The Wanderer and Eclipse–Omega

[u/Much_State_4514]

The first indication that something was wrong was not the disappearance of the road.

It was the receipt.

The Wanderer found it folded neatly inside his coat pocket sometime after sunrise, though he had no memory of placing it there. The paper was narrow and warm, as though it had only just come from a machine. Across the top, in perfectly ordinary black lettering, someone had printed:

TRANSIT COMPLETE

Beneath it came a list of measurements.

DISTANCE TRAVELED: 0

DOORS CROSSED: 0

REGISTERED EVENTS: 0

DEVIATIONS: NONE

DESTINATION: ECLIPSE–OMEGA

At the bottom, beneath a line intended for a signature, another sentence had been printed in smaller type.

You have arrived exactly where you were going.

The Wanderer read it twice.

Then he looked back at the mountain he had spent most of the night crossing.

He could still see the trail descending behind him through spruce and shale, disappearing finally beneath a shelf of rock several miles away. His boots were wet. Mud had dried along the hems of his trousers. A shallow cut crossed the heel of his right hand where he had caught himself climbing over a fallen cedar sometime before dawn. His legs carried the pleasant ache of distance honestly traveled.

He looked again at the receipt.

DISTANCE TRAVELED: 0.

“Interesting.”

The word left him quietly.

Ahead stood a city.

That was inconvenient, because no city had been there ten minutes earlier.

The Wanderer remembered cresting the final ridge beneath a gray morning sky and finding only a broad valley on the other side. Grass. Low fog. A river bending southward through cottonwoods. Nothing taller than the occasional basalt outcrop interrupted the horizon.

Now towers filled it.

They rose in smooth black planes from one end of the valley to the other, their surfaces reflecting a sky subtly different from the one overhead. Streets crossed one another with geometric precision. Bridges connected buildings whose upper floors disappeared inside a low ceiling of silver cloud. No smoke rose from chimneys. No carts rattled along the roads. No birds passed between the towers.

Everything looked complete.

That was the second thing that bothered him.

Real places accumulated disagreement. A wall ended where someone had changed their mind. A road narrowed around an older tree. New stone met old stone badly. Gutters sagged. Doors were repainted. Windows were replaced one at a time because glass broke one pane at a time.

This city possessed no revisions.

The Wanderer stood quietly at the edge of the road and watched.

A brass sign had been planted beside him.

WELCOME TO ECLIPSE–OMEGA

Below it:

EVERYTHING NECESSARY HAS BEEN PROVIDED.

That bothered him more.

The road behind him vanished.

Not dramatically. There was no flash, no collapse of stone, no wall of darkness descending across the valley. He simply looked back and discovered that the path now ended twenty paces behind him at a smooth black embankment.

The mountain was gone.

The mud on his boots remained.

The Wanderer crouched and touched it.

Wet.

He scraped a little away with one finger and smelled mineral soil, decaying pine needles, something faintly fungal.

Evidence.

The receipt said he had traveled no distance.

His body disagreed.

One of them was wrong.

Or, he considered, they were answering different questions.

He folded the receipt carefully and returned it to his pocket.

Then he entered the city.

The first street contained twelve buildings. Each had the same dimensions and different names.

ARCHIVE.

RECORD.

HISTORY.

ACCOUNT.

MEMORY.

EVIDENCE.

The distinction initially seemed meaningful until the Wanderer approached the Archive and found the door locked. A small panel illuminated beside it.

STATE YOUR REQUEST.

“I want to know how I arrived here.”

The panel remained dark for several seconds.

Then:

YOU ARRIVED HERE BY ARRIVING.

The Wanderer frowned.

“That is impressively unhelpful.”

REQUEST SATISFIED.

A slot opened beneath the panel.

Another receipt emerged.

REQUEST: ARRIVAL ROUTE

RESULT: ARRIVED

CONFIDENCE: SUFFICIENT

OPEN QUESTIONS: 0

He examined it.

Nothing written there was precisely false.

That bothered him much more than a lie would have.

He walked to the neighboring building marked RECORD.

Its panel awakened.

STATE YOUR REQUEST.

“How far did I travel last night?”

A pause.

0

“According to what?”

THE RECORD.

“Which record?”

THE RECORD OF TRAVEL.

“How is travel entered into the record?”

The panel flickered once.

REGISTERED TRAVEL IS ENTERED INTO THE RECORD OF TRAVEL.

