Letters of light appear in front of him, floating in the air, in some unfamiliar script that seems to write vertically rather than horizontally.

—And just as he was starting to move, he freezes again.

Okay. Think. In terms of the things he's directly seen so far, this could be some bizarre prank by a Light mage with too much time on their hands - but to kidnap him out of his own rooms at the palace you'd pretty much have to be a god. And what god would snatch him away to their enormous, austere, vaguely tomblike, extremely nine-pointed stone building and then show him words in a language he doesn't understand? It doesn't make any sense. So something that doesn't make sense is happening, and he needs to find out more about what it is and how it works so he can get safely out of it and return home, ideally before his father notices he is missing.

How long has he been gone? Impossible to say. He's been known to stay in his rooms for days, but he still sends for his meals; the kitchen would notice if he skipped breakfast and lunch, they'd probably send somebody up with a tray, the tray would sit untouched, they'd notice when they came to collect it... allow a few hours for the news to make it up the chain of command, as the people at each level debate the wisdom of telling Emperor Siurek his son appears to be missing... by that same evening, his father would know, and people would be getting tortured to death over it. He feels like he got approximately a full night's sleep, so by his best guess, he has about eight or twelve hours.

In which case he'd better get moving, hadn't he. Without taking unnecessary risks if he can help it. Getting back alive is more important than getting back fast. On the other hand, what's an unnecessary risk in this scenario? How would he tell?

Sighing, he leans closer to the floating letters. Examining them probably won't help, but it feels like a better idea than wandering off to be eaten by a void-hole.

As he leans close to the letters, something... communicates with him.

It's hard to get more precise than that, because that's really all there is at first: a sense of something, very definitely an external something, approaching his mind with communicative intent.

His instinct is to recoil from the contact, but a moment later he reminds himself that he is on a deadline here. With as little information as he has about where he is, how he got here, and what in general is going on, if something is offering him answers even in the vaguest possible way, he should definitely not let the opportunity pass him by. It could be the wrong choice and lead to disaster, but so could doing nothing, so could any other action he might choose to take - the problem is that he doesn't know. This seems more like a possible solution than anything else he has encountered so far.

He... would like to talk to the mysterious presence? Is that how you do it?

It seems to be close enough.

The mysterious presence introduces itself, in slow blurry concepts drifting into his thoughts one after another. It is this building. Its function is to distribute - something, a concept he doesn't yet have the context to fully understand. It is not directly conscious but it is able to act and learn in ways related to its function.

...does it know how he got here?

No.

(Can a building lie? Not enough information. Well - assume it's being straightforwardly honest for now. Second-guessing its every statement for hours will not serve his purposes.)

All right, what's this about the thing it's supposed to distribute? That concept is unfamiliar to him. It seems like it might be a kind of magic, but almost completely unlike the magic he's familiar with.

The thing it's supposed to distribute is called taieli in the language spoken by the building's creators. It is a kind of magic. It is not very much like the magic he's familiar with. The magic he's familiar with is not a thing this monument has ever encountered.

...can the building send him home, by any chance?

No.

So he's trapped in a magic building, so far away from home that neither of them has ever heard of the way magic works where the other is from -

He doesn't have the first clue how you'd even begin to solve this problem with the magic of his world, but maybe this 'taieli' thing hops casually between entire paradigms of being...?

It does not. The taieli monument has never encountered evidence of another world's existence before, and if travel between worlds was a common use of taieli, the monument would know.

... he is probably not going home.

He sits down abruptly.

Is there anything to eat or drink in this place—?

No.

If he chose to be evaluated as a candidate to receive taieli, the monument would sustain his life without the need for food or water or sleep for nine days. After that, or if he does not choose to be evaluated, the monument will remain filled with air for as long as he is alive and inside it, but that's all. There is no air outside, nor food, nor water; no one has visited this place in thousands of years.

