Orb-light poured out of one door-less, arched portal. "Hmm?" came his voice, noticing the light--which led past it, clearly not into the chamber. As I passed, I glanced in and locked eyes with Strength, shirtless and doing curls with a clunky looking dumbell. Or maybe barbell. I got the two mixed up, as the gym was not a place I was comfortable in.

  "You," he said. There was mild surprise, but not animosity, in his voice. "What you do here?"

  He sat on a wooden bench, a light sheen of sweat over his arms and forehead. He paused, holding the dumbell mid-air, an unguessable weight that would have burned my arm to suspend thoughtlessly like that.

  "We got out."

  Strength pumped iron, continuing the "hoo-hoo-hoo" as he blew air out of his puckered lips. Behind him was a graduated set of weights, a bench press setup in steel and iron, and several other exercise contraptions and unattended weight sets. Someone had recast an L.A. Fitness in a retro-medieval build.

  Bro just had a whole-ass gym in his labyrinth.

  "So did you get it out? The hit point?"

  He dropped the weight cracking sharply onto the floor, freeing shards of stone. He breathed heavily, once, which might have been recovery or might have been an annoyed sigh. Feral, testosterone-bugged eyes locked onto me.

  "Yes."

  "Okay...? And what happened with the captain? Did you get him?"

  "No."

  "He got away?" It bothered me that this superheroic godling had not even deigned to dive into the water and try to save us. And that I was stuck wandering around his stupid signage-free maze. And that he wasn't checking on Constitution, who had nearly killed herself trying to keep him from harm.

  "Yes." He stood up and paced with his hands on his hips in the way that I'd seen gym rats do in various viral videos before getting into fights over their perceived pecking order. "No thanks to you."

  The needle came off the record in my mind. "Excuse me?"

  "Very sorry, but it must be said." He took a long, sloppy draught out of a ceramic carafe, half of it winding up on his bare chest. "If not for the interference of Wisdom, eh, much easier."

  I don't know if it was the aura of excess testosterone, some feral pheromone cloud, or just the end of a long day, but I took the bait. "You want to walk me through that one, boss?" The astute reader will perceive the danger I was walking into, of course. Sarcastic responses to an overgrown, over-hormoned meat grinder of a superhuman who had proven himself to be the battlefield version of a food processor were not strongly advisable. Fortunately, I don't think the sarcasm actually registered. And even if it did, I was never going to show up on Strength's threat radar.

  "Is simple," he said, professorially. "You are drag on team. You make Connie lag behind. Without her, I take injury." He indicated the straight gash on his thigh, the wound incurred from the maddened captain of the Barbaric. It was unbandaged, and the skin was red, but aside from some dried red stains he did not appear to be bleeding. He didn't look like he had tended to it, only shrugged it off.

  Yeah, that checked out. To him, it was a papercut. And surely walking it off was the most barbarian way, right?

  "She was helping me help the others!" I stuttered against his insane reaction, the defiance of common sense. "We were trying to save people! You jsut went for the cargo!"

  "That was the mission," he replied, as though to a child. He looked like there was something else he wanted to say, but didn't want to say it, but also really wanted to say it. He opened his mouth twice to begin, then some sense of--could it have been better judgment? Surely not?--won the tug-of-war playing out on his face. Then, it lost utterly. "Plus... is kind of your fault."

  "My fault? What's my fault?" Even he couldn't have missed the way I felt about that.

  "You know, all the..." He mimed holding something heavy, and then some energy coming out of it, blinding his eyes. Was he trying to say the lantern was at fault? "So bright, you know? It hurts eyes." He considered that and whether it counted as a confession of weakness. "A bit. And then also all the little, ehh, thingies."

  "Thingies? What thingies are my fault?"

  "You know, the little... shadow bits." This explanation was so gesture-dependant that we might as well have been playing a game of charades. He made a flat hand and swiped it back and forth, like a falling leaf.

  No... not a leaf. A petal.

  "You think the shadow petal thingies were my fault?!" Now I made no attempt to hide the dismay from my voice. "We're talking about the same thing, right? We're on the same planet, right?" The light shapeshifter had called it a Dark Epiphany, which I thought was just a bit dramatic, and certainly too many syllables to be relevant to this conversation.

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  He did a little duck face with his lips and nodded. "Yes, same planet. Is Wisdom thing, no?"

  "No!" I channeled every iota of disbelief and contempt into the syllable. "You've seen what I do! I do light stuff! The lantern and the staff!"

  He held forth his hands like balancing scales. "Eh," he said. "But also, other guy is Wisdom."

  This felt outrageous, but it needed to make sense before I could rightfully continue to be mad. "You're talking about Old Wisdom?"

  He nodded, one jerky bounce of his head. "Needs to be under control."

  "What are you saying?" I demanded. "Are you saying you think Old Wisdom, Dark Wisdom or wahtever you're calling him, is my fault? Because we're the same?"

  "You are Wisdom. He is Wisdom. Was."

  "Do you just not understand how time works?" Then again, did I? Not here. "You think we are the same person? Like, literally?"

  He blinked at that word. I seemed to have short-circuited something.

