To you who has found these words, I am sorry. There is no way out of this place. These endless hallways lead only back onto themselves.
My name is Mint Castere. I am the last architect of Makhri-fe, The City of Walls. I am the woman who built this maze. I am the woman who ended this city. I am the woman who killed you.
I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.
Makhri-fe was a large city in a small space. We were deeply proud of our architecture, which let us build towering, spiralling buildings around and on top of each other, but it depended on our locus. You might have felt it when you entered this place, the way gravity listens only selectively, and the way stone changes at the will of a mage. Without it, our art could never exist. It is a small locus, that which the Sun has granted us, and our buildings grew tighter to one another, our alleyways narrower. There is only so much one can build in a space constrained in all directions, and we were a city of architects.
In a city of architects, I was one of the best. Do not take my words for arrogance. My skill has come with age and obsession, my obsession came from madness, and my madness grew as this city did.
We were stagnating. Every smallest building had been turned into a marvel of stone, and there was no more space to use. I remember those days in my youth as grey. Our art had not yet found its pinnacle, and there was a fear in us that it never would. Not unless we tore down our old wonders and began anew, and there were no more wonders we were willing to tear down. Makhri-fe was aching to grow, and had no space in which to do so.
The Stone Seed, then, was our salvation.
It was found in those grey days, hidden away in a crack in a tunnel wall, deep at the bottom of our locus. The tunnel wall was barely a foot thick, and the crack was just wide enough to slip a hand through, and yet, the space within the crack was large enough for a grown man to stand upright.
The Stone Seed itself looked like nothing, like a simple river rock, small enough to sit comfortably in someone’s palm, grey with black marbling, slightly heavier than its size would imply and always colder than the surrounding stone, but otherwise unremarkable.
Unless you were a mage, like me, like every architect of Makhri-fe. Draw magic through the Seed, and it allowed you to shape space itself. Anchor your work in stone, and the alterations became permanent.
It was a marvel, a miracle, the solution to all our problems.
Within our gleaming city of spiralling marvels, the greatest thing yet built was a small stone shed, barely larger than its own door on the outside, but on the inside, it opened up into a great hall.
I remember vividly the first time I saw it, the first time I walked through a simple door into vast darkness.
I was delighted, I was awed, and I was terrified. It was the largest room I had seen in my life, and the Sun through tiny windows seemed so horribly far away. It gave me nightmares for weeks. It consumed my waking thoughts. The fear seemed so insignificant, compared to what we might do with this. I was young, and I was feeling the first touch of obsession. We all were.
Makhri-fe could no longer grow outwards, and answering our pleas, it gave us the ability to grow inwards.
Our art bloomed in a vibrant explosion of new ideas, new techniques, new understanding. We put no constraints on the Seed’s usage. Why would we? It belonged to the city, and the city’s architects were its heart. Every new idea was a new delight. Every new creation had the space it deserved to shine.
Only the darkness limited us, those first few years. Natural light was always a scarce resource between our twisting towers, and now that we built castles with no more windows than the single room of space they occupied, the Sun was no longer sufficient. We had infinite stone, but lamps were expensive. How can a room shine when you can’t see its ceiling?
Then we learned to utilise it, to make art out of darkness, do justice to vast halls with a single handheld lamp. We worked around our limitation, and our craft grew stronger for it.
We built wonders in those first few years. Cultivated spaces flowing seamlessly into the outside world in some places, in others, hallways twisted around and around upon themselves in the space of a single pinhead. It took time to learn, but we learned from one another, fed on each other’s ideas, built upon the shared.
The fear faded during those years. We spoke about it, about the instinct of humanity to shy away from what they couldn’t understand. That was all it was. All it took was getting used to it, and you could ignore your fear of the dark and the impossible, to see nothing but brilliance.
Sometimes we would nest spaces, even in those early years. We would create a cultivated space within a cultivated space within a cultivated space. We learned quickly to avoid it. Three layers deep, even the rules of the Seed became unreliable. Space might shift while you weren’t looking. Doors might close, tunnels change their entrances, rooms switch places. In the early years, we didn’t understand it, couldn’t use it, so we feared it, as humanity always fears the unknown.
And then, as humanity is wont to do, we learned to understand it.
Fluctuation was our greatest breakthrough since the discovery of the Seed itself. The ability to predict it, control it, let us solve the problem of distance. Living in a space the size of a castle may be beautiful, but it is hardly practical. Once we mastered fluctuation, we could make doors that let you travel from one end of a cultivated space to another. After this point, we started nesting everything, made every outside door at least five layers deep, with vast unused shells of cultivated space between each layer, just to dig deep enough for fluctuation to work. Within the walls of Makhri-fe, space was twisted and stretched so far you could feel it, but we barely noticed. It felt normal to us.
I spent weeks at a time in the darkness, those years. The Sun felt strange and alien the rare times I ventured outside. The air felt too heavy. I walked the abandoned streets of my beautiful city with my head down, only to get to another door and dive into the old, comforting darkness.
When I was a child, Makhri-fe was a beautiful sight. It was a marvel of architecture, reaching for the sky and digging for the roots of the world.
After three decades of cultivating space, most of us had forgotten our spires and towers, only remembered our old basements and tunnels as pale echoes of what was to come. We forgot it, forgot previous arts and wonders. Three decades in, obsession had consumed us all.
