The Backrooms: Pantheon

Chapter IX

The council chamber of the Timekeepers was a pocket of regulated chronospace—a sphere of arranged null-time suspended between one moment and the next, where the flow of seconds was a visible current. The walls were made of stacked moments, each one a thin translucent sheet showing a frozen instant from some timeline or another. The space housed an impossible library of floating crystalline pillars, each one containing a frozen thread of time suspended in faceted amber, stretching as far as any eye could see in every direction. The floor ticked, and the ceiling tocked.

The Gearmaker arrived precisely on schedule, for ae would not be an avatar of Time otherwise. Ae had dressed for the occasion; brass face-plate polished to a mirror sheen, the Paradox Engine’s housing visible beneath aer collar like the hilt of a sword, aer Filigree Angels trailing behind aem in a brass comet-tail. Ae was received by a tall, thin functionary whose face was a clock—the hands spinning at different rates for each eye—and escorted through a corridor where moments stacked like sedimentary rock. In one, a city burned. In the next, it was never built.

The council chamber was circular, its seats arranged in a hemisphere rising into impossible heights. Each seat was occupied by an avatar of Chrono’lektra from a different reality. This congregation was one of time-keepers whose collective jurisdiction spanned the multiverse. Some wore robes like the Gearmaker’s. Others had faces of sand or water or falling leaves. One was nothing but a persistent echo that spoke in tenses that hadn’t been invented yet. The Gearmaker had rarely attended such meetings in the last several centuries. Ae could feel the others noting aer absence-made-presence, the long gap in aer attendance logged and weighed and, in some quarters, resented.

The Kaironomer sat at the head of the assembly, its form a nested helix of polished chronium, each rotation marking a different temporal frequency. Beside it, the Chronarch wove and unwove the same five-second loop of a supernova’s birth, studying it with rapt patience. The Metron, a slender figure of vibrating crystal, seemed to be tracking the pulse of every timeline simultaneously in the back of their mind.

The Gearmaker took aer seat. “Brothers. Sisters. Siblings of the clock. I come before you on behalf of the Council of Daedos—”
“You come before us because your timeline is hemorrhaging.” The voice came from the seat at the apex of the hemisphere, in which an elderly white-haired man in red monk robes was seated. He was The Clocksmith, timekeeper of an adjacent reality that had nearly collided with aer own when their two Keymasters had crossed streams. They had worked together in prosecuting the two displaced Keymasters for crimes against time. He had been brisk then, officious. But now, he looked awfully tired. “We have been monitoring the breach event since it occurred. The ripples in spacetime caused by the Cassiopeia Cradle’s activation were not exactly quiet. We are well aware of SHALTOKOL and Hubris, and their plans to breach You Cheated.”

“And just how long have you been aware?”

“SHALTOKOL and Hubris are not the only ones seeking the prison.” The Clocksmith answered. “In my own reality, we have been tracking a being called The Eclipser. He acquired an artifact of devastating power known as the Defiled Crown, and used it to escape his own imprisonment. I aided the Royal Court in attempting to contain him, but our efforts were futile. He used his power to open a rift and escape. His stated intention was to reach You Cheated and free its prisoners, to enact revenge upon the structure that confined him.”

The Gearmaker gave pause, processing this revelation.

“This may not be coincidental, Gearmaker. The Eclipser’s path and SHALTOKOL’s have been paralleled for some time. We have records of their trajectories intersecting at seven distinct nexus points across the past cycle. Two grudges, two roads leading to the same locked door. Something is pulling them. Their meeting was inevitable.”

The Gearmaker was taken aback. “And you did not see fit to warn us? Surely you are aware of the threat they pose.”

“We are. And we are also aware of approximately 17643 other threats currently demanding our attention.” The Clocksmith rubbed his eyes. “Do you have any conception of what it takes to maintain temporal stability across the multiverse, Gearmaker? Any conception at all?”

“Must that even be a question? I hold a seat on this council! I have maintained the Enigmachina since the fall of the pantheon!”

“You and your Enigmachina have, by your own volition, limited the reach of your jurisdiction to only the timelines concerning your own reality. One branch. We have been regulating the entire tree in your stead.”

