Soth in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 7: Sunny afternoon

  Soth pocket, Thesaurus dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (visitor time)

  Soth threw a few more logs on the fire, then sank into the recliner to watch the sun approach the horizon over the lake he had named Crystalmir. His new body was young and sprightly, and he felt confident that he would be able to accomplish what he had envisioned. His refuge here in Thesaurus was well hidden from the prying eyes of the Confluence Diviners who were searching for him, and he would not need another body for at least a century.

  Over the past millennia, Soth had developed dimensional magics far surpassing anything he had seen other people use – including that of his fellow Elders, although admittedly they would not have shown him their best work. Most importantly, he had invented an engram that allowed him to travel – with his body – to other dimensions, where this body would survive because the engram created a pocket of three-dimensional space inside the target dimension. Thus, while Thesaurus was unidimensional, Soth was residing inside a three-dimensional pocket anchored inside Thesaurus.

  Whenever he thought about this, Soth metaphorically patted his own shoulder, because his solution was indeed worthy of his genius. Thesaurus was famous for being a prison dimension, so he never had to deal with visitors. For a while, it had been extensively probed from the outside by Diviners attempting to understand its structure and function, but this project was now regarded as complete. Anyway, even if Soth had not obfuscated the anchor for his private pocket dimension to the best of his ability, opponent probes would have to be extraordinary lucky or skillful to detect it. Because Thesaurus was unidimensional, an actual visitor might be able to detect this anchor since the visitor and the anchor would be located at the same place (there being only place in Thesaurus), but there were never any visitors. Should such a visitor nevertheless arrive, it is unlikely they would be able to maintain the presence of mind to investigate their surroundings carefully, even less likely that they would be able to overcome Soth’s obfuscation and, at the end of the day, should they accomplish all this, they would not have any way to communicate their finding to someone not trapped in Thesaurus.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  One aspect of dimensional travel that Soth did not understand well enough to mess around with was time. There was no time in Thesaurus, so a person trapped in it would experience the confinement simply as a moment of eternity. Soth did not know how that might feel and did not imagine the experience would be joyful. The pocket dimension created by his engram might actually be described as four-dimensional, because it recreated the full spacetime structure of the Confluence dimension: within the pocket, time passed at the same speed as in the Confluence. If Soth had not been so afraid of making mistakes, he might have manipulated the time dimension in the pocket so that it passed at a more leisurely pace, giving him more time to plan while he was at his little retreat. That might have been useful, but he was afraid he would get it wrong. Soth was afraid of being trapped in time.

  For a while now, Soth had been watching the new Confluence Republic turn into a deepening chaos after the revolt against Elder supervision. The new Confluence leaders had no idea what they were doing, and Soth was particularly concerned about their reckless simulation spaces. Eventually, he thought, these simulations will transform into new magical dimensions, and then the people of these dimensions will initiate their own simulation spaces. This will soon spiral out of control, ending up as an exponential proliferation of new magical dimensions. Then, sooner or later, some of these dimensions will crash into one another. There will be interdimensional wars.

  It clearly had to stop, and Soth’s plan was to kill this madness in the bud. He would stop the Confluence’s simulations from turning into magical dimensions, starting with Erd, which seemed to have reached some sort of critical point in this regard. To accomplish this, he had enlisted allies. A long while ago, he discovered an outpost of some alien race, and over a period of centuries he was slowly able to establish cordial relations with these beings. More recently, he informed them of the developments in Erd, and they shared his concern and decided to assist him in dealing with the threat.

  Soth threw a few more logs on the fire, then pulled a few fishes from the lake and roasted them. His garden was full of ripe vegetables, and he harvested some of them while humming happily to himself. While he had been estranged from the two other surviving Elders and had no one to share his meal with, the solitary lifestyle actually suited him well. Anyway, enhancement magics blunted the edges of whatever loneliness he might feel. The food tasted great.

  A three-dimensional space anchored in a unidimensional space, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.