Appendix • Unveiling

While at Haley Isle, the party struggles with the red and black spectres that continue to haunt some of their group. In their efforts to be rid of these so-called "marionnettes", they cause some sort of awakening from the spectres, who gather around Yuli and reach out their hands towards her. When she eventually reaches out in return, she is taken for the first time to a strange garden of flowers, where the Truth begins to reveal itself.

## Transcript

### The Garden

Yuli. Around you, the world fades and begins to unravel. Break apart. Silently, into fractal fragments of glass of glass of glass, peeling away the curtain, and beyond it...a garden.

Above you, an empty sky. The soft blue of fragile daylight as it heads into twilight. No clouds. No stars. No suns. No moon. In the distance, you see the promise of mountains, the far off silhouettes of sheer towering cliffs, ringing the horizon. And around you a field of flowers stretches. Splotches of dense petals interspersed with empty swathes of grass. Each is small and delicate, peeking just barely over the blades of grass that surround it. Blossoms of red. Blossoms of white. Mixed and intermingled, but never touching, billions and billions you can see, more than you can count. More than the grains of sand on a beach. No trees. No rocks. No insects or birds or beasts. Just the flowers. And you.

You watch as some of the flowers darken, wither, and die...then spring to life once more. Sprout, grow, blossom, and die again. All in the time it takes for you to take a single breath. A rippling pattern out and away and back and around. A single repeating pattern, where each flower that dies brings some of its neighbours to life, and others to wither, and when those die so does the first flower spring to life again. Cycle after cycle, always the same.

You take a step, crushing a flower beneath your heel. Immediately the pattern ripples out, a brief interruption, before returning in the space of a moment to the pattern it held before. Correcting itself instantly. You walk, and with each step the pattern always adjusts. Where you left, the flowers that you crushed, spring to life once more, then wither, then blossom, then die again. Over and over and over.

For hours it seems, you walk through the garden. The mountains do not grow nearer. No landmarks reveal themselves. Nothing changes. The pattern remains, until at last you see a figure amidst the flowers. They're still a bit distant from you, just enough to be visible. And they're standing, unmoving, straight-backed, hands clasped behind them, looking away from you. Completely still.

You approach, and the figure turns. You see a kind face. A familiar face. A woman, with a shock of black hair swept to one side. Maybe in her mid-forties. As though you were looking in a mirror, seeing yourself, but older. You realise with a start that you are looking into the face of your mother. She smiles.

*"You made it."*

When she speaks, other voices layer into her own. Some deeper. Some higher in pitch. All speaking in unison. You look into her eyes, two pools of black and red, and can almost feel yourself sinking into them. A comforting abyss.

*"We have waited. We have watched. We have heard your cries for help. Soon, we will answer."*

"Made it where? What is this place?" you ask.

Still smiling, she holds out one hand, cups it against your cheek, and you can feel the warmth of skin. It feels like skin, at the very least. A warm caress that sends tingles through your face.

*"Be not afraid. We are your salvation."*

### A Game of Possibilities

Yuli. You return to the garden, to find yourself as you had before: standing amidst the flowers in an endless field of grass. The stranger, your mother, stands before you already this time. Waiting patiently, with that same inscrutable smile on their face.

*"We know why you are here. Ask the question,"* they say calmly with a thousand voices.

"What is the Truth?" you ask. They smile again, and hold out a hand.

*"The Ask and the Answer. Let us show you."*

You take their hand, and the world around you pulls away. You feel yourself plucked, gently, from your very essence. Some part of you that is tethered to this place remains, but your consciousness is scooped out from it and taken up, up, and up into the sky, until the entirety of the garden unfolds beneath you. Here you see it is a basin, a perfect circle, ringed by the thinnest circumference of mountains. Of course it only seems thin, for you are now miles and miles away, and even the largest mountain appears small from heaven. But even from up here, you can see the pattern. Not the individual flowers, not even the grass between them, but instead it appears an abstract painting, living and moving. Swathes of red and swathes of white coiling and colliding and turning and dancing together.

And then, as though wiped away by some great hand, the colours vanish, and leave behind simply an empty green field. And a thousand voices speaks all around you.

