A few paces revealed an explosion of it, flung out over the floor and the walls, long black veins unspooled. Dust was fully in the air now, reflecting the helmet’s light back to me, leaving only the visor’s periphery marginally clear. My throat and lungs thickened with the stuff. I kept coughing it out.

Despite the suffocating particulate, the smell, the confusion, I only moved faster. Closer and closer toward the thing I’d always sought, an object that someone else, long dead, had hidden away. I was compelled by something stronger than instinct to retrieve this thing that meant life to some, nonexistence to trillions.

I came to a place that no longer resembled the interior of the radiation shield. It was Scythin by all measure, but also different from the Timelance. The strands of resin radiated from a single point just up ahead, desperate volleys that weaved a funneled web. Like long-fingered hands reaching out. Final gasps.

I waded through the dust, waving it away, dodging strands of Scythin glass. Then, something familiar. Embedded in the structure of the shield was the distinctive bow of a voidscull. Jutting up from where the wall met the floor, it appeared to have pierced the heavy structure of the shield, melding both together in a moment of relativistic alchemy. Only by its shape was it distinguishable from the surrounding surfaces, which had been coated in layers of the sinuous exudate that originated from inside. A black shadow beckoned from the gap between the fairings, drawing me in.

Gently moving anomalies peppered the periphery of my vision, gliding past and disappearing into false distance. I took them for motes of dust at first. But gradually they assumed colors I recognized, and I saw them for what they were: Reflections. Filtering into my present awareness from a place deeper than I’d ever been. Without the dredge as medium, they were no longer presented as intricate geometrical shapes with layers to dissect, but as flakes of snow, with orange, violet, and aqua flurries falling toward an invisible horizon. I was remembering.

I angled the beam between the fairings, and the flurries fell harder, tiny fragments of memory pouring up from the past. And suddenly I was the one fleeing the Timelance decades ago. I was the one absconding inside a voidscull to the floating world called Aszerat in order to conceal the Chime. I was the one seeking to end the drawing together of dimensions so that they might be crossed, destroying unfathomable life in one so that mine might continue in the parallel. I was the one who trapped my people within this alien dimension to die.

I shook my head. “No, I’m Ben,” I declared aloud, publicly reasserting my identity.