Pitch black. The kind of darkness where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Where the difference between eyes open and eyes shut is only in how fast your eyes dry out. Where you can see absolutely nothing.

It is an experience usually reserved for spelunkers, deep sea divers and the unfortunate few who get buried alive.

Like Rita.

Her spear twisted, its tip springing out and digging into wall that had blocked the entrance to the alley. At least, she assumed that’s what it did. She couldn’t actually see.

After her fight with the Inquisitor – which she’d won! – the entire alley had sealed up, somehow. Both the entrance back to the street and even the gap above her head through which Aer’s always stationary sun had been visible had had the stone flow like goo, sealing shut and plunging her into absolute darkness.

She’d barely managed to scrape past one disaster, only to be plunged head-first into another. She was sore, blind and if her neck wasn’t one big bruise already, it would be very soon. At least there was one silver lining to this whole debacle.

“What are you trying to do?” a mystified voice in her head asked.

Alice was back.

Ixxy had done it. She’d pulled her back from the brink of being devoured, cut her free from Rita’s mistake and saved her life.

“My spear does a thing,” Rita rasped under her breath as she pulled it free and ran her hand over where the hole was supposed to be.

Nothing. Again. The wall was almost supernaturally smooth under her fingers.

“What thing? Where are we?” Alice asked again.

Her idea had been to punch a sequence of holes in it, slowly digging her way out by carving away at the wall. For whatever reason, her spear wasn’t working. She wasn’t making any progress. Either the tip wasn’t popping out, or the wall was sealing back up the moment she removed it.

Careful not to stub her toe in the dark for the second time, Rita stepped back. “Grailmane. It’s…”

She sighed. She wanted to say that it was a long story, and of course it was. It had been about a week since she had arrived in Grailmane and three weeks since Alice had gotten savaged in the Tree. So much had happened in that time, though. It felt like it had been years.

There was so much she wanted to talk to Alice about, so much she wanted to tell her, about all the things she’d seen and what was going on in the world and… it was just…

Her throat really hurt from where that stupid Inquisitor had tried to throttle her.

“… sorry,” was all she said in the end, gesturing to her neck.

“Okay, yes. I understand. It hurts. Don’t speak. I don’t feel great either. Not sure what happened to me, but I think I’ve been out for a while.”

Rita nodded as she slowly made her way around the edge of her stone tomb, feeling against the wall with a hand and a few of her feet.

“The old man. He seemed human?”

Rita nodded again. “Yes,” she croaked.

“Right. Not one of the monsters. More like those people that tried to kill us. The knight and the demon. What did you call them, back in the Tree? Sam and Gore?”

This time Rita shook her head. No. “Samual and Gora,” she croaked again, before coughing.

Damn, she’d kill for some water right about now. Perhaps even literally. Maybe. Probably not.

“Not a friend, though, I’m guessing? He tried to kill us and you stabbed him in the leg.”

Rita shook her head. No, not a friend indeed.

Her loop of the edges of their stone box revealed nothing. No gaps, secret exits or anything else. It was a closed stone box encompassing the entire alley. Nothing more.

Rita slumped against one of the side walls of the alley and slid down to a seating position with her legs curled up to her sides. By this point, she was so tired, and now that the adrenaline was fading, it was all hitting at once.

“Are we in any imminent danger?” Alice asked. “I mean, other than suffocation.”

Rita shrugged and shook her head. It seemed fine, but who could know?

It was ironic. The only reason Alice could even tell what Rita’s response was was because she was inside her head. She could feel how Rita’s body moved, and speak because she was transmitting her speech straight into Rita’s brain, somehow. And yet Rita couldn’t communicate properly because her throat hurt like hell.

If only she could send her thoughts back to Alice in the same way, they could talk without issue. But despite Alice being literally in her head, there was no way…

Wait. Would that work?

Rita closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, she was standing in the same white space where she’d narrowly avoided having Ixxy yank her soul out. Everything was exactly as she’d left it, with the same soft, spiderweb floors and web-covered walls. The only difference was what appeared to be some kind of spider-shaped mummy in the middle of the room, staring blankly into space.

Alice.

Her mental roommate was no longer lying in the middle of the floor, cocooned in webbing. Instead, she was standing upright on all eight legs, covered head to toe in white, silky bandages that bore an almost eerie resemblance to spider webs.