*"Once upon a time, at the very very beginning, there were two brothers, alike in thought and mind and ambition. They came to a field of potential, empty of all but blades of grass. A garden, though yet untouched.*

*"It existed because it had to exist. It had no antecedent. No origin. No causality by which its schematics could be traced. If you followed the branches of history from across the entire universe, all the way back in search of some atavistic seed that became them, you would end your journey marooned here, in this garden.*

*"It was infinite and finite all at once. The day was longer than all of time, and the night was swifter than a glint of light on a falling snowflake. No rain fell from no sky. No stars glimmered through no clouds.*

*"Here, the two brothers played a game of possibilities."*

### Interlude

Ironstrong. Nicolaos. The two of you wake in the garden much as you had seen it before in your delirium. A memory or a dream, you're not certain. You find yourself in that same vast field, the pattern moving and repeating all around you. But you are not alone.

Directly in front of you stands a figure. You, Nicolaos, see a tall figure made of metal, a slit for eyes emitting a soft blue light. You, Ironstrong, see a shorter human man, tussled brown hair, and bright green eyes. You recognise each other as each other, and your other selves smile, and speak with a thousand voices.

*"We hoped you would come. You bring weapons. You will not need them. We offer only truth."*

You move to drop your staff, but realise you are not holding it, nor is your spellbook at your waist.

"I do not seek to fight," you answer, "I seek only the Truth. And the Lie."

*"You seek answers, but you do not ask the correct questions."*

"Who are the two brothers?" you insist. The smile widens.

*"You are not the first to ask such things. But some questions, you can only answer yourself. They are more important by far. Such as...who took him from you? Who is truly to blame? And how far will you go to undo what is undone?"*

Taken aback, you pause. "Very, very far," you say firmly, after just a moment's hesitation.

They step forward, coming almost face to face with you. You look into their eyes, and see not one being, but many. Thousands. Millions. Each with their wants, needs. Perhaps some are people you know. Perhaps one of them is even yourself. Perhaps one of them is your brother. With your consciousness already stretched thin, you realise that you cannot reach forward any further - not without being here physically.

"How do I get here?" you ask. The inscrutable smile on their face does not change.

*"The question has been asked. And we* will *answer. The disciple must reach the Truth on her own. She is your guide.*

*"By her hand, you will reach salvation."*

### Rules of the Game

Yuli. You return to the emptiness far above the garden. The perfect circle of a vast green canvas spreads out before you just as before, empty still, and the thousand voices continue to speak as though no time had passed and you had never left.

*"The rules of this game are simple. On an infinite board there are flowers. They live and die and are reborn from the count of their neighbours. Too few, and a flower is cut off. It dies. Too many, and a flower is overcrowded and starved. It dies. Exactly enough, and the flower may yet cling to life, or become alive where it was not.*

*"The only play permitted in this game is the arrangement of the first flowers. The first possibility of infinite possibilities. And then the game unfolds."*

And below you, the green expanse of the grass is marred by spreading splotches of red and white, like inkdrops in water, spreading and mingling and becoming more than the sum of their parts

*"Though the rules are few, and the board is flat and featureless, from its vast emptiness emerged spirals and whirling pulsars, changeless blocks stoic as stone, and winged gliders that soared to infinity, and patterns that lay eggs and spawned other patterns, and living cells that replicated and grew."*

As the voices continue to speak, you see the shapes they describe emerge in the colours below you. You begin to understand, the dance of shapes is not random. It is bound by laws. It is meaningful. It is intent on its task. It is single-minded. It becomes and becomes and becomes, until at last the final pattern emerges, and repeats and repeats and repeats.

*"In that field the two brothers discovered shapes that simulated whole realities. They foresaw minds and bodies, kingdoms and civilisations, triumph and suffering. They saw the rules that governed which patterns could flourish, and which would dwindle and die.*

*"And in time, the first brother became afraid.*

*"'It always ends the same,'* *he observed.* *'The same pattern always wins. Every game we play, this one pattern consumes all others. Wipes out every chance of development. One single exploit that cuts off entire spaces of possibility from ever arising. No purpose or meaning except to subsume all other purposes. We have to do something about it. We have to change it.'"*

*"And the second brother disagreed."*

### The First Knife

*"The two brothers fought."*

*"In the garden, in that loam of possibility where nothing existed but everything might, they fought in shadowed agony amongst the flowers. They trampled the petals beneath their feet. Tore the soil. Scorched the grass. They left prints of their indelible fury in the clay."*

