The text Lysander had given him was titled, in the old notation, "On the Nature of Adjacent Spaces and the Problem of Speaking Across Them." Its author was indeed the Tender from three hundred years ago, a woman named Aela Voss — the same woman who, three centuries later, would paint the picture of the Shattering on the third floor of the main building.
He stopped. Re-read the name. Found Lysander before lunch.
"The painter," he said.
Lysander looked up from his desk.
"Aela Voss," Aaron said. "She wrote this book three hundred years ago. She painted the Shattering three hundred years ago. That's the same person."
"Yes." Lysander said it simply.
"How old was she when she painted it?"
Lysander looked at him for a moment. "The records are unclear. The best estimate we have is that she was approximately — one hundred and forty years old." He paused. "Long-lived cultivation practitioners are not unheard of, but her longevity was extreme even by that standard."
"What element?"
"Space," Lysander said.
Aaron stood in the doorway.
"She accessed adjacent Shards," he said. "Uncontrolled, you said. But repeated exposure to spatial layer bleeding — if it happened enough times, over a long enough period —"
"We believe it extended her life." Lysander's voice was careful. "We don't know the mechanism. She documented the experiences but not the mechanism — she didn't understand it herself."
"What did she experience?" Aaron asked. "Specifically."
"Read the book," Lysander said. "She describes it better than I could summarise."
— — —
He read it over three evenings, in the cave, with Sirath following along through his perception. It was not a long text — perhaps forty pages, hand-written, in the clear and precise script of someone who had learned to write before she learned to doubt herself.
Aela Voss had first experienced spatial layer bleeding at rank five, during an extreme cultivation state following an injury that should have killed her. She had touched the boundary — felt it as a surface, like pressing your hand against glass — and through the glass seen another place. Another sky.
She described the adjacent sky as greener than their own. The stars in different positions, which she'd had the presence of mind to map. A horizon that curved at a slightly different rate, suggesting a larger or smaller world. She hadn't been able to see any detail within the adjacent Shard on that first contact — just the sky, and the sense of enormous distance compressed into the thickness of a membrane.
The second contact came two years later, under similar conditions. By then she'd been looking for it — she'd developed a meditation technique designed to bring her close to the boundary without crossing it. This time she could see ground. Trees. A landscape that was similar to the world she knew in structure (trees, rock, sky) but different in detail in ways she couldn't fully describe, like a reflection that was almost correct.
The third contact, and every subsequent one: she moved closer. Not physically — she was clear about this. She was not physically crossing the boundary. Her perception was extending toward it, the way you can focus your eyes on something in the distance without your body moving. And each time, the adjacent Shard resolved more clearly.
By her thirtieth contact, she could see people.
She described them in her text with the careful neutrality of someone determined not to let the strangeness of what they were seeing contaminate the accuracy of the record. They were human — recognisably human, in proportion and structure. Their clothing was different. Their infrastructure was different. The technology she observed was, by some measures, more advanced than her own world's; by others, less. The comparison didn't organise cleanly on a single axis.
And then, at contact forty-seven: she saw one of them look directly at her.
She wrote: "He could see me. I am certain of it. He could not have known what he was looking at, any more than I knew for certain what I was looking at in the early contacts. But his gaze was not random. It tracked my position with an accuracy that random chance cannot account for. He was aware of something at the location I occupied in his visual field. He did not know what that something was. But he looked."
"She made contact," Aaron said.
"Forty-seven attempts before the first successful reciprocal perception," Sirath said. "That is the patience of someone who has decided to solve a problem regardless of how long it takes."
"What happened after?"
He read on.
Contact forty-eight: the man in the adjacent Shard was waiting at the same location she'd first seen him — different time of day, but the same physical point. He had been there, she estimated, for several hours.
He held up a sign.
She described the symbol on it: two concentric circles with a line through them, and at the end of the line, an asterisk with irregular arms.
Aaron set the book down.
"The same symbol," he said.
"The same symbol," Sirath agreed quietly. "She was the one. Three hundred years ago, Aela Voss made first contact with an adjacent Shard. And last night, someone in that Shard — or a Shard accessible from that Shard — used the same symbol."
"They've been waiting," Aaron said. "For three hundred years, their version of the Tenders has been waiting for us to respond."
"Or they gave up waiting," Sirath said. "And started pushing on the formation network to get our attention."
