The rock didn't have a name.
I gave it one eventually. I called it the rock. Very creative. Seventeen years alone and that's the best I managed.
In my defense there wasn't much to work with.
The void went on forever in every direction which you'd think would be peaceful but is actually deeply unpleasant after about the first week. No sun. No sky. No anything except rock and void and the specific silence of a place that had decided atmosphere was optional.
Speaking of which, I'm actually surprised I haven't run out of oxygen yet.
I don't know if oxygen even exists here. I don't know how I would know. I've been breathing fine which either means oxygen exists or my body has stopped requiring it which would be concerning information I've chosen not to investigate.
You know what, that's fine. That's future me's problem.
Ignorance is survival. That's my philosophy now. I have several philosophies now. Most of them are about not thinking too hard about things I can't change. I've gotten very good at this. It's probably my most transferable skill at this point.
The beetles came every cycle.
I want to say I hated them but honestly they were the only company I had so it was complicated.
They were consistent. Committed. Completely unbothered by the fact that I kept killing them. They adapted. Built new approaches. Found gaps in the barrier I hadn't noticed yet. Genuinely impressive problem solving for creatures I was also eating.
I also ate them.
Listen. Don't judge me. I spent the first week being disgusted about it and then I spent the second week being hungry and by the third week I had developed what I can only describe as a professional relationship with the situation. They're fine if you don't think about it too hard.
I've gotten very good at not thinking about things too hard.
The barrier across the entrance held most nights. Most. The ones it didn't hold were character building experiences I have chosen not to elaborate on.
Three medium sized beetles came through the gap on the left side that I hadn't fully patched yet and I dealt with them in the dark half asleep which had become the kind of thing I did automatically now without fully waking up.
First one, barrier gap, came in low. Dealt with.
Second one came in right behind the first one. Which was new. They were learning to use each other as distraction. Noted. Annoying. Also dealt with.
Third one, the largest of the three, shell thicker than the others, moved differently. Slower but more deliberate. It wasn't rushing me. It was watching me handle the first two.
I stopped.
It stopped.
We looked at each other in the dark for a moment.
I thought, okay, so that's happening now.
Then I dealt with it.
But I thought about that afterward. The watching. The waiting. The specific patience of something that was learning rather than just attacking. In a different life I would have found that fascinating. In this life I found it deeply inconvenient and went back to sleep thinking about Ari instead because thinking about Ari was considerably better than thinking about beetles developing tactical awareness.
I had two katanas.
Lizzy built them and I'll leave it at that because explaining it properly would require me to be in a better mood than I currently am.
Indestructible. Genuinely. Not dramatically indestructible the way people say things are indestructible before they get destroyed. Actually indestructible. I tested everything the pocket dimension had on them in the first year. The beetle shells that deflected standard blades. The rock formations. Forces that had broken every other thing I'd thrown them at.
Nothing touched them.
Which was good because if they had broken I genuinely don't know what I would have done. Probably just sat down and refused to participate further. That was my backup plan. Fortunately I never had to use it.
My babies. The only things in this place that were mine and stayed mine. I kept them clean. Obsessively. Unreasonably. There was genuinely no reason to keep them this clean in a place with no witnesses and no standards but some things you hold onto not because they're logical but because letting go of them means letting go of something else.
I wasn't ready to let go of something else.
I sat against the cave wall with the katanas across my knees.
On the wall beside the tally marks I had written one thing. Not a message. Not a note to myself. Just a question that had been sitting in me since the first cycle and had finally needed somewhere to go.
It never answered. In retrospect I'm not sure what I expected. The wall was a wall. It didn't have opinions. I kept looking at it anyway.
Next to it I had drawn something else.
Not a question. Not words at all.
Just a face.
Ari.
Okay so here's the thing about the drawing. I'd done it about forty times on various surfaces before I got it right and I want to be clear that this is not something I'm embarrassed about. I was working from memory in a place without photographs or reference material of any kind using a piece of beetle shell as a drawing implement. Forty attempts is actually very reasonable under those conditions.
The version on the cave wall was the good one.
She was smiling in it.
The real smile. Not the careful one she used in public or around people she hadn't decided about yet. The actual smile. The one that only showed up when something genuinely caught her off guard and her face did what it wanted before she could decide what it should do.
She laughed with her whole face. That was the specific thing I kept trying to get right. Not just the mouth. The whole face. The way her eyes did something particular when the smile was real versus when it was polite. There was a difference and most people missed it and I had spent approximately four hundred cycles making sure I didn't miss it.
