Once upon a time, two girls went on an adventure. Being young girls, what they'd meant by 'adventure' turned out to be nothing grander than a trip to the outer markets. But as was the way with these things each step of the way had felt thrilling, impossibly grand, astonishing, appalling, terrible, and terrifying in its turn until it finally overwhelmed them and sent the two heroes scrambling back to the safety of their home.

There had been the climb over the palace wall, facilitated by a rope spun from weeks' worth of carefully 'misplaced' bedsheets. The weave through the shadows to avoid the eyes of the perimeter guards. The breathless, excited giggling as they donned pre-tattered cloaks: a perfect and impenetrable disguise. And running, running, running until the glittering alloys gave way to dingy streets and streets crammed so full of people there could be no word to describe it other than misery. 

The market stank to hell. Filth wafted everywhere, just pervasive enough to overwhelm the advanced filtration systems and fight with sickly sweet wines and other desperate street fare that was in no way appropriate for the palate of an Imperial Princess. Moans. Sniffles. A few brave but hollow cries for help. Barter offers shouted atop the other voices (one even offering a pair of diseased Servitors for just one of their cloaks), the general din even more oppressive than the massive wall of bodies and the stale air that had warned them even then: this was a place of death. No less in fact than the Palace of the Dead. Nothing living could be kept inside this prison.

They had been far, far less careful coming home. And home had turned out to be far, far less safe than they had left it. And the rest was history.

Now those girls were grown up. Less naïve. And at the end of a vastly grander and yet far less magical journey, they find themselves once again at the farthest markets, in the Palace of the Dead.

But these halls are cavernous, and empty. These shouts are muted and polite, lifting themselves into full focus only when they've already caught someone's eye. The streets are glittering with wealth, even if they seem so flimsy compared to the adamant power of Tellus that it boggles the mind that ambient solar winds or even a stray sneeze haven't torn this wonderful place to shreds.

Everything is a marvel. No breath of air smells or tastes quite the same as the one before it, and none are natural. Wispy attempts at floral scents dance with freshly baked bread, though there are even fewer souls here to make it or eat it than there were among the ghosts of the Azura. Incomprehensible messages bounce back and forth across the halls in an endless chorus, dancing in time to strange images that call to mind the magic of movies without ever quite seeming to fit that word.

Bella's ears strain every which way. She turns her head, eyes darting this way and that to catch the soft beams of light that must surely be trapped in the air above her. But she is thwarted at every turn. There is no telltale flutter of a projector, however faint. No beacon streaming from a cleverly hidden backroom to paint these motion pictures against these walls. They loop, occasionally break, then reform without any help or source at all. Like magic.

"The arts must have thrived in the ancient Empire. Don't you think so, Redana? Just look at the styles they worked in! It's all so vibrant and yet... it almost hurts my eye to watch it too directly. I think their explorations of Love must have consumed the entire society. They called it an 'Investment', right? I don't know that word. Love is... a return on Investment. They were so wise. They must have been."

There is wonder in her voice, and it paints its way across her face. Slight headache or no, every bit of motion on every screen captures her attention. There is no need for her to pull Redana to heel; she rushes about just as much to capture and gawk at every little thing, all the while feeling an intense longing build up inside her head. The pressure is overwhelming. Impossible to ignore. And what law could stop her now?

Trembling, her fingers reach for a screen in the midst of depicting a cloud of hyper-stylized falling leaves, just before it shifts to an equally stylized depiction of a man and a woman in dark tuxedos dancing on some golden, unrecognizable moon. Her fingers press on the smooth, glassy surface of the screen and she gaps.

"Redana, look! Look! It's..."

Everywhere her fingers touch the image bursts into a cloud of rainbow light. It follows her touch this way and that, blurring only where she passes and reforming the original image as quickly as it broke behind her experimental probing. She strikes it again and again, hardly daring to breath, when a slightly too excited flick cracks the entire thing in an enormous spiderweb pattern. Liquid oozes from several of the larger gaps, paradoxically containing none of the colors they had just been watching. All around them, images play on as if nothing had happened, but in this one spot there is nothing beyond splintered black and white.

"I understand now!" she smiles to herself as they pass around the bend to a new set of wonders that await them, "How they managed to create their films without using projectors. These are paintings, Redana! They must have spent months on each individual one of these! Can you imagine? Hundreds, no, thousands! Maybe even millions of master craftsmen bent over their workbenches painting every motion blur into existence with their brushes. All to create a hallway filled with treatises on their musings about love, worship, and society! Though I'm still not certain what message they intended by drawing all of their characters so... scrawny. Still, though. Beautiful."

And as she says the word, she glances at the Princess. Her fingers are still coated in bits of mystic paint as they entwine around Redana's. Two girls went on an adventure, to find a marketplace. Only this time, their feet carry them further on without thought for safety or home. 

At the end of it all... would be the two of them. If not together, then at least not apart. But at least for now, there was the promise of a picnic under the stars, and even deeper wonders and puzzles left behind by the great Foremothers of civilization. To say nothing of the promise of another night. There was, after all, still so much to see.