Ae leaned forward. “I have come to warn you of the serpent which gnaws at the roots of the tree. The ambitions of SHALTOKOL and Hubris extend far beyond a mere prison break. They seed to awaken Baughust, and should they succeed, it will not remain a mere ‘regional concern’. A thing that devours conceptually will certainly not respect the boundaries between timelines.”

The Clocksmith sagely nodded. “That, we are also aware of. We have run the projections. In the event of a full Baughust awakening, temporal collapse propagates across all connected realities within…a timeframe I am not permitted to share with someone of your clearance level.”

The Gearmaker’s gears ground audibly. “I sit on this council.”

“You sit on this council as a courtesy, because you maintain a machine we find useful. You do not sit on this council with full voting privileges, because you abandoned your post for several centuries to drink with that alchemist creature.” The Clocksmith’s voice could have frozen a sun. “Do not lecture me on clearance, Divus. I was stabilizing my timeline after my court fell, while you abandoned your pantheon to drown your sorrows in the bottle.”

The other Timekeepers shifted uncomfortably amidst the tense exchange.

A towering avatar composed of shifting sand and fractured sundials slammed a stone gavel against his plinth. “This Council recognizes the severity of the threat. However, our resources are currently exhausted.” He produced a manifest from nowhere. Pages and pages of temporal crises, each one annotated with priority ratings and deployment schedules.
“Exhausted?” The Gearmaker bristled, stepping forward. “What supersedes the unmaking of the omniverse?”
“The integrity of the baseline,” a female avatar with a face like a porcelain clock dial answered flatly.
She gestured, and a holographic projection of the Ginnungagap flared in the center of the room.
“The Heart of the Universe has begun to… accelerate. Its pulse has increased by 0.003 three beats per minute. A being known only to us as ‘Auxiliary’ has been attempting to destroy it, seemingly to overcome death itself. Every attempt thus far has failed, but each one sends shockwaves down the threads we maintain. We have an entire task force currently dedicated to absorbing the damage.”

Ae held up a hand. “I understand the mathematics.”

“Then you understand why we cannot spare even a single Filigree Angel for your prison break.” The Clocksmith replied. “The Enigmachina itself, by your own admission, has been malfunctioning recently. Something is causing micro-fractures in its temporal lattice. We are occupied with attempting to patch them before they propagate.”
“Micro-fractures?” The Gearmaker’s voice sharpened. “I detected no such thing!”
“Of course you would not. You have been distracted.” The Clocksmith leaned forward. “And then there is the matter of Temporal Apotheosis; it has begun to multiply, or more aptly, metastisize. Instances have appeared in twelve new adjacent realities, literal ticking time bombs. Their countdowns are accelerating, and we are hemorrhaging field agents trying to suppress the resulting integration points and memory wipes.”

“We cannot intervene directly. Our resources are committed.” The Clocksmith sighed. “But I will authorize the release of temporal intelligence; projections, probability matrices, whatever data we have on the Eclipser’s movements and capabilities. It is not much, but it may give your pantheon the margin it needs. The multiverse is already ending in a thousand places at once, and we are holding back the tide with our bare hands. Your prison break is one wave among many.” He paused. “Do not let it be the wave that drowns us.”

As the Gearmaker rose to depart, the Clocksmith drifted close, and lowered his voice so it carried only between them. “Watch the Eclipser. If he and your SHALTOKOL are being aimed, if something is gathering the venom-touched from across realities to a single point, then You Cheated is merely the staging ground. Whatever they free, they free as an army, and an army needs a war. Find out what the war is for before you spend yourself fighting the soldiers.”

He pressed a small chronometric beacon into the Gearmaker’s hand. “If it comes to it. If you find the thread that matters. Call me. I’ll come, council or no council. Some debts are older than mathematics.”

The Gearmaker closed aer brass fingers around the beacon. “Thank you…” Ae reluctantly whispered.

Part of the desert had been terraformed into something beautiful.