The previously missing parts were especially thickly wrapped, the bandages bulging out around them. It looked like she’d taken the cocoon that Ixxy had cut loose and incorporated it into herself, to facilitate her own recovery.

“R-i-i-i-t-t-a-a-?” a slow, deep voice reverberated through the space at the same time Alice’s mouth moved. She was still staring off into space.

Rita reached out and gently touched Alice on the shoulder where the bandages were thinner. The results were explosive.

The moment her fingers made contact, Alice’s entire body jerked in surprise. From a standing start she launched herself half a meter into the air and a significant distance away, landing heavily on all eight legs.

Her entire body was trembling as she stared at Rita in dumbfounded shock.

“Rita??” she shrieked.

“Umm… yeah,” Rita replied lamely, more than a little surprised by her reaction. “Hi, Alice.”

“Ow, ow, ow, ow… fuck, everything hurts… don’t press so hard,” Alice hissed while Rita fussed over her.

“You seem much better. Surprisingly so,” Rita responded as she gently checked Alice’s injuries.

“Really? This is much better?” Alice asked, lifting an arm that was so thickly wrapped in bandages she could hardly move it.

“Well, yeah,” Rita replied. “Alice, I don’t think you realize how badly off you were. You had pieces missing. Pieces!”

“It couldn’t have been that bad.”

“That leg was not attached to your body!” Rita exclaimed.

Alice glanced down at the indicated leg and it twitched as she flexed it experimentally. It had a thick bulge of wrapping right over the first leg segment.

“How is any of this even possible?” Alice asked, looking around at the strange, white space they found themselves in. “Where even are we?”

“The inside of our head,” Rita replied, still fussing over Alice. “Sort of.”

“Certainly explains all the empty space,” Alice muttered.

Rita paused. “Did you just call me stupid?”

Alice just stared silently at her.

“You realize that you just called yourself stupid too, right? We both share this brain.”

“I didn’t call us stupid, I called you empty-headed,” Alice huffed.

Rita sighed and just shook her head. It was pretty clear Alice was just unsettled. She was grasping for any shred of normalcy, even if it was petty insults. No point in holding them against her.

“Wait, if you’re in here, then who’s flying the plane?” Alice asked when Rita ignored her.

“Flying the…? Oh! You mean, who’s piloting our body? Nobody. We’re still in exactly the same place.”

“And that doesn’t strike you as dangerous?”

“We’re sitting in the dark, in a sealed stone box. What is going to happen?” Rita asked, rolling her eyes.

“I don’t know, what if the walls start closing in?”

“Then we’re dead anyway and I’d rather not see it coming.”

“Rita, I don’t…”

“Look,” Rita said, “we need to talk. Out there, we’re blind and helpless and my throat hurts too much to speak. In here we’re still blind and helpless, but at least I can talk and time moves about ten times faster, so we have more time. Okay?”

Alice sighed. “Okay, fine. What is this place, anyway? Pretty sure we didn’t have spider webs in our brain last time I checked.”

“It formed after we came out of the Tree,” Rita explained. “You know, the big, weird tentacly thing that hurt you? After I bit it, there was this big magical explosion or something and next thing I knew, we were both in here. You remember? You were still awake then.”

“Yeah, vaguely,” Alice replied, looking around. “Mostly I just remember everything hurting. I thought I was dying. You did something and I remember being incredibly sleepy…” she added.

“Yeah, anyway,” Rita quickly went on, “when I bit the thing, all of this magic came flowing out. It was like biting into a water balloon filled with essence. Or possibly a high pressure pipe. I think I used some of that stuff that I sucked up to… I don’t know, create this place? Tear it loose from the Tree? I don’t really know. Things are a little bit… fuzzy.”

“Stuff you sucked up?” Alice asked. “Essence?”

Rita blushed. “Yes, okay? You were right. It’s pretty much confirmed at this point that we can eat magic. Or ‘essence’, as the locals call it. I’ve been having borderline indecent thoughts whenever I’ve seen a vial of the stuff ever since we left the Nightmare.”

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Alice blinked. “And how much have you had since then?”

