Vivi honestly hadn’t expected to find Isabella Caldimore alive.

She hadn’t thought the possibility nonexistent, either, else she wouldn’t have dived headfirst into the primordial soup to begin with. But she’d expected complications at least. For Isabella to be hurt—physically, mentally, or in some inexplicable magical way. The girl had slammed into and through the dimensional boundary, breaking open a pathway for other travelers. And come out fine?

Though maybe ‘slammed into’ was verbiage that didn’t apply. That was how Vivi imagined the situation, but these were magical and metaphysical concepts so far above even her understanding that she wouldn’t pretend to be an authority. There was no particular reason to believe Isabella would have been hurt by such a thing; Isabella had specifically not been a sacrifice, merely a component. Vivi had just assumed the worst.

That Isabella was unharmed relieved Vivi greatly, but they were far from out of hot water. There might not be complications when it came to the girl herself, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t ones for the situation at large. Getting back home wasn’t going to be easy. She wasn’t even sure how to go about it, yet.

“Our first step is finding out where we are, what this place is, and how it works,” Vivi told the still-stunned blonde girl, choosing to address the practical concerns to help snap her out of it. “Though I’m not sure it can be considered a place at all. Not in any traditional sense.”

Isabella focused on the words, as Vivi had hoped. “Not a place at all? What do you mean?”

After a second’s hesitation, Vivi chose to deflect. “Let’s go take a better look.” She held a hand toward the girl. “Can I teleport us?”

“Y-yes?”

Before Vivi did so, she layered the usual suite of defensive spells onto Isabella. They had been heavily adapted against the void by this point, though Vivi had far from fully cracked that enigmatic puzzle, so she intended to keep a close eye on Isabella to personally guarantee her safety. She couldn’t blindly trust her shields anymore, which unsettled her.

Once Isabella was protected as best she could be, Vivi started pulling together a [Blink] spell. She wondered what she was in for. She had only gotten a quick glance at the otherworldly terrain, because immediately upon groaning into consciousness—in her bedroom at her estate, of all places—she had jolted into awareness, then cast [Detect Presence] and hurried for the one living being that had pinged to her senses. With great relief, she had found Isabella.

But that meant she knew little of what was going on. She really shouldn’t have tried to keep her eyes open when jumping through the dimensional rift. Perhaps if she’d blocked her senses, especially her magical ones, she wouldn’t have gone insensate for—she wasn’t sure how long, but enough time for the gateway to finish scabbing over. Meaning grabbing Isabella and fleeing back through was no longer an option.

She wasn’t sure she would have wanted to try that, anyway. Vivi had survived the passage, but she was a fair bit tougher, magically speaking, than…anyone. Could Isabella handle that same trip? She would at least like to contemplate the idea for a bit, and perhaps design safeguards to wrap Isabella in before going again.

So all things considered, this wasn’t a total catastrophe. She hadn’t expected to snatch Isabella and rush back through the boundary. The fact the option was denied to her was almost relieving; she wouldn’t have to make that complicated decision now.

She [Blinked] high in the sky with Isabella in tow, and the city of Meridian presented itself to her. It was as she remembered from her quick glance earlier. Physically, the structure of the city was unchanged, though everything had been leeched of nine-tenths of its color. The streets were empty. All the objects remained: stalls, tents, banners, buildings, abandoned horse carriages, and so on. But not a soul stirred, sapient or otherwise. Not so much as an insect.

Interestingly, even monsters were scarce. She saw some, with how keen her eyes were, but most were voidlings or voidbeasts floating lazily in the distance, with a few black-violet carapaces stalking the streets below. Considering the sheer amount that had poured through the breach, she’d expected a realm packed to the brim.

Then again, she had spent fifteen minutes unleashing her full power on those hordes, erasing them by the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands. She had heavily thinned their numbers, explaining their scarcity. Plus, the gateway had acted as a beacon. With the wound sealed, the local residents were no longer swarming toward Meridian from miles off, and specifically where the Wardens’ guildhall had once stood.

Speaking of—her gaze drifted in that direction. The guildhall was gone. The scab was almost gruesomely accurate to the metaphor, dimensional flesh stitching over. Perhaps it was because she’d drawn that comparison that the pulsating, shattered patch of ground so strongly reminded her of a healing wound. What she was seeing wasn’t physical, after all. Simply a visual interpretation of deeply magical phenomena.

