Simon withdrew his left foot from a patch of cool shadow where the dampness of ancient stone clung to his sole, then followed mechanically with his right, his movements devoid of enthusiasm. The heel of his black leather shoe struck the precisely laid pavement with a hollow, brittle click like the sound of wooden beads snapping in the depths of a cave. Another click followed, then another. His rhythm was unvaried: one step every two seconds, exact. The pallid light filtering from a high, narrow slit in the right wall, where motes of stagnant gold dust hung suspended, never reached the floor. It halted midway, swallowed by the rough, gray stone walls that leached all color from the world. The air was thick with the scent of old mold, damp earth, and the metallic tang of rust floating, unmoving, in the frigid stillness that brushed against Simon's already cold cheeks.
On he walked. Ten steps. Twenty. No sound but the solitary click of his shoes, their faint echo rebounding from the arched ceiling high above, drowned in darkness. The palace seemed to exhale in answer. Simon's own breath was shallow, quiet, visible only as a wisp of white vapor that vanished instantly into the biting cold. His right thumb moved unconsciously, rubbing circles into his left palm, searching for warmth that wasn't there.
Then, the door appeared.
Massive, wrought from dark oak and banded with iron in intersecting geometric patterns—like the veins of a long-dead tree. At either side stood the guards. Their dull gray armor, unadorned, emitted a faint metallic rustle as they shifted, as though internal corrosion hindered their motion. They moved in unison, two mechanical steps back, retreating from the door's center without so much as a glance not at Simon, not at each other. A short exhale came from one, the sound of air passing through a visor. For a moment, the stale odor of old sweat and rancid machine oil clung to them before dissolving into the corridor's chill.
Simon raised his right hand, his palm damp despite the cold. Slowly, he pushed against the door's weight. A groan, deep and ancient, shuddered from its iron hinges the creak of a giant bird's bones. A narrow sliver of light appeared first, spilling liquid gold into the corridor's gloom, banishing the shadows. Then, steadily, the gap widened, revealing what lay beyond.
A wave of warmth—soft, like the breath of a banked furnace—flowed toward Simon, curling around his chilled legs. An intoxicating scent followed: rich Damascus roses, their sweetness edged with bitterness, mingled with molten beeswax, the sun-warmed dust of aged wood, and the crisp fragrance of linen dried in sunlight. Simon stepped inside. His shoe met polished walnut with a muted tap, a sound utterly unlike the stone corridor's hollow echoes warmer, quieter, intimate.
The room was an explosion of color and light after the darkness of the vaulted passage. High, arched windows with frosted glass softened the harsh noon sun beyond the palace, transforming it into liquid gold that bathed everything. Vibrant hues bloomed everywhere: heavy chestnut silk drapes, Persian carpets woven in intricate patterns of crimson, indigo, and emerald, walls sheathed in gilded paper embossed with floral motifs. Even the air glittered, alive with dancing motes of gold. The warmth was palpable, seeping through Simon's thin coat, touching his skin like a living thing.
Then, as if pulled by some strange gravity, Simon's gaze dragged heavily to the left side of the room. Toward the massive royal bed, heaped with coverlets of crimson and gold damask.
There she was, perched on the edge so close to falling.
The girl.
She lay on her back, utterly still. Her short dress of deep red velvet gleamed under the light like the skin of a ripe apple. A small Victorian bonnet, the exact same shade as the velvet, sat snugly on her head, allowing a single lock of pale blond hair—faded as old linen—to escape onto her pallid forehead. Her long silk stockings, black, stretched over her slender legs, stopping just above the knees, a stark contrast against the near-translucent whiteness of her skin. Her little black shoes, polished leather with delicate laces and low heels, were perfectly formed, rigid no different from the porcelain dolls' footwear displayed in glass cabinets. Their toes pointed stiffly toward the ceiling. Her small hands, clad in thin black gloves of the same leather, rested on her chest, fingers perfectly straight, parallel.