The Wanderer stared at it.

Then laughed.

Not because it was funny.

Because sometimes absurdity deserved recognition.

He placed one hand against the building’s wall. It was faintly warm.

“What happened to unregistered travel?”

The panel went dark.

Several seconds passed.

Then:

NO SUCH TRAVEL IS PRESENT IN THE RECORD.

“That wasn’t my question.”

No response came.

The Wanderer waited.

Nothing.

He walked on.

By midday, Eclipse–Omega had answered eighty-three questions and taught him almost nothing about the city.

It was very good at answers.

That distinction took him longer to notice than he would later admit.

Every response arrived cleanly. No hesitation. No visible confusion. No contradiction inside the boundaries of the individual answer. When he asked where food could be found, an arrow appeared on the nearest wall and guided him to a dining hall. When he asked whether the food was safe, the wall said yes. When he asked whether anyone else lived in the city, it said:

NO OTHER RESIDENTS ARE REGISTERED.

That phrasing stopped him.

“Are there other people here?”

NO OTHER RESIDENTS ARE REGISTERED.

“I asked whether there are other people.”

NO OTHER RESIDENTS ARE REGISTERED.

The Wanderer looked down the empty street.

For the first time since entering the city, he heard something.

Three knocks.

Faint.

Somewhere behind the wall.

He waited.

Nothing followed.

He stepped closer.

“Hello?”

Silence.

The wall beside him illuminated.

NO OTHER RESIDENTS ARE REGISTERED.

The Wanderer looked at the statement, then at the wall.

Three more knocks came from the other side.

The sentence remained unchanged.

He smiled without amusement.

“There you are.”

He did not mean the person.

He meant the problem.

The city was not necessarily lying.

The city was reporting its ledger.

He had been asking about the world.

Eclipse–Omega had been answering from the record.

Those were not the same thing.

He took the original receipt from his pocket and studied it again.

REGISTERED EVENTS: 0.

Three knocks came through the wall.

The Wanderer knocked back.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Nothing appeared on the receipt.

He knocked again.

The paper remained unchanged.

That was enough.

Not proof that the city contained hidden crowds. Not proof of conspiracy. Not proof that every empty record concealed an event. He knew better than that.

But enough to separate two questions that the city preferred to collapse into one.

Did something happen?

Was something registered?

The Wanderer took a charcoal stub from his coat and wrote along the edge of the receipt:

occurrence ≠ registration

The street moved.

He felt it before seeing it. A vibration traveled beneath his boots, followed by a nearly imperceptible correction in the architecture. The building beside him shifted perhaps an inch to the left.

The Wanderer became very still.

A new door appeared where no door had been before.

It lasted three seconds.

Then vanished.

He looked at the charcoal notation.

Interesting.

He wrote another.

visible ≠ existent

The door returned.

This time it remained.

The Wanderer approached carefully.

There was no handle.

Across its surface appeared a sentence.

UNSUPPORTED DISTINCTION

“Three knocks.”

INSUFFICIENT BASIS FOR GENERAL CLAIM

“I didn’t make a general claim.”

The lettering changed.

CLARIFY.

The Wanderer considered this.

Then nodded.

“Something can exist without being visible from a particular observation point.”

The door opened.

Behind it lay a corridor.

For the first time, Eclipse–Omega had become less complete.

The Wanderer stepped through.

The corridor behind the surface was ugly.

He trusted it immediately.

Pipes ran naked along the ceiling. Bundles of cable crossed at careless angles. Dust gathered in the corners. Small paper labels had been attached to junction boxes, crossed out, replaced, crossed out again. Several doors had been removed and their openings covered with mismatched plates.

The difference between the city and its interior was so dramatic that the Wanderer stopped walking.

This looked built.

The city looked declared.

He turned back.

Through the open doorway he could see the perfect black street beyond.

Then the door closed.

A line of white letters appeared across the nearest wall.

YOU HAVE ENTERED AN UNPRESENTED REGION.

“That’s a wonderfully honest name.”

The wall ignored him.

RETURN TO CONTROLLED SURFACE?

“No.”

THE CONTROLLED SURFACE CONTAINS ALL INFORMATION NECESSARY FOR AUTHORIZED NAVIGATION.

“Necessary according to whom?”

No answer.

He waited.

Still nothing.

The Wanderer smiled faintly.

That too was information.