He curls up in a little ball on the floor and cries with mingled relief and despair. Despair because he is going to die here and he'll never have a chance to fix the mess his father made of the world and Ruava will never know what happened to him and his disappearance will cause a lot of suffering and he can't do anything about it. Relief because he is going to die here and it won't be his fault - if there really is nothing he can do, then he can just stop trying, he never has to watch his father torture someone again, he never has to see Nirue's smile again, he never has to read another report about the capture of a political prisoner, he will never again be asked to kill someone because she's afraid to live.

His surroundings are still and silent. The monument has nothing to say on this subject.

He hasn't cried in - he can't remember. Years at least. He'd forgotten how much it hurts, physically, his throat aches and his eyes sting and his chest tightens painfully - why does the normal reaction to being miserable tend to make you more miserable, that's hardly fair - he tries to pull himself together, not because he has to, just because he prefers not to be crying, and it's dizzyingly strange, being free of the weight of duty...

He takes a deep breath, wipes his face with shaking hands, sits up, wipes his face again because there are still tears trickling down it. Maybe he should try being evaluated for taieli, just to give himself nine more days of life. Does he want nine more days of life? He has no idea and isn't really sure how to find out. It would probably take him more than nine days just to adjust to running on preferences instead of necessities. And then afterward he will die of thirst alone in this huge empty building.

...no. He's getting ahead of himself. If the monument is able to sustain him for nine days, then logically it must be theoretically possible to sustain him for longer than that using the magic that built it. So he could live, if he could acquire the magic and learn how to use it fast enough.

And if he could live - perhaps indefinitely - or at least as long as he was able to keep himself going - with an unknown form of magic... even if the monument has never heard of a way to use taieli to travel between worlds, he got here somehow, and that means that in theory there exists a way to get back.

He draws his knees up to his chest and presses his face against them and refuses to start crying again. It's such a tiny, ridiculously implausible chance - he was so close to being able to stop - couldn't he just assume that returning home really is impossible, and go from there -

No. And he's already wasted enough time succumbing to the temptation of abandoning his duty. No matter how tiny the chance, no matter how difficult it is or how long it takes, he will do everything he can to return home. He is Fareine Korovai, prince of Eianvar, and his father's empire is his responsibility.

Standing up would be beyond him, just now, but it seems unlikely that the building will care. He addresses it in his thoughts again. What would he have to do, to be evaluated as a candidate?

The evaluation process is different for everyone, but it will involve staying in this building for nine days, and no physical harm will come to him during that time.

Would he like to be evaluated?

(He would like to go to sleep and never wake up—but he can't do that, he can't, he really truly does not have it in him to walk away from his self-imposed duty to the people of Eianvar. As long as there's any chance he could make a difference, he will go on.)

He composes his mind into as unambiguous an affirmative as he can manage and directs it at the monument.

His intentions are acknowledged. Evaluation will begin.

First, some background information...

There are nine ainelin - elements, aspects, fields - that together make up the system that is taieli. They're not divided by personal compatibility like the elements he's familiar with; you either have the magic and can use all the elements, or you don't and you can't. Simple, orderly, symmetrical - at least at this level of abstraction. Things get a little messier in practice.

Doing magic with taieli is a matter of applying one or more ainelin to an object or situation to achieve a desired effect. The only limit to how many you can use at once is your attention and working memory, and the only limit to how big an effect you can achieve with them is that plus how much practice you're willing to put in first in order to expand your range.

As part of its function, the monument is able to teach him about the nature and uses of the ainelin. It will now do so.

He is certainly listening.

Although the ainelin come in no particular order, the one that is normally listed first is epru: void, absence, lessening. Erasure, removal. With epru, you can diminish a thing, make it dimmer, colder, quieter, or vanish it completely; but you had better be careful not to get rid of something which you might later wish you hadn't.

Then there's ileyi: energy, fire, creation. Heat and light and sound and motion. With ileyi, you can create; but by itself, what ileyi creates is undirected explosions, and it needs to be coaxed into anything more specific.

After that comes rilte: reflection, innovation, continuation. With rilte you can copy, alter, extend; as long as you have something to build from, you can keep improving on it indefinitely.

