Chapter Text
It is little more than dust and time worn bones. An old carcass, in the icy wastes that were once dense Siberian forests. The cracked curve of a skull sits, buried in the snow, in the lee of what had once been its home, marking the accidental burial site.
Heat had seared the bones near black - it has turned some to ash, which the wind has stolen and played with, and scattered without a care.
It once had a name - when it was a living person and not just a marker of sorrow. It had seen the forests it had called home run wild with monsters - before the skies had gone stark white, and fury erased it before a heart could finish a beat.
It had been named Kara Illyc.
She was simply one of the hundreds of thousands who had died in the Second Impact - not at the touch of the Herrscher, or the Honkai, but at the misfortune of choosing to live briefly in that wood at the wrong time, and be at the wrong place, when the missiles fell.
The Wrong Time.
The Wrong Place.
If she had instead been…
Elsewhere… bubbles rise from the depths.
They are not literal bubbles. This is not a literal ocean. This is a deceit that the mind plays on itself so it may understand.
This is the Sea of Quanta - the vast infinity between all possibilities. If one can imagine a different future, one could find it, no matter how close it may resemble their own world, or how drastically it is different.
The Human Mind perceives the impossible gulf between worlds as an ocean. Dark, deep, crushingly heavy - it has all the properties of an Ocean, but it is not one. A crucial fact that those rare few who delve into it all but forget. Afterall, when one pushes through a wall that is thinner than a human hair, and enters into the real and tangible, safe from the crushing, consuming darkness, how can you not think of it as rising from drowning? Otherwise, the human mind must accept the infinite.
Which it cannot. So it scales down, it simplifies, it compartmentalises the concept into a means it can safely, comfortably accept.
It accepts that Infinity is an Ocean - you cannot see the whole ocean, and you cannot see Infinity. Surely, then, they are the same.
It accepts the contradictory idea that reality is finite - and thus, being finite, can be grasped, measured and quantified. It accepts that existence is brief - as brilliant and short lived as a bubble.
And thus, this is the Sea of Quanta, the vast infinity between all possibilities, as fine and ephemeral as bubbles.
The snow crunches underfoot. It is getting late. The sun is dipping down behind the treetops - the snow is turning wine dark. She knows that she should head back now. Kara Illyc knows these woods well, and knows enough that wandering it in the dark is likely to result in her being stranded, freezing, hungry and, ultimately, dead.
She knows there are two common hunting routes that she can take. Both will take her to her truck, with its warm interior and heavy tires to ferry her home to her cabin - where the hearth and soup and her father’s books wait to keep her warm and safe.
She checks the marks on the trees. One path goes north, across a ridgeline. There’s a good view of the wall from there. The other path goes west, down in the gully, which is more sheltered from the winds.
The Kara Illyc That is Now Dead took the path west, along the gully, sheltered from the winds, happy in her choice she was not freezing as much. She would die several days later, when the missiles fell.
Kara pauses, and looks up. She checks her watch, her map, and hunches her shoulders as she marches north. She may as well see the wall one last time before she heads home. Years ago, before the wall was there, one could see the tower.
She is ignorant that over three hundred people had just been killed in that tower. She is ignorant that hundreds of people have died in it before, and that the atrocities there will lead to hundreds of thousands more dying.
She passes close to the Exclusion zone and there, watching along the ridge, barely seventeen kilometres out from Schicksal’s Tower of Babylon, just outside the wall that kept it from the wilderness, close enough to see its parapet.
Close enough she runs into the girl.
Elsewhere... a Bubble rises.