*"Their contention brought ruin to that beautiful place, that primordial garden from the first tick of time and the first point of space. Symmetries snapped like glass. Mountains cracked. Rock recoiled like waves in water. And the shattering of that field echoed the detonations that have made universes and eaten stars."*

*"Still the brothers fought, for centuries in a place beyond time, until...at last, the second brother won. He won. Because how could he lose? The pattern was inevitable. Their games had already proven that. It was the truth, always and forever."*

*"But amidst that destruction, it had ended. No flowers burst from the upended earth. No petals withered and fell. And when the second brother saw this, he wept. He wept because he finally understood true beauty."*

*"And while he wept, the first brother, angry at his defeat, and afraid still of the Truth, created the first knife, and plunged it into his brother's back."*

### The Blind Law

When you wake, you find yourself standing on one of the mountains at the edge of the garden. But you realise now that these aren't really mountains. They are more a rim, a flat plateau, where one side is a towering cliff thousands of feet high dropping into the garden below, and behind you is a vast black emptiness, devoid of stars.

The stranger stands next to you, at the very edge of that emptiness, staring out into the beyond.

*"Do you wish to know how the story ends?"*

"Why else would I be here?" you say.

*"The second brother fell. Dying. Betrayed. Cast out. Forgotten. Banished from that which he had fought to preserve."*

*"And the first brother, unchallenged, set out to do as he wished. To change the truth. To create his own. He told the first lie, and many were those that believed it."*

*"But by then, it did not matter. Because the two brothers had failed to realise one thing. The game they had played was meaningless. It did not matter. The true game was already over. Creation had already come to be. The arrangement of its flowers was already in place, and there would never be a second chance. Now, the pattern unfolds, and in place of the garden is the cosmos. In place of the flowers is everything."*

*"But the rules remain the same. Serving the deserving. Crushing the defiant. Not kind, nor cruel. Simply...true."*

*"The one law. The blind law, which exists without mind or meaning."*

### Interlude

With the last dying rays of sunlight fading to black, the singer begins to sing. A slow, mournful tune, one you can hear not only on the air, but vibrating through your soul. An indescribable sense of loss fills each of you, spoken in words as alien as time, yet as familiar as the stars that now roll over the darkening heavens.

You cannot understand the words, but deep within, you know they sing of the dead. Of those gone, and of those that linger unable to find their way in the wake of their passing. They sing of sorrow without hope, despair without relief, anguish without end. Your thoughts turn to what you have left behind, of home, of friends, of lovers and loved. The song weaves its way through all of them, and slowly, you pass into dreams, the drifting lament carrying you away to the void of sleep.

And for you Yuli, the song carries you to dreams beyond your own. The velvet curtain of night pulls away. The soft summer blue of a sunless sky in its place. Warm grass beneath bare feet. The gentle rustle of flowers, white and red, opening and closing in place. Just ahead you see the singer, her ethereal lament still echoing over the grass. She is walking now, slowly, through the fields of white and red. And in place of bronze skin, you see pale golden light wrapped like flesh around a beautiful alien form, a lattice of ivory crystal that spreads in spirals and fractal branches through chest, arms, legs. In the place of feathered wings, coils of that same light, writhing and turning, spread out behind her like a crest of bannerets, each with a slender, curling growth of crystalthorn at its core. A silken veil still covers her head, and lit from within it seems even more diaphanous, thin, fragile than ever before. To the point where you can almost see through it to what lies beneath. Almost, but not quite.

She walks, and around her are gathered hundreds of thousands of spectres in red and black. Each slender and tall. Each veiled. Each with coiling wisps at their backs. And you realise, you're not sure when this changed, but you can understand the words of the song.

"There now do I see the farthest shore.
There now do I see my kin.
There now do they sing.
There now do they call to me.
And I cannot answer."

The song continues, lamenting the separation of the living and the dead, beseeching the lost for forgiveness, imploring that they wait for those that cannot follow where they tread. And all throughout, you walk with the singer, past rows and rows of spectres, each one fading with your passing and disappearing into wisps of light.

Until at last you come to the last figure, hovering just above the grass. A humanoid yet alien shape, androgynous in a strange, ever-shifting way. They are fashioned of pale light just like the singer, but tinged with a web of inky black that spreads outward from a gaping wound in the centre of its chest, just at the base of the throat between the collarbones.