I think by cycle two hundred I finally had it.
Honestly my best work. Which is a slightly depressing sentence given the circumstances but I'm choosing to focus on the achievement rather than the context.
I had plans for when I got back.
Specifically I had a reservation, mentally, in the plan that existed entirely in my head because there was nobody else to tell it to, at a rooftop restaurant in Itaewon that I'd walked past three times before disappearing and never gone into because I kept telling myself there would be time later.
There would be time later.
I had the whole evening planned. The table by the railing. Good view. Proper food that was not beetles, and I cannot stress enough how important that part was to me. Somewhere high enough that Seoul spread out below us and the city looked the way it looked from a distance when all the difficult parts were invisible and it was just lights.
I even had the specific thing I was going to say when she asked why I'd picked that place. I'd rehearsed it enough times that I could deliver it without it sounding rehearsed which was the goal.
Was it a lot of planning for one dinner. Yes. Did I have seventeen years and nothing else to do. Also yes.
That was the plan.
I'd refined it over approximately four hundred cycles.
It was a very good plan.
She never answered from the wall. Which was fair. She didn't know she was on a cave wall in a place that didn't exist. That wasn't her fault.
I stopped counting days.
Not because I gave up. Because counting days required believing in days and days required a sun and the sun had not received that particular memo. Without a sun there were only cycles, beetle cycle, sleep cycle, eat cycle, walk in circles looking for an exit cycle.
I'd been walking in circles.
I knew I'd been walking in circles. I genuinely knew this. I just kept doing it anyway because the alternative was sitting still and sitting still felt like agreeing with the situation and I refused to agree with the situation.
Agreeing with the situation was not something I was prepared to do.
Then the giant one appeared.
I was meditating. That's my story and I'm committing to it. I was absolutely meditating and definitely not accidentally asleep against the cave wall when the largest beetle I had ever seen in my life, and I had seen a lot of beetles, I was at this point internationally recognised in the field of beetle related expertise, came through the barrier like the barrier was a suggestion.
I tried cutting it.
Sixteen times.
The shell deflected everything. Sixteen attempts. Different angles. Different approaches. Full commitment every single time. Nothing worked. Which was actually the first time something in this place had matched what my katanas were built for and under different circumstances I would have found that fascinating.
These were not different circumstances.
Then it started getting payback for its family.
I want to be clear that I understand why it was angry. I had eaten several hundred of its relatives. That is a legitimate grievance and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But understanding the grievance and accepting being thrown repeatedly into a cave wall are two completely different things and I was having significant trouble getting to acceptance.
It had learned to punch.
It had learned to throw.
This was the one from before. The watcher. The one that had stood in the dark while I handled the others and filed information away for later.
Later was now apparently.
I was losing.
I was losing badly and I want to say I had a plan but honestly the plan at that point was mostly just stay conscious and hope something changed.
At a certain point I was on the ground and the light was very bright and I thought, I am seventeen years old. I have a reservation at a rooftop restaurant in Itaewon. I have a very good drawing of Ari on a cave wall that took forty attempts to get right. I have a plan that I have refined over four hundred cycles and I refuse, I absolutely refuse, to be ended by a beetle that learned to punch by watching me.
I refuse.
But the light kept getting brighter.
And I was very tired.
And then it wasn't the bright light.
It was a portal.
I stared at it for approximately half a second.
Then I ran.
I ran the way you run when you have been walking in circles for an unknowable number of cycles and the only exit just appeared six feet away while a giant vengeful beetle that has learned martial arts is directly behind you.
The katanas were in my hands before I'd decided to pick them up. I was not leaving my babies in a pocket dimension. That was non negotiable. Whatever was on the other side of that portal was going to have to deal with the fact that I was arriving armed because I was not putting them down for anything.
I thought about the barrier I was leaving behind. The tally marks. The question on the wall that never answered. The drawing of Ari that had taken forty attempts and was honestly the best thing I'd ever made.
I thought about the rooftop restaurant and the table by the railing and the specific thing I was going to say when she asked why I'd picked that place.
I thought, there has to be time later. There has to be. I did not survive four hundred and however many cycles of this place and develop genuine expertise in beetle based combat to not get the time later.
I hit the portal at full speed, panting, one eye already swelling shut, at least four things broken that I'd catalogued and several more I hadn't had time to get to yet.
And I jumped.
The last thing I thought before the portal took me was Ari's face on the cave wall.
The real smile.
There would be time later.
There had to be.