Return and Enter

From the top of the tower, the miniature city stretched out before them—an intricate lattice of memory palaces, each humming with quiet significance.

Daemon scanned the architecture, eyes drifting from tower to rooftop. Symbols accompanied some rooftops, though not all—strange icons, surreal in shape and hue. A stack of bent silver spoons. A yolk in a broken shell. A lime wedge stuck in a bottle. A tiny fish, glimmering with an electric edge. Each one made Daemon pause.

Some seemed whimsical. Others felt like riddles. The fish, in particular, puzzled him—it swam in place, a single glinting loop of motion, unmistakably green and lit like a filament. He tried to place it.

He began to wonder if the symbols were just markers. Representations. Maybe even metaphors. He scanned another rooftop and saw what looked like an orange being cut with a butterknife. They were a dull orange.

His eyebrows lifted. The symbols weren’t just random.

They were icons of color—Dull Orange, Silver, Egg Yolk Yellow, Lime Green... and Neon Green. At last, he recognized the fish: a Neon.

Odd, he thought. But maybe that was the point. Odd things stick.

"Exactly," the Mage murmured beside him, as if reading his thoughts.

Daemon leaned forward. He could see everything. Not just rooftops, but tiles. Not just tiles, but the texture of the grout between them. The detail deepened as he looked: rodents beneath the floorboards, fleas on their backs, and in one case—a cell dividing inside a flea’s stomach.

The Mage raised a hand and pointed to a structure near the center. A cluster of spires lit up faintly in response, glowing like fireflies caught in formation. The entire city dimmed around it.

"Each neighborhood has a name," the Mage said. "This one is called Lysia. Others include The Stacks, Hollow Vault, and The Orchard."

He gestured again, and a few distant corners shimmered faintly, as if acknowledging their titles. One of them—The Orchard—glowed the same dull orange he’d seen before, the same dull hue marked by the butterknife. His eyes flicked from symbol to district and back again. It dawned on him: the colors and their symbols were part of an interface. It was memetic dream software.

"You’ll remember them if the name suits the memory," he added. "Or if the memory suits the name. Some of the buildings have their own names as well."

He pointed toward a large structure with a rounded top near the edge of a campus-like cluster. The entire district brightened faintly, but the building he’d indicated came alive—its shell glowing electric indigo, sparkling with purple fairy dust and laced with drifting threads of energy.

“The Lecture Hall. You’ve been there before. Many times. Though you rarely seem to remember.”

He extended his other hand and made a gesture—subtle, precise. The air shimmered in response. A golden eight-pointed star appeared above a nearby archway, pulsing once before unfolding into a swirling gateway.

The Mage glanced at him and beckoned toward the portal.

"Time to cross the threshold."

Daemon stepped forward. The floor beneath him felt less like stone and more like flattened light shaped into geometry. The air bent around his ankles. Symbols shifted faintly beneath his feet as he moved.

The city didn’t vanish when he passed through. The only change was that he stepped into it—into the very structure he had just observed from above. It felt like entering a dream nested inside another. The Mage looked down, watching as Daemon reappeared within the architecture—now embedded in the scene itself.