Argos arrived at the Travelers’ base on the soles of bare feet, his blindfold streaming behind him, his clusters of orbiting eyes drinking in marble-white sand and the impossible architecture rising from it: colonnades of ivory and gold, ribbed vaults like the bones of some vast and pristine beast, asymmetrical and yet perfectly balanced. It was a Slip Palace, resembling a cathedral built by mathematicians, catching the starlight like a jewel held up to the eye of eternity. Oases dotted the dunes. The air was cool. It was a paradise carved out of a hell, and the people who had carved it were artisans and scientists and, by every account Argos had ever read, friendly.

But the base was too quiet. Like the silence of mourning.

An Astral met him at the threshold of the central hall. “Justice walks among us,” he spoke in a layered chorus. “We know your shape, Tlamelahuacachinaliztli. Our forefathers taught us your name in the old records.”

“I come bearing warning, and seeking aid.” Argos inclined his head, a courtesy he extended to few. “I will be brief, for I sense your house is in mourning, and I would not trespass long upon grief.”

“You sense correctly.” The Astral turned, gesturing for him to walk alongside. They moved through the great hall, past walls inscribed in the Travelers’ language; each letter a flourish like a sword stroke or a fencing arc. “Speak your warning. We will hear it, though I will tell you now…our elder’s heart is not in receiving guests this cycle.”

Argos spoke it plainly. He had expected disbelief. He had not expected the Astral to stop walking entirely, and stand very still.

“The Outer Darkness…” The Astral paused. “Come. The elder must hear this from you directly. And you must hear from us what it cost to learn what we learned.”

The elder of the Travelers was an Arcane, robed and hooded, a being of immense age whose helmet bore the wizard’s-peak that signified a scholar’s station. She sat before a display of suspended starlight, a memorial of seven points of light arranged in a constellation that meant nothing to Argos and everything to her.

“Tell me the name again,” she said, before Argos had spoken a word. “The one in the dark.”

“Baughust.”

The Arcane sight, tilting her head down. “Then…it is truly as we have feared.” She gave a gesture, and the starlight reformed. A constellation became a sleek, monumental vessel of ivory and gold, all sweeping arches and balanced asymmetry, a structure that connected to a network of light-threads spanning realities.

“Slip Palace Aethon-Kai,” the elder explained. “One of our great vessels. A nexus-craft capable of traversing the Ginnungagap and even the dark beyond. Crewed by seven of our finest. I will speak their names, for the dead deserve to be spoken.”

Projections of the crew materialized from the starlight alongside the ship.

“Sigma-Rho-112-A, who mapped the Thalasso System singlehandedly. Lambda-Phi-778-D, our finest Architect, who could raise a fortress from a single gem. Zeta-Omega-555-G, the Seeker, fastest of us all. Psi-Kappa-201-E, the Psion, who could soothe a panicking mind across a lightyear. Iota-Sigma-400-F, the Martyr, who never let a comrade die if breath remained in her own body. Omicron-Tau-339-B, the Crusader, who held a breach against a tide of marauders for nine days. And Alpha-Delta-900-H, the Astral, who navigated by stars no one else could see.”

The seven points pulsed once with each name. “Seven. Lost.”

“How?” Argos asked quietly.

“Curiosity. Our great virtue. Our great curse.” The elder’s hood dipped. “We are explorers, recorders, before all else. We illuminate the dark places, because that is what we are. And there is no place darker than the Outer Darkness. The abyss beneath the Aetherl, the original night from which the Ginnungagap emerged. We had charted its edges for centuries. We grew bold. We sent the Aethon-Kai deeper than any vessel had gone, to learn what truly dwells at the bottom of everything.”

The display shifted to recorded transmissions; fragmentary, distorted, the Travelers’ beautiful written language scrolling and breaking apart. “For eleven days they sent back wonders. Structures that should not be. Geometries that hurt the recording instruments. The Aethon-Kai descended through layers of the dark, and her crew sang with the joy of discovery, because that is our nature even unto death.” The elder’s voice dropped. “On the twelfth day, they found something that was looking back.”

The final transmission played. It was almost nothing. A field of absolute black—blacker than the void around it, a black that drank. And then, slowly, in the center of that deeper dark, a change. An orb of intense, malevolent white. A lure, illuminating the visage of a great beast. The transmission cut to static. The seven points of light winked out, one by one, in the space of a single breath.

