No. No, she wouldn’t. She wasn’t going to die like this, in some fucking mirrored reality cave bullshit. Life was too short for that. Lylah hadn’t even figured out how to walk through Nirvana, goddamnit, and if she was going to die, she was going to die at least knowing that. She was going to die having eaten her breakfast in the morning, instead of skipping it like she usually did. She was going to die happy, or at least content, smiling. Fuck this. Fuck this weird ass cave shit. Lylah was getting out of here.

  She breathed, in and out, trying to stall her heartbeat; if she could rise to Nirvana, even briefly, she could maybe make it back to the physical realm. Or, well, whatever that constituted as, because she felt pretty physical now. Maybe she was just stuck in some abandoned cave, slipped into Nirvana so briefly she hadn’t noticed, and wound up somewhere a few lightyears off. Her mind stretched out into the cosmos – she pretended Derik was next to her, reminding her to breathe and occasionally recite some mantra or something. She could hear murmurings again, though they were quiet, and far, far above. This was not the physical realm. Not the one she knew, anyway. Lylah’s stomach dropped; she was much, much further down than that.

  Trying to fit the ever-expanding layers of dimensions and realities into her brain, Lylah imagined herself in a pool, or at the bottom of the ocean. Maybe not the ocean. Bottom of a pool. She kicked her metaphysical legs; swam with her arms up and up and up – she felt herself slip out of this physicality at the bottom of all thing and shift into higher dimensions. Layers and layers. This was it! She was doing it! Wobbles, now, as the currents strengthened – her metaphor was becoming strained, and the swirling seas became overwhelming. Information bombarded her from all sides; planets, orbits, people, thoughts and conversation; her legs began to tire. She began to slip back down the layers.

  Tunnels and walls began to take shape around. Water started to weigh on her back, press against her body. Fuck, fuck! What was happening? Shit, shit shit. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. Water clouded her vision. There! Light! Paddle quickly, quickly! Breath was running out – quick, quick! Currents tried to stop her, whispered in her ear; something about worthlessness, but Lylah was too focused. Swim, damnit! Nearly there, nearly there. Almost to the light. It was bright, spilling out of some hole in the side of this dreadful place. Lylah kicked like a madwoman. Nearly there, almost… there… she could almost touch it, and –

  A grand hallway of pillars and gold, filled with paintings separated by extravagant columns. Elegant, frivolous, stretching on for ages. It was not a narrow hall, but the height made it feel like it, the domes above so far up their carved imagery was hard to make out. She looked left, and right; paintings adorned the walls, framed in mahogany, or marble, or gold or silver or obsidian. Each had a small plaque of some precious metal, some Lylah couldn’t recognize, likely brandishing the name of each piece. Equal square foot tiles were set into the floor, rimmed with ingrained marks, dictating the end of one block and the beginning of the next.

  Lylah was on the floor, palms down, face lifted to take in the view. She stood up. Went to the painting next to her. It displayed and image of a man she didn’t recognize, a writer, by the looks of the desk strewn with papers and pens next to him. He was old, and graying, and lived in a time she didn’t know, by the antique décor all around the image. A Man Worthy of Being Forgotten, the plaque read. Franz Kafka. She turned behind her – originally her right, and there was another painting. A similar age, of sorts, but certainly different. Another man, in a composer’s coattails and bearing a look of great sadness in his eyes. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, it read, Vulgar and Unknown.

  More paintings, of people she didn’t recognize – King, Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Michelangelo and more. Some said things like A Shackled Creative, The Unoriginal Bastard, Never Given a Chance, or Abraham’s stark Tragedy of a Man Who’s Lost Everything. There were no signatures on the paintings. Finally, after wandering the halls, absorbed in the sullen tranquility of the place, she found a painting of a man she did recognize. Strong, determined eyes, hands behind his back, dressed in the gold and xenon steel plates of the Lorelain military, standing against the harsh background of burning wastelands behind him. Dead littered the scene, and he stood with one foot over the head of a corpse.

