And so, the fight was finished.

	Not [i]over[/i], not by any means, but the ending was underway, so she thought. Her sense of time started to falter; Events came before and after; Events [b]be[/b]came 'fore and after. The purple eyed facsimile made a near beeline to Exeter, hurling itself like a shuriken on a direct intercept path of the approaching vomit beam, dimensions folding until it collapsed down to the size of a kangal. On its way to the girl [i][u]feelings of dissociation took hold of her[/u][/i] and the beam, this copy of Aracite sliced through the Amalgam, its branches having extended far enough for azure [i][u]it was starting to become green[/u][/i] moss to be visible along its upper length. The copy captured the products of its arboreal destruction within its gelatinous body, grinding wood, and moss within its core in search of the bacterial agent known only as Dorn - the *Healer* Of Cosms [i][u]"I shouldn't know this."[/u][/i]

"You don't."

The seventh-scale vibrations ceased their structured language, and the crystalline room lost its cerulean glow. Separated from herself, Ecluy drifted back down to the circular patterns that marked the floor like the white pips on semi-transparent casino dice, each ring smaller and yet more interlinked the farther away it was from the central design, a [i]Mohr's circle[/i] on a raised platform; One main ring, with two rings inside of it, one larger than the other; a two-dimensional representation, and therefore simplification, of a calculation used in determining the amount of stress that a single point in a material object is experiencing. Used here, it was a tad more metaphorical -- and a tad removed from the original definition. It had its spiritual uses as well. So she'd been told.

Another Luminar stepped towards her. His white robes made no sound when dragging on this floor; It was all the [i]clonk-kalonk[/i] of his footfalls. The temple's High Priest himself, Azimuth.

Exeter couldn't quite determine the emotion on his face; He'd always had a perfect poker face, she knew, but this was something else. An honest, yet complicated expression.

She vaguely gestured to the room, one she'd first considered before being aligned with, contacted by, and connected to the [b]energy[/b] that concentrated here, at the end of the known universe. The journey here had taken years -- she was twice as old once she got here, and almost literally bored to death from constant mid-flight meditation.

She still couldn't believe what she'd seen. "So this is real?" she asked.

"It is an Order Built From Order," Azimuth said. "Not any less real than an Order Born From Chaos. Just a different [i]kind[/i] of real."

She blinked. "It certainly hadn't felt any less real than our universe. I swear I almost died!"

"You almost did, indeed. Just not the you here. A more experienced, yet conflicted you."

"That's a funny way of saying 'thousand year older but still flawed' me."  She put a hand on her hip, pursing her lips. "What's the point of being my own peeping tom if all I'm going to see is how I almost lost myself to, you know, myself? [i]Evil[/i] myself, I guess."

Azimuth's expression finally broke into a smile. Something remained, however. Conflicting emotions, maybe, warring underneath the more vocal and transient emotion of amusement. "Young Ecluy, you have much to learn. Learning from oneself, in every sense of the phrase, is the best way to improve. The woman you saw, [i]Exeter[/i], is desperate. She is flawed, yes. Few things are perfect. Even this machination-"

He gestured more deliberately to the dome-like ceiling above, where garbled images washed over one another in a sea of cerulean pixel-particle data. "Even the Listening has its flaws and mix-ups. We live on the verge of infinity; We are [u]not[/u] [i]amid[/i] the infinite, and must depend on things outside ourselves -- including other ourselves and perspectives -- to correct our paths."

"So you brought me-..."  She clenched her jaw. "I was sent here because I'm [color=ed1c24]predisposed[/color] like she is?"

"You are yourself."

She clenched her jaw harder. Enough to snap steel.

Azimuth's face softened. "Exeter did not succumb to it."

"Almost did."

"Almost. Perhaps she could use a reminder to stay on top of her flaws."  He again gestured to the psychedelic dome. "I will align you to the Order Built From Order once more, if you wish."

