Wait, so all Ian had to do was just close his eyes and he could go to the inner world?

Yes, Lilly assured him. This was something he had always been able to do, he’d just forgotten how.

Wait, he’d forgotten?

She thought back to their early childhood. It was a period of his life that was too hazy for him to recall any details of, but she did, partially. He’d spent a lot of time there, actually, but there was an event when he was 11 that had caused him to repress it.

So he really had been repressing memories. That… was unnerving. Apparently traumagenic systems were the most common among the plural community and it wasn’t hard to see why. Coping with large amounts of stress during early childhood would do that. This led to segmenting memories away from the host, so that they could keep from bubbling over and becoming utterly disabled—to put it in layman’s terms.

He supposed there were probably some skeletons in his head ready to be shaken loose.

Lilly could not deny that.

Um, did she know something that he didn’t?

She knew some basics about the place, enough for her to protect it and to protect Ian from it. She had a job to do as his guardian and it would not do for her to unearth the skeletons. She agreed that based on what he’d learned there were probably skeletons. Not, like, literal ones mind you.

He sighed. There was no putting this off any longer. He needed answers, and it seemed Lilly didn’t have them. So he withdrew from the physical body, as best he could, and recalled the room that he had seen through the portal. He imagined it from that point of view again, with the bed and stonework and orange lighting. But it didn’t seem to click.

Lilly informed Ian that he was doing it wrong. She was standing there waiting for him, she let him know, but he didn’t see her.

It hadn’t clicked for him because it wasn’t the room he was familiar with. He had rebuilt it from scratch in his mind, and it was disconnected from the inner world. It suddenly looked dull and grey.

She offered another method to try to get in. She had him imagine himself laying on his back, on a bed, and he complied. She took his hand in her own.

What he felt was not his hand being held. It felt, to him, like… imagine how sometimes you’ll wake up and you’ve laid on your arm wrong and it’s gone completely numb, but as soon as you give it room to breathe it fills with the sensation of needles and static as it wakes up. This is the sensation that ran through his hand, spread up his arm, and then filled his entire body. His entire body was waking up from a long, deep sleep, it seemed.

He worked his body into a sitting position and sensations filled the gap where the pinpricks gradually died. Lilly’s presence next to him, holding onto his hand with her own. The rough fabric of the tunic he wore which he brushed with his other hand. The stale air of the room, which was warm and arid, and smelled just faintly of ash and sulfur. The dryness of his mouth, the knot in his stomach, and the ache of his body after years of unuse and atrophy. He opened his eyes but he couldn’t see anything. He reached his hand up and felt that he had a blindfold tied around his head, so he roughly pulled it off. Removing it had the feel of taking off a hat after a long day, where it couldn’t be felt before but its absence was fresh and prickled at his skin. Bright cyan light filled the room and he had to squint to protect his eyes.

“How are you feeling, Ian?”

He took a deep breath to work his atrophied lungs. There was a weight missing. He looked down and saw a flat chest, small hands. He was the boy.

“I’m a boy,” he said.

He looked around the room. Apart from the lighting, it looked how it did in the hand mirror, but flipped of course. That was always an adjustment. He looked at Lilly, and she appeared far taller than him. She looked the way that he looked in the real world, having grown and matured into a young woman: a look he was beginning to dissociate from himself.

“That’s the way you looked the last time you were here, at least.”

“The last time? I was a boy?”

Lilly smiled helplessly. “I don’t know, you tell me?”

Ian thought about it for a moment, but he didn’t get far. He couldn’t remember his childhood at all. He hadn’t been able to, for as long as he could remember. His first spattering of memories began around high school age, but it wasn’t until college—when he’d gotten away from his family and lived in a college dorm—that he felt his life truly began, and he recalled that era fondly. He had never really questioned this before. It just seemed natural, normal; nobody was really able to recall that much as far as he knew. Sometimes people would pull up photos and it would recall some old memory in them, like some sort of eldritch summoning ritual. He’d left all sentimental items at home when he’d left and didn’t bother with the need to dwell on the past. So he truly had no idea what sort of kid he’d been at eleven years old. The thought to ponder this had simply never occurred to him.

He had repressed this world along with everything else. Seriously, why? What was the deal with all of this, he wondered?

Shaking off his thoughts, he hopped off the bed and walked to one of the windows, gasping at what he saw. There was no life to be seen out there, the ground barren stone that led to an escarpment. And beyond that, only the ocean. Not just any ocean however. It was glowing a radiant blue, and it had no waves, instead bubbling and roiling like magma. The sky was pitch black.

