Uncounted days later, Chain invited Ruvle to the alcazar.

  He selected a windless day, under the largest tree with the largest canopy. Ruvle sat next to him, her legs crossed and her hands on her ankles. His scarf cooled and tingled her shoulders, different from its texture when healing her after the lab–but just as tight, with it wrapping all the way around from her right shoulder to Chain’s left. Methodically, he placed pre-scrivened tiles–across his lap, across Ruvle’s, several on his shoulders, a few atop his head.

  “How do those work, this time?” she asked.

  “Parable of the Comet,” he answered. He grabbed another handful from his pile, narrowed his eyes, and placed it with the others in Ruvle’s lap. Foolswood really did prefer to stick together with its gripping texture; they remained in a grid even if she shifted slightly.

  “...Chain. I don’t know what that means.”

  “Of course not. I barely know what it means.” He held up another tile, towards her neck, thinking. “One of the books told me a story about how planets are only so far away from the Sun, but a comet can go further and will still come back to the Sun in the end. It’s about extending scope. Says you can finish a really long tislet sequence with a cloud of tiles if it’s only 10% or so extra, but I have no idea why it does that and changes the sujecta target, too. …Man, I cannot find an elegant place for this one,” he said. “You know what, no, the whole effect is off, it just looks ugly; let me do this a different way.” He tossed it back into his pile and then scooped up a few from Ruvle’s lap.

  “So you’re extending scope to me,” Ruvle said, finishing the thought.

  “Yeah. Only works for sujecta, which I still don’t know how to do. But, turns out, a tag is affecting something besides the scarf itself, which is to say, it pops me into the alcazar,” he said, shuffling his pile by scooping it up, complete with petals from the ground below, and shaking it. A few tiles fell out randomly and yellowness stained the corners. “It’s not a new idea at all, but I’m trying it myself.”

  “So your tag is a sujecta?” Ruvle said, looking over her shoulder to the end of the scarf. She still could not tell where one cluster of meaning began and another ended. (Or if this was the correct end of the scarf.)

  “Ehhhhhh, kind of, lass. It’s like a special baseline exception. Magic is complicated, freakin’ sucks sometimes. All you need to know is that I figured out a really niche trick specifically so I can bring you in.” He re-tiled her lap, leaving two one-tile-wide gaps, right on the vertical centerlines of her thighs, exposing the now solid-yellow of her bodysuit underneath. “Oh yeah, that’s way better. Just a few more…”

  “Do I have to do anything special to go in?” Ruvle asked. “I never figured out what you were physically doing to go into the alcazar. You’ve always been so shy about that…”

  “Yeah. I…see, back when I lived in Rir Kranbar Ro, I dozed off a lot as a kid. Got made fun of a lot. It’s not sleeping when I go to the alcazar, but still I feel like if I’m powering down, it’s ‘safer’ to do it where nobody’s watching.”

  “Oh.” Ruvle didn’t know a lot about Rir Kranbar Ro in the north-northwest end of Crater Basin, but she knew about feeling different due to sleep habits. ”…Sorry about that time I tried to catch you doing it a few days ago…” She’d been taking a short rest from successfully expanding the sector again and got up to see why he was sneaking off.

  “Nah, that’s my baggage. You don’t think I don’t wanna watch you training too sometimes?” He chuckled, then pressed the last few tiles across her clavicles hard enough to stick. “...I think this is a good spot…I don’t think it will stay on if it’s a few inches lower, but this should still work.” Ruvle barely had time to figure out how that was a compliment–the tiles wouldn’t stay on her chest, because her bust was smaller now, because she’d been so diligent about losing weight–before he settled into a pose with his arms crossed over his chest and changed to a more instructive tone. “Ground rules. Don’t touch any books I haven’t touched first. If you start feeling like you haven’t eaten in days or been hugged in years, you tell me so we can leave immediately; that’s the alcazar pulling your mind apart like loose threads. Don’t take off your bodysuit or leave behind anything you carried in, because you will pay for it in sanity. Don’t get so far away from me that I can’t see you in the haze, because if I can’t find you to bring you back out, it will be bad. If you see a big floating cluster of tislets that aren’t attached to anything, ask me about it before you do anything to it. And most importantly,” he said, “Do at least one stupid thing in there that I’m going to hate so I remember not to be so damn Thoughtful about everything.”

  She laughed. He cackled, too.

  “Alright. Cross your arms like I’m doing. It’s an easy meditation…”

  Ruvle followed his advice. Gradually, she brought her awareness to her extremities, and her consciousness settled in them like the blood in her veins.

  With each finger and toe she mentally moved on from, a sense of vacancy and warmth followed behind, an assurance that she no longer needed to worry about that part of her body–it had been accounted for, budgeted into her selfhood, and would be there when she needed it again. The process continued for every slice of her human form, an exercise in patience as much as in concentration–for her, a person so better aware of her muscles than someone not Exact, she chose to release every opposed muscle pair individually. Her hands took an age and a half. Her awareness ascended up her core as the slowest form of climbing she’d yet tried. Her shoulders were complex, and yet, she found satisfaction in fully accounting for them.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  Ruvle remembered what Elial had told her about Acoff, the Ultrafine that had flayed himself when his sense of self narrowed too far. She took a moment to go back and give extra mental care to her bones, which had absorbed countless impacts for her. Her skin, which had too many functions to even name. Even her thinning layer of body fat that she’d been working so hard to narrow down–she had to admit, it made small falls safer, gentle impacts ignorable, even gave shape to her silhouette. No part of her body was useless.