She did not move. Her thick, flaxen lashes did not flutter. Her narrow chest did not rise with visible breath. Hers was a silence so absolute, so encircled by the room's flood of life and warmth and color, that it made her presence all the more uncanny. All the more urgent. Simon's widened eyes traced every detail: the tiny, immaculate stitch at the shoulder of her dress, the single faint wrinkle in her left stocking above the ankle, the deep sheen on the tip of her right shoe where a beam of light struck directly. The stillness was a physical weight pressing against his eardrums, smothering even the sudden, violent acceleration of his own heartbeat.
She knew.
She knew Simon had come to take her.
How?
The question pierced his skull like a white-hot needle, but he forced it aside with a surge of will. No it wasn't that he didn't know the answer. It was that he feared what the answer would be. Feared the truth taking shape in his mind. The terror was a living thing now, writhing in the icy hollow of his gut.
Where had she gotten that crimson velvet dress? That precise Victorian bonnet? Those black stockings that clung like serpent skin? No servant had entered this locked room in… in so long. The questions swarmed his skull with half-formed answers, vague and ghastly enough to skirt madness. As if the clothes had sprouted from her flesh. As if the shadows themselves had draped her.
Simon had not visited her often. And in most of those visits, her small body had been a ruin: bones sharp beneath paper-thin skin, bruises blooming like poison flowers, eyes extinguished in dark hollows. The change had been easy to miss.
But he saw it now.
Saw it with a clarity that gnawed at his entrails.
She had grown older.
Much older.
Now, she looked fourteen. A slumbering maiden in a royal bed. Ten years lived in this lightless, hellish prison of his and she didn't even know it was a prison. Didn't know anything at all.
Simon's gaze veered away, fleeing her suffocating stillness, and landed on the right side of the room. There, atop a small table of dark cherrywood, lay a final stack of papers. His footsteps clipped against the warm wooden floor—click… click… click—each one rustier than the last. For a moment, he forgot the girl. He reached out with his left hand, the smoothed fingers trembling faintly, involuntarily, and seized the stack.
Then he turned toward the bed. His rough voice, dusted with a thin film of emotional grit, split the gilded air:
"You… you thing. You are the anchor of this branch of my tree."
A pause. The swallow in his throat was audible a faint, wet click.
"Though it is my story… you are its foundation."
A deep breath, as though he were driving the words into his own chest before releasing them.
"There is no other Simon who knows of you. I am singular. The only Simon, in all the infinities, who can truly be called… distinct."
Then, in a single motion swift as a spark of madness, he raised the stack high into the golden, light-dusted air and rejected it.
The papers exploded.
A moment of silent void, and then the stack became a white tempest. Scraps—thousands of them—cascaded like deranged snow in a warm room. Each slip of paper, no larger than a fingernail, drifted down with deceptive slowness, spinning on its edge, curling like dead moths. On every one, printed in dense black ink, was something: a random sequence of letters. "Q Y S H W." "A R B K L." "SH T GH M S." Words without roots. Sentences without ends. A language stillborn, stripped of meaning. The scent of old, fumigated paper unfurled, fouling the purity of the rose perfume.
Simon raised his hands to the heavens his fingers splayed like the spasming wings of a crow caught in a magnetic field.
The scraps stopped falling.
Time itself seemed to freeze. The fluttering paper hung suspended, like shards of a shattered planet caught in a static orbit.
Then, the reversal began.
Slowly at first, then with gathering speed, the scraps ascended. Each piece vanished toward a single focal point in space, beneath the gilded ceiling. Converging. Accumulating. Aligning with terrifying precision. The sounds: a dry rustling, like the fracturing bones of tiny dolls; a faint metallic creak, like nails dragged across glass.
Compression.
The crumbling white mass grew denser, shedding volume, gaining a visible weight. It took shape a cube. Its angles formed as though carved by an invisible chisel. Its top and bottom faces flattened into perfect planes. Its edges sharpened.
Light.
A flash—pure, white, transient, brutal—erupted from the new form. It flooded the room for an instant, bleaching shadows, searing the eyes, dissolving the vibrant colors into a sea of stark white. A scalding heat lashed Simon's face like a slap.