“Where are we?” Isabella murmured, tone somewhere between horrified and awed.

“A liminal space, if I had to guess,” Vivi said absentmindedly. “I don’t think this is another world, properly. I don’t think it exists physically. I’m not sure we exist physically.”

Even before she finished the sentence, she winced. If she was right—and she felt fairly certain she was—then she shouldn’t have shared the theory with Isabella, a thirteen-year-old girl. Being some sort of disembodied magical existence was a disturbing enough concept that even Vivi didn’t particularly like thinking about it.

“We…don’t?” Isabella asked.

She shrugged. “Anything I say is a best guess. I wouldn’t put too much stock in it. Just, this is clearly not a proper world. It’s a…reflection of ours. The monsters—the System named them voidlings and voidbeasts. So we’re in a void. A place between places. A threshold?”

She finalized the thought, and confidence settled into her. Earth had been a world, an alternate dimension. So was the world of Seven Cataclysms. But this? No. Vivi and Isabella had gotten themselves stuck in the great black emptiness between. A nowhere-place. The gray impression of Meridian was the world they’d traveled from leaking into the void, like heat rising out of a deep-sea thermal vent. Or maybe steam imprinted on a cold mirror. Or—who knew, really.

“A threshold?” Isabella repeated quietly. A few moments of silence passed before she blurted out, “Is this even real? Am I—am I dead?”

“You aren’t dead.” Funny enough, Vivi knew exactly how she was feeling. That sense of surreality. Her arrival to the world of Seven Cataclysms had evoked similar emotions. “And I’ll find us a way back home. You don’t need to worry.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Isabella muttered.

“What doesn’t?”

“You. Being here. You’re…Vivisari. The Sorceress.”

“Yes,” Vivi said, somewhat confused.

Isabella floundered. “And you took Saffra as an apprentice?”

Vivi raised an eyebrow. “She’s perfectly deserving of my tutelage.”

“W-well, yes,” Isabella stammered. “Of course. That’s not what I meant. It’s just that—” She cut off and seemed to struggle with what she wanted to say. “How did you two meet?”

The memory amused her—the latter half of it, at least. The beginning, she didn’t like as much. “She got herself involved with some unsavory criminal elements at Prismarche. I intervened and helped her. A short time later, we met again by coincidence.” Her lips quirked up. “She stomped up and demanded that I teach her, and I agreed. I think her exact words were, ‘I’m your apprentice now.’ She didn’t give me much choice in the matter, I’m afraid.”

Isabella stared at her with an almost horrified expression. An incredulous noise escaped her, something between a snort and a groan—but not quite a laugh. To be fair, Vivi herself had been rather bewildered by the event.

“I…can see she hasn’t changed much, then,” Isabella eventually said, the bare hint of amusement fading rapidly. Vivi’s heart clenched, seeing the dull look return.

“I suppose she hasn’t. She’s waiting for you on the other side. You’ll see her soon. As I said, you’re through the thick of it—let me handle things from here.”

Vivi’s reassurance didn’t seem to inspire much hope. Though not skepticism, either, at least. Isabella’s expression was simply a passive resignation.

“Yes, Lady Vivisari. You have a plan, then?”

Vivi grimaced. That was, unfortunately, where things got complicated. She had a lot of faith in her magical abilities, but being trapped beyond the dimensional horizon, in the black aspic of the void, was going to be a head-scratcher for even her.

“I may have to spend some time studying these creatures, and this realm.” Vivi paused, wondering how honest she should be with Isabella. Not as a matter of trust, but because she was already furious about this poor girl’s fate, and didn’t want her to worry. But the ignorance was probably more stressful than whatever unnerving truths she might reveal. “Since I’m here, it would be foolish to not look around and understand what this place is. There was a separate incident with the dimensional boundary at Prismarche. A partial fracturing, not a true breach, but it tells me that our concern with this realm might not be limited to your father’s ritual. While I might

be able to tear open the scab and create a gateway back, not only would I rather not expose Meridian to the void unless I must, but doing so would be premature, strategically speaking.”

Isabella’s brow furrowed. She looked thoughtfully out across Meridian. “If this…threshold realm…is mirroring our own world, and something happened in Prismarche, then you think something happened there? On this side?”