“That was the last we heard of the Aethon-Kai,” the elder said. “No wreckage. No bodies. No final words. They were simply unmade. We retain the memory of them only because we are stubborn, and we wrote their names into hardened record the moment we lost them, before the dark could reach back through the thread and edit them from our knowing.” She turned the full weight of her hidden gaze upon Argos. “It tried, and we felt it trying. We could feel the pull of our memories trying to leave us. That is what you face, Justice. Things that kill by erasing the fact that there was ever anything to kill.”

Argos absorbed this in silence, his many eyes dimming. “Then you understand the threat,” he said. “You, of all the factions in the channel, know that this is real. I do not come to ask you to descend into the dark. I merely ask for your help in stopping SHALTOKOL before he awakens Baughust fully, before the worm climbs up the root and into the light. You have warriors. Crusaders who held breaches for nine days. Astrals who fold space. Arcanes who command the elements.”

“No.” The single word was gentle, but absolute. “I will not spend more of my children on this.” The elder rose now, slowly. “Hear me, and do not mistake my refusal for cowardice. You ask me to send more into the path of the Old Hungers. To gamble more of my people against a foe we cannot fight, only flee from. I will not.”

“If it climbs into the light,” Argos said, “there will be no fleeing. For anyone.”

“Then we will study it until the last instant, and write what we learn, and perhaps in some future existence our records will help those who can fight it.” The elder turned her back towards Argos. “We are not soldiers, Justice. We are not your Pantheon, with its wars and its grudges and its endless willingness to throw itself upon the pyre. We are witnesses. We will witness this, and do nothing more beyond that.” She gestured, and the seven points of light flared bright, and held. “That is my judgment. I trust you, of all beings, can respect a judgment, even when it is not the one you wished to hear.”

Argos stood in the cool, beautiful, grieving silence of the terraformed desert, and found he could not argue. He, who had hunted sinners across centuries because the pursuit was the punishment and the punishment was just. He understood, better than most, the weight of a decision made to protect one’s own. “I respect it,” he said at last. “Though I grieve it. But I ask one thing. Your records. Everything you have on the Outer Darkness. Everything you have on Baughust. Everything your crew transmitted before the end. Give it to me. Let your knowledge fight in your stead.”

The elder considered. Then she reached into a data-node and extracted a crystal that pulsed with stored light. “Take it. Go with this, Justice, if it is worth anything: the enemy is vast, and old, and it does not hurry, for it has never in all of time needed to. Your window, if it still exists, is smaller than you would like and perhaps larger than you fear, perhaps. Spend it well.” She paused, before leaving one final request. “And speak their names, sometimes. Sigma-Rho-112-A. Omicron-Tau-339-B. The others. While they are spoken, the dark cannot finish unmaking them. That is the only war we know how to win. Do not let their deaths be meaningless.”

Argos took the crystal and repeated the seven names once, fixing them in his perfect, eternal memory. Then he left the Travelers to their mourning.

The Backrooms Remodeling Company’s current job site was located in a level resembling a school. The gymnasium was filled with scaffolding, tool racks, crates of Reality Fresheners, and enough extension cords to circle a small planet.

The Alchemist, upon arriving, had to duck under a length of conduit being carried by a worker whose head was a toaster (set to medium heat, with two slices of bread inserted).

The Remodeling Company worked with frantic efficiency. He watched a team of three workers—microwave head, blender head, and something that might have been a dehumidifier—attempt to install a Reality Freshener in a doorway that kept shifting size every time they looked away from it.
“Hold it steady!”
“I’m trying! It won’t—”
“Just spray the foam!”
“I did! The foam is ignoring me!”

The Alchemist ducked around them and found a Salaryman seated at a table, eating a sandwich from a plastic container. Its head was a 1980s-era microwave, and it took the Alchemist a moment to realize it was eating by holding the sandwich against its side panel, where it was slowly warmed and, apparently, absorbed into the machine’s casing. A silver insignia gleamed on his uniform. Mid-rank, then. Capable of conversation. It would do.

