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If Kaveh had a wish— one of three granted by a genie, or perhaps a kind and charitable god— it would be to go back in time exactly four hours and grab himself by the shoulders, shake him until his teeth rattled free from his skull, and demand in the clearest of words that he not go outside that day.
Of course, even if he somehow succeeded in time travel, he isn’t sure it could change his current position at all. It had happened so abruptly that cause and effect seemed irrelevant to the process; one minute he and Alhaitham were walking back to the city, discussing whether their decades-old cabinet should be put in the pile of historical preservation or the pile of firewood, the next they were somewhere else entirely.
No words could really capture the wrongness of the space they found themselves in, his architectural vocabulary insufficient for even a preliminary assessment. When they first touched down in this whatever-place, Kaveh was on his back with a deep ache on his side, suggesting he had fallen a great height onto the slightly damp, carpeted yellow floor. He looked up and only saw more of the same— yellow ceiling tiles, yellow walls (with a faded geometric wallpaper that he did not find particularly attractive nor offensive), and yellow lights. Blinding, fluorescent lights that flattened every shadow and every color into the same, monotonous yellow. Kaveh could puke from the banality of it all.
A building could be ugly, it could be inefficient, it could be hostile to the human spirit, but this was something entirely different. It felt less like an interior and more like a memory of one recalled by someone who had only heard it described secondhand, and was asked to draw it.
When he finally made it to his feet, he found Alhaitham standing several paces away, apparently unharmed and, absurdly, completely unbothered. In an instant Kaveh magnetized to his side, gripping his shoulder like an overboard sailor to driftwood.
“Alhaitham,” He demanded. “Where in the world are we?”
Alhaitham stepped forward and looked down a hallway to their right, one that disappeared behind three separate corners before vanishing from sight. He looked down a hallway to his left, where the room opened up into a larger space, but had a tall red hexagonal sign with the word ‘STOP’ written in white standing in the center. And just behind them, a large pile of random furniture stacked in a bizarre, clustered way. Even from their limited perspective, each direction seemed to branch and rebranch into an incomprehensible labyrinth. Yellow. It was yellow yellow yellow all around.
“I have no idea.”
Kaveh felt his stomach drop. That was perhaps the single most alarming answer Alhaitham could have given.
“You don’t know? Well, use your enormous scholarly brain and give me a theory, at least!”
“What do you want me to say? That we've accidentally fallen through reality and landed inside an impossible extradimensional space? Because at the moment, that's the most reasonable explanation available to us, seeing as we seemingly teleported here out of nowhere.”
“Reasonable?” Kaveh repeated. “Your reasonable explanation is that we've fallen through reality?”
Alhaitham gestured around them. “Do you have a better one?”
Kaveh opened his mouth, but no sound came out. His grip on Alhaitham strengthened considerably.
“Ok, then, hypothetically, how would we leave this blip in reality?” He swiveled his head in every direction. “I certainly don’t see an exit sign anywhere.”
“Assuming we arrived here through some kind of spatial anomaly, the most reasonable possibility is that the process can occur in reverse. We would need to identify what conditions caused the transition in the first place, then attempt to reproduce them.”
Remembering at once how they fell into this place, they both looked up, and found that the ceiling was far too high for them to attempt to climb back through it to the real world. Their only hope of escape, dashed.
For a brief moment, Kaveh entertained the possibility that he just hit his head. Perhaps he was unconscious somewhere, and this was a dream, or he had finally worked himself into some stress-induced delirium, Alhaitham standing over him in the waking world with a disapproving expression. Unfortunately, Alhaitham being here with him invalidated that theory, because Kaveh had learned over the years that even his imagination wasn't cruel enough to accurately reproduce Alhaitham for extended periods of time.
He made the incredibly brave decision to let go of his junior’s arm and turn slowly in a circle, surveying their surroundings properly.
From a distance, the place gave the illusion of variation. One hallway bent left, another right. Some widened unexpectedly while others narrowed. Yet the longer he looked, the more he realized these differences felt superficial, like distinctions invented to justify an underlying sameness. Every corridor still possessed the same yellow walls, the same damp carpet, the same fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.
Kaveh stepped back to examine the pile of furniture, as it seems this place is utterly devoid of anything else to do.
There were dressers, cabinets, couches, chairs, shelves, but none were positioned in ways that made sense. A couch sat on top of a desk, a cabinet sank halfway into the floor, a chair sat upside-down on top another, and when Kaveh reached to pick up the top one to confirm its solidness, they seemed to be inexplicably welded together. He dropped it.
