“Why would Arekusa erase Aidan’s name? Is it really just because he wanted to stop working on the project?”

“I don’t… really know. Arekusa’s definitely a notorious and vindictive woman. But even for her that seems, shall we say, quite extra? Trying to peek into a mind like hers, however, is a futile effort.”

“Because…?”

“Because she’s MIA. Like most insane, bristling, babbling magi. Highly respected, esteemed, darling of the academic world. Disappears in a flash, and stern-faced geriatrics just grumble at you if you try to ask what the deal is.”

Insane, huh? Thinking about her definitely feels like chugging ice water. But that’s a feeling I’ve been getting a lot lately. I feel like I’ve exhausted all the shock, dread, and terror out of my body. So much so that something could pop up and threaten my life right now and I wouldn’t have the emotional resources to process it.

It’d be like why, how are you Mr. Chainsaw-Wielding-Bear? Oh, looks like you sliced me.

Something like that.

“You know, you seem a little better now,” Shiori says happily. “When I found you, it seemed like you couldn’t handle all the, ah, sus susurrus, no?”

“The what now?”

“The susurrus, to which I appended the adjective sus.”

“That’s the word I don’t know.”

“It means whispers. Susurri are whispers.”

“That’s not a word,” I frown.

“It is a word. It IS a word,” Shiori butterflies through the ether with an inflection of anger. “It’s a WORD.”

“Okay, okay! It’s a word,” I say. But it’s not.

She’s right, though. The whispers don’t bother me anymore. Far from it, they’re comforting in a way I find uncomfortable.

I can hear them right now.

I wonder if Shiori can hear it too. Probably not. The very ether here is infused with secrets, the bits of pages that dissolved into seeming nothingness, the fleeting moments that can’t even quite be called thoughts. A glance at the person you love, and that short second of rage that you feel ashamed of for the rest of your life. That embarrassing adoration and affection for someone you never thought of that way, so brief, they never caught it, and you never dug it out again. A bout of hopelessness forcibly forgotten by an optimist. A happy thrill that a cynic stuffed in a sockdrawer.

All those whispers that used to hurt my head and break my mind are louder than they’ve ever been. But I can hear each of them, individually, through the whirlwind.

I’m starting to get it now. Now I understand. It’s not that I’m growing weaker. The closer Shiori and I get to The Heart, the stronger I get… the more lucid I become. And the price I pay for it is my humanity that’s quietly slipping away.

---

---

“It’s… a geyser? A hydrothermal vent?”

“I’m not really sure myself,” Shiori says. “We’re deeper into this vault than anyone’s ever been besides its Constructors. Beyond this point, there’s no literature. But it sure looks like a geyser, doesn’t it?”

Up this close, the soft pulsating light is not so soft anymore. It’s intense and dominating, and each flash burns my retinas. Accompanying every flash is a small puff like steam which we just couldn’t see before.

All of this coming from medium-sized cracks in the ground, that stretch across the ‘sea’ floor as far as the eye can see. Medium relative to us, I mean. Unless we were at least as flexible as cats, there’s no way we’re crawling into them. And, to be real with you, I really wouldn’t want to anyway.

“Well, what now?”

“We… keep looking. This isn’t The Heart itself. I don’t think.”

“You’re telling me the pulsating mysterious magic light isn’t the thing we’re looking for.”

“It doesn’t feel quite right. I suppose what we’re looking for um, ah. Ah? Whatever made these cracks? Evidently, Arekusa was trying to reach The Root, but…”

“So, what? The light we’re seeing shining through isn’t The Root, either?”

“No way. There’s no way The Root would be this trite. We’re talking about The Origin of everything. The answer that all magi seek. If we were looking at The Root flashing like it’s… like it’s low on battery… I don’t even know what would happen to us. But we wouldn’t be just gazing at it quizzically.”

Then… what’s all this knowledge swirling around my head? I can feel the hamsters in my head working overtime. Yes, hamsters. I like the metaphor. The formerly chubby rodents are lean, mean, and spinning the wheels faster than ever before.

Arekusa… The glowing light…

“Let’s just keep following the cracks where they seem to get wider,” Shiori says.

The secrets…

The flashes of emotion… The nostalgia that crashed upon me when I saw Shiori…

“My magi sense is tingling. And it’s telling me we should follow common sense. Genius, no?” Shiori continues.

The Tower itself…

Click. Click click click. Hypotheses are forming, pieces are snapping into place. Theories and alternatives, all just passively, while I’m looking like I’m wondering what’s for dinner.

It’s not all there. The gears are turning. The mechanisms are working. But the jigsaw puzzle’s been split in half, and some jerk mixed up and messed up the pieces. Things are being kept from me. Things were stolen from me by something cosmic, and now I know it for sure. But I can barely feel upset. It feels like I’m losing even that.