A distant thumping made itself heard, and felt through the floor. Ian jumped at the sound, his heart racing. “What the hell? Is that an earthquake?”

“Nah,” Lilly said, “that’s just Ben.”

He looked around frantically before spotting a gargantuan figure rounding one side of the structure outside. Its huge lizard feet were dripping with the glowing blue goo, stomping forward then stopping before the window. Its head bent down and looked through the window at Ian with an eye the size of his head. It blinked and its pupil dilated.

“B–b–Ben?” Ian stuttered.

Ben nodded and let them know that he would meet them in the dining hall. Then he stood and kept walking, the ground rumbling as he went.

“Alright, you heard the guy, let’s go eat,” Lilly said, gesturing at Ian to follow.

He gulped. “That was a dragon. How…?” He was at a loss for words.

He closed his eyes and closed his mind. He came back to his body in the real world, took a deep breath and held his head. The quiet, cool air of his home greeted him. It was dark. He hadn’t bothered turning the lights on.

That place had felt so real, and yet unreal at the same time. In some ways it had the quality of the dream, where so much of it was outside of his control, unlike his mind’s eye which was a sandbox he could mold to his will. It was controlled by his subconscious.

The worst part was, he felt comfortable while he was there. It was a familiar place. It was a bit overwhelming to see it like that for the first time, but as he thought about it, he wondered why he had never gone there before. It seemed like a nice place to relax and get away from the world. For some reason he had simply been kept from seeing it. Quite literally, too, having worn a blindfold so he would never wake up.

He had so many questions. Who or what had blinded him to this place? What was the deal with Ben, the huge lumbering dragon outside, who seemed to think it could fit indoors? And what else had happened in the past that he couldn’t remember?

It took him a few minutes to calm his nerves and go back inside.

 

Ian didn’t end up needing to follow Lilly the whole way to the dining hall; he somehow instinctively knew the way around the place, and within a few minutes, the three of them were sitting at a long table with plenty of food stacked on trays for them to help themselves to. While he ate, he felt his body heal almost as if by magic, and he soon came back to tip-top shape.

He sat across from Lilly and Ben. Ben, in his human form, looked like a pretty standard dude, not quite like Lia before her transition but maybe like his brother. He was the only one of them who wore glasses, the same pair Ian quit wearing nearly three weeks ago.

It turned out that he was an active presence in Ian’s day-to-day life but Ian was totally unaware of it ‘til now. Much moreso than Lilly, he didn’t care to have his presence known. He apparently took care of a large portion of their working life. Especially during school, it was hard to keep focus and get the assignments done, so he took over many of the unpleasant tasks. In fact, he was the most knowledgeable of the three on many topics. He was the detail-oriented one, the artist, and he had designed much of the inner world himself.

Ian suddenly felt awful. He could hardly believe what they were saying. And Lilly agreed with Ben on a lot of this. Why had she kept Ben’s existence from him? Now he felt like a selfish asshole. All this time, he had attributed their traits to himself. He knew that he was an artist and that he used those skills to make a living. He had memories of himself sketching on a graphics tablet or dragging nodes around in vector programs, but only in fleeting glances. And he thought he was strong like Lilly, could take care of himself on his own, but he couldn’t even face other people without wearing her like a mask.

He hadn’t known he relied on these people so damn much until he’d met them. It had felt before like all his thoughts were his own, before he began learning to differentiate Lilly’s thoughts from his own. Now he was meeting them both face-to-face and it was totally different. He owed them so much. He didn’t know how he could ever repay that.

Just then, he realized with horror that they had just witnessed all of these thoughts. He looked up at the two of them. They both looked down because they were taller—older—than he was, and they had a look of… pity?

He didn’t want to deal with this. He was a worthless host. He needed to make himself useful for once. He ran off before either could protest.

 

Ian let his feet guide him. He had only the faintest idea of where he was going. He knew it was somewhere important.

The torches on the walls glowed with the same blue hue as the ocean of lava outside. It was an interesting color for the place. While the air was kept at a pleasant temperature, he still felt a chill roll down his spine.

He found himself eventually on a spiral staircase downwards. Torches still dotted the wall every half flight but the stones got grimy and gross the further down he went.

When he finally came to a landing, it was made of dirt. The stonework was no longer decorative, only purely functional. He stepped through an archway into a holding room of sorts. There were benches and a table. A heavyset man dressed in chainmail was guarding an iron portcullis that led further into the dungeon. He was still as a statue, seeming to be absent from his own body, before Ian approached and life returned to his eyes.

“Hoy! Who might you be, young’un?” he asked, adjusting his grip on his spear.

