He lifted his head. The walls around him were smooth, reflective, as though cast from mercury infused with a spark of lightning.
At the center of the room stood Fayet. But she was not as he remembered her: her once-short hair now fell in soft, ink-black waves over her shoulders. Her skin bore a faint platinum glow, and her ears tapered into delicate points, as if she had emerged from another lineage altogether.
The greatest change, however, was her size—no longer a creature no larger than a sugar cube, but a full-grown woman standing firm.
"Clonmachnoise? Have we arrived? And why do you look… different?" His voice came out hoarse, laced with the scent of ozone exhaled by an ion engine humming beneath the floor.
She smiled—a blade-thin smile.
"We drink first. Then, I'll explain everything."Her voice flowed slowly, a tone that brooked no argument.
She opened the door to the temporal equilibrium chamber; the wall split apart, revealing a silver passageway that arched like the ribbed ceiling of a metallic cathedral. Light pulsed within it like a living artery.
Fayet stepped in first, and Simon followed. He touched the walls cold, then warm, then suddenly flashing with an electric flicker.
Every footstep resonated with a hollow echo, like drums beating in the heart of emptiness.
At the end of the passage stood a wide door, its apex inscribed with an Old French word: ASCENSEUR. The letters glowed with a neon whisper.
The door slid open without a sound. Inside, a glass floor revealed a spiraling abyss descending into unseen depths. The couches lining the walls were upholstered in blue leather, emitting a faint shimmer with every movement.
They entered. The door closed behind them, silently. The moment it sealed, their reflections multiplied across the glass from dozens of angles, as if the light itself were watching them.
The elevator began to move up? Down? Simon could no longer tell. He only felt as though the ship were rearranging his consciousness, tugging at the edges of his perception.
Fayet, poised motionless at the center despite the temporary absence of gravity, leaned toward him and whispered:
"I know you're drowning in questions… but let the ship notice you first. After that, I'll tell you what changed me… and why I came back."
Her voice was like a low, resonant hymn. And with every word, the heart of the elevator pulsed faster.
Simon stared into her new eyes… and in them, he caught the reflection of an entire galaxy hurtling toward an unnamed fate.
The crystalline compartment splits through the heart of Clonmachnoise like an arrow of light piercing a labyrinth of non-endings.
The elevator's walls part intermittently, like metallic eyelids, revealing layered halls that defy dimensional logic: corridors stretching in opposite directions at once, transparent domes cradling pockets of swirling color, chambers that flicker past and vanish as though they had never been.
Beneath their feet, the vibration is more than mere motion. The ship emits a continuous tone—a subdued symphony translated into pulses of light across liquid steel. Symbols flicker and dissolve, as though the vessel is weaving a poem spoken only in sound and luminescence.
Fayet extends her hand and touches the wall. She presses a button camouflaged into its surface—impossible to detect. A moment of silence, then a soft reverberation, and the space splits open like an electric flower.
From within, a tray emerges, suspended in a magnetic field: a teacup of honey-amber liquid, its warmth carrying the scent of a summer meadow; a spiral-patterned biscuit etched with intricate designs like extinct maps; and a shifting-hued elixir, its consistency caught between liquid and light.
Fayet takes the cup. She sips, and smiles—a childish glow passes behind her eyes, a sigh from another time. The ship responds with a warm note, like a broken string recalling a melody that still echoes somewhere.
"Warmth..." she whispers.
She offers the cup to Simon. He drinks. And in that moment, something fractures.
He hears the tea's aroma. He *sees* the taste of honey rising in cerulean rings. He *touches* the color of the elixir and feels a wind passing through lunar fields.
Astonishment strikes him. The walls flatten, then curve, and in his hyper-awareness, he glimpses other versions of himself lifting the same cup in parallel floors—before the vision winks out.
The outside is no longer outside. The elevator's windows reveal electric clouds and tiny ships glinting above them like luminous insects on celestial waters. The very air feels vaster than his lungs. He laughs. Without reason.
The laugh of one who realizes he has stepped into the impossible—and will not leave unchanged.
