The journey's last leg

[Amaterasu]

Amaterasu had no idea what to expect of the space beyond the portal. It could be anything: they could find themselves standing on an enormous transparent bubble containing the Frozen Fields, if Urist’s theory was true. Or maybe in a white expanse like the Nexus, or more dangerously, a sort of outer space. As Oki’s hands reached through from beyond the black portal and grabbed her arms to pull her through, she wondered what it would be. Then she was lifted up and saw herself faced with a pitch black sky, and her three friends already waiting for her.

Oki, Urist and Fiara stood on a sort of platform, or to be exact Oki was kneeling on it with his hands gripping her arms to tug her onto the surface. Was it even a platform? The only pointer to that was that they all stood there and that she met a resistance when propping her hands below herself to climb up. Urist seemed to have realized this too because he was tapping the ground in front of him with his pickaxe, checking for holes. Shuddering at the thought of what might happen if they fell into the void, Amaterasu pulled herself up and looked back.

The portal was still there. Like a window they could see the peak of the rock they had just climbed, and the snowed mountain extending beneath that. How peculiar… one could see in from the outside, but not the other way around? And extending that thought, did that mean that there were more “windows” like these where an outsider could look into a verse from? It was a creepy thought to pursue, so she decided to leave it at that. The matter at hand was a whole different one, after all…

“This en’t right”, murmured Urist. “Ah can’t see no borders ta this place.”

“What about those things?” asked Fiara and pointed at the ground. True enough, there were faint white lines that Amaterasu hadn’t noticed yet. They were blurry like paint that had been washed away by water, but the more one looked at it, the clearer they stood out.

“Leylines…” she murmured. “Could it really be?”

“Wha? Layla-ins?” Urist parrotted Amaterasu’s words.

“I think I know what this place is… none of you move”, she ordered, but a moment too late. Urist had turned around and lifted his foot to move towards them, but the moment that he did so his body flipped over and, with a surprised scream, he fell upwards as a sort of reversed gravity gripped him. Before anyone could really react to the sudden shift though the dwarf hit a surface and tumbled forward, rolling along an invisible ground and finally stopping at a fair distance from the rest of the group. Diagonally above them he sat, his head facing downwards and his face depicting such a comical grimace of confusion and shame that even Amaterasu had to laugh despite the severity of the situation. “Are you okay, Urist?” she asked once she managed to regain control of herself.

“Aye… ah, bu’ wha’ happened? Why’re ye all upside down now?”

“Stay put. The laws of space are different in this place. Moving around may fling you across the space, or worse.”

“I imagine that you’ve got a plan?” Oki intervened with a worried frown.

“Yes… there’s only one type of space that I know that this could be, one that has leylines and where the regular laws of space and time are distorted: an extradimensional hypometric area with chaos-logical antilaws.”

“...”

“... okay, that’s a mouthful, I realize. Omoikane, the Kami of wisdom, discovered it before I was reincarnated into Nippon, as a space between spaces through which lesser Kami can navigate from Tamagahara, Earth or the Underworld to any other of the three realms without undertaking the lengthy journey through Nippon. The common name we gave that place is ‘Abyss’, the realm between realms that holds reality together.”

“That I think I can memorize… so you know how we must move to get out of this place?”

“Yes and no… the good news is that I think I know where this could lead. The Abyss was a connection between the underworld, the surface and the heavens. If this place is anything like it, then it may have a connection between these realms too. We could try to find an exit that will bring us to the Nexus.” Yes, they could. But her destination was going to be a very different one. Oki raised an eyebrow and despite that he didn’t object Amaterasu suspected that he knew what she intended to do.

“And the bad news?” Fiara interjected.

“The bad news is that I will need to calculate the chaos-geometric properties of this antispace to define what antilaws govern it, and thus determine how to reverse those very same antilaws in order to synthesize a formula that allows us to determine the correct path of leylines to follow if we are to get anywhere. And that sort of calculation will take a while… depending on the magnitude of the antispace we’re in I could need a few days.”

“What if we take a path along a leyline at random?” Oki suggested. “I realize that it may not be the best course of action but we can’t leave Urist up there and it’d be faster.”

“I have no idea where these leylines may lead, Oki… sure we may end up somewhere we want to be but who’s to say that we won’t end up in the Underworld, if the Omniverse has one? Or in some other, equally bad place, like the core of a verse, or in midair where we will fall to our deaths.”

The Oina warrior shuddered. “I… suppose.”

“The leylines should be the single constant in this world, which will allow me to unravel the whole thing… you guys can travel up and down along them if you have to move, but avoid straying from them. Urist, try moving around and see if you can get your feet onto one of those lines! You should be able to navigate your way back to us.” Having said that, she took a seat, crossed her legs, closed her eyes and emptied her mind. This sort of calculations would take a while, and a single error because she didn’t concentrate could make everything else useless.


Oki observed as Amaterasu began to paint a complex spherical model into the air using her Celestial Brush. Every stroke, every blot of ink seemed to have a purpose but the pattern was getting more and more complex with every second. Before long he had to turn his eyes away because it was making his head hurt to just look at it, let alone to listen to the rows of numbers she was writing next to it and murmuring to herself. Was she even taking breaks to breathe?

Whatever the case was, the Kami seemed to know what she was doing, and the three of them could do little but to trust in her. A place like this, a plane of existence where the most fundamental laws of reality did not apply, was not a domain for a simple warrior like him, or even for a learned scholar: it was the domain of the gods.

“Urist! Do you happen to still carry that Protractor on you that you’ve been using on the maps?” Amaterasu asked loudly.

“Uhh… aye, ah should. D’ya need it?”

“Please. Throw it down to me.”

The dwarf did as told and Oki watched with great interest how the little piece of metal fell downwards from his perspective. Urist was standing upside down with gravity seemingly pulling him upwards, yet it seemed that the Protractor cared very little about that. Amaterasu snagged it from midair without turning her eyes away from the drawing.

“Oki… can you pass me a can of food from our provisions? A big one, preferably.”

“Sure”, he replied and dug around in his backpack. Strange, it felt like it was way larger and deeper on the inside than out… he quickly found one of the cans with preserved meat and vegetables and tossed it towards her. “Did you need that for your calculations as well?”

“Eh? Oh, no”, she said as she popped the lid off, then tilted the can over her mouth and swallowed a mouthful. “I’m just hungry and need some brain food.”