“I’m the Wizard, I’m twelve thousand years old, of course I know everything,” the young man smirked. She noticed seams in his skin, starting at the corners of his mouth. “I was turning tower-dwelling savages inside-out before Igaria built the first spoke. This-”

  He gestured about himself, perhaps at the Lost Sun Society, or perhaps at the world at large.

  “-is nothing to me. I’ve seen the Banishing, I’ve seen Zavesh shoving random organs into his torso, I’ve seen the Tannhauser- no, wait, that’s… That’s not one of my memories. The point is, you wouldn’t believe the things I have seen, little god-eater. Tell me, how did Chernobog taste? Make that question a trade offer, too — answer it, and you may ask me one in turn.”

  Krahe felt… Dazed, more than anything. She took a deep breath and answered as best she could.

  “I wasn’t conscious. Woke up here, so to speak.”

  “Ah. From a weak-tide world then. Unfortunate. Or fortunate, I suppose. You likely would not survive with your sanity intact had you been conscious. I admit, you are new after a fashion — you are the first of my kind I have met in this world. The difference between those they call Greater Pilgrims and us god-eaters — it’s strange that they haven’t noticed the pattern yet.”

  “Pick one. Are you young, or are you twelve thousand years old?” Krahe sighed. She had already accepted that this was an encounter similar to the six-eyed dream serpent.

  “I said what I said. This body has held up well thus far, all things considered. Grafting truly has come a long way, you can scarcely see the traces of the Old Ways anymore if you take refined grafts for what they are. As I am, in this flesh, in this life, I am… Sixty-eight, I believe. I am also twelve-thousand, six-hundred and eight. I was there for the razing of the Towers and the raising of the Spokes, I was there for the Interdimensional Summit… Indeed, I even met the Thousand-in-One before he went mad with his eternal crusade. Your system readout states two ages, does it not? It’s the same. Mine says sixty-eight slash twelve-thousand six-hundred and eight.”

  A grin spread over the Wizard’s face, his cheeks splitting apart fully, revealing his teeth. They were pointed, far moreso than normal, but not quite like those of a shark. It was almost as if he had two premolars where each molar should be.

  “Heh… The hollow comfort of forgetting — you will never receive it again. When your flesh next meets its end, you will slumber for however long it takes your True Soul and Astral Body to return into equilibrium. What was the saying? I can sleep when I am dead? Welcome to that reality. You will find many coping with their own mutability by calling eternity a curse, just as one who cannot reach the grapevine says they must be sour. What we are is what you make of it, no more or less.”

  “Alright, show me the artifact.”

  Holding his smug, split-cheeked grin, the wizard held out his left hand, revealing a small stone shard. Eldritch symbols crawled over its surface like the grasping tendrils of an octopus waiting for a fish.

  “There is some matter of ritual when it comes to attuning with it. I will share the ritual secrets after you hand over the Schwarzfaust.”

  Krahe did as was asked of her, and after stowing away the talisman paper, the Wizard added a memslate with the same petrified-wood texture as his staff.

  “If you choose to accept my full offer, make your way to the coral tree and focus on calling me to that place. It will at once permit me to contact you and prove that you are qualified for the task at hand.”

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  Once they had made the exchange, the Wizard glanced down at Mistress Yao’s isolation talisman, which gave no indication that its power was waning.

  “Looks like our time is just about up. I’ve got a nasty old drunk to drag back into the catacombs before he makes a scene. Don’t leave me waiting. Or do, chances are I will forget this exchange if you don’t remind me.”

  The Wizard grabbed the talisman from the air, and its eight copies burned up into nothing in an instant. He then simply walked away, and Krahe realized the shooting range was now completely deserted. The moment after that, she realized she had completely lost track of the young man, despite her best efforts. She got the distinct impression that the harder she tried to look for him, the less likely she would be to find him, much as one would lose grasp of an eel by trying to get a grip on it. Deciding that it would be best to let this bizarre and disconcerting exchange sink in for some time, and craving a dose of normalcy, she made her way to the nearest cafe. After a cup of coffee and a cigarette, she finally returned to her office and turned in for the night, making for Garvesh’s pawn shop in the morning.

  Far too late into her stay in this world, Krahe learned that Zastreon did after all have what was functionally radio. In fact, she had been offered the opportunity to have one in her pocket and had refused it. It was during a visit with Garvesh that she saw the lizard tinkering with an eyebox a little larger and much newer than hers, and after some manipulation, he had it spitting out what was unmistakably a radio drama. A soundscape of astonishing fidelity spilled out of it, the fray of battle that, somehow, painted an immaculate mental image of metal smashing into metal. With a bit more manipulation, he even made the eyebox project an image — an illustration of two gigantic machines facing off against one another in the midst of a desolate city.

  “That shape! It’s… Is that him? That steel beast that humiliated me a century ago?!”

  The moment Garvesh noticed her, he shut off the eyebox, nodding at her in acknowledgment. Krahe put aside all pretences, and openly asked: “What was that, just now?”

  “This? Don’t tell me you don’t know,” he answered casually.

  Through this somewhat humiliating interaction with the old lizard, Krahe came to learn of this keystone technology, which she had avoided until this point by the virtue — or in this case, by the vice — of her own overcautious behavior. Garvesh mentioned how the churches didn’t like using “the ol’ astrowave” because “they don’t want to risk having the tides cause interference,” as if wanting to console her in some small way.

  “...Ah,” Krahe deadpanned as the realization dawned on her. For much of her time here, she had lived in church safehouses, which obviously chose the most secure option for entertainment. She had also only interacted in any significant capacity with… Casus. Casus Aristedes. A man who, even had he lived in Megacity Gamma, Krahe still would have expected him to somehow get his hands on physical scripture, even if it likely wouldn't have been of the Abrahamic sort. And if the most common option for astrowave reception was a personal eyebox, then she had a pile of them stashed away, left to rot because she had tried their basic functions and found them lacking compared to her ultra-heavy-duty prospector-grade eyebox.

  Realizing that this hadn’t come up beforehand, that she somehow never found out about this ubiquitous thing, and realizing that she wouldn’t stop him from speaking, Garvesh proceeded to go on at length about the local media landscape. She had already encountered Zastreon’s cinema, of course — at Nozar’s place. But it hadn’t been until now that she really learned of its state as compared to Megacity Gamma’s hyper-intrusive media landscape. Screaming at you from every corner, demanding your attention often in the literal sense. As far as she could tell, there was no such thing as a perpetually-active broadcasting network. Not for visual media, anyway.

  In this roundabout way, Krahe learned that Audunpoint’s surface society, that part of it which she had interacted with so little, had a widely varied selection of entertainment to choose from. It just didn’t come in the formats or by the avenues she was used to, so she hadn’t noticed them. In place of streaming, screens, ocular implants, headsets, or direct netscape plugs, there were instead these astrowave radio broadcasts and a vast world of… Memslate-based home video. In this world, it had been of all things books and home video that came to dominate the civilian entertainment market.

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