49. Interlude: The Third Method

Calistarius knew clearly that he was unconscious. To his mind, the fact was far too obvious.

Yet this gave rise to a paradox—if a person was unconscious, how could he possess the clarity of mind to perceive it?

Calistarius raised his head and gazed silently at the fiery clouds of Baal I.

Beneath the crimson sky stood colossal rocks of strange shapes, grim and majestic, clad in burning armor by the colors of the sinking sun. Towering spires and split canyons coexisted among them.

Beyond them lay an endless sea of sand. There was no sign of human life, not even the desert plants and animals that ought to have existed, as though it were a dead world.

Calistarius looked calmly upon it all, with no nostalgia in his eyes—he missed his home, but these sights? No. They were not part of it.

As a child, these things had once driven him to the brink of madness.

Every deep night, when the whimpering wind swept across the tent and made it tremble like something dying, he would curl up atop a piece of cloth—the thing they called a bed—and imagine the world beyond the tent.

Then, one night, he could no longer endure it. He crept out of the tent, only to be made to tremble all over by a strange shape shrouded in darkness, fleeing back inside in panic.

Looking back now, he truly had seen something then. A figure, yes, that was right—a tall shadow.

He—or it—stood in the darkness, with limbs like a human's, yet far taller than any ordinary man. Its eyes glimmered in the dark as it mercilessly scrutinized the child who had left the tent alone.

For that child, such a small act of sneaking about had been enough to make him tremble in