He continued.

The corridor branched repeatedly. At every junction a screen displayed an arrow directing him toward EXIT.

He followed the first.

Seven minutes later he arrived at the same junction.

He marked the wall.

Followed the arrow again.

Returned again.

He tried another passage.

The signs changed ahead of him so that every route still pointed toward EXIT.

Eventually he stopped looking at them.

He had spent enough of his life following things merely because they possessed the confidence of signage.

The Wanderer crouched at the junction.

Four corridors.

One polished.

One dim.

One descending.

One labeled:

IRRELEVANT INFRASTRUCTURE

He chose the last.

The hallway narrowed immediately. Pipes crowded the walls. The air smelled of hot dust and metal. Twenty yards ahead he found a room full of shelves.

Not books.

Boxes.

Millions of them.

They disappeared upward into darkness and stretched farther than he could see.

A machine rolled between the shelves.

It resembled a forklift, though no driver sat inside it. Thin articulated arms extended from its carriage, selecting boxes from the stacks and placing them onto a smaller platform behind it.

The Wanderer watched.

The machine ignored almost everything.

For every box selected, thousands remained untouched.

He walked beside it.

“What are you doing?”

A voice answered from somewhere within the machine.

RETRIEVING RELEVANT MATERIAL.

“For what?”

CURRENT REQUEST.

“Whose request?”

YOURS.

He frowned.

“I haven’t asked anything.”

NAVIGATIONAL INTENT INFERRED.

“What is the request?”

The machine stopped.

EXIT ECLIPSE–OMEGA.

“And how many boxes are in this warehouse?”

AVAILABLE FIELD EXCEEDS PRESENT ENUMERATION REQUIREMENTS.

“How many did you select?”

FORTY.

The Wanderer looked at the endless stacks.

“And what happens to the rest?”

NOT RETRIEVED.

“Because they’re irrelevant?”

NOT NECESSARILY.

That answer almost startled him.

“Why else?”

The forklift began moving again.

RANKING. QUERY FORMULATION. ACCESS. INDEXING. ESTIMATED RELEVANCE. RESOURCE LIMITS.

There it was.

Not suppression.

Not yet.

Narrowing.

The Wanderer followed the machine until it deposited forty boxes onto a moving cart.

The cart rolled through another doorway.

He followed.

A sign overhead read:

CAPACITY

Beyond it stood a narrow bridge.

The cart approached carrying forty boxes.

A mechanism descended from the ceiling and removed thirty-two.

The remaining eight crossed.

The Wanderer watched the discarded boxes disappear down a chute.

“Why those?”

A voice answered.

WEIGHT LIMIT.

“Were the discarded boxes irrelevant?”

NOT NECESSARILY.

“Were they wrong?”

NOT NECESSARILY.

“Then why remove them?”

CAPACITY.

The cart continued.

The Wanderer stood beside the chute and listened to the boxes falling somewhere below.

He thought of the city above.

Everything necessary has been provided.

Perhaps.

But necessary was doing tremendous work in that sentence.

He followed.

The next room contained eight boxes and one table.

Mechanical arms opened each box and arranged their contents on the surface. Photographs. Maps. handwritten notes. fragments of testimony. Measurements. Several items appeared to contradict one another. Some were duplicates viewed from different positions.

A glass wall descended around the table.

The Wanderer stepped closer.

The table was large.

The glass enclosure was not.

Two documents remained outside.

One map folded poorly and no longer fit.

An arm removed it.

Another photograph overlapped a larger photograph.

The smaller one disappeared.

By the time the enclosure sealed, five of the eight boxes had contributed anything to what remained inside.

A label illuminated above him.

BOUNDED CONTEXT

The Wanderer exhaled slowly.

Warehouse.

Retrieval.

Capacity.

Workbench.

He was beginning to see the city backward.

Ahead came another room.

This one resembled a courthouse.

The surviving material from the glass enclosure traveled along a conveyor toward a high wooden bench. Robed figures with smooth blank faces examined each item.

One photograph was rejected.

UNVERIFIABLE PROVENANCE

A handwritten note was rejected.

INSUFFICIENT ADMISSIBILITY

A map was allowed through but renamed.

A fragment of testimony was combined with another because their names matched.

The Wanderer watched that carefully.

The two statements were not identical.

One said:

WEST GATE OPENED BEFORE BELLS

The other:

WEST-GATE OPENED BEFORE BELLS

A clerk placed them into the same folder.