"Because we stopped responding when Aela died," Aaron said.
"She was the only one with spatial perception sufficient to initiate contact. When she died, the channel closed." Sirath's voice was quiet. "And they've been doing the only thing they could think of to reopen it — making noise at the boundary."
"And we read it as threat," Aaron said.
"That is how threats typically look," Sirath said, "when you don't have the context to read them as anything else."
He read the rest of the book in one sitting.
Aela Voss had, over the following twenty years of contact attempts, developed a rudimentary communication system with the man in the adjacent Shard — who was, she eventually concluded, himself a spatial mage of considerable advancement, sufficiently attuned to the Shard boundary to achieve reciprocal perception. She called him the Greensider, which was her private notation for the adjacent world based on its sky colour.
She had learned approximately forty symbols from the Greensider's communication system — enough to exchange basic concepts. "Here. There. Other. Same. Danger. Safe. Time." She had begun to work on more complex exchanges when her contact was interrupted by a war in her own world that forced her to relocate, and by the time she found the boundary point again, the Greensider was no longer there.
She spent forty years looking for him, or anyone else in the adjacent Shard, at seventeen different boundary points across the empire.
She found nothing.
At the end of the book, in a handwriting slightly less precise than the earlier text — the writing of someone older, or tired — she had written:
"The Greensider showed me the symbol as a greeting. Or so I believed. I have since come to wonder whether it was also a warning. The symbol, in the contact system I had begun to develop, can carry the meaning: I am here. But it can also carry: I have found you. The distinction, in our system, is contextual.
I did not ask which he meant. I assumed the first because I wanted to believe it.
In thirty years of attempting to re-establish contact: nothing. The Greensider may be dead. The boundary may have shifted. Or he may have decided, after thirty years of silence on my end, that we are not worth the effort.
I am leaving this record for whoever comes next. I am leaving the painting for the same reason. If you are reading this, you are looking. That is more than most people manage.
Do not make my mistake. When contact is established: ask."
— — —
Aaron set the book down in the morning light and looked at the mountain below.
"Forty symbols," he said.
"Forty base concepts," Sirath said. "Enough to ask."
"The symbol they left last night —" Aaron looked at the copied symbol in his notebook. "Two concentric circles with a line through them, and the asterisk at the end." He thought. "Based on Aela's system: 'I am here.' Or: 'I have found you.'"
"Yes."
"I need to respond."
"Yes," Sirath said. "You do."
"The problem is that the contact point is the formation node, and I can't activate it the way they activated it from their side." He thought. "Or can I?"
"The node is designed to record disturbances. It is not designed to transmit. But the formation array it connects to is designed to maintain spatial coherence across the Shard boundary — which means it communicates, constantly, in the language of spatial mathematics." A pause. "If you can manipulate the coherence signal — insert a pattern into it deliberately — you might be able to send something across the boundary."
"Can I?"
"At rank three?" A pause. "The coherence signal is at the array level. It's extremely delicate. You would need —" Another pause. "You would need an artifact. Something that can act as an intermediary — amplifying your control to the point where you can make precise adjustments without disrupting the array's fundamental function."
Aaron looked at the blue crystal sitting on his cave's work ledge. He had purchased it properly from the academy materials cabinet a week ago, with a month's cultivation stone allowance.
"Then I know what my first artifact needs to do," he said.
"Yes," Sirath said. "I suppose you do."
"Is this all connected?" Aaron asked. "The crystal being in the materials cabinet. Lysander's books. The painting being preserved. The formation node in the east forest." He looked at the crystal. "Did someone leave all of this for exactly this moment?"
A very long pause.
"I built the network," Sirath said. "I placed the formation nodes. I designed the crystal lattice material — the academy sourced a specimen of it, which suggests they knew to look." He paused. "But Aela Voss added the communication layer. And the Tenders preserved what I couldn't anticipate them preserving." His voice was very quiet. "It is not one person's plan. It is the accumulated work of many people across centuries, each adding a layer, none of them knowing the full shape."
"Like a relay," Aaron said. "Each generation passing it to the next."
"Yes." Sirath's voice was something Aaron hadn't heard from him in quite this form. "Yes. That is what it is."
Aaron held the blue crystal in his hand. It was warm. The spatial lattice inside it caught the morning light and scattered it in patterns across his palm.
"Then let's not drop it," he said.