The arrangement did not have any of the deliberace of a normal furnished room, nor the chaotic yet somewhat logical continuity of a room being moved. He reached out again, running his hand along the grain of a stool. It, too, was as real as everything else he touched.
“Even this place,” Kaveh said quietly, “has better taste in decor than you.”
“...When has humor ever been your preferred coping mechanism?”
“Well, the alternatives would be standing here and fully processing our situation, and I don't particularly care for any of the conclusions that exercise is likely to produce.”
Alhaitham crossed his arms. “And yet you’ve been asking questions continuously since we arrived.”
“Practical questions.” Kaveh postured himself in a way that enunciated every word of his in body language. “Such as, ‘where are we? How did we get here? How do we leave?’ Those are manageable, the kinds of questions people ask because they expect answers. What I'm trying not to think about are the other questions. ”
“The ones without clear answers.”
“How are you not bothered by this? You believe we’re trapped in a wormhole between realities, yet you remain your normal carefree self.”
Alhaitham was silent for a few moments before responding. “It bothers me considerably. I was looking forward to dinner tonight.”
Kaveh blinked at his honesty. “You have a strange way of showing it.”
“I don't see the benefit in dramatizing the situation.”
“You could not possibly dramatize the fact that we are standing in an infinite yellow labyrinth.”
“We don't know that it's infinite.”
Kaveh huffed. “You’re really choosing now to be pedantic?”
“In a situation like this, I think precision becomes more important, not less.”
From there, Kaveh had no other responses. And with no other choice, the two began to walk forward, or what was arbitrarily decided as forward. The place only got weirder and weirder the farther in they went, with entire floors narrowing to a ramp leading up to a hole on the wall, or expanding outwards into an impossibly-large room complete with columns and balconies.
Kaveh had spent years studying architecture, and he was of the philosophy that buildings held their own identities. Architecture was, in many ways, an attempt to translate feelings into space. People built things for reasons: a palace communicated power, a home communicated comfort, a temple communicated reverence. Even terrible ones reflected something about the people who made them. This place reflected nothing, like a copy of a photo of a painting of another photo, a memory that had long since forgotten what it was originally depicting. Eventually, Kaveh couldn’t take the silence overlayed by electrical buzzing anymore.
“I can't decide whether this place is unsettling because it's strange or because it isn't. If we'd fallen into some ancient ruin or divine realm, I could at least comprehend that we’re in a space belonging to something greater. This?” He gestured vaguely around them. “It's familiar, almost. It's the sort of room I've walked through a thousand times before, like… a cheap storage facility. Sans the random furnishing piles and pure architectural bizarreness, of course. Yet standing here…it feels like I've accidentally discovered something I wasn't supposed to see.”
"Humans tend to categorize unfamiliar experiences through comparison."
"Which means?"
"It means when people encounter something unprecedented, they instinctively search for familiar points of reference.” Alhaitham looked at him. "We're standing in a place that shouldn't exist, yet your mind keeps insisting that it resembles a storage facility because that's the closest framework available."
Kaveh considered this. "Are you doing that too?"
“I believe it looks more like the back rooms of a retail store, personally.”
“Well, I’m glad that even in a nightmare realm, you’re still finding opportunities to disagree with me.”
They dissolved back into silence. For a while Kaveh found himself watching the walls. Again, not because they were interesting, but because they weren’t.
"You know,” he eventually began again. “If this place was finite, I still wouldn’t believe it was made by a conscious hand at all.”
“Explain?”
“There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to anything we’ve come across so far.” Kaveh began to gesticulate, channeling his frustrations into the wave of his arms. “A window is placed a certain way because somebody liked the view. A room is shaped a certain way because somebody imagined people living inside it. Every structure contains evidence of thought."
Alhaitham nodded slightly. "A reasonable observation.”
"And intentional spaces possess purpose. A hallway exists to connect rooms, a room to facilitate activity, a staircase to connect elevations. You see where I’m going with this, yes?”
“Please, spell it out for me.”
“This place,” Kaveh enunciated. “Has nothing. It is completely detached from humanity, or any species of coherent thought. There are hallways that lead to more hallways, rooms that are empty or filled with a random assortment of objects with no common throughline or logical context, and staircases to nowhere at all. This space is just… anti-people. It doesn’t feel like it belongs to anything or anyone.”
Alhaitham hummed. “Perhaps that means we are simply not meant to be here, and its purpose is beyond our comprehension.”
“Well, I’d sure love to leave, Alhaitham! Please show me the way!”