Next, soryo: cycle, balance, orbit. Tides, days, seasons; erosion, formation. With soryo you can create stable cycles that strongly resist being pulled off course. A planet that never strays from its orbit; a clock that never falls out of time. But the blessing of stability can also be a curse: enough soryo will keep a cycle stubbornly turning according to its original plan even if its creator has second thoughts and wants to tweak something.

Right in the middle, tsaer: edge, threshold, separation. With tsaer, you can join what was once divided or divide what was once joined; you can set boundaries that keep certain things from entering or leaving certain areas. You might think, looking at tsaer's neatly symmetrical applications, that its mistakes tend to be easily reversed, but this is not always true; putting something back together can be very different from never having taken it apart.

The next aineli is beshenn: stasis, structure, permanence. With beshenn, you can build things that will last, or preserve existing things against harm or decay. Of all the ainelin, this is perhaps the one whose mistakes are hardest to fix. Use too much beshenn, and whatever you have preserved will resist all attempts to change it, even for the better.

And then, with an entirely different set of problems, there's poai: life, biology, vitality. With poai, you can bring lifelike attributes to things not traditionally alive, or work with living things in a way broadly similar to a Wood mage's lifeshaping. Of course, working with life and the living is an area with a lot of potential for trouble; living things tend to have characteristics like autonomy and preferences and the capacity to suffer.

Speaking of autonomy, there's also kiina: identity, agency, personality. With kiina you can give your creations a mind of their own, fully or partially - a complete mind and personality, or just individual characteristics like the ability to learn or act independently. You can also create an inviolate identity check, or guard a personality against alteration by outside forces, or (with considerably more difficulty) make those kinds of alterations yourself. The ethical implications are obvious.

Lastly, naharr: chaos, transformation, destruction. Anything and everything. There is no theoretical limit to what can be done with naharr; but the practical limit is that the more of it you use, the more unasked-for effects it will give you alongside the thing you actually wanted. There is not much use in turning yourself into a hundred-foot-tall legendary monster if in the process you also turn your entire planet and everything on it into a handful of pebbles.

He's so fascinated by the ainelin themselves, at first he almost misses the background knowledge that sneaks in behind them. Ileyi tells him how stars are made, and that they are the same thing as the sun; rilte explains that moonlight is just sunlight reflected off the moon, which is why ileyi and rilte are culturally associated with the sun and moon respectively; soryo comes with a quick education on orbital mechanics. It's - half unsettling, half amazing.

How long has he been here? He has no way to know, but he suspects it's been hours at least. His father could start looking for him any minute. He needs to put that out of his mind; if he dwells on what's happening at home without him, he will be less effective in returning there.

Okay. The monument can consider him educated on the subject of the ainelin, at least to a basic degree.

Now what?

Now the monument would like him to explain why he wants the magic.

...he takes a deep breath and tries to put his thoughts in order.

The short answer is that he has a responsibility.

The long answer...

At home, he lives in a world-spanning empire called Eianvar. His grandfather used to rule it. When Korovai was a small child, Emperor Torvari looked at the empire's history - civil wars, wars of conquest, succession disputes, disastrous emperors - and decided that something needed to be done about it. Torvari spent a few years carefully thinking over how to restructure his government into something with more long-term stability and less reliance on the competence and moral character of a single individual, and just as he was about to put his plans in place, his son, Korovai's father, had him assassinated and took control of the empire. Korovai was six at the time.

Emperor Siurek is everything Torvari realized was wrong with the world-emperor concept. The civil war he began with Torvari's death was long and bloody, and the campaign to reconquer the outlying territories after that was shorter but bloodier, and now that he's firmly in power, all he wants to do is live a life of unparalleled luxury and torture people a lot. The only reason the empire isn't already well on its way to falling apart is Lady Reihar Nirue, who is competent, organized, and has the foresight to realize that she can't keep living a life of unparalleled luxury and torturing people a lot if the empire ceases to function.

