Sophie Strange in the style of Mikhail Vrubel, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 10: Blue moon

  Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  Sophie spent the days sleeping, as she had promised, weeping, talking to friends and family, feeling miserable. She went to all the funerals, talking as little as possible. She had weird dreams that somehow seemed real where she met her friends and they were ok. She watched a lot of stuff on the ether. Occasionally, the people from the headquarters checked in on her to see if she was alright and tell her what was happening, which was not much. The Expedition management had apparently asked some other people in the government for advice on how to deal with the shadow dimension, and now people were just waiting.

  Besides dimensional magic, Sophie had one big hobby that she had invested a lot of time in. Many years ago, she had applied for training in life force magic because she wanted to explore the Citadel, and she had kept up the practice whenever she wasn’t busy exploring weird magical dimensions. (You should never do a life force projection while visiting a different dimension. It’s dangerous.) Over the years, she had learnt to traverse the Chamber of Distractions, which took a long time, and the Chamber of Insight, which took even longer because she used her experiences there to get a better understanding of dimensional magics. That was still tempting, but now she spent most of her Citadel time in the Chamber of Memories, which seemed to be different for her than for most people. In the third Chamber, she was exposed to other people’s memories. At least they were not her memories.

  The people at the (restricted) School for Life Force Magic first suggested these memories were Sophie’s after all, but she had repressed them or maybe just forgotten. This was frustrating for a while, but Sophie was soon able to prove them wrong, because in many of those memories there was no magic. They were memories – or maybe just her imagination running wild – of a person who lived in a world without magic. At the School, they dismissed the idea that it was all her mind imagining things, but considered the possibility that Sophie was actually in the Chamber of Visions (she was sure she had not passed through a fourth portal) or, more vaguely, that her experiences with other dimensions somehow affected things in unpredictable ways (other dimensional explorers seemed to be unaffected, though).

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Of course, anyone alive before the awakening of magical consciousness lived in a world without magic, so maybe Sophie was remembering something from that time. That was 5680 years ago, though, which meant that unless she was actually a Protector Elder, those memories could not really be her memories. (She played with the idea that she was an Elder who had taken the body of a recently conceived fetus in order to hide. It would be her last body, then, because she was not going to kill someone in order to steal theirs.) Unless some of the religions were right, and you reincarnated when your body died. That would make sense on one level, but Sophie did not believe in reincarnation.

  Religion had gone through some changes after the Revolution. One might have believed that the identification of a Citadel entrance would have energized the Devotees and similar groups, but for the most part, the opposite happened. While the Devotees felt vindicated at first, there was also the embarrassing fact that none of their theories had predicted an entrance. The real problem, however, was that the High Renegade’s discovery shifted attention away from something the Devotees were good at – speculative theorizing – over to something they were not so good at, namely the task of maintaining mental silence while crossing through the various Citadel chambers. This, at any rate, was the leading explanation among the people at the School for Life Force Magic, which counted some Devotees but was mostly filled up with people like Sophie, who had no religious background.

  On an overall level, nevertheless, there was a lot more interest in the Citadel today than there was before the Revolution. Lots of people enrolled at the School, even as access to life force magic got more restricted after some people harmed themselves in serious ways doing reckless experiments with it. Recently, it had become fashionable to use life force magic to exchange bodies for a while, especially as it allowed lovers to experience the relationship from each other’s perspective. This was mostly frowned upon at the School, where people who tried to enroll along with their partner were usually turned down.

  Anyway, lots of people worked their way into the Citadel, although they usually did not say very much about their experiences there. Some people had presumably reached the Chamber of Visions and whatever lay beyond, and it was reported that those who did tended to end up as teachers at the School. Sophie’s experience with the School teachers, nevertheless, was that they mostly concerned themselves with helping people get through the earlier chambers, saying little about what might come after.

  ---

  In the Chamber of Memories, Sophie relives yet another experience she has never actually lived. In a time of war, a woman lives in an occupied city and is taken captive by the invading soldiers. The woman is beaten and raped. Sometimes she is questioned about whether she supports the resistance, which she does but denies. It does not really look like the soldiers care very much one way or another, they just enjoy beating and raping her. The woman has no magical defenses and is basically helpless. One day the soldiers take her up to the roof of the apartment block, and she sees that the city around her is devastated. They kill her by pushing her off the roof.

  Sophie Strange observing herself in the style of Félicien Rops, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.