Ecluy looked up at the data dust-storm. "If I die there, I don't die here, right? And that won't cause weird time anomalies or interreality problems-"

She looked down. Azimuth was already walking away, towards the shell of yellow lattices that allowed him to "lower" her -- it felt more like rising -- into this Order Built From Order, the partly isolated reality that'd been constructed by the thread-of-thought-beings, themselves from an Order Born From Chaos. She was still unsure what the difference was between the two types of realities. Both seemed real. Both seemed equally chaotic to her.

The seventh-scale vibrations began talking again, drawing down pixel-particles to adhere to her soul and mind. She rose, and then she stopped, but it still felt as though she were rising.

Much akin to someone putting on headphones to listen to music, she became parallel to the Listening and became a listener of this Exeter person, unaware of Dorn and the names of the monsters and their origins, fully immersed and pressed against that other Order.

	Exeter opened her eyes from a long blink, and in that time, her perception, observation, and memory of the girl Ecluy from the other reality had all been eradicated from memory. Rather, they had been pulled out of herself, as they were still attached to Ecluy; And when she came back in, Exeter's mind -- now in an emersion from that reality -- no longer held Ecluy's "Order Born From Chaos" in its conception. Nothing did. Even Aracite might not have noticed or, if it did, retained that memory, all-seeing as it might seem and distinct from (Exeter's) reality as it might be.

	To her, this reality she resided in [i]was[/i] an Order Born From Chaos. Why wouldn't it be?

	To Aracite, another participant in this self-contained story of brewing up bubbling boredom-bashes in brains, even if it should recognize that its "outside" wasn't quite as "outside" -- actually, more like "next door" -- as this other reality, it had naught much it could do about it. The two realities would sooner or later go their separate ways, anyhow.

	The facsimile skidded to a halt mere feet from Exeter, its eye shifting purple to red, to stone gray, and back to purple. She eyed it warily in return. In the distance, titans raged; Small as this version of the eye was, she didn't care to test if attacking it would mean certain doom for herself. She didn't have much of a means to communicate with it.

	She knew one surefire way to get her position across.

	As the creature's little eye peered towards the battle and yet spied eight spots to spray down, Exeter took it upon herself to help clean up -- action spoke louder than words. The titans were not so distant now, only lightmoments away. With an outstretched arm, she squeezed the blob of negative-mass matter into a needle-like shape, roughly the dimensions of its original form as a sword. It resisted maintaining this shape, naturally. She twisted the matter lengthwise, providing anti-tension while also setting its eventual driving action to be less like a nail and more like a screw or drill bit.

	Last time, Barrusom's dark matter coat had nullified her attack. All she'd need to do now is to part that coat, forming a bullseye for her attack. From this far away (as opposed to farther), and with the recent power boost from the green frequencies of her nova grenade's blast, Exeter mustered the matter-maneuverability to burrow an alcove into Barrusom's defensive coat.

	She wrung the negative-mass needle tighter and tighter, more compact and spring-loaded. She let loose this black bolt, taking it the long way around -- the quicker way, once acceleration through the matter was accounted for. It was a struggle to keep its form together. It wanted to veer off every which way and burst in all directions like ink in oil. But now wasn't the time or place for that.

	She took a deep breath and grit her teeth. Somehow, she felt like something else was watching over her, maybe cheering her on.

	When the needle completed its round-trip and left the diminishing mass of Ebrias, flying lightning-fast, she corrected its path and angled it towards Barrusom. Light speed was not only trivial to the Luminaru -- it was also relative, much like everything else in the universe. She needed only [i]most[/i] of the speed from before, with Aracite providing its own acceleration of Barrusom to complete the equation.

	Perfectly straddling relative-lightspeed... with calculating precision... And then she let it free from her lightspeed-limit-decoupled telekinetic grasp.

	She, again, was attempting a time-machinegun, only these "bullets" were now spiral-flange projectiles whose particles would diverge like a budding tulip, a tiny swarm swimming through his flesh. None would decelerate; They'd continue ravaging the Ravager's insides until the particles were diffuse enough so as to slip out, leaving only tiny holes behind in the wake of a largely tenderized, discombobulated majority of his torso, and then escape into the void surrounding him.

	On repeat.

	Until Barrusom was no more.