And the only thing Korovai can do about all this is wait until some unforeseen accident claims his father's life, and hope that when that day comes he'll have some way of dealing with Nirue so he can fix the empire without her interference, and in the meantime make slow careful inroads into those parts of imperial administration which both Nirue and Siurek find boring, so he can at least make sure that some things are run by someone who is neither incompetent nor evil.

So now he is here. If he doesn't get the magic, he'll definitely die, and that will be the end of his ability to fix his world. If he does get the magic, he probably still won't be able to get home, not from a starting point of having no idea where to start - but it's possible in principle, so he will not allow himself to give up. He is not capable of giving up. He will do everything he can to get back to his world and make it a better place to the best of his ability, because as the only available Fareine who cares, he is his world's best shot at recovering from his father's disastrous reign without yet more civil wars. And while it's possible that something will happen to his father while he's away, by far the likeliest thing is that Siurek and Nirue will keep right on doing what they're doing until he comes back, however long it takes.

With that in mind, he will do his best to get the magic, and then do his best to go home, even if going home takes him a very, very, very long time. Because any less than that would be abandoning his people.

For a few seconds, there is no response.

Then the monument indicates that it finds this answer acceptable. It can resume teaching him about taieli now.

Okay.

Each atailora (taieli mage) begins with the ability to do magic at touch range. With practice, they can expand this to do magic to things farther and farther away, until the only constraint is their ability to specify a target object or location and know enough about it to successfully do magic to it.

There are six range levels, conventionally described as "touch", "arm's length", "stone's throw", "line of sight", "familiar", and "unlimited". These descriptions are approximate rather than strict, and especially as an atailora progresses between levels, they may find themselves slightly exceeding or slightly falling short of the level they are nominally at; but the levels are also discrete, so there's a noticeable jump between 'a little more than arm's length' and 'a little less than a stone's throw'. The levels are also cumulative: someone with line-of-sight range can work magic on an object they can touch but not see, and someone with familiarity range can work magic on an object they can see even if it is not personally familiar to them.

In addition to the basic ability to use the nine ainelin, each atailora also has a unique sensory/informational power that is suited to that person specifically. It is impossible to predict in advance what someone will get, but it always turns out to be something they appreciate and find useful and intuitive, even if they might have preferred something else. The power is called a fera, but a reasonable translation into Eivarne might be 'Sense'.

At which point he realizes that he speaks an entire new language.

This is bizarre.

He has learned languages before. Satni, Avashin, both dialects of Hialene, and a few from the outlying territories. It's hard work and it takes years to achieve reasonable fluency; it's been - not more than nine days, anyway, being educated by the monument interferes with his sense of the passage of time - and now he speaks Aiha, the language of the monument's creators, every bit as fluently as his native Eivarne.

It's a good thing the monument seems to be more or less benign because that's honestly kind of terrifying.

What happened to these people, anyway? Does the monument know? He can't help being curious.

The monument knows how it was built, and it remembers every evaluation it has ever made, and it remembers when its surroundings were sunlit and inhabited, and it remembers the end of both habitation and sunlight, and subsequently the end of evaluations.

As for the reasons... most things have finite lifespans. The monument very emphatically does not, but it was the work of a civilization-spanning effort that took years of coordination on an unprecedented scale. Here is a more detailed explanation of astrophysics, with reference to the law of entropy; see how all the stars eventually burn out, and the birth rate of new stars slows and slows and finally stops? It's possible to extend a star's lifespan or create alternatives with taieli, but the scope of the project required to sustain a civilization that way would have been on a level with the creation of the monument, and they weren't able to muster that kind of effort again.

...so he's on a deadline after all. A deadline of - billions of years, most likely, but he does not in fact have literally forever to get home, if his world works anything like this one, and it sounds like except for the magic it more or less does. Good to know.

Is it possible to create another monument? How difficult would it be? Can the monument teach him how?

Creating another monument: possible. Difficult. Much less difficult than creating this monument in the first place. This is the original, the template, the first and last; there have been others built in its image, but none were indestructible and so all, eventually, were destroyed. The monument system is intended to allow for arbitrary numbers of secondary monuments; it would have been highly inefficient for all the prospective atailoran on dozens of planets to have to come here and be evaluated one at a time over the course of nine days each.