  The last two body parts she focused on and released were her eyes. The good on the right, and whatever mangled tissue remained on the left. Whatever remained, safe behind wax, it released.

  Only then did she feel the magic–as if there were an extra body part she’d missed, with no specific location. Not a piece of the self, but the entire gestalt of the self, completely clashing with her mental map. She had to mentally construct a ‘second space’ to make any sense of it, like a null point with no coordinates, disconnected from genuine location. All she had to do was repeat the focus, the inventory, the release, of that final extension of the self.

  And once she did, Ruvle longer had form.

  She opened her eye to the place outside and took stock of herself. Chain was already rolling his scarf back up.

  Her bodysuit had changed color for a second time on this trip, now taking on a uniform pale blue glow, as if the strokes that comprised tislets were an ink and she’d had her clothing replaced by a solid film of it. And this did, truly, feel like replacement–the weight and substance remained, but as she slid her hand along her arm, her precise touch struggled to parse the non-fabric. A discrete contour along her body shed light, with that contour taking the place of what her bodysuit had been moments ago, but its substance…what made the most sense of the tactile information was that her bodysuit was that light now, the thing being shed, not the thing doing the shedding. She had been in the alcazar for a few seconds and it was already turning her brain upside down.

  “How are we feeling, lass?” Chain said, and wrapped his scarf around his shoulders. He, too, had his outfit replaced by solid light, as diffuse and certain as neon bars at night.

  Ruvle took a look around, without moving from where she sat. The tiled floor, at least, felt familiar, albeit so smooth and geometric–unblemished tessellations of triangles and squares–that they seemed unreal. The one bookshelf to her right towered above her, a monolith of learning in thick tomes, their spines mostly written in dead languages or tislets themselves. She could pick out a few written in Step Basinian, but even those were more of the Gabardinian dialect than native Stepwise. Chunks had been excised from the end of the bookshelf, recycled for building material, all the way up the siding–to the distance where it all became fuzzy, like light itself decayed from that far away, a haze that Ruvle’s focus could only do so much to cut through. The haze surrounded her, a globe of distance. Opposite the bookshelf and at human sizes, velvet ropes stretched between freestanding metallic–brassy?–poles, each with a teardrop-shaped top that narrowed to a point, ornate and shiny.

  “I’m feeling…” she trailed off. “I need a second.”

  She approached the ropes. They didn’t cordon off anything in particular–a maze from nowhere to nothing in the middle of irrelevance. Ruvle looked at herself in the brass of the teardrop, getting as close as she could, angling to get a good look at her missing eye. Not glowing. The wax had started cracking again; Ruvle needed to reapply it soon. But more to the immediate point…

  “I can’t tell what color anything is,” she said, and looked back at Chain.

  “Yeah, that’s normal.”

  “It’s not that it’s grayscale. It’s not, I can tell there’s color. I can tell when something is tislet-colored…” She looked around, identifying his scarf, his and her clothing, the glow on the books, even a few books whose covers were blue without magic. “But it’s as if…” she stared towards the lack of ceiling. It had to be up there somewhere, but the haze obscured her. “My mind is trying to fill in the colors on its own. I think my eye is red here. I think this is brass, because maybe it’s yellow. But I’m not sure.”

  “Ooh, you can see it a little!” His mask shifted with a wide smile underneath. “Congrats. Lotta people say it’s completely colorless for them besides tislets.”

  Ruvle smiled back. “What do you see?”

  “Red. You’re definitely red. And you’re close, that’s more of a bronze, Ruvie.”

  Oh. Now she could see it. Coppery orange, not brass yellow.

  Chain led her down the bookshelf, holding her hand. More complexity came to view–a chunk of wall, presumably peeled from somewhere, had been driven into the ground by a metal pole; the masonry itself was sparsely covered in tislets. Cushions, stuffed with building insulation, leaned against it. More tislets spilled loose over the floor like water from a jug, all aligned into mutually-incompatible grids like cities. Books were scattered, some in stacks, some freely open. She winced, thinking about organizing all that text. A fallen chandelier had been turned upside-down, its fixtures and swoops like an organizing rack–some held up chunks of shelf-wood unused, others propped open important books.

  “It’s convention here,” he said, “that where you pop into…the area close to it, that’s public ground, but it’s still your space.” Chain hung his scarf up on two hooks attached to the wall, showing its entire front surface, and sat down on the cushions. “Here’s where I read.”

  She sat down with him; he took to a Chain-shaped depression in the cushions. “...Did you build all of this yourself?” she asked.

  “Not all of it. It’s farther from the shelf than I’d like. But you take what you can get.” He leaned forward and put a hand on the chandelier. “It’s my workspace. Feels important to show you it first.”

  Ruvle smiled. “I could never work with organization that looks like this.” But…she didn’t have to. “Whatever helps you learn the fastest, that’s how we succeed.”

  He swept an arm towards the mess in front of him. “Ruvle, how do you be so straightforward in your brain but have a complicated organization system in your office?”

  “...I don’t understand the question,” she said. “Of course I do?” If she had a one-path mind and a lot to do, of course she had to add lots of distance markers and guidance signs.

  It was nice for that one path to be, now, permanently crossed with the many of a man who discarded the signs on purpose.