Upon sensing his presence, the Salaryman looked up, its microwave-door face blinking a single LED in acknowledgment. “Can I help you?” it asked flatly.
“I’m looking for someone who works Level 0 maintenance,” the Alchemist said, pulling up a chair. “I was told there was a Foreman working out of this office who handled a recent Middlesorts contract.”
The Salaryman’s microwave beeped with consideration. “That would be Foreman Reginald. He’s on break right now. Up on the roof. Fire escape’s around back.”
The Alchemist nodded.

As promised, he found the Foreman on the roof, leaning against a large ventilation unit, staring at the perpetual blue sky of the level’s artificial horizon. The Foreman was a large being of concrete and steel cables, easily three meters tall even seated, its Jumbotron head displaying a single word: THINK.
“Alchemist,” it rumbled, not yet looking at him. “Heard you were coming.”
“I’m flattered my reputation precedes me.”
“Simon sent a message. Said you might show up asking about the Level 0 job.” It turned its massive head, the word on its display shifting to OBSERVE.
The Alchemist scoffed. “They’re really not good with coverups. I could smell it miles away. Tell me, Reggie, what’s really going on?”

The foreman paused. “The Level 0 contract has had…complications.”
“Complications. Do tell. I love a good complication. Keeps things interesting.”
“Information regarding active contracts is proprietary.”
“Mm.” The Alchemist withdrew his hand from his pocket. In it, a small glass vial of golden liquid: his own ichor. He held it up to the perpetual sunlight, turning it. “You know, I’ve always found your kind fascinating,” he mused. The way the heads function in their original purpose; a microwave that still cooks, a telephone that still rings. I could understand you, if I cared to. Open you right up and read you like a manual.” He pocketed the vial, facing the foreman once more. “Orrrrr, we could simply have a friendly chat about the Level 0 contract, and I could be on my way. Your choice entirely, friend.”

The foreman paused. “…Very well.”

The Alchemist nodded enthusiastically. “‘Atta-boy. Talk to me, Reggie. What happened down there?”

Reginald’s screen cycled through bands of static. When he spoke, it was slow, the words dragged up from somewhere deep. “It was a Middlesorts contract, direct from the Corpus Cores. Simon himself signed off on it personally, which is rare. We had to patch the damage the Horned Keymaster left. He’d broken something in the foundation of the level. Snapped a seal, they said, and the recoil chewed through Level 0 like a moth through wool. The Cores wanted it patched before the Staff noticed the damage and started asking questions. Damage control.”

“Cleaning the scene of the crime,” the Alchemist murmured. “Before the inspectors arrive. Go on.”

“Our job was to restore the structural integrity of the seam where the seal had taken damage. We went in with a full crew. Reality Fresheners, scaffolding, the works. And Level 0, well, you know how it is. Isolation effect. Everyone gets separated, even us. We worked in our own little pockets, calling out on the comms because we couldn’t see each other through the maze.” The Jumbotron display flickered: HOWEVER. “But the Backrooms don’t forget damage like that. The wound in that level was deeper than we thought. We were repairing the surface while the fracture kept growing underneath.” Reginald’s hands knotted together. “We had a junior unit. New. Eager, though. Eager to do good work. He was patching a section near one of the pitfalls. He was being careful, but…Level 0’s periphery shifted, and then the floor under him stopped being one.”
“And then he fell?”
Reginald nodded silently. “But here’s the thing, Alchemist. The pitfalls in Level 0, they’re supposed to go somewhere. Down into the structure. Maybe to a sublevel. Maybe just to death. But this one…”
“Where did he fall?”
The Foreman’s display went blank for a moment. Then one word: OUT. “Not down. Out. Out of the level entirely. Out of the Backrooms. Past the membrane, past the Ginnungagap…”

“The Outer Darkness,” the Alchemist said softly. His grin was entirely gone now.

