"Time runs approximately one thousand times faster here than on Earth," she says. "That's one of the two major omissions from that account; I didn't find it out until later. The other, I was still verifying. There is... a sense in which people who die in the Kingdoms are not entirely gone. It's subtle and hard to track, but I'm very confident in my conclusions at this point. Sometimes they reincarnate without memory of their previous life, sometimes they just linger as faint impressions with no continued awareness, but anyone who has ever died in this world is still here... unless they went to the void, either through one of those holes or past the edge of the world. It's the same result either way: it destroys them completely. Once I was sure of that I became much more conservative in my experiments with deescalation."

"I'm not sure reincarnating without memory - counts?"

"It is not impossible that one day those memories could be restored somehow. I am much less optimistic about getting anyone back from the void."

"Okay."

"I want to find a way to use your outworlder's power to end the world's dependence on the war, so that I can deescalate the rest of the way without the world tearing itself apart and throwing all its inhabitants into the void. I have some thoughts for what to do after that, but the crucial thing is not having to be at carefully managed war with myself any longer."

"Mm-hm. Uh, if I have to work in the standard fairytale framework options include 'third party enemy' or 'Romeo and Juliet plot'... respectively costly and awkward to implement..."

—that startles a laugh out of her.

"Yes, rather. I don't think we'll have to go that far. I expect you'll need a lot of sustained effort and a high expectation of success, but the exact framework depends on what works best for you. If I were in your position, the approach that would come most naturally to me would be going out into the world and convincing as many people as I could that the war was pointless and should stop, with the implicit assumption that reality itself was listening. Some people might have an easier time of it if I built a physical representation of the structure and they worked on altering it until reality shifted to match. As long as it's something that can sustain a significant time investment, that you can commit to doing for a while, and that feels like it should work..."

"I mean, mostly what this feels like is that it should not have been like this in the first place, which is different."

"True enough. But I don't see an immediately obvious way to turn that into a means of changing things. Unless, I suppose, you want to go the very direct route and spend a lot of time talking or thinking about your dissatisfaction with the way the King and Queen made the world."

"I could do that. Is talking to creatures an important ingredient or could I just write a design document and gesture at it emphatically."

"If design documents are what feels effective to you, then design documents will work best. And I'll be able to tell how effective your approach is; I've had a very long time to study my sense of reality and I'm very familiar with it by now. How easily are you adapting to the nocturnal schedule? Would it be easier to work in the Kingdom of Day? It wouldn't be very difficult to send you across the border."

"It's not terrible, I'm not sure it's worth the travel even though the place is very picturesque. I think the phrase I used was 'the grass has been to a hairstylist'."

...she laughs again. "What an evocative description."

"You're not personally combing all the grass, right?"

"No. To some extent, the place does that by itself; I influence it but more in the way of an art director than a hairdresser."

"Is it like that in Day too?"

"Yes, but with a different underlying aesthetic."

"I'm sort of curious to see it but that's probably not enough to justify a trip either."

"I'm sure you'll have the time afterward."

Nod.

"The design document idea raises some interesting possibilities," she adds, thoughtfully. "For example, if I were designing a world under these circumstances, I would give it expanding borders, although then we would need to figure out a patch for the lighting, since the current scheme doesn't scale indefinitely. I think it should be possible to add in a few tweaks along those lines without a significant extra cost in your time and attention. It might even make the original task easier, by giving you more to focus on. How thorough an explanation of the cosmology have you heard; should I fill in the details you're missing?"

"Not thorough at all, I knew it would have to be screwy if the creatures were right about the planet being flat but I don't know that much astronomy from Earth to compare."

"The world is a flat circle of land and ocean under a hemisphere of air, surrounded on all sides by void. The moon rises in the northwest and sets in the northeast, travelling eastward over the Kingdom of Night; the sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest, travelling westward over the Kingdom of Day. A naive rescaling of that would eventually lead to too much air between the lights in the sky and the middle of the circle, making everything uncomfortably dim."

"The moon gives off its own light? And do the sun and moon just go around and travel through void? The void is voidier than vacuum, right?"

"The void is very much voidier than vacuum. I have reason to believe that it's what people travel through to get between here and Earth, except that transit between here and Earth is safe in a way that contact with the void normally isn't. The sun and moon don't travel through it; they're... more like a projection on the outer edge of the sky than like objects moving through it. And yes, the moon gives off its own light, although it still has phases."