Then, as swiftly as it came, the light dimmed.
Vision returned, bleached by afterglow.
At the center of the room, where the shredded paper had danced, Simon now stood.
In his outstretched left palm, he held a small object.
A die.
A small die, carved from ancient bone, its color pallid like something long buried in damp earth. Six edges, each honed to geometric perfection. On every face, a single black dot glistened, a perfect circle, a puncture in time itself. Some of its edges were faintly worn, as if eroded by countless fingers over countless ages. The air around it trembled slightly, like the boundary between two realities. A faint scent rose from it: dull salt, the dry rot of a tomb, cold metal.
Simon rolled the die between the fingers of his left hand. His right thumb brushed one of its bone-smooth faces, tracing the unyielding chill. His wide, dry eyes fixed on the single black dot staring back at him. The room was silent save for the whisper of silk curtains swaying in an unfelt draft, and the sound of Simon's own breath one long, slow exhalation, carved with dread.
And on the bed's edge, the girl lay still in her crimson dress and bonnet, motionless as a specimen preserved in liquid gold. Her closed eyes remained closed.
Simon's lips—pale, cracked like parched earth—peeled back in slow menace. Not a human smile. A rictus. A spasm of flesh baring teeth too white, too even, too sharp, like shards of glass. The corners of his mouth stretched upward, nearly reaching the hollows of his wide eyes, splitting his face into two dark crescents that radiated psychic cold. His forehead creased, the skin folding like ancient bark beneath the surface, deep fissures branching like cracks in dry clay. This was no smile of joy, nor pride. It was the smile of a man confessing to sacred madness, to power that devours itself. Shadows pooled around his eyes, turning them into black pits where the demons of singularity lurked.
Between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he pinched the bone die. This was no throw. It was a bending of reality.
He flicked it with his right finger.
It did not roll.
It folded.
As if the space around it were elastic. The die bent at an impossible angle—momentarily—before snapping back into shape several inches to the right, having never crossed the distance in between. A soft sound accompanied each "fold," like the pop of a dislocated joint. The air rippled around it, water disturbed by a thrown stone. The scent of ozone, hot static, surged forward, clashing with the room's ancient rot.
Then the faces began to change.
The bone surface of the die rippled like a disturbed lake. Its six original faces collapsed inward, folding upon themselves as their number fluctuated three, then seven, then seventeen, sixty, a thousand. Each new face was flawlessly smooth, each stamped with the same black-ink letters that had covered the paper scraps. The words made no sense. "F SH L W Y M." "S Q R N H." "A B T TH J H KH D DH R Z S SH S D T DH ' GH F Q K L M N H W Y"—a single endless word, its letters spilling beyond the edges of the bone surface that somehow expanded to contain them, as though folding into a new dimension. Some words were just one letter repeated a thousand times: "AAAAAAAAAA...", like the babble of mad water.
The die was no longer a cube. It became a sphere with infinite faces, a mutating cone, a grotesque shape that continuously formed and dissolved, as if the laws of physics around it melted beneath the heat of his will.
"If probability itself must be unique..." Simon whispered, his voice rough as the hinges of hell, harmonizing with the rustle of shifting bone-faces. His eyes tracked the die's impossible dance, burning with an inner blue fire. "...then its journey must be even more singular. A story unrepeated across infinities." His right hand rose, pointing at the shimmering mass that briefly flattened into a transparent disk every intricate inner face visible at once. "This die contains every possible sequence of letters. In any repetition. There are worlds without end here... Every logically possible arrangement of letters could birth a new world on this planet. Every sequence is a distinct order."
Suddenly, he caught the die in his outstretched left palm. The writhing mass stilled, as if surrendering to its fate. "This is no ordinary throw... but a unique throw." His smile widened. His cracked lips split further, releasing a single black droplet of blood that gleamed like mercury on his chin. "In one throw... I play every logically possible outcome. Which means there are no probabilities left to play. It is an infinite throw... where I cast every possible permutation simultaneously. And every outcome that repeats even once is filtered out... leaving only the one that never recurs."