Fayet leans in, her voice a blend of primal flute and calculating machine:
"This side of the ship returns the senses to their origin—before they were reduced to skin or named by language. Every sip restores a spectrum you forgot the day you learned its name."
Simon lifts the cup again.
Beyond the glass, doors open onto darknesses brimming with stars, onto meadows where a gazelle of music runs, onto cities that reshape their architecture with every heartbeat.
And then, with startling simplicity, he understands:
Clonmachnoise is not a vessel. It is an experience of perpetual crossing.
Every step within it is a passage from one impossibility to the next.
And he smiles.
The elevator hummed around them, a crystalline resonance like ripples in water. Simon turned to Fayet, searching her eyes for an explanation he could grasp.
He didn't need to ask. Not in her presence.
She arched her newly shaped brow and leaned toward him with feline grace:
"You fainted because your body tried to contain a consciousness too vast for its frame. Imagine a universe crammed into the eye of a needle—that's how your bones compressed. So I pulled you into the temporal equilibrium chamber."
She flicked her wrist, and a blue line traced the outline of a capsule-like room encircled by slow, concentric rings a schematic of the chamber:
"There, I infused liquid time with a strand of transparent energy. Your body stretched, little by little, until its dimensions matched your new awareness. The ship—the finest medical ensemble in the universe—monitored every temporal atom, tuning them like a violinist adjusting a string mid-melody."
Light danced across the elevator walls in agreement. Simon shook his head.
"Half of what you say is cryptic… but I'm with you."
She laughed and nodded.
"Your senses now drink from a higher stream. You'll hear two opposing melodies at once, taste endless new currents flowing in contrary directions. Brief disorientation—then your body learns the dance."
With her last word, the scent of petrified honey in the summer heat unfurled. Simon tasted it—a bolt of lemon fused with the echo of a distant flute. Strange… and yet, he was beginning to relish this future pulsing beneath his skin.
The elevator accelerated faster and faster—until it dissolved, colliding with a wall of water.
On a floor of black iron, as though forged in colossal fires, Simon stood alone beneath a lantern dangling from an unseen ceiling. The lantern resembled a crucified heart, dripping both sparks and blood.
As he stepped forward, a circular arena ignited around him. At its edge, Fayet materialized from ribbons of light that braided themselves into the shape of a woman before solidifying—a near-complete statue.
Simon raised his voice, and the arena's echo repeated each syllable a step too late, as though time itself were coughing:
"Clonmachnoise? The ship that conjures the impossible—can it grant what I've sought all my life? A permanence that doesn't fade?"
In the empty sky above them, an hourglass bloomed into existence. Its grains fell upward, not downward.
Fayet touched the air, and a veil of smoke-like violet shadows descended around them. Her lips moved, but the voice came from dozens of masks suspended in the gloom, each etched with a different expression: mockery, tenderness, terror, indifference.
The chorus of masks, in unison:*l
"It can."
"But not as you dream it."
"What you call immortality is a dead shell."
"What the ship offers… is a seed that splinters into infinity."
Above their heads, the hourglass split in two; its grains scattered into a constellation of tiny stars before winking out.
Simon advanced, and beneath his feet, a narrow path of shattered mirrors lit up—each step fracturing another time, each shard reflecting an unlived life.
"If it sees more than I do, let the decision be hers. Perhaps she is truer than my ignorance."
The masks trembled. One fell, shattering into ash. From the embers rose a tongue of cold fire, etching words into the air:
"Immortality is a definition, not a gift.
You choose it, and bear the weight of its form.
The ship chooses it, and you inherit a shape your mind cannot hold."
A faint echo followed, like a priest reciting dirges for the nameless dead:
"You might be reborn without a body, left to dwell in the silence of a remorseful thought.
You might be trapped in a single day that births itself anew, until you forget the difference between dawn and burial.
You might be robbed even of oblivion, your absence made as impossible as your existence."
Suddenly, a curtain of metallic veins descended around the arena. The light contracted to a single beam, revealing a small platform at the center—on it, a black candle with a white flame that screamed without sound.
Fayet—her voice, but roughened:
"This candle is the trial's gate.
Light it, and you surrender your throat to the ship's definition.
Walk away, and remain a prisoner of your own."
