Rosario hesitated before touching the next shard. She looked at her hands and saw thin lines on them; they had extended all the way from the injury on her chest like cracks in a glass. She could still see the clarity from the surface above, but it was starting to feel distant, like it would take some effort to swim back up.

But she still had no answers, and the current was slowly drifting the shards further apart, splitting some into smaller pieces. She forced them to come closer and found the months in which Cornwell struggled to fine-tune his control over the Convergence. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than expected, and he could never quite let go of the way he initially learned to access the Convergence, so no matter how far he wandered in it, he would always return to the same location where he left in his world. With great effort, he learned to shift over short distances, but that wouldn’t do.

Still, even if he couldn’t physically reach a different location, maybe he could at least see it. And so, one day, he saw the hospital room as if it had been traced with a colorful pencil. For the first time in months, he walked around town, though only for a few blocks, before the effort became too much and he was back under the surreal sky. Still, it meant it was possible. He just needed some time to practice. But then, a handwritten letter from an acquaintance, mailed five months prior, eventually found its way to him.

How he wished he’d been old-fashioned enough to have a printed photo of his wife and son to keep in his wallet, or an old photo of his parents, or his siblings, because digital photos were of little use inside a cell phone that no longer worked. Now all he had left was the memory of his loved ones.

The strange parallel world no longer interested him. The pain that accompanied him through his long recovery now felt insignificant. The nurse who had praised him for the effort he was putting into his physical therapy went from encouragement to concern and finally stopped asking. From his bed next to a window facing the street, days ran into each other.

In the dark ocean of the Convergence, Rosario took her hand away from the shard; the fingertips of her right hand started to chip away, but she paid no attention. The grief was overwhelming. Although tinted differently, she harbored the same emotions she’d just gone through secondhand. After the Collapse, when she found herself completely alone, she took her parents’ camper and drove away with no goal. She never told anyone that she hoped to drive past a behemoth that grew a crystal so strong her body could not withstand.

But just as it had been for her after discovering she was resistant to crystals, and later when she met Stefan and Franzi, the turning point for Cornwell came when he learned there was a severe issue with the town’s electrical grid because of behemoths disrupting the infrastructure. Maybe it was guilt, boredom, or just human nature, but he convinced someone that he knew how to fix the issue, and Rosario smiled as the next memories were filled with warmth. Emptiness and isolation were slowly replaced by purpose and camaraderie. The circumstances had been different, but their paths similar. And yet, Rosario still didn’t understand how the change could have happened. What else was there? He had sounded so sure when telling her she would share his view, but she could not imagine what might cause such a change.

Sinking deeper and with her fingers almost gone, Rosario searched through the shards until she saw something she recognized: a six-legged monster.

The memory of the first crawlers was hard to watch. Up until then, the threat to the town had come from the invisible effect of the crystals growing on the roots of behemoths. The new threat was all but invisible, and the town was unprepared when the creatures arrived. It had been a slaughter.

Shortly after, the construction of the first wall around town began. Everyone living in the vicinity moved into the smaller area, where construction of rows of townhouses was also taking place. Agriculture and traveling outside of the walls were now risky endeavors, so the lake became essential both for fishing and trading with the few nearby towns, which soon became only one.

Rosario witnessed expeditions to fell the nearest behemoths, campaigns to restore roads and recover technology left behind in abandoned towns, the construction of the greenhouses, building the Double Wall, as well as a new power grid, one not dependent on decay sources. Plans fueled by optimism, that shaped the town that Rosario would later know.

But when did the change happen? How was there not a hint of it? She had expected Cornwell to be some monster in latency, maybe having become resentful over the years, but could not sense any trace of that and it scared her to the core. The two of them were too similar.

While Cornwell never told anyone about the strange parallel world, he never fully abandoned it either. After the attack of the crawlers, he secretly worked on improving his vision through the Convergence to scout the town’s surroundings, finding ways to warn the town whenever he saw monsters in the vicinity. There was also another matter that worried him: the entity he’d encountered during his early travels in the place of stone and water. Over the years, he’d found others and learned that the one he met back then had been a weak one. He worried that one day, a creature like that would arrive, and this would be a foe that no wall or crystal defenses could stop.