  Funeral of a Soul, Kieren Wylliams. A singular tear streaked down her father’s oil face; his irises were fractured rainbows. There was a note on the corner. A small bit of paper, taped to the otherwise unblemished hall. Lylah looked closer. The handwriting was poor and rushed.

  Welcome to the bottom of the world, Lylah. Where great men and women, and people like you and me too, believed they’d lose themselves forever.

  Lylah looked once more at those shattered irises; dancing shards of opalescent glass crashing into each other. They almost seemed to glow, almost seemed to light up right out of the painting.

  You’ll get out of here fine, the note read, I know you will. – Dad.

  The halls stretched on for what must’ve been miles onward. They continued, repeating endlessly, back and back into the annals of time. These images hung at even intervals for the entirety. Bottom of the world, her dad had said. His visage, despite being set, held a twinge of sadness. Like those eyes knew what its hands had done was wrong, untenable, but the man behind them simply couldn’t fathom anymore. Couldn’t reconcile his actions. Too many deaths to number. Too many families with sons, and daughters, and fathers and mothers coming home in boxes. Too much to reckon with. Too much on his hands.

  A soldier who did his job. That’s what he was. A soldier who killed for his country and didn’t ask why; a soldier who gave his humanity in exchange for his family. That’s what he believed, surely. That’s what Lylah had been told to believe. She had read what he’d done – now it was laid out in front of her – and it was horrible. But he must have taken some respite in the belief, however false, that it was for a greater cause. Surely. Atrocities, yes, but tenable. Explicable. Reasonable. Moral. How else could a man like him continue on?

  Those eyes said otherwise. Those eyes begged to differ, begged to go back in time and refute himself, to hide away from the man – the monster – he’d become. Pleaded to unsee the hordes of corpses ringed around him, reaped by his hand. Those eyes fell to their knees, asking not for penitence, only oblivion. Only to forget. Only to suffer no more, to be offered the respite of the void.

  Lylah was thirteen when her dad had killed himself.

  She closed her eyes. You’ll get out of here fine; he’d written. He’d been here, too, at some point. And he’d suspected she’d wind up in this infinite hallway the same. Okay then. What should she do, smile more? Try to forget her dad and hope everyone else would, too, so that she wouldn’t be the failure daughter of a war hero, a god, and instead just a failure? Just fake it ‘till she makes it? What does she do? What does she do?

  “What do I do?” Lylah screamed, stomping her foot, slicing through the stuffy, coagulated silence. “The hell am I meant to do, in this situation? Dad? I’m stuck in this godforsaken…” she searched for a word, “bullshit! Without so much of an inkling of what to do. Or of where I am. Or of why, for whatever fucking reason, I can’t be like you, Dad.” Was she talking to the painting? Lylah was pretty sure she was yelling at a painting. A painting that just kept its unwavering forlorn gaze.

  “I’m not perfect, okay? I’m not perfect like you, or like the teachers think you were. If I were, I’d snap my prissy little god fingers and I’d be up there with Derik again, floating above some ‘natural marvel’ he thinks is going to jog my undoubtedly hidden abilities. What if they’re just not there, huh? What if not everyone can be Mr. Magick Mcgee at the flick of a wrist? What if it’s your fault,” she began to point accusatorily at the painting, “maybe you sucked all my abilities out of the timestream or whatever we fucking call it? Would’ve been the least selfish thing you’ve done to me.

  “What happens when people realize I can’t be like you, and they stop being nice to me for your legacy, or whatever? What if I’m stuck here, like you, apparently, except I can’t warp on up and out of here on a whim? I’m not one of the greats, Dad. I’m not like you. I’m not like,” she waved a hand back towards some nonspecific painting, “Back, or whatever the fuck his name was. I’m not some important official, or a respected scholar, or a well-learned Nirvana-dweller. I’m not even an artist, for crying out loud! I’m just a lousy idiot, bumming off you and your blasted atrocities you labeled as accolades.”