Once we learned to harness fluctuation to tunnel from one cultivated space to another, how to make doors that would take you not only to the other side of your house, but to the other side of the city entirely, everything outside became… insignificant.
After that, I don’t remember how long I spent in the dark. Ten years, fifteen. I must have forgotten what the Sun looked like. I must have forgotten it existed at all.
I think we all did. I think it’s why we didn’t notice.
We got visitors still, occasionally. There were tourists, sometimes, coming to see the wonders of The City of Walls, the heights and depths of Makhri-fe. They came pale and quiet and left quickly. How many of them found their ways out of our doors without help, I do not know.
One of them, before he was lost, was the one to put the thought in my head that something was wrong. Before he left, or was consumed.
Where does your magic come from, he asked me, cold and shivering in a dark hallway. All magic comes from the Sun, but your locus has outgrown itself, and there is no more sunlight left for you. Where does your magic come from?
I didn’t understand at the time, but the question stuck with me.
Nest space five, six times and fluctuations let you go anywhere. Nest it twenty, thirty times, and you can twist space itself to give you light. We made structures too massive to see all at once, all lit up from impossible angles, but we lived in darkness still.
If you are reading these words, you understand. You have seen it. You have felt it. I am sorry.
We were losing people already. I do not know when we started losing people. Makhri-fe was a big city in a small space. There was no way to keep track of everyone. Perhaps we had been losing people since the beginning.
Once the thought had been planted in my head, that something was wrong, I couldn’t put it away. I began to notice.
We only ever found one Stone Seed, yet it always seemed to be in use in so many places. It was never hard to get a hold of. In a whole city of architects, any one of us could get our hands on it whenever we wanted. Always available, never in use when you needed it.
Fifty, sixty nested layers deep, time seemed to flow differently. Maybe it always did. Maybe we only needed to go that deep to notice it.
People were disappearing, walking through the empty hallways and never coming out.
I began asking. Who? When? Where?
Never architects, I learned. Never mages, no, never mages who had touched the Seed. Or at least, none that hadn’t walked into the dark of their own volition.
The number of that latter category didn’t surprise me as much as it possibly should have. Even then, I felt the pull.
What hides in the spaces between spaces between spaces?
The deeper you went, the sooner you disappeared. Never when anyone was looking for you, but deep enough, always, if no one were.
Even beginning to raise concerns was met by immediate anger. Anger explosive enough that, were I not a respected senior architect, I fear would have killed me. The Stone Seed was safe, they insisted, and I agreed, I wanted, longed to agree. The Stone Seed was safe. Our art had still not reached its pinnacle. Makhri-fe was a city yearning to grow, and it was our duty to make it so.
I agreed. I agreed, and I knew, deep in a corner of my heart that still feared the dark, that it was too late for any of us.
What hides in the spaces between spaces between spaces?
Nothing. Vast, incomprehensible nothing. By its nature, humanity fears nothing more than the unknown. And I fear nothing more than anything.
The worst thing is how easy it was.
My worst crime was not to kill the city, it was that I did it without thinking. I was hit by an idea, and ideas in Makhri-fe were there to be chased, not questioned.
I found a door to the outside, and looked into the sky for the last time. Glimpses of blue shone between abandoned, twisted towers. The Sun was brighter than I remembered. It hurt my skin, weighed on me like a physical thing.
I bowed my head towards the stone and returned to the dark, and I locked the door behind me.
A simple fluctuation. Walking in would do as it had always done, but trying to walk out would lead you back where you began. Seamlessly, unnoticeably, I made it impossible to find this door, among the thousands of the city.
It didn’t seem significant. By the rubble and dust on the floor, it was clear no one had used the door for years.
Then I continued, and every door I found, I sealed the same way.
When I was done, I had sealed every exit of the city, and there was no way left for anyone to get out.
It did not seem significant, at the time. Anyone could escape, using the Stone Seed, and anyone could get their hands on the Stone Seed if necessary. It would always be possible.
Days passed, and no one did. We dug ever deeper, built ever larger, and no one ever seemed to notice they were trapped.
Or at least, none of the architects did. There were still people in the city other than us. Thousands of them, still. A week after I sealed the doors, there were riots through the endless halls of people who could no longer get their food and water. No one was starving yet, but it was clear they would be, were the doors not opened.
I realized I did not remember the last time I ate.
What hides in the spaces between spaces between spaces between spaces between spaces between spaces between spaces between spaces between spaces between spaces between spaces between spaces between spaces betw
I took the Stone Seed and I painted around the riots, around the city, around the architects, around every grand wonder we had produced in fifty years of growing inwards.
I took the Stone Seed and I did not give it back.
I wanted to. I wanted to let it go, give it up, let someone else have their turn.
I shattered hallways into fractal fluctuations, made them go everywhere and nowhere. I changed door connections, closed some and opened others, connecting it all in a single spiral. Every door and hallway leads you deeper. None will ever lead you back.
This is when I killed the city.
They hunted me, of course, once they realized what I was doing, but without the Seed, there was nothing they could do.
I do not know how many hundred layers deep I am. How deep you are, if you are reading this. Time and space apply only in the abstract, here. We will die never, or in an instant, or forever. I dug a hole with no bottom and dropped the Seed in to fall.
There is no way out. I am sorry.
Even if you had the Seed, even if you were a mage, only the architects of Makhri-fe ever knew how to use it without tearing themselves apart.
Even then, we did.
The light you are reading this by is of the dark as well.
I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.