“Are you alright…?” Shiori breaks me out of my thoughts. Her lips part slightly, hanging sadly on some word she can’t seem to say.

She wants to say my name. I get it. This whole time she’s been with me it’s been this lump in her throat.

“Of course I am. Don’t I… look better than usual?” Do I not? I’m not grabbing my head or twitching or anything.

“No. No you don’t,” Shiori says a little plaintively. “You look…sad.”

Somehow this feels like something my new brain doesn’t get. But I think she’s probably mistaken. So, I just shake my head to let her know everything’s alright.

“My mind’s clear, Shiori. Please don’t worry about me,” I try to comfort her with my smile, even though I’m terrible at it. She’s always smiling for me after all. Even when it’s hard. I’m tired of never being able to take care of her.

“O-okay…”

She doesn’t say anything as we keep moving along, but she’s worried. I can tell that much.

The cracks get wider and wider, but the flashing actually dims as we move on. Almost like whatever’s down there, we’re going to the point where it was being directly extracted. No wonder we descended down to the wrong spot: we went where things were brightest. But as we follow the cracks, the flashing light fades, ‘till we’re reaching the sort of mundane dark that defined the rest of The Cellar.

Through Yorick’s faint light, the thing we’ve been looking for slowly comes into view, a shocking interruption of stone and iron through the dark. A massive series of concentric circular layers reach up into the sky, as if scowling at us for not noticing earlier. It’s hideous and rusted, but that’s what makes it kinda pretty. Industrial blight that stuck around exactly long enough to become industrial just right.

“It’s a ziggurat?” Shiori asks.

Maybe. But my gut says ‘not quite.’

Compared to everything else in The Cellar, or even the entirety of Waechner’s Vault itself, it’s rather inert: evidence that it’s been long abandoned. Like an excavator in a tunnel that’ll never be completed.

“That’s The Heart of the vault.” I say.

“I’m in full agreement, but you seem more, um, matter-of-fact than usual?” Shiori says cautiously. “I liked it better when you called it the Tower of Tattle. Ah, hey! You let go…”

I begin swimming over to the iron behemoth, but not before I carefully hand Yorick over to Shiori. This thing’ll respond to me, and me alone. My will, and my heart. Even while it’s off in the distance, I can see the base begin to turn, circles grinding the ground until their gaps match and reveal an entrance to its center.

“You’ll… want to prepare for this, Shiori.” She looks at me like she doesn’t really get what’s going on, but nods with some anxious resolution in her eyes. Yorick stretches with what I think is resolve, himself. Sweet little slime.

From the dark ocean, into the darker ziggurat. The ether’s cooled down here to complete lifelessness. There are no secrets left here. No whispers. And somehow it feels lonely.

There in the center, a tunnel straight downward, shaped like two overlapping circles: a Venn Diagram, basically.

“So…”

“Down there, yes. Um. Are you ready?” I hold out my hand to her, and try to catch her eyes with mine. I feel so… neutral, I don’t know how much I can speak with my eyes anymore. But I try my best, because I want her to feel safe. That protectiveness feels like the strongest emotion I have left.

She smiles back at me, and I realize I’m still the one being reassured. Even down here those golden eyes can somehow shine as if they’re catching the light. They really are the prettiest things down in this awful space.

I take a deep breath.

And so we dive.

And as we pass through the tunnel, it feels like a dream enters me. The dream wasn’t mine, but it becomes mine, and it becomes a dream “I” had once, long ago.

Once upon a time… “I” had a dream about despair.

“I” was neither above, nor below. The rain came and fell and never stopped, and the dregs of humanity tried to escape it by building boats. They fought to own the peaks of mountains. But the rain kept going. And eventually the wisest, just like the pettiest, realized there was no point.

So, they looked up and stared. They knew they were going to drown, and they did.

And all the roads they built corroded. And all the palaces they built washed away. The thick branches and immense trunks of trees tore apart. The corpses bloated and lost their color, turning to mush and everything, all of it swirled together. Humanity, our works, nature, the world itself. Mixing unseemly into a dark and repulsive paste till all that was left was ink.

No life to be found. No memories to be cherished. The ink just splashed around, growing stiller. “I” was terrified. Terrified of the moment when it would all finally stop moving entirely.

And slowly… and never… and surely, inexorably… with the time we never had… with the only time we were given… forever came and went, till even time had nothing left to keep it ticking.

All “I” wanted to see was a small light in that ocean. Any proof, anything to keep the faith and hold fast… just one thing that insisted upon eternity.

But soon “my” nightmare ends and I’m what’s left, right here beside Yorick and Shiori.