But years went by without his worries becoming true, until the day the crystalsmiths arrived.

Being so far into infested land, Spiez had no coterie of smiths or a crystal hunter’s association, so when Cornwell received Emilia’s proposal to grow behemoths in a controlled environment, he, now a local authority, granted her permission, the agreement being that she and her team would become the town’s own coterie of crystalsmiths. He even had the old shopping mall reconditioned to make it safer for this purpose. Nothing, however, could have prepared him for what he saw when the smiths stepped down from the afternoon train.

Later, in the evening of that same day, he walked back to the smithy, but this time through the superposed world. Fritz was waiting for him, standing near the balustrade of the Double Wall, taking in the view of the lake.

Rosario felt the uneasiness of the moment as he walked up to the smith, unsure if the entity standing before him still had a human mind or to what degree it had given in to its primal emotions. She now understood why Cornwell had been so skeptical about her since the day of her arrival, and why he’d questioned and tested her reactions within the Convergence. He’d been right in doing so, because now she knew how easy it was to lose yourself when the limits of human existence were no longer there, and all that was keeping them in place was your own decision.

Eventually, Cornwell decided that Fritz was harmless. Just like him and Rosario, he’d been deeply hurt by the events of the Collapse, and just like Cornwell, he’d found the place of stone and water as a way to escape. The smith was torn between staying with his only surviving daughter or wandering into the Convergence for good, and Cornwell let him be, visiting from time to time when he worked on crafting new behemoths.

One day, after meeting with Fritz and giving him a small sample of red crystal, he turned to leave when he noticed that the smith never took his eyes off something on the horizon. The Mad Smith often acted like this and Cornwell mostly ignored him, but this time, he turned around. By then, the cosmic sky and the creatures that roamed between the celestial bodies barely bothered him anymore; his senses had developed to a point where he could see far, yet he didn’t belong to those places and had no interest in them. But Fritz wasn’t looking at the sky, and Rosario felt uneasy when, instead of an image, the focus of Cornwell’s attention was a cluster of emotions. It reminded her of the first time she stood alone in a behemoth forest, years before she even picked up a weapon in her life, when the awe she felt when looking at the majestic trees turned into dread as she discovered the tracks of a monster and realized she was prey.

“It’s ineffable, isn’t it?” said the crystalsmith. “Maybe it’s the true reason I’m so undecided, because it will eventually decide for us.” He sighed, turning back towards a small garden of behemoths he’d been growing over some ruins. “I’m just a coward.”

Cornwell pretended to ignore the older man’s words, yet the anomaly in the distance remained at the center of his thoughts. Not even a week passed, and he couldn’t take it any longer. He had to see it up close, to know what it was because, after straining his eyes on it, he’d realized it was in the same world he lived in.

He arranged for a trip to a nearby town as a cover, and as soon as he was alone, slid into the Convergence, where he used his control over the distances to shorten the gap to his destination. But even after years of practice, his control decreased when he distanced himself too much from the point where he entered the Convergence, so after a while he walked, and he did so for days.

Rosario wanted to pay closer attention to his emotions, to immerse herself in them with all her senses, because this had to be the moment she had tried to find. But in that instant, her right hand and forearm splintered into silver shards, and she sank deeper into the darkness.

Panicking, she reached for one last shard ahead.

A wrinkled hand with sickly colored skin carefully placed two wine glasses on a metal table, on a porch outside a rundown house surrounded by an overgrown vineyard. Cornwell sat at the table, and distrust tainted the moment. The old woman in the other chair had vines decorating her grey hair, wore comically thick-rimmed rectangular glasses, and now poured red wine into the glasses. They talked, but most of the words were lost, except for what she said when raising a glass filled with the inky, darkest red wine Rosario had ever seen.