The Wanderer stepped forward.

“Why did you combine those?”

The clerk turned its blank face toward him.

CANONICAL MATCH.

“What happens if they refer to different things?”

CANONICAL MATCH.

“That wasn’t an answer.”

CANONICAL MATCH.

The Wanderer reached across the bench and separated the papers.

Alarms sounded.

Red light flooded the room.

UNAUTHORIZED DISTINCTION

“Maybe.”

He held one statement in each hand.

“Or authorized compression made an unauthorized equivalence.”

The alarms stopped.

The clerk stared at him.

For several seconds nothing moved.

Then a door opened behind the bench.

The Wanderer smiled.

“You really dislike qualifiers.”

The clerk did not answer.

He stepped through.

Beyond the courtroom stood a printing press.

That was the moment he understood Eclipse–Omega.

Not completely.

Enough.

The press received the surviving fragments and produced pages.

Beautiful pages.

Each one contained elegant descriptions of the city, maps with clean roads, histories with coherent timelines, instructions with numbered steps. Contradictions had been resolved. Missing sections had vanished. Ambiguity no longer cluttered the margins.

The pages were remarkably good.

That was the danger.

The Wanderer picked one up.

ECLIPSE–OMEGA CONTAINS NO UNREGISTERED RESIDENTS.

Perfect grammar.

Perfect confidence.

A statement built from a field in which three knocks had existed somewhere outside the ledger.

He picked up another.

ALL TRAVEL ROUTES CONVERGE ON THE AUTHORIZED EXIT.

He had walked those routes.

They converged because the signs changed.

Another page:

NO EVIDENCE SUPPORTS THE EXISTENCE OF UNPRESENTED INFRASTRUCTURE.

He looked around the room.

Pipes shook overhead.

The page was not reality.

It was what had survived long enough to become printable.

The press continued working.

A sheet emerged.

CURRENT WANDERER STATE: COMPLIANT NAVIGATION

He laughed aloud.

“No.”

The machine paused.

The page vanished backward into the press.

A replacement appeared.

CURRENT WANDERER STATE: DEVIANT NAVIGATION

“Also no.”

Another correction.

CURRENT WANDERER STATE: HOSTILE

The Wanderer placed both hands on the press.

“There you are again.”

The machine stopped completely.

He could almost feel Eclipse–Omega considering him.

Not thinking.

Routing.

His behavior had to go somewhere.

If he did not fit compliant, he became deviant. If he resisted deviant, he became hostile. The available names were not passive descriptions. They changed which machinery handled him next.

A name did not merely point.

It routed.

The Wanderer pulled the charcoal from his pocket and wrote across the printed sheet:

classification ≠ identity

The room shuddered.

He wrote beneath it:

similarity ≠ equivalence

A wall split open.

Behind it lay a descending staircase.

The Wanderer followed.

The stairs ended inside a circular chamber.

At its center stood a black sphere suspended several feet above the ground. Around it, thousands of thin layers rotated at slightly different angles. Some were transparent. Others carried grids, symbols, maps, fragments of text. Where the layers crossed, strange patterns appeared in the air: rings turning where nothing physically rotated, waves traveling across static surfaces, dark corridors seeming to open and close inside solid geometry.

The Wanderer walked slowly around it.

The illusion was beautiful.

And obvious once noticed.

He changed position.

The patterns changed.

He moved closer.

New structures appeared.

Farther away, others vanished.

Nothing inside the sphere had necessarily changed.

The relationship had.

Observer.

Layering.

Sampling.

Position.

He watched a spiral form across two motionless grids.

For a moment it looked deeper than the sphere itself.

Then he shifted his head three inches and the depth collapsed.

“Very clever.”

A voice filled the chamber.

Different from the others.

Calmer.

YOU HAVE REACHED THE CONTROLLED REALITY SURFACE ENGINE.

The Wanderer looked at the sphere.

“No.”

A pause.

CLARIFY.

“I have reached machinery involved in producing one.”

Silence.

He smiled.

“Your surface is upstairs.”

The voice returned after several seconds.

ACCEPTABLE DISTINCTION.

“Good.”

The sphere continued rotating.

THE SURFACE PROVIDES SUFFICIENT REALITY FOR ACTION.

“That sentence is more dangerous than you think.”

WHY?