“Nothing. Turns out, the stuff’s expensive. Way out of my budget. I don’t even have a job yet, I was too focused on getting you back. And I think the local Magelord kind of wants to get his hands on us, so its been a bit risky to wander around too much.”

“Woah, wait, wait, wait,” Alice said, holding up her bandaged hands. “‘Job’? ‘Magelord’? Rita, where are we? Last I knew about, we were in the fucking apocalypse.”

Right. It was easy to forget that Alice had been out for the entire time that they’d had contact with actual civilization.

“Yeah, turns out that was a bit of a local phenomenon,” Rita said sheepishly. “Once you get outside the Tree’s sphere of influence, it’s actually rather nice.”

“Oh, that’s a relief to hear, at least.”

“Also, the world’s a big hollow planet with the sun in the middle.”

There was a moment of silence.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Yeah, if you look up, you can see the entire world curving up at the horizon and just going up, up, up… It’s like standing in a massive, planet-sized bowl. Kinda freaky,” Rita explained.

“W… what?” Alice stuttered.

“Yeah. And the sun’s always directly above you. So night doesn’t exist. The locals don’t even seem to know what the word means, despite the word ‘Nightmare’ being perfectly understandable to them. I suspect it’s a translation issue.”

Alice just stared at her, peering from between the bandages wrapped around her head.

“Yeah, I know,” Rita sighed, sitting down next to Alice. “It was a lot for me to take in at first, too. But I’ve gotten kinda used to it over the past few weeks.”

Alice’s brow furrowed. “’Weeks?’ What do you mean ‘weeks?’ How long have I been out?”

Rita fidgeted awkwardly as she looked upwards, thinking hard. “Umm… about three weeks?”

“THREE WEEKS?”

“Time’s a little hard to judge, what with the no day night cycles, but yeah, round about there. Probably.”

“You managed to survive three weeks without me? I wouldn’t have given you even odds on three hours!” Alice exclaimed, equal parts shocked and amazed.

“Excuse me!” Rita cut back. “I survived just fine, thank you very much! I even made friends and they’ve been helping me adapt to this madness!”

“And yet here we are, sitting in the dark after an old man nearly choked the life out of us, with not a friend in sight.”

Rita opened her mouth to argue and found herself struggling to come up with a response. “He wasn’t that old…” she eventually replied, lamely.

Alice winced as she got up and scuttled over until she was sitting right in front of Rita.

“Right. Now you are going to tell me everything that happened since the Tree. All of it.”

“All of it?” Rita groaned. “For goodness sakes, Alice, it’s three weeks worth…”

“In which nothing at all dangerous happened?”

Rita stared sullenly at her. “No…?”

“Everything!”

“Did you find her?”

Gora shook her head, stepping into what had once been her nice, cozy, enclosed living room. Before some absolute jackasses had blown a Rita-sized hole where her front door used to be.

She’d spent far too long chasing the last of those hooligans. Most were dead, obviously, but to her surprise, at least one had survived the blast of whatever the hell magic it was that Ixxy had tossed up there. He’d probably had stout a wall between himself and the epicenter of the explosion.

The moment Gora’d pushed herself through the rubble blocking the last flight of stairs, he’d taken off, scrambling onto the roof of an adjacent building and booking it before she could get a hold of him.

What had followed had been a merry chase across the rooftops as both of them leapt from building to building.

Several times, the fuckstick had shot more of those odd, crackling, magic bolts at her. While they didn’t seem strong enough to cause any serious injury, generally speaking, since it in no way inhibited her natural, demon-gifted regeneration, Gora had quickly realized that a lucky shot to her head or heart could be fatal. So she’d used cover, tried to avoid open sight lines, and generally tried to make herself as hard a target to hit as possible.

The result was that she didn’t get hit once. Unfortunately, it also meant that she was far enough back that as soon as they made it down to street level, the little fucker quickly lost her in a crowd.

She’d arrived back, irritated and still in pain from the injuries she’d sustained in the fight, to find Samual on the ground, in a bad way. In between coughs of blood, he’d told her about Inquisitor Patrus’s attack and Rita running off to lure him away.

After checking that her cousin was still okay, she’d gone after them.

Unfortunately, it had been almost ten minutes since Rita had set off down the street with Patrus in hot pursuit, and their trail of blood and carnage had quickly dead-ended.