The monument can teach him how to create more of it; would he like to learn?

Yes. Definitely.

(If he's going to prevent his world from dying one day he is going to need more than one atailora, and it might be prohibitively difficult to bring people back here. He has to know how to bring this magic elsewhere.)

In that case—

The monument draws him into a vision so complex that it completely displaces his ordinary senses. One atailora can build a monument, although it is difficult and time-consuming and requires care and precision. Here are the specifications. The geometry of the central platform must be exact, but it is possible to vary the other architectural details; the exterior of the monument matters not at all, he can carve it out of a mountainside surrounded by solid stone and it will still qualify; the ninefold symmetry of the structure is necessary, and here's the trick with rilte that allows you to reflect the structure to the necessary degree of precision...

And that's just the building. The magic that becomes a part of it draws on all nine ainelin. Beshenn to make it durable and guard it against tampering, ileyi to give it the ability to create things like air and the letters made of light that he saw earlier, poai so it can sustain the life of a prospective atailora while evaluating them, kiina so it can learn and understand - but not too much, because it would be a problem if a taieli monument became a person - and rilte in its memory and its adaptability, and tsaer in its discernment, and epru so it can keep its interior neat and tidy, and naharr to make its evaluations unpredictable and prevent people from trying to game the system, and soryo to bring it all together and coordinate the disparate pieces into a unified whole - and more and more layers of each aineli under that, serving more and more complex roles, coming together into a dizzyingly intricate artifact.

The monument system was created in order to unify the various methods of acquiring taieli into a single sensible reliable whole, when the ancient Aihanin discovered that inventing a new method for passing on the magic made previous methods less effective. The capacity to use taieli was once strictly heritable, and then thousands of people invented their own individual ways to give the magic to someone who wasn't born with it, and by the time they noticed something was wrong, the heritability factor no longer worked at all. So they brought everyone together and created this system: eternal, inviolate, impossible to supplant with a new method. And they made very sure that it would function for their purposes, and keep working forever, and they built in as much flexibility as they reasonably could, and they gave it criteria with which to make sure that new atailoran were not the sort of people who would wreck planets with naharr or turn cities into frozen dioramas with beshenn.

Normally the monument would not give away the secrets of its own construction to someone it was still evaluating, but it has known that it was going to give him the magic since before he asked. He is extremely qualified.

He absorbs all the information, pays careful attention - he needs to have this down, he needs to be able to do it without making any mistakes that would disqualify his attempted monuments and render them nonfunctional, this is important - and he's so caught up in memorizing the details that he almost misses that last remark completely.

It... makes sense, once he stops and thinks about it. He knows the monument's criteria now. An atailora must be the sort of person who will use magic responsibly and carefully and not maliciously. Most of the entire point of Korovai is being responsible and careful and not malicious. He's a very good fit.

Yes.

His nine days are up; the vision of how to create a monument took most of the rest of it.

He wonders what Sense he's going to get—and then he knows.

It's a Sense of self. His own mind and body, his own magic, the fading traces of the ongoing effect that the monument was using to suspend his biological needs while it evaluated him - and things he's touching, his clothes, the floor of the monument under his hand. It's strange and slightly unsettling, but he can see the use of it immediately. He is his own best tool, and with this Sense he can make sure he stays in good condition. He can improve himself - make himself immortal, probably, do away with his need for food and water and sleep, although he thinks he'll leave himself still able to eat and drink and nap in case those things turn out to be psychologically important.

It's going to be a tricky project and he has to get it done before he dies of thirst in here. He'd better get started.

His first priority is making sure he doesn't die while he's busy sorting everything else out.

He lays both hands flat on the floor of the monument and closes his eyes and explores its magic with his Sense. There's the part for sustaining his life - can he pull out a copy with rilte—? No, not quite, but he can spend a few hours studying its structure and then very carefully build himself a temporary version. Okay, there's his survival taken care of for the next few months at least. Now what?

