The projection was no more difficult than any other I’ve been doing in the Ena, and after Sefen and Wen confirmed I was projecting a single building rather than the whole of the Kalasa Valley, Zee said:
"We’re starting with this room because the Place Sight talents marked it as important and worth investigating. Now that we’ve confirmed the energy cost of projecting it, we’ll try to reconstruct it as it was before the Breaking."
"How?" I asked. I hadn’t made any effort to look into the past last time, and had been asleep, which is when weirder stuff always seems to happen to me.
"I’m going to redescribe the room as we believe it looked before it was destroyed. It’s very important that you try to confine the visualisation to this room, or at least this building."
I shrugged, willing to give it a shot, but not entirely convinced it would work. It seemed more likely that what I’d produce was a fiction of the past, since they were making up the details.
Zee began describing the room again, and I closed my eyes and tried to picture what she was talking about, although the image of what I knew the room looked like now kept creeping in and it was a long time before I got any result at all. Zee ran out of her pre-prepared script, but just started again and on the repetition I managed to focus and could properly see what the room looked like, and felt the extra energy cost kick in. Not too bad, but it was obviously taking more out of me than the current-time projection.
When I opened my eyes the room was crisply real, with bonus people. A guy in robes just in the act of spreading out this big piece of paper and weighting each corner. He was looking very worried, and having a discussion I couldn’t make sense of with another robed guy. The most I could figure out of the Old Muinan was something had gone wrong, and things were unbalanced. The language experts have provided a translation, though, and it seems he was talking about the tearing of the gates into real-space and the incursion of Ionoth and how it didn’t make sense and that there had to be some extra factor they hadn’t calculated for, something which was pulling everything out of alignment.
Zee stayed by me, keeping an eye on my vitals, but gestured my escort guard forward to get a better view of the piece of paper. Eeli and Sefen were both practically leaning over the table to get a full look at it, and the two Lantarens were kind of noticing their shadows and being startled.
I was already starting to tire, and when Sefen and Wen picked up a couple of the books on the desk and flipped rapidly through them, recording the contents, I noticed another jump in my energy output. The Lantarens looked thoroughly freaked out, but still couldn’t quite properly see us.
And then – it’s really hard to describe, but I felt suddenly like my brain was being pulled out of the back of my head, and it was as if there was a really bright light somewhere nearby – I think the best analogy I could have for it is a neighbouring sun had gone supernova and was turning into a black hole. The two Lantarens – and Sefen – also reacted as if something major was going on. The nearest Lantaren ran to the door and threw it open, yelling something about madness. Zee was yelling too, telling me to stop, shaking me. And then she slapped me.
I did some face and chest clutching then. Face because Zee hadn’t held back – my eye’s still a bit swollen – and chest because it felt like my heart was trying to kick its way out. I gasped and shuddered, convinced I was having a heart attack, and Zee kept telling me to take deep breaths, which reminded me of Kaoren and the last time I’d nearly killed myself. It was pretty close, I gather – my system had gone far beyond its tolerances and I was shaking and dizzy and had a horrendous headache, but Zee had snapped me out of the projection before I’d done any real damage. I’m not allowed to do any strenuous exercise for a few days, just as a precaution, but at last I’ve managed to come through one of my dramas without any major injury.
It wasn’t till Zee was ready to move me that I noticed that Wen, Sefen and Eeli were all clutching books. I’d made them tangible, though not nearly as well as the origami cranes, since they started fading even before we were back to the gate, and there was a pause while the three Setari madly skimmed through them, capturing visuals of the pages to be translated later. Two of the books weren’t related (one was a book of poetry), but the one Sefen had picked up was the latest volume in a meticulous set of observations regarding the activation of the Pillars.
The greysuits are most excited about the piece of paper, though, since it was some kind of hugely complex metaphysical map of the placement of the Pillars. I don’t even begin to understand what they’re talking about when they start foaming over it – it sounds as comprehendible as the Fifth and Sixth Dimension to me (perhaps quite literally?). This and the journal have produced some ecstatic reactions.
When we went through the gate (Wen was levitating me) absolutely everything in real-space was blurry, which produced the usual needle-to-the-brain sensation. I spent a while barely able to pay attention to anything until my first dose of painkiller, which is when I realised that the settlement had been in an extreme flap when we returned. Zee was staying with me, and told me sternly to calm down when I realised that she’d sent the second shift of Setari to check on those at the Pillar. But she let me clutch her hand until everyone had returned safely.
I’d started projecting the event which wiped out the majority of Muina’s Lantarens. And when that happened, every platform in real-space reacted with a huge power surge, as did the Pillar. I hadn’t killed anyone, thankfully, or caused the Ddura to stop recognising people as Muinan, and very interestingly the drones stationed with the two malachite marbles detected a power surge from them as well, suggesting that they’re somehow linked. I’d given the settlement a big scare, though, for all that the greysuits are overjoyed at the information recorded from the projection. Even the power surge is considered overall a good thing, because it’s a clue to what happened, and they got lots of interesting readings from it.
Kaoren was very quiet when he got back, and though I had my eyes shielded at the time, I could hear the way he was being remote and super-polite to people when he did talk at all. Zee apologised to us both for not seeing the implications of the test, which I found embarrassing, and I wish I’d thought it through more myself, because it seems obvious in retrospect that the room as it appeared just before the disaster wasn’t a very safe thing to try and project. It took me a while to work out that Kaoren was angry at himself, and when I finally talked everyone into letting me rest in my own room and got a chance to ask him why, he said it was because he hadn’t read more than the outline of my test, that he’d let himself be distracted by the investigation of the Pillar.
It didn’t help at all that for the rest of the day I couldn’t open my eyes without seeing a completely blurry world and getting insta-crushed by the headache from hell. I completely refused to let them hold open my eyelids and shine lights at my pupils after the first bout, thank you very much. Maze told them to tape shut and bind my eyes, and to hold off further examination till today and fortunately this morning they were back to normal, with just very occasionally the faintest quiver out of the corners of my eyes.