He raised his hand.
He threw.
It was not a throw.
It was a release.
The die escaped. It did not fall.
It revolved.
An invisible spin. A speed beyond logic. It did not rotate around a single axis, but around infinite axes at once. Its endless faces flickered like lines of mad text folding in upon themselves at a speed that defied perception. The space around it warped. The Persian rug beneath it rippled like sand under scorching heat. The wall behind it distorted, flashing glimpses of impossible vistas volcanic crimson clouds, a city of black glass, a dark sun swallowing stars. The sound of its turning was not physical, but a deep hum in the mind, like the birth-cry of a universe. The stench of scorched metal and rust bloomed.
And then…
It landed.
On the polished walnut floor, beside Simon's right foot. It did not fall violently. It landed like a heart stopping utterly still between one moment and the next. The infinite spin ceased. The bone mass collapsed back into a simple cube, six faces, its top side upturned.
On that face, in glossy black ink, a single word was written:
"THE ALUMARIANI."
Silence. Thick. Suffocating. Even the whisper of the curtains stilled. Even the golden dust motes froze midair.
Simon's face… was swallowed by darkness.
Not shadows cast from without. This darkness welled from within. His wide eyes flooded with a depthless, ink-black void, as though stars had been snuffed out inside them. His devil's grin did not fade. It widened. His cracked lips stretched upward, nearly meeting his hairline cunning, feral, radiating an inhuman joy, the joy of a beast finding its rarest prey. The pale skin of his face seemed to shrink against his skull, revealing the ghostly contours of other skulls beneath the surface. A long, frigid exhale escaped him, dissolving the white cloud of his breath in the warm air, leaving behind the scent of barren earth after a storm.
The moment the die settled, Simon saw.
Every possible timeline fractured across his vision. Countless eyes opened in his mind like surveillance screens, each displaying a different sequence of probabilities. Each streamed data of alternate Simons—names, wars, evolutions, deaths. Millions. Billions. Trillions. Then… infinity.
In none of them… did this name exist.
"The Alumariani."
It had never appeared. Never been conceived. Never been possible.
Except…
Here.
In this outcome. In this throw. In this exact moment.
"Here…" he whispered, his voice a dry rustle like the wings of dead beetles. His grin glimmered in the darkness shrouding his face, a crack in reality's wall. "Only… here."
Simon stepped forward, his movements weighted by the stagnant air thickening around him, toward the creature crouched on the edge of the black velvet. The girl rose—a mechanical twitch devoid of any visible life—to face him, her eyes two dull panes of glass witnessing an unfathomable slumber. Her motion carried the grotesque precision of a force beyond reason, like a puppet strung with wires of solid darkness.
He reached out with his left handb a trembling gesture that betrayed the terror festering beneath his veneer of control. And she mirrored him, her arm extending in a demonic parody, until their fingers met. A strange warmth pulsed from her palm, an organic fire smoldering beneath skin as pale as weathered marble. That warmth was the only proof, in that hallowed silence, that some vital ember still clung to her corpse-like form a statue exhumed from an ancient tomb.
Then, with the furtive quickness of a grave robber, he slid the ring onto her finger that very metal band Fayet had given him aboard the ship.
Light erupted.
A white glare, sharp as winter's fangs, laced with venomous green the glow of toxins sleeping in forgotten laboratory vials. And with it rose a shrill, electric whine, drilling into the eardrums like the wings of colossal insects in a damp catacomb. Through it all, Simon's lips remained fixed in that same rigid grin, terrible in its stillness, a bronze mask stamped with sacred horror.
Then, they vanished.
Like mist.
A disappearance that left a palpable void in the room, as if the air itself had congealed where they'd stood. There was no transition, no visible movement only a severing of existence's thread, like a page torn from the book of reality. In their wake lingered the acrid stench of chemicals and the echo of that buzzing whine, which resonated deeper than bone, a testament to the violation of nature's pitiless laws.