• Once, when we'd found that there was more to us than we ever thought could exist.
• Twice, when we'd seen that the doorway was ajar.
• Thrice, when we saw that no reason could be provisioned for their properties.

And so the great mirror-cage device now unveiled to us showed us worlds we could not touch after worlds we could not touch.

And we lay, enraptured in the stream of fleeting possibilities that we would reach out to grasp even as they dissolved before we ever made contact.

So the world grew fractured and splayed outward, backward, the burning shadow of a future that could not exist eating away at the present more with each year.

Then, in the ashes of the Last War, there were certain things that remained - fortunate byproducts, born only from the great misfortune of our times.

By then, a false sun blazed down on half our planet, turning our flesh foreign and new right with waters the color of pale sulphur.

So we were not only the remnants, nor were we in any way something lesser or meaner than what had come before us.

And beneath the sea, without light, without sound, still, those now ancient beacons glowed.