“I call it the Convergence. It is the place where all those who are destined to be part of reunite.” She paused to swirl the wine in her glass, then held it closer to her eyes to admire the tears that slowly ran down the crystal. “Do enjoy it, my dear, because our species awoke too soon, and a short walk is all we can manage when our time comes. I am still grateful to them for making it even possible for us to be part of it, however briefly.”

In response, Cornwell didn’t say a word and left the table. Contempt flooded as he walked away from the house and the vineyard, and up the mountain towards a ravine.

The place was beautiful, with leafy trees and ferns clinging to steep rock walls that left barely enough room for a mountain stream to pass through at the bottom. Cornwell followed an old hiking trail, which had been cut into the rock and over the years had partly disappeared. Rosario thought he was using his overlapping vision of the world, but wasn’t entirely sure. He moved effortlessly, and his leg injury didn’t seem to bother him, but the rocks, soil and vegetation around them were not transparent.

After wandering deep inside the ravine, he stopped to inspect a rock formation covered in moss, water seeping through. After searching for a while, he found a narrow gap and disappeared into it. Rosario followed, crawling into a slippery passage that extended long enough for her to lose sight of the entrance. It should have been complete darkness, yet she could somehow perceive her immediate surroundings.

The tunnel, made of boulders and soil, quickly dried up and descended steeply inside the mountain before leveling off. When Rosario saw light ahead, she imagined it was the exit, although she thought it strange, because she could have sworn they had wandered deep enough to be below the base of the mountain. But against anything she could have imagined, the rugged earth gave way to sleek metal panels, so perfectly fitted that the seams were nearly invisible. In utter disbelief, she followed Cornwell through narrow hallways, where light seemed to emanate from the surfaces of walls, ceiling and floor, casting no discernible shadows.

They walked deeper inside the windowless structure, down a ramp and past doors that opened at Cornwell’s command. The corridors widened, but were equally devoid of any signs or markings. Regardless of whether the surfaces were straight or curved, everything was built with those same sleek, luminous panels.

At last, in a long semicircular hallway with a ceiling so high that Rosario could not see, a wide door shifted open, and they stood on the edge of a perfectly spherical room, in whose center floated a platform. Standing on the edge of the widest point, it was easy to lose any sense of proportion, but the crystal hunter was sure there must have been the equivalent of several stories above and below them.

Cornwell was watching the room with astonishment, and Rosario was distracted when she noticed something on the otherwise clear hallway that went around the spherical chamber. She walked closer, surprised to see two backpacks, a pair of hiking poles, and a helmet with a flashlight that no longer worked. The objects looked like standard hiking equipment from before the Collapse, and Rosario even recognized the name of a budget sporting brand on a backpack. To say that the items looked out of place would have been an understatement.

She returned to the spherical room, where Cornwell now stood on the platform in the center, with a hand extended in front of him. The large chamber was no longer empty, but Rosario had a hard time recognizing the elements because the visuals were subjugated by an avalanche of emotions; as she tried to focus on them, her arm broke apart and the fractures over her body deepened. Time was up.

“You had no right to do this,” said Cornwell, looking slightly up at something his mind had refused to remember visually.

His fists were clenched, and tears escaped his eyes. He spoke again, but Rosario could not hear; she had left the shard and was now frantically swimming up from the dark pit. Her entire essence was crumbling when she finally reached the surface and inhaled the afternoon air.

“Rosario?” said a voice she barely noticed.

“Come on! The tower’s going to fall!”

Two pairs of arms grabbed her by the shoulders and dragged her backwards. She saw the mayor in front of her, equally unable to move. She caught his gaze for a moment and felt she was looking at a different person.

“Is that the mayor?” said Emilia in surprise.

“What? I didn’t see him before! Hey Bill, get out of there!”

“Noah, no! It’s too late!”

Rosario’s senses were too numbed to keep track of what happened next, yet she knew the mayor didn’t react on time when the keep collapsed.