“Not knowing where we are makes determining where we're going somewhat difficult.”
The conversation ended there, though not because either of them had run out of things to say. Rather, the place seemed to consume conversation the same way it consumed distance. Words drifted away into the fluorescent hum, becoming small and insignificant against the vast sameness surrounding them. For several minutes they walked in silence.
Alhaitham rarely looked unsettled. Kaveh isn’t sure he could identify the emotion on him, seeing as he’s never caught Alhaitham in a moment of genuine unease. He still isn’t certain that’s what’s currently pulling the pinch of Alhaitham’s brows or the slight frown on his lips, and whether Kaveh is choosing to abstract the expression for his own comfort, he also doesn’t know.
Alhaitham looked up at the endless yellow. "If this place is finite, it's impossibly large. If it's infinite, it raises questions that I also don't particularly enjoy considering."
"What kind of questions?"
"If the space is genuinely infinite, it shouldn't be able to exist. The amount of material required alone would be infinite as well, which suggests ordinary physical constraints do not apply. This then raises questions regarding locality, and if that doesn’t apply, then concepts like distance may be fundamentally meaningless.”
“And all of this is to say, what exactly?”
"If something like this can exist, what else can?"
The implication lingered unpleasantly between them. "Aren't there already plenty of impossible things in the world?" Kaveh asked. "We have elemental energy, gods, dragons, the Abyss, the traveler. We've spent years watching reality ignore its own rules."
"Those things still fit inside a larger framework. They belong somewhere, pieces of a larger cosmology or continent." Alhaitham gestured around them. "You said it yourself, this doesn't feel like it belongs to anything but itself."
The emotion his observations evoked in Kaveh surprised him. It felt like a recognition of their cosmic insignificance, one he had experienced many times before; standing beneath the stars in the desert, looking out over the ocean, examining ancient ruins emerging from the sand. Moments that reminded him the world was larger than any single person could comprehend. But instead of an almost beautiful melancholy, all he felt now was dread and despair.
"When I was younger, I used to think there was something comforting about the idea that the world was bigger than us."
Alhaitham glanced over. "How so?"
Kaveh shrugged, his voice softening. "I suppose I imagined that even if something was large enough, old enough, distant enough, it would still have to make sense. Maybe not to me personally, but to someone. A scholar somewhere, or a historian, or even a regular civilian from the past."
He laughed without humor. "I never really considered the possibility that there might be things with no explanation waiting for us at the end."
Alhaitham was silent for a moment, his gaze fixed somewhere far down the corridor they walked.
"I don't think that's what you're afraid of."
"Then what?"
"I think you're afraid there is an explanation."
Kaveh frowned. "How? I think I would much prefer a terrible answer to no answer at all."
Alhaitham kept looking ahead. "In my experience, people can become comfortable with mysteries. They're less comfortable with answers they dislike."
“That's an absurd statement.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. People crave closure above all else, that’s just human nature. It lets you know where to begin in understanding the problem.”
“You're telling me if somebody explained this place tomorrow and the explanation was deeply unpleasant, you'd feel better?”
Kaveh opened his mouth, closed it, and thought about the proposal because what else did they have to do but entertain endless philosophical problems.
At first the answer seemed obvious, of course he would prefer an explanation. An explanation meant context, context meant understanding, understanding often meant a solution. Yet the longer he considered it, the less certain he became. It would simply transform the place from an inexplicable horror into a comprehensible one, but which is worse? Perhaps ignorance really is bliss, and the burden of knowledge that this place possibly existed for some malicious reason would only serve to drive him into a terrified panic rather than simple confusion. But in the end, both scenarios would likely end in insanity.
Alhaitham gave him a sidelong look. “I seem to have given you something to think about, you’re welcome.”
"One day,” Kaveh rubbed a hand down his face, “I'm going to discover the mechanism that allows you to function like this, allowing you to present as devoid of any visible emotion."
"Let me know when you do, you’d be the only one clever enough to understand its mechanology.”
“You’re making jokes now. We’re truly doomed.”
If there was one constant in the universe, it was that Alhaitham remained irritating regardless of dimensional context. It was the only comfort available to Kaveh now.
As they trudged on, the interior began to resemble his dreams from childhood. Not in the literal, physical sense, but in the constant feeling of complete dislocation. The kind where logic dissolved into a natural confusion, almost as if the rooms rearranged themselves whenever they looked away. But it seemed even that level of chaos was too much for this place, as Kaveh’s constant re-examinings of the rooms they pass consistently confirm that nothing changes. It occupied the peculiar middle ground of design where it became impossible to remember what it looked like even while actively staring at it. Somehow every hallway looked identical, yet every time Kaveh rounded a corner he was seized by the dreadful certainty that this one would somehow be worse.
