It had been a boring week since leaving the underground library. The desert’s shifting sands seemed to stretch infinitely towards the horizon. We followed the stars, and seemed to be heading in the right direction, but made no progress. Every ten paces, the wind blew, and our footsteps were wiped clean, returning the desert to a blank slate. We were able to subsist, but food was scarce: we rationed the meager meat of the few stilt-legged desert rats we managed to catch, and drank from the unique, twisted Garibo cacti that were the desert’s namesake. On the ninth night, I grew anxious; the cacti would cause intense diarrhea if used as a substitute for water too many days in a row. I went to bed restless and unable to sleep, staring at the roof of my tent as desert birds called out eerily in the night.

Very early the next morning I awoke to the sounds of chatter outside my tent. I had slept poorly, and felt around in the dark for my knife before poking my head out. The first signs of the rising sun were only faint traces on the horizon.

To my surprise, there was no threat. Romulus had gotten off to an early start, as he liked to do, and had already started a roaring fire. He was speaking with an enormous man I’d never seen before, who wore the flowing white clothes. The man did not look native to the desert lands; his complexion was extremely fair, and I was puzzled as to what he was doing out here. He was sweating profusely, with curly hair that poked out from beneath his turban, and tiny round-frame glasses that were so odd they suggested he was either pretentious or completely oblivious to his looks.

“Let me introduce you to Rigere,” said Romulus. “Believe it or not, he’s from Lateros Island!” This was a small island less than a day’s journey from Embryon Isle.

Rigere and I shook hands. He had a firm handshake, and despite my earlier misgivings, I found him instantly trustworthy. After reminiscing about old regional haunts of Lateros, like the swimming hole beneath the Cartwheeling Waterfall, I was curious.

“So,” I said, “What brings you out here?”

“A client here in Tuaqie. And several along the way that I manage to fit in every so often when I’m traveling. Typically I do estate law — family squabbles over the will and that kind of thing.”

He went through the list of places he’d traveled, occasionally pausing to wipe his brow from sweat. There were many recognizable names from our journey, including Orphalese and even Walden’s cabin.

“Wow,” said Romulus. “So you’ve been walking nearly the same path, this entire time! That’s amazing!”

Our sense of kinship with the portly Rigere grew significantly. He understood where we had come from.

“Ever been to Tuaqie before?” he asked.

We said no — that actually, we hadn’t ever heard of it.

“I’m not surprised. It’s a secretive city. I’m just about to head in myself, if you’d like me to bring you. I guess it’s nearly impossible to find, if you don’t know what to look for.”

We leapt at the chance for adventure, and hopefully a decent meal.

Within a month Rigere had introduced us to his client, who turned out to be a minor prince of Tuaqie. We stayed as houseguests in a beautiful villa off of the palace. This was incredible, but the novelty soon wore off as Romulus and I noticed something strange: we were basically powerless to do anything other than what Rigere suggested.

It’s difficult to explain, but it must have had something to do with his persuasiveness as an attorney. The three of us would meet for breakfast in the morning, as we usually did, and I would start to tell Romulus and Rigere of my idea to head to the library and read fiction, or maybe wander in the square. “Hmm,” Rigere would say in his booming voice, cutting me off before I could say my plans aloud, “I’m not sure about that. Shouldn’t you be working on a map to document all of your travels, so you can benefit those back in Embryon Isle? Otherwise, you’re really wasting your potential! Reading fiction all day?”

And he would go on to provide an unassailable set of reasons why his suggestion for me to work on the map was right, and my decision to head to the library for fiction was wrong.

I’d see his rationale, which I reluctantly accepted as true, and I’d drag myself with a sense of dread and duty towards map-making. I knew his suggestion was right, that I should work on a map, and so when this proved difficult, I felt even worse about myself. The whole thing was even more confusing, because sometimes Rigere reasoned with me; other times he yelled and berated, and still other times he praised me. But for some reason, maybe the esteem that living at the prince’s villa in Tuaqie had given us, we could not seem to move on from Tuaqie. Nor did we even want to – we welcomed Rigere’s guidance.

But one day, for some reason, I ignored his advice. It did not matter to me that he was right; I just did what I wanted, and I headed into the palace, towards the library, to find some fiction. In the library, I was surprised to see Rigere already there. He shook hands with a seedy-looking rat of a man, and the two of them walked into the stacks of the Tuaqie Royal Library. I followed them, before feeling a tap at my shoulder. It was Romulus, who’d evidently had the same idea as me today. Rigere had tried to shame him today into writing a column for the local news, but today, Romulus wasn’t having it.

After tiptoeing into the back stacks, we watched the pair stop and look around cautiously.

“What are they doing?” muttered Romulus.

They were talking, and we crept closer to hear, when something terrible happened.

Our eyes bulged out of our heads as we saw Rigere bend over backwards, at a 90 degree angle, his enormous body opening up like a hinged box. To our shock, this revealed a smaller man inside. No muscle or blood or guts poured out of what had formerly been Rigere; the internal man smiled, as if elated to reveal the truth to his rat-like accomplice.

The internal man stepped outside of Rigere, leaving the hollowed shell of the original, larger man crumpled on the ground like a molted skin.

“I’ve been engineering situations this whole time,” boasted the inner-man. “The pair of them have no idea. I make them focus on my definition of the truth, beating them into submissions with arguments. This makes them forget whether something is useful to them. You see that husk on the ground? That fatter skin contains the expectations of society. But this inner form, the real me? I’m the expectations of the individual. I take what each of them is most afraid of, and I start an inner war. Those two hacks out there, trying to make something of their journey? They don’t stand a fucking chance. And no kidding that we’ve been on the same path together: I’ve been tailing them since Embryon Isle. And they’ll do whatever I want, at my beck and call.”

“You’re a cold one,” said the skinnier man.

Suddenly Romulus’s bag caught fire, and the shrieking cry of a baby bird echoed through the stacks. The inner-man stepped back into the skin of Rigere, re-hinging it, turning back into Rigere once more, yelling, “Help!”

Rigere seemed to instantly sniff us out. When a group of guards stepped immediately from the shadows, he pointed straight at us before we had time to react. “That’s them! Get them!”

And so we fled into the stacks, pulling open the nearest door and plunging deeper down into the maze of the underground palace.