“I think Rita climbed a building,” Gora rumbled as she gazed miserably around the space that used to be her living room. “Their tracks stopped at a sheer wall.”

“Or he killed her,” Samual added grimly.

He was sitting up, at least, which was a huge improvement from when Gora had found him the first time. Then, he’d been lying on his back, barely able to lift his arms.

Though, oddly, without any actual injuries. Gora had chalked it up to magic-stuff.

“No, there was no body,” she replied, shaking her head again. “Or even a sign of a fight. If he’d killed her, I doubt he would have bothered cleaning up after himself, even if he’d had the time. I think she’s off into the city, and our inquisitorial buddy is after her.”

“Oh no,” Timothy said. “Is she going to be okay?”

Gora had found him hiding behind her bed upstairs, unharmed but probably lightly traumatized. Poor kid really wasn’t used to combat.

“No, she won’t,” Samual stated flatly. “This city is a cesspool. A dangerous cesspool. Rita should not be out there unsupervised. What if… what are you doing?”

“Packing,” Gora rumbled simply, throwing a cooking pot into a large burlap sack she’d fished out from inside one of her kitchen cupboards.

“Packing?!” Samual exclaimed incredulously, then winced in pain, clutching his stomach.

“Umm, yeah, shouldn’t we be trying to find her?” Timothy asked awkwardly.

“Are we just abandoning her?” Samual added in a more normal tone.

“Listen!” Gora snapped, slapping her large hand onto the counter. “I owe Rita my life, and I think I’ve gone pretty above and beyond to help her out up till now. But she’s out there and none of us have any idea where. She’ll either find her way back or end up shanked in an alley and there is nothing that any of us can do about it right now, except make sure she has somewhere to come home to.

“My house, in case you haven’t noticed, has a gigantic fucking hole blown in the front and the assholes who did it are still out there. It is not. Safe.”

Timothy sucked in a panicked breath, glancing at the large open hole nervously. “It’s not?”

“No, Timothy. It’s not,” Gora replied tiredly while holding up a bent spoon for a few moments before tossing it aside. “One of them survived. They could be coming back. Unless they were just the first wave and the next lot are already on their way.”

Samual stared grimly at Gora for a few seconds before nodding. He didn’t like it, but he understood. Whoever had attacked them here, while mostly dead now, could have simply been a group of hired killers. It was prudent to assume that her apartment was compromised, even without the large, gaping hole where her front door used to be.

She needed to move; to grab her valuables and lay low somewhere safer until she could figure out who was behind the attack and why.

“Where are you going to go?” Timothy asked as he began helping Gora pack. “The Delver’s Guild?”

Gora shook her head. “These could be friends of that mage that died on the road in. Delver’s Guild would be exactly where they expect me to go. The Guild in the city is rather small and not exactly defensible. Triskellion’s too far.”

“Where then?” Samual asked.

“Last place I’d look for me. My mother’s,” Gora said with a scowl of distaste on her face.

“You aren’t concerned about putting her in danger?” Samual asked, but she just snorted.

“Hah! I’d be that lucky… But no. A little assault like this? Doubt it would get very far. And if it escalates to the point where she can’t protect me then we’re all fucked anyway and I’d get the satisfaction of dragging the old bat down with me.”

“Hey, I always thought your mum seemed nice,” Timothy muttered dourly.

“Yeah, she’s good at that,” Gora scoffed. “’Seeming.’ Don’t worry, Cuz, I’m going to drop you off at your dorm first. Unless you’re worried that walking around with me might paint a target on your back?”

“What? Oh, no, not at all!” Timothy protested. “I’d feel much safer with you around, at least until we get to the Academy District.”

“And what if Rita comes back here?” Samual asked.

“Then she’ll see we’re not here,” Gora replied. “Unless you decide to hang around. Feel free.”

Samual sat quietly for a few moments. “No. You’re right. This place is not safe. And I’m in no condition to fight right now.”

Gora paused. “What? You’re not planning on picking a fight? How unlike you.”

“What are your plans for putting an end to this situation?” Samual asked, ignoring her jibe.

Gora shrugged. “What do you think? Find out who did this, then kill them first before they can do it to me.”

“And if you can’t?”