  Lylah sunk to the floor. “I’m not like you, Dad. And you know what? I don’t want to be. You were a shit person. A selfish person. You,” she choked up, “you weren’t even there. You weren’t even there for so, so long. War, at first, or whatever. Days out of years, Dad. I barely knew you. All I wanted was to see you again, and get to know you, and like, talk, or something.” Crying in that undefined fashion between chuckles and sobs, she continued, “Instead, you kept on going back, promising me and Mom that you’d come home again, that this was the last time. Do you know how many late nights she was up crying, Dad? Do you have any idea, as you traipsed along your days, doing your fucking war charade to please those in the capitals, she was spending her nights praying that you wouldn’t meet your match out there? Or that you wouldn’t be inattentive once, and slip up?

  “And when you did come back, finally, really ready to retire this time – you said – you up and left us for good. Wrote us some fucking sob apology about how you only felt normal at war, how it was all you knew and all you could do, how you didn’t deserve us back home, and – you know what, actually? You didn’t deserve us. I was working damn hard to make you proud, and never once did you so much as praise me for slipping in and out of Nirvana – took me years, Dad. Years. Years you weren’t there for. Mom spent nearly every moment of her waking life – and I’d bet sleeping, too – worried she wouldn’t see you again. Or worse, that she’d see you in a box. She was a nervous wreck, reading every fucking war article she could find. Stressed her out enough to worry about you, now she was reading the news every day.

  “I don’t know how much of my shit is your fault, through actions or genetics or what have you, but I know you fucked me up big time. You fucked Mom up. You fucked my one goddamn chance at a childhood up, and spectacularly at that. Now you’re gone. And maybe it’s selfish, or fucked, or righteous or cruel to be angry at you – I don’t understand war, and frankly never got the chance to understand you – but I just wanted my dad, man. I just wanted to see my dad. I just wanted you to be there.”

  Lylah cradled herself, sobbing on the floor. When she finally wiped her tears and raised her head, she was no longer in the hall. She was back in the cave; dark, dank, the faint sounds of water dripping down stalactites echoing through the catacombs. Lost, confused, crying on the floor, this was going great. Couldn’t see anything in here. Damp stone soaked her palms as she groped around the cragged slabs of what felt like granite, far removed from the even, smooth-cut tiles of the hall. Occasionally a drop of water would plop on her head as she clambered against uneven and winding walls, looking for a way out.

  Nirvana hadn’t gone so well last time, but she was beginning to suspect it was worth another try. Was that the same crack as last time? That felt like the same crack.

  She was going to die here.

  No, no she wasn’t. Lylah refused – no one was coming to save her; despite this place seeming physical, she was pretty sure she was well beyond the influences of the simple three dimensions. She’d have to do this herself.

  Slumping down against the curving side of the cave, Lylah huffed and screwed her eyes shut. Into her head and out into the world – but nothing came to her. She breathed, recited some mantra or another, yet nothing. This was new. The breathing exercises had worked for years now – it was the only way she was able to get anything out of Nirvana. But now it fell flat.

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  Heart started pounding. Palms started sweating. Fingers started grasping at the ground, looking for something to hold on to while gravity span around her – so she was dying here. Crags in the floor, cracks in the ground, crevices in the slabs around, she was going to die here. Her breathing quickened, her fingernails dug into the stone, grinding against the rock. This was it. She would starve, slowly, painfully. Or suffocate – she felt like she was suffocating. Drowning.

  “Feel the world around you,” her dad’s only advice popped into her head, “Nirvana is not so much a place as it is a mindset. Don’t listen to those idiot scholars who’ll tell you all the reasons we named the mathematical plane after the ideals of Nirvana and blah blah blah,” Lylah’s eleven-year-old-self had giggled at this, “It’s a mindset.” He’d rolled his eyes. “Of sorts, anyway.” They’d been at the park, on Clevil, the fancy planet of lush hills, titanic mountains, and glistening beaches hosting mostly rich people. It’s where Lylah had grown up, at least as far back as she could remember. Perks of your dad being a legal mass murderer, she supposed.

