None of us had uttered a word since our last debate. This was no innocent silence, nor even one of tension; it was a forced, therapeutic silence, as if the very place compelled us to lower the volume of our thoughts. I felt any word I might speak would be recorded, not in the air, but in something deeper… in an invisible fabric surrounding us, which I could not see.
The Detective walked ahead. His steps were unnervingly regular, born not of will but of some algorithm. With each stride, something within me lagged half a second behind, as if my own consciousness suffered an artificial delay—a natural thing, I suppose, when you try to separate yourself from Thomas and narrate the tale at the same time, as if you *are* him. We followed, four barely-human entities, moving along a path that permitted no deviation, not even hesitation.
And when we crossed the village's dividing line, I did not feel I had entered a new place… but that I had stepped outside of myself.
The air changed. It was no longer breathed; it was measured. Heavy, precise, saturated with particles that monitored the expansion of lungs and counted each breath. Behind us, the impoverished village—its honest misery, its dust, its hunger—suddenly seemed more real than it ought to. Here, however, everything was too clean, too silent, as if the only permissible filth was that of perfection itself.
The houses were towering, white—but not white in color, white in *sensation*. A whiteness that blurred details, erased shadows, and wearied the eye in its search for an edge to rest upon. It was like the dream of a foolish architect, stacked in endless, layered rows. The walls, too, were not steadfast; I noticed—or fancied I did—that they slowly rearranged their engravings, a shift perceivable only when you looked away. Extreme magical technology was woven into every atom: surfaces that mended themselves the instant they were scratched, passageways that widened or narrowed according to the number of passersby, and a faint pulse beneath the ground… not a tremor, but a rhythm.
This stood in utter contradiction to the—pre-modern world—I had been narrating.
There were no oil lamps or simple magical laws functioning as crude lanterns. Light was extracted directly from the void, concentrated, compressed, then released with surgical coldness. Thin filaments of light, invisible most of the time, swept over bodies as we passed, not touching the skin but passing through it. I felt a prickling inside my skull, as if my memories were being indexed at speed.
No sounds. Only an intermittent electronic whisper, resembling a prayer recited in a language not meant for men. I realized suddenly this whisper was not in the air… but in my mind. I tried to distinguish my thoughts from the noise, but the boundaries were dissolving.
The inhabitants were few, and their scarcity felt unnatural. They moved with a terrifying smoothness, without haste, without hesitation. Their eyes were open, but I did not feel they were used for sight. Some did not blink at all. When they looked upon us, I felt something being weighed within me—not hatred, not curiosity—but an appraisal. As if we were files newly entered into an ancient system, being judged worthy of preservation… or deletion.
The further we went, the more my sense of scale collapsed. Distances were no longer measured in meters, but in degrees of compliance. The houses that had been towering suddenly appeared small, not because they had shrunk, but because something vaster was drawing near. I felt we were walking inside a scaled-down model of a city built to be studied, not lived in.
Then we stopped.
And before us… was the villa.
To Thomas, it was not merely a building; it was a thing he could not assemble into a single thought inside his head. It was as if a fragment from another logic had been forcibly implanted here. It had no fixed form; its angles fractured and then returned, its vertical lines tilted with an imperceptible slowness, as though the villa was perpetually recalibrating itself to accommodate our presence. The gate was an architectural catastrophe: a smooth white surface, devoid of engravings, devoid of hinges, devoid of a handle, stretching for miles towards the sky…. Save for one thing. A single, small inscription carved on a wooden plaque at the left edge: "Juliana." That was its name.
When I raised my head, it was not that I failed to see the summit—I felt the summit did not wish to be seen. An immense pressure settled behind my eyes, and an inner voice—not my own—whispered that entry was not a prudent step, and in truth, I agreed. But we only live once, or so it is said.
I stood there, understanding a truth with painful clarity:
We were not before a villa, nor even before the authority of magicians.
We were before a system.
A system designed by a man who was either a genius or the greatest fool in Oures.
The Detective halted before the gate, which seemed less an entrance and more the sheer wall at the edge of the world. An unnerving stillness enveloped the place, a stillness not broken by the clash of swords or the tread of guards.
"Where are the guards?" I asked, my voice dwarfed by the structure's enormity. "A place like this... is it not supposed to be protected by an army?"
Ancaues turned to me, his eyes a cold blade cutting through my ignorance. "This place has no need for men who shiver behind their armor, Thomas. The villa is reinforced with the magic of 'Moghan,' High Magician to Lord Simon. And more to the point, those who dwell here are the very pinnacle of the magician's craft... a guard with a spear would be no more than a superfluous ornament in the presence of such as these."
I did not reply. I watched as The Detective retrieved his small notebook, jotting a swift note in utter silence, as if capturing a detail invisible to all others. Before I could question his quiet, Lagrita stepped forward with confident strides towards the gate. She placed her slender hand upon the cold stone, closed her eyes for a few seconds, and then a mysterious smile graced her lips.
"Oh... intriguing," she whispered.
The Detective did not lift his head, but his pen moved once more across the page.
Castor stood directly behind Lagrita and uttered a word that rumbled like subdued thunder: "Gorath-nir."
I attempted to match their demeanor. "Yes, it is indeed a fascinating construction."
But Lagrita released a short, sharp laugh that fractured the night's silence. "Not the construction, my dear... but the material it is made of."
