Sophie Strange in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 2: Shadowplay

  Unknown location, unnamed dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (visitor time)

  “Pretty grim place, huh?” Sophie was standing in a small plaza, looking out on a bleak urban landscape half-hidden in fog and shadows. She was with her team, the five of them standing in a circle, covering every direction, ready to jump back out at any sign of trouble.

  “Wouldn’t want to live here.” Margaet, their leader, was casting a detection flow searching for life forms. “Looks like no one else does, either. Nobody around, as far as I can see.” They were sharing a Transmission flow directed by Sophie but kept talking out loud as a safety measure. Alien dimensions can sometimes mess with your magics, so the standard procedure was to maintain as many simultaneous lines of communication as possible. Also, the last team exploring this place had died.

  Their mission was to find out what had happened. Preliminary scouting – explorers jumping in and out after only a second, a few seconds, then up to a minute – had already been completed without incident. This was the real mission, but their orders were to take only minimal risk. Get out at the first sign of danger.

  There was something different about this place. Confluence explorers had discovered a portal leading here while investigating an obscure corner of the Kirat dimension, which had been known to the Confluence for millennia. There were plenty of portals in Kirat, but the one leading here was different from anything anyone had seen before. The portal seemed to blink in and out of existence, as if it was unstable in some way. And its destination was somehow obscured from outside probing.

  This might reasonably have been taken as a warning sign, but the leaders of the Expedition had decided it was important to explore this place. When the first team got wiped out, they sent another – taking every precaution, of course. Anyway, Sophie Strange and the rest of the group volunteered. She supposed they liked a bit of darkness in their lives.

  Margaet seemed satisfied that there were no hostiles nearby, and they started moving slowly toward the other end of the plaza and out onto something that looked like a passageway for vehicles or maybe large beasts. The architecture was fairly nondescript, like something made for a low status neighborhood in the Confluence. Then again, this was the first time in all the millennia of its existence that the Expedition had discovered anything like architecture at all. There really was something different about this place.

  They walked in the middle of the passageway. There were buildings on either side, but as far as anyone could see they were just empty boxes containing nothing but fog and darkness. It was a dimension of nothingness and hollow urban architecture.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  While Sophie felt fully present in the grim cityscape – not only emotionally and attentionally, but physically – her body was actually resting in a recliner back in the Expedition’s headquarters in Mikla. She experienced her surroundings as a three-dimensional material space, but there wasn’t necessarily any correspondence between what a magical dimension was truly like and how her brain interpreted it. At least that was the dominant view among dimensional theorists. Your brain tended to impose three-dimensionality upon its surroundings because it had evolved in a three-dimensional material space and was structured to perceive reality in those terms. For this reason, one would normally perceive even a one-dimensional space such as the famous Thesaurus as extending before one in length, height, and depth.

  In other words, dimensional explorers could not really trust their senses. Sophie was used to that, and she supposed it did not really matter whether the cubic structures she perceived around her represented the truth about this place – as long as her perceptions would suffice to warn her about hostile forces. On the other hand, the discussion of real versus perceived dimensionality might make sense for a dimension such as Kirat, which was largely devoid of shapes and forms, but did not seem equally relevant for a dimension filled with buildings. Anyway, all the fog and shadows made this place seem to lack depth, as if it was all surface and nothing beneath.

  The fact that her body was actually in Mikla provided her with a sense of security, as if what she was perceiving was merely some sort of dream that could not truly harm her, but any such sense of not-really-being-here was false and could get you killed. Indeed, the previous team sent here had ended up dead, although their bodies back at the headquarters were unharmed. What exactly had happened remained unclear, but the important thing was that dimensional travel was real enough to kill you. Real enough to trap you forever.

  Gimme danger, little stranger her brain wanted to sing, but Sophie silenced it and focused her attention on her surroundings. Did something move behind that window over there? The thought, shared with the others via the shared Transmission space, made everybody freeze. They probed the area with Divinations, waiting, watching in all directions. No life forms detected. They replayed Sophie’s perceptions with a Recall flow, Divining it to detect changes.

  One of the shadows seemed to flicker. The group was already obfuscated to vision, hearing, vibration, and life-form/magic detection, but Crage further strengthened the obfuscation flow while everybody remained perfectly still.

  “Movement confirmed.” They watched the output of Margaet’s detection flow showing something like a swirl of shadows in a darkened room. The shadows seemed focused on an object in the center of the room.

  “What is that thing?” Sophie asked. Margaet probed it. The shape was indeterminate, but there was a slight residue of magical energy inside it. Observing it further, this residue appeared to slowly dissipate into the swirling shadows.

  “They’re sucking it dry,” Annat declared. She was their Life Magic specialist, known for making intuitive leaps on flimsy evidence and often being right. “I think it’s time to leave.”

  Margaet agreed. “Let’s go, Sophie. We’ve seen enough.” Sophie started setting up the flow for the return trip.

  The shadows moved at the speed of light. For some reason, Sophie’s magic flow attracted their attention, and suddenly they were all over them, sucking out their energy. They all felt drained, their flows faltering. Sophie poured everything she had into her travel flow, tried to extend it to everybody in the group, but instead it contracted and threatened to collapse.

  “Go!” Margaet shouted. “Leave!” But Sophie did not have the energy even to enwrap herself. She was on the verge of collapse when Bilk, channeling all his remaining energy, exploded into light.

  The shadow dimension in the style of Abstract Expressionism, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.