  “Smell the grass, feel the sun. Watch the birds flutter by,” he’d bent down, and pointed at some colorful avians (genetically modified to be beautiful pastel shades). “It’s overwhelming, at first. Some people are good at narrowing down where they want to go – they kick up to the fourth or fifth dimension and cut straight to the point. Others are better at manipulating stuff down here; looking at the physical realm and modifying it as they see fit. Others still are best at seeing beyond the timestream, across it; these are our historians and, rarely, our oracles.

  “I’m not like that, and I doubt you are either. I see it all, at once. Like,” in a blink, he was halfway across the park, and he shouted across, “this!” Briefly, the sky dimmed to the night and erupted into galaxies and whirling constellations –the twinkling image began to shift, and the stars began to fall and fizzle out in the atmosphere, and the whole sky exploded into a theatre of cosmic wonder. “See?” he was behind her again, “This is just a fraction of what you’ll be able to do, to see.”

  Lylah had sat, stunned, awestruck by the lights in front of her. “The trick,” he’d finally said, after a moment of this monumental display, “Is paying attention to it all, rather than what’s going on in here.” He’d tapped her head. “If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time there, and while that’s not bad, that’s not the way to reach Nirvana. At least, it’s never been for me.”

  Lylah felt the rocks around her. There were no birds here, no sunlight or grass to bask in or breathe in, no stars to wrangle into submission. She still admired him, a little, despite herself. The man had wrapped the cosmos around his finger to teach his daughter something. That was levels of control no other had achieved. But it was a natural tact he’d had since he was young – second nature, apparently. Lylah had none of that. Instead, she had a cave, some pebbles lodged in a few cracks in the ground, and a complete lack of knowledge of where she was.

  Derik had always told her to look inside herself, to try and find Nirvana in some crevice of her personality. While that may have worked for him, it hadn’t for her. That had only gotten her here. In a cave.

  So, she tried to breathe – it was humid, moist air. Ran her fingers along the rugged textures of the ground. Squinted a bit in the dark – no luck there. Listened to the pitter patter of echoing drops of water. Her heart gradually began to slow, her palms were still sweaty, and the world stopped feeling like it was spinning. This was nice, she reasoned, but not exactly –

  Whirlwinds of understanding, of beauty and wonder and color and art. Of celestial minds and titans’ hearts. Macrocosms of humanity and torrents of insanity and understanding of who she was, where she was, why she was; physics unwound and prostrated itself in front of her, oceans of stars bowed in displays of honor. Laughter and chaos and order and light, knowledge of the infinite Days After; all in which she swam, all in which she took flight. Gods and farmers and kings alike, all were nothing in the face of this might; this ethereal plane, this heavenly dimension, this perfect Nirvana. So this was why they named it such, so this was why they raved so much, so this was what she’s been missing, all this time.

  And then she was back. Back in the cave, back in the dark. What. What? What the hell was that? That was Nirvana? Everything she’d read and everything she’d seen had displayed it as something like a highway, or a different, strange realm. Not the sudden expansion of your mind to accommodate everything that ever was, and is, and will be. Lylah had no body, during that trip. No physical anything. It was hard to remember what she’d seen, what she’d felt, how she’d done that. She cradled her head.

  And she tried again.

  Into the realm of gods, now, into the realm of the mighty; whispers turned conversations and planets playthings. Galaxies wrapped themselves around her, heeling like dogs, waiting for instruction. She weaved her body up and out of that place, that place at the bottom of all this creation, of all this blinding light and color. Through the kaleidoscopes of confusion, up the ladders of constraint, blatantly beyond time and thought. This place wasn’t for her, she realized. Not as she was back down below. This was a place for the mind, and the mind alone. Others were here, too, others danced and played as she, but they were restrained by some force or some vision, constrained to lateral movements and liminal views. She watched some cut straight through everything around them, she watched others twiddle with physics, she watched even more peer through time and mutter to themselves.

  The cosmos spread around her; the fleets of the human empires dwindled by comparison to her power here. This was easy to lose oneself in. This was why her ancestors had split from the rest. Power. Strength. Understanding and knowledge. Lorelain would never be threatened if they had those like her father – like Lylah herself, possibly – to defend it. Lorelain could never be lost if they had seers peering into the future to report back on movements the enemy has yet to conceive, and weapons wielding dimensions its foes couldn’t see.