“I’m, uh. My name is Ian. I’m the host of our body,” Ian replied.

“You? The host?!” His eyes boggled. “Pfahahaha! Don’t kid yourself, boy!”

Ian frowned. “What does that mean? How many people can there possibly be, here?”

“Oh, about half a dozen or so, I’d say. There’s the Knight and Cleric who run the show upstairs. I stay down here and watch over the two chilluns what cause trouble. You as well. You used to reside here too, Prince, before I noticed that you’d never, ever woken up. So I took you up and plonked you down somewhere nice to rest.”

“Oh… huh.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “God, that’s more than I expected. So who are you?”

The man pounded a fist on his chest proudly. “You can call me the Warden!”

Ian gasped. “Does that mean this place is a prison?!”

“Maybe so, but I do more taking care of them than anything. You may even visit, if you like.” He waved his hand and the portcullis rattled its way up into the ceiling, with him stepping aside to let Ian enter.

Ian nervously slunk past, wary of the large man. He didn’t exactly trust him but he doubted that he could be locked inside if he didn’t want to. So he ventured into the dungeon and looked around.

It was dimly lit inside, two torches on the left wall flickering with the same blue as everywhere else. On the right were lined up three cells. This was actually just a prison!

The first cell he looked into, he saw a girl asleep on a cot, facing away from him. There weren’t any actual accommodations inside; it was the bed, and that was it. No toilet, no sink, no table or chairs. It was a cot with a pillow and what looked like an okay-ish blanket. What she could see of the girl was that she had straight black hair.

He moved on to the cell that was second closest to the door and saw a boy around his age sitting on his cot. He was hunched over and staring at the ground in that detached, still way that Warden was doing earlier, but then in the same way he woke up from his daze and looked up at Ian. He was a bit shorter and scrawnier than Ian and his head was shaved bald. He had a resolute look in his eyes, unsurprised that Ian had showed up. He slowly stood up and walked to the cell door, opening it. Ian hadn’t noticed but it had no lock so it seemed like these alters could leave if they wanted to.

The boy put his hand on Ian’s shoulder and a touch of remorse entered his expression. “I’m deeply sorry that you’ve had to see this.”

“Uh-huh…? Okay. Well, my name is—”

“Ian, yes. I heard. Warden likes to call me the Waif.”

“Waif? So like an orphan? But alters don’t have parents, I thought?”

“Ugh. Yeah, but it’s a symbolic thing.” He balled up his fists in front of him angrily. “I hate that guy. He’s such a dipstick.”

“Wait, what do you mean, ‘symbolic?’”

He waved his hand, as if to point out something obvious. “Everyone else cast me out, so I’m stuck just kinda doing my own thing down here. Stewing in my own thoughts. Not much else to do.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Behhh I was, what, thirteen at the time?” He hemmed and hawwed for a moment. “Yeah. I don’t know how long it’s been. Time moves strangely here.”

“Our body is 25 now.”

“Oh?” Waif sighed. “That’s a long time. Heck.”

“What’s it like…? I mean, you don’t feel like it’s been years, but you know you’ve been here a while. So what…?”

“Yeah, no, that’s the problem. I’m here so that I can stew on my mistakes specifically. It’s not fair!” He kicked a pebble and sent it flying across the room. “And I’m powerless. I’m not allowed to exert any power, specifically. I sometimes feel myself being roused into the—what do you call it, meatspace?” Ian nodded. “And it sucks, it hurts. But the Warden pulls me back here before I get to do anything. He…” His eyes looked haunted. “I don’t want to say what he does. It’s unpleasant. It’s not like I want that to happen, but what am I gonna do? Sometimes it just happens.”

“Why do you get ‘roused into the meatspace?’”

“Embarrassment. Cringe. Despair. It witnesses something horrible and makes me relive a memory.”

“A memory?”

“You don’t wanna know.” Waif turned and walked back into his cell.

So this was it, Ian thought. Waif was the… the skeletons that he had buried. Or maybe it wasn’t him in particular committing the burying? Either way, it was pretty obvious that Waif was a trauma holder.

So he followed Waif into the cell. He had nothing else to do. Lilly and Ben could take care of the body while he was gone, and it’s not like she would let him continue pursuing transition anytime soon. And it’s not like he would be able to catch up to Lia, who had two weeks of experience over him—he’d seen her improve her presentation drastically already and he couldn’t imagine getting that far with the way things were.

 

Hours passed and the lighting dimmed to a shade of purple. The torches lining the interior and the roiling magma outside always matched: a reminder to those within the world of the emotional state the body was in.