She approached, pressing into Simon's hand a match that could only burn once.
Behind them, the inverted hourglass reappeared—but its hands were now blades, spinning threads of flesh from the air.
Simon studied the candle… then turned to Fayet, only to find her gone. The space held only her resonance, like a flaw in gravity.
He lifted the match to the wick.
Before it could touch, the heart-lantern above dimmed, and the violet veil stirred like a theater curtain falling gently.
Darkness—then one final flicker:
A fragile scale hung in the void. One side empty; the other holding a droplet of living light that throbbed like a pulse.
Before the eye could grasp its meaning, the vision vanished.
The question remained, suspended—a candle neither lit nor extinguished, merely a wick awaiting a definition of eternity. One that would come not from human or machine, but from a silence balanced on one foot, neither falling nor stepping forward.
"Is it forbidden to think of survival?" Simon asked.
Perfect silence. The curtain did not rise. The scene permitted no applause.
The elevator emerged from the abyss of water. Simon and Fayet returned to the glass chamber.
The crystalline elevator slowed, as though gasping its last drop of light before drowning in the throat of an eternal crypt. The reflections on Fayet's face splintered like the stained glass of a shattered cathedral, revealing countless iterations of a beauty that shifted like a cursed theatrical mask.
Simon asked her, his voice ringing like nails hammered into a coffin of air:
"What is this new form? Why change it?"
She tilted her head, shadows tracing a crescent on her neck like a demon's brand, then whispered softly:
"I grew weary of the old mask, nothing more. As a woman, my ever-renewing beauty is not a whim… but a condition of survival. A body that does not change withers, and the immortal who does not adorn themselves rots."
Before he could reply, the glass floor of the elevator split open onto an iron night; they crossed a concrete threshold into another fragment of *Clonmachnoise*. Simon looked down… and the scene unfolded.
A desert of hollow, ashen earth stretched without a horizon, as though creation had regurgitated all that remained. There, a wild boar lumbered like animate ugliness, its hide sagging over bones long acquainted with hunger—now part of its very form. Its eyes, two pits gleaming with black saliva… saw nothing but a single thought: food.
Facing the creature stood two children—a boy and his sister—frailty etched into their limbs until their skin seemed paper. No food, no mercy in the air. The boy trembled, pushing his sister behind him like a knight raising a broken shield, and whispered to her in a voice fraying:
"Run…"
She ran. No betrayal in her flight, only instinct clinging to the dregs of breath. He remained, his body shaking, but his eyes glittered with a faith as fragile as glass: *Perhaps a miracle will descend. Perhaps God will listen. Perhaps the boar will sate itself on dirt.*
He parted his lips to pray a prayer that held no keys to heaven:
"Why me? Is this the price for a stolen handful of sugar? Forgive me, but do not leave me like this…"
No answer. Only silence spoke, as though the universe had turned its face away to avoid witnessing what came next.
The boar lunged. It crashed onto the boy's knees, its hooves crushing tender bones like fresh lilac roots. The child screamed—a sound that split into layers until Simon swore the very walls of the elevator reverberated with his pain. The boy raised a trembling fist, struck the beast's hide… a blow that did not stir even the air.
Then the boar opened its jaws; inside, ivory knives that knew no mercy. Its tusks plunged into the boy's belly. Vivid entrails spilled onto the ashen soil, spreading a choking, metallic scent—like church candles burned atop an inverted altar.
The death was slow, like dragging a soul over broken glass. The boy kept gasping the name of an absent god until his lungs fell silent, leaving only the wet crunch of the boar devouring his future to survive another half-day.
The glass returned to darkness. A question withered in Simon's throat, unasked; his chest became a cave echoing with the weight of dead stars. He turned to Fayet—still herself, yet her features now seemed older, as though she, too, had witnessed what he saw:
"This is how immortality is consecrated, Simon…
Not a vase preserving roses, but the mouth of a well where days drop their victims into infinity.
The boy screamed, and the gods of silence swallowed him.
Do you still believe adornment is salvation?"
Simon did not answer. Only one thought cycled in his mind: "The sister escaped..."
The elevator resumed its descent, carrying with it the weight of unanswered prayers.