Chapter Text
Lodmath Cethreni is dying of exploration.
It's a broader category than you might think. Forging her way into places untouched by the hand of man counts, certainly. But it doesn't have to be that extreme. She's turned down a new hallway and been trapped in a maze of ever-shrinking corridors until she's crushed. Opened a staff-only door and been impaled by booby-traps. Searched for something at the back of a kitchen cupboard and mortally offended the society of homicidal pixies living behind the salt.
There's something she's looking for. Something that she knows she can't live without, not really. Not what you'd call living, anyway. And it's not here.
So she keeps on going. Past the places she should be. Past the places it's safe to be. Even for a Rider, there are dangers beyond the fields they know. Maybe especially for them. Sooner or later, her path always takes her to something she can't survive.
But what's the other option? To just stop? To live in a place that's not the one she needs to find?
She can't do it. Because she's an explorer, she'll tell you, and maybe that's the truth.
They finally came to a stop perhaps two hours out of town, on top of a tall, skinny mesa. There hadn't been a path up to the top, much less a road stable enough to ride a motorcycle up, but never mind that — the obstacles to exploring the summit had just ceased to exist as Lodmath approached them. The police had dropped out of the chase long before. Now, the three of them sat on the edge, legs dangling off over nothingness.
There was a lake stretched out ahead of and below them, a big one, shining with reflected stars in the clear winter night. It was beautiful, in its own way, but not in a way that anyone watching could really appreciate. None of them could get past just how wrong it was for such a lake to exist, for it to reflect the sky in such a way, for there to be a world around the lake at all. It was an itch impossible to scratch, and the beauty in its own way just made it worse.
Lodmath broke the long silence by pointing ahead and down, marking a spot on the far shore. "There's a waylet up ahead. On the far shore. We can take shelter there for a while."
"Unless this whole business was some Rider trying to shepherd us to his lair so he can destroy us or rope us back into the war."
Suleik smirked. "Well, now that you've said it, we're totally safe." Cannadrasteia just groaned at that.
"I've been there before," Lodmath said. "It's not even a new place for me to explore, so we should be safe from my bane, at least. It's a nice little place. Cozy."
The longing in her voice was palpable, and the other two felt it resonate with them. A place slightly outside of the Creation that was so inherently broken. A place where everything they looked at or felt wasn't tainted. A place where the world wasn't trying to kill them all the time.
"Think we could push through tonight? I really want to unwind after all of this, and, well..." Cannadrasteia waved one hand around to vaguely encompass the entire world, and the stress of existing in it.
"I'd rather not try," Lodmath said. "You know how likely we are to stumble on something weird or dangerous on the way. I'd rather not have us all falling asleep on the road if it twists into a mythic path of trials or a herd of jackalopes get in our way or something. So we sleep here, and head out when we're as fresh as we can be."
"Dibs on not unpacking the sleeping bags," Suleik said.
Lodmath smiled fondly. "I'll handle them. In a minute." She leaned back on her hands, looking up into the stars.
"Oh, whatever came of that hole in the sky?" Cannadrasteia asked.
Lodmath shrugged. "Reality fraying at the edges. There was some kind of crustacean monster inside collecting stars, and I had to fight him in a rap battle to escape, which also released all the stars and rebuilt a missing constellation."
"So pretty much the usual."
"Well, the monster was blue this time. That's a nice change."
Cannadrasteia sighed and slumped forward, looking at the long drop down to the desert sands below. "This freaking world."
"Maybe we should make this into a real road trip," Suleik said, kicking her legs idly. "Get off this lousy little planet, take a spin around the World Ash, try and find a world that's a little less broken. Or at least broken in a new, more interesting way."
Lodmath smiled faintly and shook her head. "It wouldn't help. There's worlds that are better than this, sure, in some ways. Worlds that are plenty different, too. But when they're better, that just makes the glitch all the uglier. When they're different, the glitch stands out more against the things you're not used to. There's nowhere in Creation that makes any of us happy."
There was enough wistful melancholy in her voice that even Suleik had to take it seriously. "Sounds rough," she said. "I always forget you've got so much more experience with this than we do."