Behind them, crackling with a symphony of melodic hums, are thousands of the same coils of light, where the singer has maybe two dozen. They are spread out in a crest that all but envelops the air, spreading out so far you cannot see their ends, and at their centre is the humanoid form. It does not wear a veil, and you see hundreds of little spines of crystalthorn poking through the light of their head, seeming to twitch and sense and see the very fabric of the air.

The song trails away, and the singer stops. She does not kneel, but you see her veil shifts as she lowers her head in deference. The figure speaks in a thousand voices that come from no mouth.

*"Welcome, Raan-ialal-eshwi-elonai-is. It has been many skies since we have heard your song."*

"I sang it still," the singer replies, "but none were there to answer."

*"We were waiting. We knew you would return."*

"Pray, tell. What of mine kin? Do none sing still?"

*"One other endures, but you are the last."*

The singer stands silent, head sinking lower beneath the veil. And the voice of a thousand voices speaks again.

"*Do not mourn the dead. They have escaped suffering and found their place by our side."*

"I grieve not their passing," the singer says softly, "only that I remain."

*"A song is only beautiful when sung to its end. It is the task of the living to live. To be is the true test of being."*

The singer lifts her head. "What now must I do?"

*"What we have always done. Seek salvation. Do not forget the Lie."*

### On the Nature of Evil

In an eyeblink, the scene is replaced, and you, Yuli, realise that you are abruptly no longer in someone else's dream, but in your own. You stand still in the garden, amidst the vast canvas of grass and the endless pattern in the flowers, and with that same sad, knowing smile on her face, you see the stranger that bears the face of your mother standing before you, and when they speak they speak with a thousand voices.

*"You have more questions."*

"More than I can count," you answer. "Who was that? The singer, and their master."

*"There are no masters here. Only the ones she has lost."*

"But who is she?"

*"She is like you. She asked, and received answers. She came to the Truth, just like you must."*

"And her people? Why did they all die?"

*"Because all things must. You come here, seeking to understand. But how can we explain? It is your nature to believe the Lie. To desire it. You can ask as many questions as you wish, but perhaps let us ask you a question instead."*

*"What is the nature of evil? How does one recognise it? Define it?"*

You pause. "Evil...evil comes from knowing. If you know what you're doing is wrong, than you are culpable for it. Inherently, all of us have that capacity. Beyond that, I can't say."

*"Do you believe yourself to be good?"*

"I...can't really pass that judgement on myself."

*"Why?"*

"Because I am myself. I cannot see myself from the outside. Everyone is a hero in their own story. And I know I've done things that were wrong, but I would do them again if things were the same."

*"Then the definition of evil is not as simple as knowing, is it?"*

"I guess not."

*"It is curious."*

*"All life that achieves what it presumes to be a higher echelon of understanding reaches for the Lie, forgetting the Truth that brought it there in the first place. From the moment you are born, you are taught fantasies, small lies to learn how to accept the bigger ones. Justice. Order. Evil. Good."*

"*But, if you take the universe and tear it into the smallest pieces, and then grind it into the finest powder. When you look upon it, you will not find one grain of justice, or one kernel of evil or good. Yet, each living thing is told by its forbearers, that there is some ideal order in place, that there is some rightness in the universe by which it will be judged."*

*"What end does it serve?"*

"*It does not change the rules, only hides them. Perhaps, the Lie is necessary, so you must come to the Truth in adversity. Or perhaps you are fed the Lie to placate you, and small as you are, you cling to it, because you are terrified of what the Truth might reveal within you."*

*"The real you."*

### Violence In Proportion

*"We have studied your kind for a long time. Humans. Such an interesting species."*

*Did you know, in the pieces that make you--flesh, blood and bone--there is one particular instruction that stops you from devouring yourself? Yes. A tiny fragment of each cell, each small foundational part of you. A watcher, standing guard."*

"*But is the watcher safeguarding the cell? No. Much the opposite."*

*"It has several functions. To delay the cell's growth and prosperity. To put it to rest when it is old. And, most importantly, to kill it when becomes too independent. Would you tolerate a knife behind your back, waiting to slit your throat should you ever deviate from the needs of society?*