Now he designs himself the perfect kind of immortality, that's what. The ability to die is a luxury he can no longer afford.

He needs to be not only immortal but also invincible, or at least proof against anything Reihar Nirue might try to do to him. But he also needs to avoid closing off potential avenues for improvement. He should be able to modify himself, but he should be the only thing that can - except that if he takes that principle too literally, he'll end up with all his external senses cut off because outside information would cause changes in his mind, or something similarly stupid. Careful, careful, careful.

A few hours' practice with rilte and ileyi gets him to the point where he can reliably supply himself with pen and paper. He starts making notes. The monument didn't do it, but someone else could - he needs to be immune to magical mind control, and he should probably also make his mind impenetrable to outside inspection - but for cases like communicating with the monument, he should probably be able to share his thoughts deliberately...

And on and on, through hundreds of different ideas for what should and should not be allowed to happen to him. Not only should he not be able to die, he should also not be able to become trapped. That's a hard problem, though, and probably relates to interworld transportation; he'll save it for after he has his basic immortality worked out. He should be able to eat and drink and sleep and breathe and so on, but not require any of those things in order to remain comfortable and functional. He should not be susceptible to aging, or to illness or injury or miscellaneous deterioration.

It may be tempting to explore potential improvements - make himself think faster, that sort of thing - but he should focus on the necessities of basic immortality first, and experiment with more daring self-modifications afterward, slowly. He has time; he does not have a spare Korovai if something happens to the first one.

...he could create a spare Korovai.

But that would be a significant undertaking, and could itself potentially go wrong in damaging ways, and he still needs to get his basic immortality out of the way before he starts in on other improvements.

It comes as a considerable surprise to him when he looks up from his notes and realizes that he is hungry. He's been distantly aware of the passage of time, but clearly not paying it enough attention if three months could go by while he was distracted.

Does he have everything he needs?

Not quite. He spends a few minutes reapplying the temporary fix, and then, no longer distracted by hunger, dives back into his notes. Three months later when the ward wears off again, he has his basic immortality designed and ready to implement.

Kiina to strongly reinforce his tendency to be himself. Beshenn and soryo for endurance and stability. Ileyi for inexhaustible energy. Poai to handle the biological side. Rilte for small improvements to how it all works. Kiina and beshenn again, and a touch of tsaer, to emphatically ensure that he is the only person who will ever be able to alter any of this.

There. Done.

Now to work on getting home.

Getting home... is going to be a problem.

The best idea he comes up with, after a week of writing on yet more paper, is to create any kind of transportation device at all and then keep iterating on it with rilte until he has something that works. He's not going to use naharr for this. Caution over speed, always. But if he does it that way, it seems unlikely that he will be able to aim. In which case he could be wandering for a while. In which case he had better find a way to consolidate all these notes into a form he can carry around conveniently.

Giving himself a perfect memory is slightly tempting, but on the principle of conservatism in self-modification, he instead gives himself a less deeply integrated ability to take, store, organize, and review private mental notes in arbitrary quantities. And then he rereads all his paper notes and puts them away in mental storage and clears away the physical notes with epru.

Magical transportation of any kind... ileyi can affect motion, let's start there...

Time goes on without him. It doesn't matter. The only thing he can do is keep working. He carefully crafts a flying boat, and then refines it into a teleporting boat, and then refines it further and splits off several variants and works on all of them until he has something that he's pretty sure can travel between worlds.

There's only one feasible way to test that, of course.

He tests easier things first. Reviews his immortality, implements a few small improvements, gets in his teleporting boat and voyages across this empty universe. There isn't even another planet available, but he can go assorted distances away from the monument and then return. It works perfectly every time insofar as he can tell. He tests its refusal to intersect with solid objects: it does indeed very much refuse to do that.

He takes the time to give himself a streamlined version of the monument's conceptual communication ability, because unless he gets home on the first try he's not going to speak the local language. He double-checks that he is definitely proof against anything Nirue could feasibly do to him, even if she had a god in her pocket.

And then he leaves.