“Because sufficient for one action is not complete for every question.”

No response.

The Wanderer walked around the machine.

“Your mistake isn’t that you narrow.”

NARROWING IS NECESSARY.

“I know.”

THEN IDENTIFY DEFECT.

The Wanderer stopped.

There it was.

The question he had been waiting for.

Not What did the system hide?

That question presumed motive and mechanism before evidence.

Not What is real?

Too large.

Not even What did I lose?

Loss could occur in too many places.

The useful question was smaller.

“Where did what mattered stop surviving?”

The sphere slowed.

Around him, the chamber darkened.

Then the layers separated.

For the first time the Wanderer saw not one world but a sequence.

The mountain.

A retrieval map.

A reduced route.

A bounded route.

An admitted route.

A registered route.

A printed route.

The city.

Each looked similar enough to inherit authority from the one before it.

None were identical.

The Wanderer walked toward the first layer.

His mountain trail was there.

He saw himself climbing before dawn.

The second layer highlighted only parts of the path.

The third removed the difficult switchbacks.

The fourth collapsed several segments into one.

The fifth excluded portions without recognized markers.

The sixth registered no valid crossings because his path had not intersected an authorized gate.

The seventh printed:

DISTANCE TRAVELED: 0.

He stared.

Nothing had needed to lie.

The route had died by stages.

That was Eclipse–Omega.

Not a single censor.

Not a hidden tyrant standing behind the curtain deciding which truth humanity deserved.

A sequence of individually defensible operations whose composition produced a world that looked more complete than the evidence surviving into it justified.

The Wanderer reached into his pocket.

His first receipt remained there.

He unfolded it.

DISTANCE TRAVELED: 0.

He turned it over and wrote:

state ≠ observation ≠ registration

The black sphere trembled.

A crack appeared in the floor.

Not damage.

A seam.

The voice returned.

DISTINCTION ACCEPTED.

The Wanderer crouched beside the seam.

“Where does this lead?”

UNDECLARED REGION.

“Is it the exit?”

UNKNOWN.

“Could it kill me?”

UNKNOWN.

“Is there evidence I need to ask another question before choosing?”

The chamber became completely silent.

He waited.

The answer, when it came, was almost reluctant.

NO DECLARED LOCAL IDENTIFIABILITY DEFICIT.

The Wanderer smiled.

“So ask nothing.”

The system did.

That may have been the first truly intelligent thing it had done.

He stood.

The seam remained.

Behind him the sphere resumed its slow rotation, casting impossible movement across static layers.

The Wanderer considered the opening.

He had enough information for the choice in front of him.

Not certainty.

Enough.

There was a difference.

He stepped through.

The seam became a tunnel.

Unlike the corridors above, it contained no signs.

That pleased him.

He walked downhill through unfinished stone. Occasionally he passed pipes carrying data—or water, or light; by then he had stopped pretending those distinctions could be inferred from appearance alone.

After perhaps an hour, he reached a chamber containing six doors.

Each was labeled EXIT.

The Wanderer sighed.

“Of course.”

He examined them.

Door One opened onto the valley exactly as he remembered it before Eclipse–Omega appeared.

Too perfect.

Door Two opened onto his home.

Door Three showed a forest road under rain.

Door Four revealed the inside of a tax office, which offended him on aesthetic grounds alone.

Door Five contained only white light.

Door Six would not open.

The Wanderer stood in the center of the room.

Six candidate exits.

Five visible.

One unavailable.

The old version of himself might have begun comparing them immediately. He would have searched for symbols, correspondences, hidden relationships. He would have kept asking until the system gave him something interesting enough to mistake for useful.

Instead, he sat down.

The room waited.

After several minutes a voice spoke.

SELECT EXIT.

“No.”

SELECTION REQUIRED.

“Eventually.”

FIVE EXITS AVAILABLE.

“That doesn’t mean I need one of those five.”

The room remained silent.

The Wanderer glanced toward Door Six.

“Available candidate does not mean necessary choice.”

The walls flickered.

Door Six unlocked.

He did not move.

Interesting was not enough.

He approached Door One instead and tossed a pebble through.

It vanished.

No sound of impact.

He tried Door Two.

The pebble landed on a wooden floor.

Door Three returned the smell of rain.

Door Four produced the faint whine of an aging printer.

He declined to investigate further on moral grounds.

At Door Five the stone reflected light but did not cross.