Lodmath nodded. "I fought for a long time. I can't even remember where I came from, or what I used to be. Probably not human. I was a scout for the Riders. Finding worlds that were vulnerable. Finding the weak spots we could erase from existence, or use to turn the Powers against each other. Finding the waylets we could use for shelter and sustenance. I led the charge against hundreds of worlds. And every one of them was fascinating and beautiful and wrong. A world where the only important thing was ear-hair maintenance, and if you thought something like art or easing suffering mattered, you were reeducated. A world where sad people were just thrown out, because it was cheaper to buy a new one than take the time to take care of them. A world where food is left on the ground to rot while people starve, because feeding them wouldn't make enough money, and plagues spread or cities get bombed to the ground to make political points."
Suleik leaned over and nudged Cannadrasteia with her elbow theatrically. "I think that one's Earth," she hissed in a very loud stage whisper.
"Yes, thank you, Suleik, I got that."
"Every world I've been to is worse than the last. But I know Creation isn't infinite. It's really huge, to be sure, but there's got to be a place that is the most broken, a place where the sheer wrongness of this existence shines brighter than any other. Maybe it's in the oldest world, or the newest. Maybe it's somewhere down at the roots of the world tree, or buried deep in the trunk, or right up at the crown. Maybe it's somewhere that can't be described physically. And I just think… if we really did it, if we really tore down Creation without ever seeing what the worst of it was like… wouldn't that be such a waste?"
"That's why you gave up the fight?" Cannadrasteia asked.
Lodmath nodded. "It was still important to me. But this was more important."
"So what would you do if you found it?" Suleik asked. "The worst place ever."
"Try to fix it, maybe?" Cannadrasteia suggested. "If it's the epitome of the flaw in the world, maybe finding a way to repair it would have a cascade effect, fixing all the lesser aspects of the flaw."
"Or you could try to break it," Suleik said. "See how the worst glitch in all Creation gets even weirder and wilder when you do something stupid to it. Might be funny. Might even be the keystone to bringing the whole of everything down. Bet the Host would love that."
Lodmath just shook her head. "I just want to find it. That's the important part to me. What I'd do after -- how can I say without seeing it first? Maybe nothing at all. Maybe just finding it is the important part. Maybe after that, I'd be satisfied, and just walk away from all this. From Creation, from Ninuan, from everything that is and everything that isn't. See if I can find something new."
"You think you could really do that?" Cannadrasteia asked skeptically. "Just... leave? Wouldn't it bug you, knowing Creation was still here? That it's just sitting here, broken and twisted, forever and ever, and you're not doing anything about it? Even if you find something better, wouldn't it still rankle?"
Lodmath shrugged, and smiled. "Guess I'd find out."
Suleik pushed herself to her feet, stepping away from the edge. "Well, you do you. But personally, I think that sounds like the most boring thing I can think of. I'd much rather hang around here, or at least one of the worlds, to see how much trouble I can cause. While it lasts, anyway. That's what makes this whole mess worthwhile."
"To you, anyway," Cannadrasteia said.
"Well, yeah. Isn't that what matters?" She walked back over to the motorcycle, intent on unwrapping the leftover cinnamon rolls to finish off her midnight snack, leaving the other two on the edge of the mesa.
They sat there in silence for a little while, taking in the view and feeling both the beauty and the wrongness. Then Cannadrasteia licked her lips. Took a deep breath. "…You're never going to find it," she said in a dry whisper. "Statistically speaking. Just searching one world to rule out all the possibilities would take so many mortal lifetimes. Searching all the worlds, and all the parts of the world tree, and everywhere in directions we can't even think of… you'll wear yourself to shreds when your death keeps on catching up with you. You'll be gone long before you find this place, if it even exists." She hesitated, then pressed on to drive the point home. "Theoretically, it's impossible."
Lodmath smiled, and leaned her head over to rest on Cannadrasteia's shoulder. "Thanks," she said softly. "That means a lot to me."
Cannadrasteia sighed, and leaned her head on Lodmath's, as a shooting star streaked through the sky, reflected in the lake below, as brilliant as the ones in their eyes. "Yeah. Yeah, I know."