“We didn’t have a name for it. We just saw the dark. Absolute dark, the kind that’s hungry, and our boy falling through it, his cam-light the only thing for a million miles.” Reginald produced a thick, black VHS tape. He jammed it directly into a slot on the side of his own monitor-head.
The machine whirred, clicked, and the screen flashed blue before footage began to play. “And then the light hit something. And the something… opened.” The jumbotron displayed grainy footage of a falling light. A vast and growing dark. And then, in that dark, a reddening—a socket of crimson luminescence yawning open, and within it, a single white orb of impossible intensity, fixing on the tiny falling speck with an attention that was older than attention itself. For one frame, the dark resolved into scale—and the scale was catastrophically wrong, a thing so vast the falling worker was less than a mote of dust before it. The feed cut to black.

The Alchemist sat very still. He understood it, all right. He understood it down to its most basic system, and the most basic system was hunger, and there was no editing it, no molecular restructuring, no clever trade that could close an eye that had decided to open.

“Baughust,” he said softly.

“I couldn’t not speak of it,” Reginald said into the silence. He pulled the tape out of his head, his hulking hands shaking slightly. “So when your friend said you were asking after me…” The screen steadied, just for a moment, into something like resolve. “I wanted someone to know. Someone who’d understand. There’s an eye at the bottom of everything. And it’s awake now. And it saw us.”

“Can you help us?” the Alchemist asked, already knowing.

“Help you how?” Reginald’s laugh was a burst of white noise. “We’re decorators, Alchemist. We hang wallpaper. We’re not good at that, even. We can’t fight the thing in the dark. We can’t even find it again—the feed’s the only proof it exists. The Company is not in the business of war. We just try to make things a little less broken than we found them. But we don’t go into the dark.” The screen flickered to something like determination. “But we can give you what we have. The footage. The incident report. Geographical data on where the floor was thin, how thin it was, what the readings looked like before and after.”

The Alchemist nodded slowly and transferred the data to his own devices—a small, jury-rigged thing made of parts he’d collected from seventeen different levels—then stood and tucked it into his coat.

“One more question.” He paused at the threshold. “The floor of Level 0. How thin is it now?”

Reginald’s screen went blank for a moment. When it flickered back to life, the jumbotron displayed one word: THIN. “Every time we measure it, it’s thinner.”

Volyx found The Staff in the Blue Channel, as he knew he would. A patrol group of seven, wearing their distinct uniform—black cap, blue shirt, black pants—and their name-tags were blank, as always. Their faces were human, more or less, but there was something about the set of their features that suggested they had been designed rather than born.

They were chatting about something vague. Sports, perhaps, or the relative merits of different brands of coffee. Then the Dark Sovereign materialized in their path, and The Staff stopped. Seven gazes turned toward him.

Volyx—the architect of Order’s first walls, the being who had measured the blank with ebony rulers and imposed structure upon the formless dawn of Daedos—drew himself to his full height. Around him, the shadows that always clung to his form tried to spread, to claim territory, but the void absorbed them, refusing them purchase. “You are the patrol designated for outer-reality monitoring,” Volyx stated.

The Staff member at the front of the group stepped forward. “That’s right. And you’re the Dark Sovereign. The Crystal King’s earthly representative.” The Staff member’s voice was polite, professional, but utterly unimpressed. “We’ve met. Sort of. We processed a writ of appeal. We understand you’re here about the SHALTOKOL situation.”

Volyx crossed his arms. “So you are aware of it.”
“We’re aware of everything that happens in our jurisdiction.”
“Then you know what he intends. You know what will happen if he succeeds.”
“We do. But we also know what he is capable of. The threat, as we have assessed it, is quite manageable.

“’Manageable’…” Volyx’s voice was the sound of foundations cracking. “Is it? He has already breached the outer barrier. He is inbound towards You Cheated as we speak. The prisoners—”

“Are contained.” The Staff member’s smile didn’t waver. “You Cheated is not a physical structure with walls to be broken down. It is the sentence carried out upon the violators of reality’s rules. It exists because we say it exists, and it will continue to exist because we say it continues to exist. SHALTOKOL can wander its corridors until the stars burn out. He cannot open cells that we have not authorized to be opened.”

“He opened the rift to it.”

The Staff member seemed completely unfazed. “You Cheated has protocols. Contingencies. Fail-safes that have been in place since before you were but a twinkle in the Crystal King’s eye. SHALTOKOL is not the first being to attempt a breach, nor will he be the last. And like all the others, he will fail. His efforts will be stopped at the threshold.”