  This was an idea.

  She gazed through time herself, searching for her father. She wanted to know. Wanted to see. There he was, in the dust worlds of the North, in the watery depths of Cavvalis, in the dense jungles of Arinth. Slaughtering. She watched the light in his eyes as he warped through space, ripped through legions, tore through battalions. That look on his face was, in his earlier years, a mix of rage, fear, and adrenaline, but later matured to a deadpan, sordid countenance. Clenched teeth, set jaw, hands ripping out some poor soul’s spine. This was terrible. This was too much – she knew of the things he’d done, usually painted in some twisted patriotic or moral fashion, but watching it was too much.

  She swished away the threads of time, moving to Derik’s ship – he’d undoubtedly be worried – until one caught her eye. It was her father, in his tent, wearing his golden armor glazed in blood, bawling. Head-in-hands sobbing. Another man came in, sat next to him.

  “Kieren,” he began.

  “We can’t keep doing this, Marcus,” her father, Kieren, looked up – he looked horrid. His face was pale, and gaunt, and his hair was graying. Lylah had never seen him like this. “We can’t keep doing this. I’m going to resign.”

  “You said that last time,” Marcus, his apparent companion, sighed. “We both did.”

  “I mean it this time.”

  “We meant it last time. Look,” he gripped her father’s shoulder, “it’s never, ever going to be the same. Never.”

  “But I can’t keep—”

  “Your family can’t see you like this. They’ll always know what you’ve done out here, my family is always going to know what I’ve done. There’s not a lot left for us. My wife won’t look at me the same, when I visit.”

  “My daughter,” Kieren said, “I see it in her eyes. She thinks I’ve abandoned her, and I suppose I have. It’s just… when I see them, I can’t unsee this.” He gestured around. “It’s hard to tell myself this is for them, you know? When I smash some poor bastard’s skull in, I can’t look at my daughter and tell her ‘this is for you.’ That’s not… I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.” He began to cry into his hands again.

  “Stay, Kieren, stay with me. I can’t go back. You can’t go back.”

  Lylah moved away from the scene, and to another, farther down the line. This one featured the same two, arguing this time. Not in a tent, but some burning temple overlooking stark, obsidian mountains and fields of purple diamonds. Soldiers – dressed in Lorelain’s gold-and-black military garb – organized themselves into phalanxes out in the field. There must have been thousands of them.

  “I’m going home,” Kieren said, with his arms crossed. He held himself like the proud general he made out to be. There were two other centurions there, plumes of velvet coming out the top of their helmets, at attention. Marcus was there, too, standing in a similar fashion to Lylah’s dad, at the entrance to the temple. “I’m done with all this. I want to see my daughter. I don’t care if she hates me, I’m going to see her.”

  “You can’t, though. We’re a hundred thousand lightyears away – that’s too far even for you to travel. Our ships,” Marcus said, gesturing to the blazing fleets above, crashing down to the planet’s surface, “are gone. We’re going to be here a while, at least until reinforcements come.”

  “You don’t know what I’m capable of,” Kieren snarled, marching over to Marcus. The other general stayed his ground, unflinching.

  “I know exactly what you’re capable of,” Marcus said, drops of malice in his voice. He swept his hands back towards the scene behind him – a firestorm of death and piled bodies, wearing thin, green and yellow leather armor, swarmed by the legions of Lorelain soldiers. “By your orders, Kieren. By your hand. The capitals know what you’re capable of, the common people know what you’re capable of, your family, too. But none of them know like me,” Marcus pounded his index finger into his chest. “None understand like me. None can. Not even the centurions, for all their bravery, not even the soldiers, for all their honor. Not even your daughter, for all her compassion. They will never understand.”

  “They see me as a war hero,” Kieren muttered, “those back home. My family.”