I stared at the gleaming white stone before me; it seemed merely marble polished with exceeding care. "What do you mean?"
She turned toward me slowly, as if preparing to deliver a lecture on the fundamentals of the impossible. "This is no ordinary stone, Thomas. In the tongue of the Dwarves, it is called 'Gorath-nir'—'The Weight That Remembers.' It is a rare material… exceedingly rare."
I scoffed, gesturing toward the gate that rose to embrace the very stars: "Rare? Look at the scale of this edifice! It seems you've consumed mountains of this 'rarity.'"
She laughed that laugh again. "Yes, rare… not in its quantity, but in the manner of its extraction. The source of this stone is a single, solitary meteor that struck Oures at the dawn of history."
Castor stepped forward, completing the tale with his gruff voice: "One meteor alone of Gorath-nir in all the world's history. It was not of this reality, nor of its known layers."
I raised an eyebrow in disbelief. "A meteor? It must have been the size of a continent to yield all this!"
"Its diameter was but three kilometers," Lagrita stated simply.
"Impossible!" I interrupted loudly. "Even if that meteor were hollowed out entirely, it would not suffice to build a single wall of this colossal villa."
"You are correct in your mortal arithmetic," she replied, "but Gorath-nir does not bow to logic. It behaves as a creature might… not alive in the spiritual sense, but possessing a kind of will. It *remanufactures itself*. The mother-meteor reshapes its lost parts over long years, by means unknown."
The Detective paused in his notation for a moment, as if listening to the echo of the words, then returned to his page.
Lagrita continued: "A separated piece does not multiply, but it 'recognizes' its sisters. If a piece is struck with a hammer, it adapts. The next time, the same force will not affect it, nor indeed the same hammer, however you might increase your strength. The stone remembers the tool, remembers the pain, and adapts to become utterly immune to it."
My mouth fell open in astonishment, and the name began to resonate in my mind with new depth: The Weight That Remembers. "That explains everything… how you built this impossibility from a small meteor."
Lagrita laughed again. "Do not misunderstand. It is not 'we' who possess the meteor… but the Dwarves. Those short-statured folk who have bound their entire existence to the service of metal."
I asked with curiosity: "How did they extract it, then, if it hardens with every blow?"
She explained how the Dwarves spent three centuries of continuous hammering that shook the mountains, yet the meteor was not scratched; it only grew harder with each impact, becoming tougher than anything else in existence. "The problem is not merely hardness, but weight. A single pea of it might outweigh a mountain. As time passes, time itself settles within the stone, making it heavier, until armor forged from it becomes a burden that crushes its bearer after two generations."
Suddenly, Ancaues stepped forward, uttering his first words in some time: "It is said Gorath-nir gains strength not from time alone, but from the 'intent' with which it was first struck. The first blow, hammered by an unknown dwarf, was charged with fear… and the stone, Thomas, never forgets fear."
A shiver coursed through me. How could mortal beings tame such a material?
Lagrita answered my question before I could voice it, speaking of 'Val Dorn'—the hammer their god, 'Al-Himam,' gifted to the Dwarves. The Hammer of Dawn, which possesses no force, but possesses an 'edge.' One strike only at dawn, when time is 'bare' and incomplete, when the stone sleeps and has not yet raised its defenses. The strike does not break the stone… but persuades it to part.
I looked upon the great stone gate with a new terror. "Then… how did this legendary stone come into the hands of Men? How did the Dwarves relinquish such a sacred material to build a villa?"
The three exchanged a fleeting glance, and then a single, cold, and confident smile spread across their faces.
"And what do you think, Thomas?" they said in near-unison.
"We took it by force."
"No more children's tales, Lagrita. We are here to work," Ancaues uttered from behind.
I stood rigid in place, my eyes unable to leave the entity that stood before me. I was attempting a simple calculation in my mind, but the numbers were crumbling. If a piece the size of a pea weighed as much as mountains, then this gate stretching miles towards the heavens must weigh trillions of tons… a weight the very earth could not bear, let alone a means to open it.
I swallowed hard and looked at Lagrita, my tone awash with disbelief. "Alright… how do we open this thing?"
Lagrita raised her left eyebrow and regarded me with a cold look, tinged with a pity that bordered on insult—as if I had just uttered the most foolish thing she had heard in her long life, and I was certain she had seen thousands of strange things. She uttered no word, summoned no strength, but simply stepped forward and extended her delicate hand, pushing the door with a light touch, as if brushing aside a dry branch obstructing her path.
With terrifying silence, that mountain of stone gave way. There was no creak, no tremor in the earth beneath the staggering weight. It simply opened with a fluidity that made my logic weep at its own impotence.
For one foolish second, I had forgotten who they were. I suddenly remembered I was not in the company of ordinary travelers, but in the presence of beings who had transcended the very notion of 'human'; entities capable of erasing this layer of reality and questioning the laws of physics with a single thought, or the gesture of a finger.
For Lagrita, the weight did not exist because she had decided it did not exist, or perhaps she was simply strong enough to displace infinity with her little finger. In either case, I had lost the argument.
The Detective crossed the threshold first, without lifting his eyes from his notebook. Architectural miracles and blatant violations of cosmic laws were but routine details unworthy of pause.
She followed, then Castor and Ancaues, leaving me to contemplate the open gate.