What was ether starts to feel more like actual water before we know it.

Even in my detached state, the fear of drowning makes my breath quicken. Sluggish, so effortful… I can breathe, but it feels like water…

And when we stick our heads above it, and the cold air and sun come gleaming down, I realize, painfully, it really is water. Too used to my previous dispensation, “I’m like a human with gills,” my brain riots and I mistakenly believe I can still breathe it in. Instead, I swallow a lot of salty, marshy, and eminently unbreathable water.

And it’s cold. Really frickin’ cold. So cold it shocks me still for a moment. Shiori is apparently experiencing much the same, because the two of us are hacking and sputtering and splashing from shivering.

“Shore! Gllugggaughooore, SWIM!” she yells at me.

We’ve been fake swimming in ether for so long I must have started to believe I was a great swimmer. But now friction and lung capacity and eyes that don’t like salt are forcefully reminding me I’ve always been a terrible swimmer. God it’s so cold!

Uh oh. That shore is close… but it’s so cold I feel like I’m losing…glug…glug…

You know, I had a dream that I got a pet rabbit once. I was so excited that when I woke up I was getting ready to feed it, but couldn’t find the rabbit food. When I realized I didn’t actually own a rabbit, I was so sad that I started to…

“WAKE UP!”

“Uh…? Where’s my bunny…?”

“Good g-g-god almighty.” A dreadful looking Shiori is staring down at me and is soaking wet. Just like me. “I-I-I had to drag you the last quarter of the way! You were so frickin’ heavy!”

“N-no, I’m not!” I sit up and snap, before shivering out another fit of coughs. “I’m m-m-mm not heavy…”

Wait. My teeth chatter. Oh god. You’ve gotta be kidding me.

I’m really hacking it up now. I get one look at Shiori and I can’t stop myself from laughing which, unfortunately, hurts an awful lot after you nearly drown. All that shivering turns into tittering that stings as much as it brings the life back into me. I can’t help but spit a few times into the ground, because I’m just giggling and wincing from that awful feeling like someone’s rubbing salty ice all around the back of your throat.

“W-w-what are you…?” Shiori starts, before getting a good look at me and bursting into a coughing, giggling fit herself.

“Haah-ha-h-h-ha… oh my god… I forgot you l-l ooked like Santa’s goth-i-est elf as a kid…” I gasp out. I keep laughing, but I’m starting to realize how screwed up the situation is. Shiori is not so quick on the uptake.

“You l-l-look like…! G-Goldilocks sucking on a lemon! Ahahahaha!” Shiori smacks the sand with her open hand, and seeing her ten year old self do it makes it three times as annoying as it should be. Especially because she hasn’t picked up on it.

…yep. We’re tweens again.

Yorick is vibing with the change of pace. I guess he finds us cute. He’s hopping up and down trying to match the rhythm of Shiori still obliviously laughing her guts out, rolling around in wet sand.

“... l-like T-Tinkerbell snorting a warhead… hah-h-h-haaha-h-h!” She prattles on.

And I get the urge… no… actually I just do it. Kick sand all over her in a big huff. I do it and I’m immediately embarrassed that I do it, and I even hear myself going ‘hmph!’ as I walk away. Oh my god. Did our minds revert too?

“You frickin’ brat! Ahhh! My eyes! Oww!”

Where the heck are we, anyway?

It’s only now that I’m getting a good look, that I start to feel my stomach sink. Looking around, I feel stupid for not noticing it immediately. That’s great. Now the helplessness inside me can match the cold and shivering outside.

A small stream, flowing out to sea, a tiny branch of a larger river. It’s sandy where we’re at, but if you look inland you can see the greenery popping up, catch a glimpse of where it’s splitting into different paths. If I followed the stream, I know what I’d see. Some flows, bordered by carved up rock, fast flowing all the way out. Some, caught and turned to slow drip, tall grasses and mud.

Along the coast, inlets and coves all over, and cliffs watching from above: the harder rocks sneering at the soft ones degrading to sand.

It’s cold. This place is cold, not just the water. The chill running through my body makes me feel like I’m about to die. Before I know it, Shiori’s upon me hugging me for warmth, having apparently gotten over her indignance.

“A-a-are we really…?” she asks. She knows the answer as well as I do.

“...yeah. I-it… looks like we’re back h-home…” I chatter out, the cold mixing with the fear.

I see it and I know, even when I can't remember. And something in me twists and chills like vomit frozen in snow. I don't know exactly what happened. Not anymore. But I remember that the townspeople went mad. I remember people died. And I remember they tried to kill her -- Shiori Novella.

It's Sussurokawa Cove. We're home.

♔ The Final Puzzle: Discover The Truth of Sussurokawa Cove.