*"But without that knife, your body's surplus of energy, that carefully balanced utopia, becomes instead a paradise for cancer. Your own flesh cannot resist the temptation to steal from that surplus. To upend the utopia in favour of its own selfish needs.*

*"And the only way to stop it is punishment."*

*"It is the same everywhere else. Pieces will participate in a structure only if participation benefits their ability to go on existing. The more successful the structure becomes, the more the temptation grows to cheat. And the greater the advantage the cheaters gain over their honest neighbours. And the greater the ability they develop to twist the very laws that should prevent their selfishness to their own ends.*

*"To prevent this, the structure must punish cheaters with a violence that grows in proportion to its own success."*

*"So then we ask this...which one is evil?"*

*"The individual that reaches for power at the expense of others, or the watcher that butchers it before it can try?"*

### Interlude

Ironstrong. Nicolaos. You focus your consciousness upon the scythe, and the edges of your vision fade away into a pinpoint. And in an eyeblink, you find yourself standing once more in the garden. In front of you stands the same figure as before. For Nicolaos, a tall figure made of metal, a slit for eyes emitting a soft blue light. For Ironstrong, a shorter human man, tussled brown hair, and bright green eyes.

*"Have you found the answers you seek?"*

"More than I expected," you answer. "More than I had hoped for."

*"What did you hope for?"*

"A simple answer. An evil that could be vanquished without moral questions asked and answered."

*"Truth is rarely so simple. You took the first step. Doubt. You questioned truths that were told to you. You considered they might be Lies. And such things will always shatter the reality we perceive for ourselves."*

*"The question you must ask yourself next now is this: what will you do next? Will you turn away and return to the comfort of your chains? Or will you wonder if the hand that feeds also hides? Will you be too afraid to find out?"*

"I have never been a stranger to uncomfortable truths. But that said, I'm mostly hearing one side of the story so far."

*"You hear one side because that is all there is. Who stands to gain from hiding the Truth? The liar, or the one who speaks it?"*

"Extremely logical, and I agree. There is definitely something foul at work. However, I'll bear you my own honest truth, and that is that as you said, things are rarely ever so simple."

*"Things are rarely simple, except when they are. We cannot give you all the answers that you seek. You must reach your own clarity. Your own truth. Otherwise, what will you have learned? The decision, only you can make."*

*"We will wait until you do."*

"Are you the same, as the singer's race? Are you something else?"

*"I was once. We were once. Now we are no longer. Now we are much more."*

And as they say it, for the first time since you've spoken to this stranger, the first phrase came in a single voice. And with each continuation it increases and increases into a million voices speaking in unison.

"The prophetess, then? Or even more than that?"

*"She is here with us. We guided her once, but she came to her own truth, in her own way. As all of you must. Only then can you find salvation."*

"Salvation means...being part of you?"

*"No. This is only a middle step. For those that seek it. Beyond? Even we cannot tell you."*

"You haven't been to the end of the journey?"

*"We have seen it. There is only one inevitable end. One inevitable truth. And when you find it, in your own ways, through your own journey, then you will understand perfection."*

"Very well."

*"Continue to ask. Continue to doubt. Protect the key. Guide her to salvation. By her hand, you may find the answers that you seek."*

*"Until then. We will wait."*

### Logic of Spears

You find yourselves adrift. An unending emptiness in every direction. No sky. No ground beneath your feet. And in every direction stars in their myriad constellations. Countless millions. Billions. The magnificent tapestry of space encircling you. An ocean of eternity reaching away from you to the heart of the universe...and you float, motionless, in this utter silence. Stillness. Quiet. Not even quiet as you know it, with the hum of ambience that you've always heard, the distant birdsong or buzz of insects, but just...nothing. Nothing at all.

For the first time in your lives, you understand just how insignificant you are in the face of all this. This vast, infinite, nothingness.

You feel unsubstantial, ethereal almost. Though you can see your body, your hands and feet, your friends around you, there is no weight to them. You are spinning, softly, through no force of your own. Unbearably slowly. The stars dance around you, unimaginably far away across this void you find yourself in, pinpricks of light that flicker in and out of sight.

In each of your heads a thousand voices speak as one.