"Well," he said eventually. "At least we know one thing. This was not designed by a Kshahrewar graduate. None would survive the review process after presenting this."
“Now who's making jokes?”
"We're trapped in an infinite yellow nightmare dimension, what else is there to do?”
"That's a hypothesis, we still haven't confirmed it's infinite."
Kaveh flailed his arms uselessly. “We’ve been walking for what, hours now?! There’s clearly no end to this place! At some point, the distinction between ‘extremely large’ and ‘infinite’ becomes entirely arbitrary.”
A sound cut through the hum. It was distant, but both of them froze abruptly. As they listened together, they heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps punctuated by something heavy being dragged across the carpet. Once again, Kaveh became stitched to Alhaitham’s side.
"What was that?"
"I have no idea."
"That answer is even less comforting the second time."
The noise of either the intruder or the natural wildlife of this fucked up micro-universe grew increasingly louder. Both of them stood tense, Kaveh gripped onto Alhaitham’s arm like it would be the last thing he ever did, and maybe it’s the utter rejection of space and logic playing tricks on him, but he could’ve sworn he felt Alhaitham's hand holding his arm in turn. Perhaps only confirming that the concept of "together" still existed and had not yet been dissolved by the Hallways.
Ahead of them, something finally stepped into view. Even if it was a flesh-eating monster, a hallucination, or some extradimensional horror beyond human comprehension, a part of Kaveh could still cry in relief for the brief freedom from the monotonous yellow it’s appearance would’ve granted him.
A man in a hazmat suit rounded the corner carrying a ladder. He was dragging it behind him in slow, lazy movements, a decidedly human motion that was a stark contrast to the space he walked though. He slowed to a complete stop the moment he saw them, through the faceplate they could just barely make out a pair of eyes widening in astonishment.
Dead silence spanned for approximately eleven seconds. Then, the man lowered the ladder and pointed at Alhaitham.
"...Scribe? How did you get here?”
"You know me?" Alhaitham asked.
The man made a noise that might have been laughter, but it was hard to tell through the suit. “Of course I know you. I work here. Well—here here, not there here.”
The two of them shared a look of equal parts suspicion and disbelief.
“The… Akademiya?” Kaveh supplied.
“Yes, that.” The man sighed so deeply it crackled through the suit’s speaker. “Hah…no one at the institute would believe me if I told them I found the two of you here. And yet I’m not surprised at all.”
He turned slightly, bringing a hand up to his shoulder, addressing someone over a radio.
“Hey. Yeah. Yeah, I found two. No, not researchers, heh. You aren’t gonna believe this. Yeah, walking through Sector Unmapped. I’m coming back with them, get the decontamination team ready. And maybe…” He glanced back at them, still clinging to each other like shipwreck survivors. “I don’t know, a psychiatrist too?”
When the exchange was over, he looked back to them, gesturing forward with resigned authority. “Alright, you two come with me.”
“Hold on,” Kaveh pointed at him accusingly. “You’re from the Akademiya? They know about this place?”
“I mean…I’m not at liberty to say, but if one plus one is two, right?” He picked up the ladder again. “Questions later. I’ll show you both to the null zone.”
Neither Kaveh nor Alhaitham had a counterargument, so they had no choice but to follow. Kaveh denoted that, still, even their savior wore yellow. If and when they ever get back to their home, he is swiftly discarding all traces of that dreadful color, and if he had it his way, it would never be seen in Sumeru again. He’ll even dye his hair. Alhaitham, for his part, said nothing, but he walked closer than before.
The journey took another forty minutes, or perhaps four, or perhaps four hundred. Time was slippery in this place. Eventually the yellow walls gave way to concrete, then metal, then actual signs. Then blessedly, wonderfully, several new colors.
A massive reinforced door stood open ahead. They were led through it, and Kaveh’s ears felt immediate relief when the fluorescent buzzing finally went away. Inside stretched a bustling research facility populated by scholars, engineers, guards, the geometry of institutional order. By all accounts the building itself was utilitarian and horribly uninspired, but in that moment it was the most beautiful thing Kaveh had ever seen.
The symbol of the Akademiya hung prominently on each wall. A realization crept up the back of Kaveh’s mind.
He turned toward Alhaitham. "How did you not know about this?"
"...I don’t know.” He paused, glancing around the facility. “But in retrospect, it explains several funding allocations."