“It’s a suspicion I have, yes,” Vivi said. “It’s worth investigating. And even if we can’t find out what happened there, now that I know for certain that the dimensional boundary can be pierced, I need to adapt my spells as thoroughly as possible. In case a second breach occurs.”

Because her defense of Meridian had not been as absolute as she wished. The casualties likely numbered in the hundreds, and while that horrified her, she knew objectively speaking it was nothing short of a miracle. The city should’ve been erased. Then possibly the rest of the continent.

Only the very greatest of the legendary immortals could have put up a resistance. The Dragon King, The Mother of Fire, The Keeper of the First Grove…maybe a few others. But even they, likely not. And they were infamously reluctant to aid mortals to start with. So that breach might genuinely have meant extinction for the mortal races.

“Your defense of Meridian,” Isabella repeated. “And…the Red Tithe. How did you do it? I saw those artifacts my father created. I thought they were immune to magic.”

“Not immune. Just resistant. And yes, your father’s voidglass especially so. More than even the upper ends of the Greater Voidbeasts. I still don’t understand how he managed that. The raw material fades when the monster dies. It’s a living part of them, some evolved defense mechanism for creatures that live between worlds and, presumably, need to resist magic of all forms.” Her voice took a musing tone. “And perhaps magic that isn’t magic—or rather, our magic. Perhaps our world’s fundamental energy is different from another’s. I think their resistance would work on anything. Any source of energy. Including what we consider natural. Which is perhaps how it’s so durable, and sharp.” She shrugged. “I’m trying not to invent too many unfounded theories. We know so little.” A realization struck her. “If you know anything that might help, I would appreciate hearing it.”

Isabella paused, then flushed. “No. I don’t think so, Lady Vivisari. It sounds like you know much more than me already.” She hesitated. “It was my grandfather who found that material in the Shattered Oracle’s workshop,” she offered. “The one in the Eastern Kingdom, underneath the Everwood?”

A frown tugged on Vivi’s lips. “I see. I didn’t know that. I’m not sure it changes anything, though.”

It did explain how the Duke had gotten his hands on extra-dimensional material. She wasn’t surprised; it had been her default assumption. Of any figure in Seven Cataclysms, the Shattered Oracle was the most common explanation behind any cataclysmic disaster related to the most esoteric magics. Time, divination, dimensional, spatial—he hadn’t so much rummaged his hands around in the guts of those branches as bathed in their viscera. He was why people all across the world looked warily upon high-level mages, and why, despite Vivisari having been on the Party of Heroes, most people were terrified of her. Or maybe not terrified, but certainly uneasy with. That madman’s shadow hung over all of magekind.

“Some of those monsters, though,” Isabella murmured, interrupting Vivi’s train of thought. “I could see their level. Above nineteen hundred. How wasn’t the city overrun? Even if it was you?”

“I killed them,” Vivi said simply. “I suppose I have the Red Tithe to thank for that. Our fight helped me learn the basics. If I’d needed to decipher the material’s immunity right as the disaster began, things would have turned out much worse.”

She went quiet, briefly, remembering the assassin. And the events of the past few hours. She hadn’t had time to digest everything—or much at all. Didn’t have time to do so even now. She could contemplate her failure to save hundreds of lives, and her direct killing of another, later.

“But…even so…they were nineteen hundred,” Isabella stressed. “As strong as the Cataclysms. And there were several. Against just you?”

The implied question was obvious. “I’m stronger than I was a hundred years ago,” she sighed, being blunt since indirectness clearly wasn’t satisfying her. To be fair, the incredulity was deserved. “They were strong, but not strong enough. I think the estimation the System gave accounted for their immunity and otherworldly nature—knowing that we would be poorly suited to fighting them. Once you get past that, they’re not as powerful as they seem.” She shrugged. “Level isn’t everything, either. The Cataclysms were troublesome even relative to their level. Far more intelligent than those mindless beasts, to name their obvious advantage.”

Isabella went quiet, probably at the reminder that she was standing next to the savior of the world. For all that Vivi appreciated the grand magical powers she’d woken up with, she could do without the reputation. It was kind of awkward, how people treated her.

“Never mind that, though,” Vivi said. “There were other energy sources that [Detect Presence] picked up on when I first arrived. Ones that read neither as a void-creature nor a person. That’s the first order of business—finding out what they were. Shall we?”