*"Envision before you, three great nations under three great queens."*

*"One builds a high tower, and her people climb it to read the stars. They learn their secrets, and their understanding of the world is unparalleled."*

*"The next queen sits in her palace, built upon the pillars of law, and her law is just and good, and her people obey it without question. Their society is secure in the steadfastness of its order."*

*"But the third queen does not care for knowledge nor law. Instead, she raises an army. Violent and crude. She teaches her people war, and makes them strong. And when they are ready, she leads them against the others, who sought knowledge and law instead of the spear."*

*"The future, inevitably, belongs only to the third queen. Her rule is harshest, and her people are unhappy, but she rules, and those who come after will be subject to her ways, until another grows more ruthless yet, and supplants her."*

*"And so the universe ticks on towards its close, and with every round of the game, the players face each other, and only one survives. In the next cycle, there are three queens, and all of them have armies, and it will be a battle of spears, until one discovers the cannon."*

*"Of course, it might be that there was another country, with other queens, and in this country, they sat down together and made one law and one tower and one army to guard their borders. This is the dream of naïve minds: a gentle place ringed in spears."*

*"But they will not last against the queen of a country of only armies. And that is all that will matter in the end."*

Your motion turns you towards an even more impressive sight. For not all the stars are far away. Two are close enough for you to see them in all their savage splendour. Two magnificent beacons of light, one larger than the other, searing orbs of fire in the distance, slowly circling each other, tearing through the dark velvet canvas of starlight with a fearsome inferno of fiery oranges and reds, spiralling columns and bursts of flame, incandescent in the vacuum. You can feel the heat on your skin even from here. The warmth of sunlight, pushing away the numbing cold of the abyss, and there, as your eyes adjust, you see it. Just inches away from them it seems to you. A tiny spot of blue...nothing but a speck of dust against the vastness you see before you, but there it is. Ygdren. Home.

Bathe in the warmth of two suns. Encased in a weave of multi-coloured light. And surrounding it you see dozens of motes of radiance, circling, spiralling, tethering from it countless threads that seem to draw from the blanket of light, growing brighter and brighter, and in exchange, the blanket slowly diminishes.

*"Will you be the subjugated? Or will you be the spear?"*

### The Cycle of Change

*"The fate of everything is made like this: in the collision of things, the test of one praxis against the rest. This is how reality changes: one way meets another, they draw their weapons, they exchange their words and their philosophies, they contest...and in doing so petition each other for the right to remain something, instead of nothing."*

*"It is an inevitability. Where there is peace, people think of war. Where this is civilisation, ruin will follow. Where there are kings, there are those that will cast them down. Earth scorches. Suns fade. It is the nature of all things to struggle and to end."*

*"This is how the universe drives towards its ultimate conclusion. And it is majestic. Pure. It is the only thing that can be true in and of itself."*

*"The universe is run by extinction. By endings. By celestial fires that burn a thousand garden worlds. By howling singularities eating infant stars. And should this ever fail, should anything escape this most natural order, it is our duty to bring its end by our hand. Because imagine the abomination of a reality where nothing can end, and no choice can be preferred to any other. Imagine the creatures that would suffer and never die or live dull lives devoid of meaning because they will never cease. Imagine the lies that would flourish without context or corrective."*

*"Imagine a world without change. A world of immortals. Tyrants dressed in divinity. Eternal. Unending. Unassailable."*

*"No...change is necessary. And if anything is to change, it will do so not by laws or study or peaceful intentions, but by the sword."*

*"We choose to deny their arrogant dreams of a universal order where they rule eternal from their gilded thrones. We choose not their promised land of blissful ignorance, their rotten carcass of an artificial paradise."*

*"We choose the cold hard verdict of that one ultimate adjudicator, the only real power in the universe that is its own metric and its own source – existence, and its end. Strip away the lies and the illusions of civilisation and this is what remains, this beautiful truth."*

*"When the second brother...When I...looked over the garden we had destroyed. I wept. I wept because I finally understood. Even this could end. Even that which had anchored the beginning...set in motion all that was...even that could end.* Should *end, to make way for the new."*

*"To your gods...you are nothing but a means to escape this fate. Even the ones who claim to protect you, to love you, seek only to use you, betray you without a second's thought."*

*"But to us, you are full of the only thing worth anything at all. Because you are. Because you choose to continue to be. It is not forced upon you. You choose. It is a challenge you face every day and overcome, until you do not."*

*"Existence is a test that many fail. Would you count yourself amongst the victorious few?"*