  “But you know what you really are,” the offending general stabbed his index finger into Kieren’s chest. Moments of silence pass, Marcus staring into Kieren’s slowly shattering eyes, Kieren glaring into Marcus’s soul. The centurions casted furtive glances at one another, then seemed to come to a nonverbal agreement. They both smashed their fists over their heart – the Lorelain salute – and bowed, proceeding to leave undismissed. Neither general said anything. “You’ll know what you’ve done,” Marcus continued, “How you’ve twisted the sacred Ways to slaughter innumerable. You’ll know every time your Lylah hugs you and asks where you’ve been. You’ll know every time you meet your wife’s eyes. You can never tell them of what it’s really like. Of what you’ve really done, beyond the gilded stories the capitals rain down.”

  Kieren’s determined look dissolved without an audience to maintain it. He shirked from Marcus, whirling around and walking towards some statue of a pagan god the temple was built to worship. Its once plush banners and rugs burnt away to ash. The place is made of something like marble, cream and tough. The fire doesn’t burn the foundations, only the rugs and flags. “Why don’t they understand,” he chuckled, not unlike a madman. “Why don’t they understand it’s futile? Hm? The pagans. The people we kill. Lorelain,” he snapped back to Marcus, “is a nation of gods. They know this. Why do they keep on?”

  His partner shrugged. “Determination.”

  “Exactly,” Kieren said. “That’s exactly why. Determination. Determination to keep their sacred lands at all costs, to revere their gods at any price, to protect their families even at the tax of their lives. That’s nobility. Not what we’re doing – a counteroffensive? This war is a long series of counteroffensives. It’s pointless. I’m going home.”

  “Please,” Marcus pleaded, tone switching from borderline malign to soft and begging. “Stay. I have no one else, Kieren. No one else understands.”

  “The centurions,” Kieren sighed, “The soldiers. They’ve killed like you.”

  “Not like me. We both know not like me, Kieren. They haven’t heard the screams of dying souls rapture Nirvana. They haven’t cut a man’s strings like a puppet. I have no one else.” Marcus rushed to Kieren, getting very close.

  “I have a family, Marcus, I—” Lylah watched her father interrupted by Marcus’s lips on his. Woah. Okay. Did not see that coming. She pulled back again, swimming away from the threads of time. She didn’t need to watch her dad get freaky on the front lines. So that was why, hm? Love? Some trauma-bonding with the pals? That was why he never came back?

  Lylah couldn’t pretend it was so two-dimensional, now, but it wasn’t exactly comforting. Her dad hadn’t come home for some mixture of fear of being judged by his family and peers, or at least, the knowledge that he wasn’t the man he’d left as. He didn’t come home because he found something better on the frontier. No, not that, Lylah reasoned, kicking up from the threads of time. Not better. But something he could reconcile with. Someone he could be with, who wouldn’t judge him as he judged himself, because Marcus was no better. Did he know that Lylah wouldn’t have cared if her dad told her that he was a monster? A terrible person? She couldn’t say with absolute certainty she wouldn’t have, but… she also would’ve like to see her dad. She’d have put it aside. Thought about it later.

  Lylah would’ve spent every moment she had with him. Present. There. Not stuck in her own head.

  Beginning to feel tired of this, of Nirvana, of the Universe constantly telling her its secrets and of learning about her dad’s situationships, she searched for Derik’s ship. It wasn’t in Jakksha, that unique little system she’d slipped right out of. It was… there. At some university world or another.

  Derik was with a gaggle of others, peering through the worlds, trying to find where Lylah may have slipped into. Arrays of scientific instruments and religious tomes lined the desks. They’d been searching for hours. No luck. This was on his watch, goddamnit, he’d be responsible. He’d waited this long, but he’d have to tell some official soon. Lylah, poor girl, she couldn’t travel Nirvana for the life of her. Derik saw the will in her eyes, but just not the way, he supposed. Just not the actual capacity. Someone would find her, then he’d gently suggest they move away from their empirical studies in Nirvana and focus more on theoretics. It was just when Derik was about to alert the capitals that he heard a voice behind him.

  “Nirvana sucks.”