  "You can't blame two people for one person's actions. You follow?"

  "I never follow!" he snapped. "Strength is leader."

  "I mean, do you understand?" But I was answering my own question, wasn't I? "First off, I'm not from here. I'm from somewhere else. I woke up as... this. And the other guy attacked me in the tower. Don't you remember?"

  He considered this for several nanoseconds before answering. "Should have dealt with him."

  "What?"

  "At tower. Should have defeated him."

  "Oh, right, sure," I said, completely losing control of the things coming out of my mouth. "Just fight off a million of those little goblins and take out my nemesis even though he killed all my--my--" The thought of Beamon and Hudrak derailed me. The next word should have been "servants." It was true, after all. I hadn't had much time to consider it, but that's who populated the tower of Wisdom, right?

  That meant that the Old Wisdom wasn't laying siege to my tower out of some warlord ambition. It was not an unprovoked attack. He was trying to retake his home.

  My inner spark was burrowing into this idea, unbeknownst to me. It was striking paydirt, just like the realization of the captain back on the ship. The last grit and gravel loosed, and understanding came flooding out.

  I could see everything. The beautiful anteroom of the Tower of Wisdom, with stern-faced guardians wearing lacquered armor. Tapestries hung from the walls, scenery tracing the journeys of myth, gardens of branching paths, footpaths leading up the sides of mountains whose peaks were obscured by clouds. Men and women holding forth hand-signs and teaching others in small clusters. Stairways up to the rooms of learning, where wanderers laid their staves across their crossed legs on the floor, sharing stories and lectures.

  Soft, buttoned cushions scattered on hard floors. Discussions by windows in round-walled rooms. Peripatetic lessons shared descending stairs in the twilight. Hopeful faces of all kinds--pointed-eared elves, thick dwarven bellies and round noses, folded-winged garuda, patient halflings--turned as my mind's eye entered each room, looking to me with hope on their countenances. An calm, warm admiration, not a jealous hero-worship.

  It felt like a memory, but it wasn't mine. Maybe it wasn't one at all. Suddenly memories and dreams didn't feel so different.

  "You see?" came a voice from far away, a place I didn't want to be, muffled by the veil around the truth I was observing. I stopped trying to hold it, because there is nothing more slippery than truth. An unwelcome, ruddy, woven-bearded face beneath a brutish mohawk had a vindicated expression. "Like this."

  A thousand fireflies filled the room, floated down softly and twirling. Petals of golden light showered me. I couldn't feel their touch as they brushed my shoulders and clung to my ratty robe.

  This was, I knew without explanation, the opposite of whatever had happened to the captain. An epiphany of light. A preternatural calm washed over me like a briney tide, ousting any worry, any male ego clash, any frustration.

  Strength was wrong. But he was also, in a roundabout but amusing way, not wrong. I hesitate to commit to "right."

  It was true, though, that I had interfered. Wisdom gets in the way of the vulgar display of strength, no? It felt right. I wasn't sorry.

  "They confused me, you know. Gave me the dizzies. That is why he got away."

  So the captain of the Barbaric was still out there, somewhere. And now he had aligned with Old Wisdom's aims fully.

  There was a lot to think about.

  "How," I said, seeing the folly in arguing, "do I get back to the Observatory from here?"

  He pointed to the ceiling. "Is upstairs." So, no interest in helping me. Got it. Hopefully the lantern could get me there.

  I departed with a grin on my face, without saying farewell.

  It was trivial to recall the lantern in this afterglow of my epiphany. Not everything was right, obviously. But I felt oriented, completely at peace with the control I didn't have. I walked allied with the truth, and that was enough.

  I think I left a trail of fading light petals.

  There were more passages, more stairs, more inexplicable spaces revealing themselves to the glow of my lantern. The epiphany faded, and with it the feeling of rightness and sufficiency. But the lantern did not fade. So I walked, fine with being lost, following always the brighter of the paths.

  The tunnels in the labyrinth began to look familiar. Then they didn't. Then they did again, and the low movie-theater lighting of the Observatory appeared around one final corner. The stadium benches were empty. The feast was gone and no sign of the table remained, only Strength's two chairs at disregarded angles.

  In the viewing windows, Arthrem's tattooed hand grasped the bars of the prison cell. He was pulling himself to his feet. In his other hand, he was crushing a bloody crossbow bolt, wickedly barbed, a halo of blood droplets each flinging in glacial time on their own vectors.

  I took a seat and watched for a while, even though it was moving at Arthrem's dilated timescale. There was a beauty there. Something about the close study of my barbarian's exaggerated movements, exploded out into a slow-motion ballet, every reflexive jerk projected like the choreography of the spheres, the revolutions and rotations of planets and comets and things. I was starting to get what Strength got, although the draw for me was more paternal than anything, having literally made Arthrem, albeit hastily. How long had Tolkien spent on crafting Middle-earth? Because all of Arthrem had come together with a few pen strokes and dice rolls. In my defense, I could never have foreseen the extrapolation of such a complex inner world full of Stat demigods, familiar fantasy civilians, nautical crews, whatever Chris was, and all the rest.