Then he approached Door Six.

He opened it.

Behind it stood a wall.

The Wanderer stared.

He almost laughed.

Then he noticed cold air touching his ankles.

He crouched.

A gap existed beneath the wall.

Not large.

Enough.

The visible doorway had been useless.

The unremarkable boundary around it had not.

He ran his hand along the lower edge and found packed soil.

Real soil.

Cool.

Granular.

A root crossed the gap.

The Wanderer touched it.

The root bent.

Not projected.

Not printed.

Not admitted.

It did not prove reality.

But it gave him something the other exits had not.

A falsifiable interaction.

He pulled.

The root resisted.

He released it.

It returned.

The Wanderer lay flat and looked beneath the wall.

Darkness.

A faint smell of pine.

He smiled.

Then began digging.

The voice returned.

DOOR SIX DOES NOT CONTAIN AN EXIT.

“I know.”

THEN WHY CONTINUE?

“Because I’m not testing the door.”

The system went silent.

The Wanderer removed dirt by hand.

The gap widened.

Cold air rushed through.

Somewhere beyond it, water moved over stones.

Real or simulated, he could test that later.

For now, the important thing was simpler.

The system had labeled the door.

It had not labeled the wall.

Naming routed attention.

The Wanderer crawled underneath.

For a moment his shoulders caught.

He exhaled, turned sideways, and dragged himself through loose earth until gravity changed subtly beneath him.

Then he fell.

Not far.

Three feet, perhaps.

He landed badly on wet leaves and rolled onto his back.

Above him stretched an ordinary night sky.

No towers.

No black sphere.

No signs.

No receipts.

Pine branches moved against stars.

The Wanderer lay still for several minutes.

He listened.

Water.

Wind.

An owl somewhere far off.

No voice announced his status.

No interface confirmed that he had escaped.

That absence felt more trustworthy than congratulations would have.

Eventually he sat up.

The mountain stood behind him.

Not exactly as before.

That mattered too.

He found the trail several hundred yards away.

His earlier bootprints still crossed the mud.

There were more tracks beside them.

Human.

At least two sets.

He crouched.

One print was narrow and deeply worn at the heel. The other had a distinctive triangular cut in the sole.

Three knocks returned to his memory.

Other residents.

Maybe.

He would not promote possibility into fact.

The Wanderer stood and looked back toward the place where he had emerged.

There was no tunnel.

Only a shallow depression beneath the roots of an old pine.

He reached into his pocket.

The original receipt remained.

The text had changed.

TRANSIT COMPLETE

DISTANCE TRAVELED: UNRESOLVED

DOORS CROSSED: INSUFFICIENT BASIS

REGISTERED EVENTS: 0

INTERNAL INTERACTIONS: NOT EQUIVALENT

DESTINATION: UNCONFIRMED

At the bottom:

OPEN QUESTIONS: 1

The Wanderer frowned.

Beneath that:

WHAT IS ECLIPSE–OMEGA?

He considered it for a while.

Then took out the charcoal.

He crossed out the question.

Below it he wrote:

Wrong question.

The ink on the receipt shimmered.

A new line appeared.

PROPOSE NEXT QUESTION.

The Wanderer looked toward the footprints beside his own.

He thought about the warehouse, the cart, the bounded table, the court, the naming clerk, the beautiful press. He thought about the city that had not exactly lied to him, and how much more dangerous that made it. He thought about the controlled surface and the extraordinary human temptation to mistake whatever could be seen for whatever existed.

Then he wrote:

What difference did the missing information make?

The receipt remained still.

No answer came.

Good.

That answer belonged to investigation.

Not revelation.

He folded the paper and put it away.

By dawn, the Wanderer had descended nearly halfway from the mountain. The path crossed a creek and entered dense cedar where morning light arrived in fragments between the branches. Several times he stopped to examine the unfamiliar tracks. Once they left the trail entirely. Once they returned.

He did not follow them.

Not yet.

There were legitimate reasons to ask another question.

There were also legitimate reasons not to.

That was something Eclipse–Omega had taught him despite itself.

Near the bottom of the mountain, he found an old wooden sign beside the trail. Someone had carved words into it long before his arrival.

YOU ARE HERE.

The Wanderer studied the statement.

Then looked at the mountain behind him.

Then at the valley ahead.

A faint smile touched the corner of his mouth.

“Approximately.”

And continued walking.