“You are not listening.” Volyx stepped forward, and the shadows around him deepened. The Blue Channel itself seemed to darken, as if reality was holding its breath. “SHALTOKOL is not acting alone. He has allies—Hubris, and possibly others. And beneath all of it, stirring in the Outer Darkness, is something older than your protocols, older than your fail-safes, older than the very concept of containment. Baughust. The thing that devours the idea that containment ever existed.”

The Staff member’s smile flickered, just for a moment. Then it steadied. “We are aware of Baughust. It is classified as an Omega-level existential threat.” His voice was still professional, but something in his posture had shifted—a tightening of the shoulders, a straightening of the spine. “Its current status is ‘dormant’, however. Our monitoring systems have detected no change in that status.”

“Your monitoring systems are inadequate.” Volyx’s voice dropped to a register that made the void itself shudder. “I have been informed of several parties with evidence to the contrary. The Travelers of Stars lost an entire Slip Palace to its awakening. The Remodeling Company captured footage of its eye opening beneath Level 0. The Gearmaker’s temporal projections show cascade failure across all realities if it fully awakens. And you—”

“We have processed those reports.” The Staff member’s voice hardened. “They have been filed. They have been reviewed. They have been assessed. And our assessment remains that Baughust entity, while a legitimate long-term concern, does not currently represent an immediate threat to the integrity of You Cheated or the multiversal containment structure. Frankly, you are asking us to redeploy significant resources based on reports from sources that are unreliable. The Travelers are scientists, not combatants. The Remodeling Company couldn’t renovate their way out of a paper bag. And the timekeepers—” A pause. “Well, the representative from your own reality abandoned aer post for three centuries to drink. Aer temporal projections are noted, but they are not the basis for operational decisions.”

“And if I am right?”

The Staff member was silent for a moment. Then he straightened his cap and met the Dark Sovereign’s eyes directly. “Then we will adapt, as we always have. It is what we do. SHALTOKOL will not penetrate You Cheated. The prisoners will not be freed. And Baughust entity will remain dormant until such time as we determine otherwise. Your concern is noted. Your warning has been logged. Your assistance is declined.” He sighed with exasperation, crossing his arms behind his back. “You may go.”

Volyx felt the weight of their indifference pressing against him like a physical force. While he had expected the staff to not be concerned, he hadn’t expected to be entirely dismissed as irrelevant. “You are fools,” Volyx stated softly. “Your rules will burn, and you will hold your clipboards while the ashes fall. The Outer Darkness will become Staff jurisdiction the moment Baughust’s head breaches the membrane of your prison. And you will wish you had offered help while it was needed.”
The Staff members remained silent, awkwardly shifting and adjusting their uniforms.
“I hope, for all our sakes, that you are right about your security,” Volyx said quietly. He turned, his obsidian form dissolving into the blue haze, and left the Staff to their patrol.

The four delegations reconvened in the Cygnus Archive as the library’s eternal candlelight dimmed to evening lighting.

Volyx sat down in his seat with a thud that should have been heavy enough to obliterate the antique victorian era chair beneath him into splinters. Miraculously, it held. “They know. They do not care. They believe their security will hold.”

The Pantheon sat in silence. Philia, returned from checking on the twins, placed a hand on the Dark Sovereign’s arm to comfort him.

“So we are alone,” Lorenzo Windsor said quietly from his corner. “As we have been before.”

“No.” The Keymaster stood by the fireplace, his white eyes reflecting the flames. “We are not alone. We still have ourselves, each other. We chose, against all reason, to stand together.” He turned to face them all: the judges and the jesters, the artists and the architects, the broken knights and the grieving mothers, the lovers and the lost. “The doors we knocked on have closed. But we do not need their permission to open them.” He raised his hand, and a key materialized between his fingers. “Perhaps, if all of us, the pantheon entire, were to enter The Middlesorts and appeal to the Cores…maybe then they will heed our plight.”

The Game Master’s screen displayed something that might have been a determined smirk.