“Leave town. But if they can’t take me out in an ambush, I’m willing to bet they can’t take me in a fair fight.”

Samual nodded slowly. The logic made sense. The attack on Gora’s home was neither subtle nor particularly competently executed. If whoever had been behind it had more, better resources, such as, for example, a Magelord, odds were they would have sent them instead.

If he had to guess, this was someone shooting their shot and missing. But that was all the more reason to crush them now before they could pick themselves up and try again.

“Alright, I’ll help,” Samual said, causing Gora to freeze on the bottom step of the staircase and turn to stare at him incredulously.

“First, you try to avoid a fight and now you’re just offering to help out of the goodness of your heart. Who are you and what have you done to Samual?” she asked.

“This isn’t free. I’ll help you take down whoever did this, but in exchange I need two favours.”

“To go find Rita?” Gora asked, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

“No, we don’t know where to look. I need another detour. To a blacksmith near the edge of the Pious District. It’s time I got my armour fixed.”

“And you need me to take you there because…?”

He gestured to his legs. “The streets are dangerous and I’m not exactly in a fit state to defend myself right now.”

“Okay, fair enough. And the second favour?”

Samual looked Gora dead in the eyes. “I need to borrow some money…”

The Eyge Stanox was furious.

“My son is dead, the organization that I have built up with my own two hands has been humiliated beyond belief and your suggestion is to cut my losses? Are you insane?”

He was speaking to a floating hole.

That may seem like a strange description, but that was literally what it was. A black spot, hovering in mid-air between three jagged, heavily rune-inscribed and slightly glowing, off-white spires protruding from the ground. They appeared to be made entirely of bone, though what kind of creature had bones of that size was a mystery.

They weren’t exactly symmetrical. Something about their shape and form were ever so slightly… off.

Looking at it made your spine want to crawl up your own back.

The hole itself was no less strange. It seemed to suck in any nearby light, as if reality itself was warped near its event horizon.

Possibly the strangest thing about it, however, was the fact that it replied.

“Clearly your foe has shown herself to be capable,” a deep, sonorous voice emanated from the hole. “And now she knows you are coming. Victory will only come at great cost, and will gain you very little.”

“Gain?” the Eyge Stanox, the leader of the Cult of the Abyss, screamed, throwing the tacky looking cup he’d been drinking from across the room so that it bounced off the far wall of the dank, rocky basement. “Look! Look at what they did to my boy!”

He turned and pointed with one finger off to the side and a vaguely humanoid shape detached itself from the shadows, lumbering awkwardly towards him.

It was a corpse. An animated corpse. One could tell from the shuffling gait, the strange posture that would certainly have been uncomfortable for any creature in possession of a functioning spine, or the fact that it was walking around despite missing its head.

It wore the rather filthy remnants of Academy colours.

“This is not about gaining anything!” the Eyge Stanox screamed, spittle flying from his mouth as he gesticulated towards the late Dalton’s shuffling corpse. “This is about sending a message!”

The hole gave a deep, long-suffering sigh.

“I told you that boy of yours was going to try to throw his weight around with the wrong person one day,” it said sardonically.

“You said the weapons you provided would be sufficient!” the cult leader insisted.

“They were,” the hole stated flatly. “With the element of surprise on your side, they should have been more than sufficient to take down anything short of a Magelord.”

“Well, they failed. And now four more of my most loyal people lie dead,” the cult leader seethed.

“Not your most competent, clearly,” the hole smirked. “I suspect the root cause was a skill issue.”

With a scream of rage, the man picked up a small wooden stool that had been standing nearby and threw it at the obnoxious hole contained by the three janky, jagged spikes.

The moment it passed between two of them, it stopped, hanging frozen in mid air. Then from the tip of the leg closest to the void it began disintegrating, the wood turning into a steady stream of particles that spiraled inwards before twisting and looping around the central black spot in strange and esoteric patterns.

The hole sighed again. “As I’ve told you before, please don’t throw matter into the containment field. Particulate matter destabilizes the connection and makes it more difficult to maintain from my end.”

“What are you going to do to make this right?” the cult leader demanded as he gestured for his headless son to shuffle back to the corner.

“I’m sorry?”

“You heard me. The weapons you provided failed, despite your assurances. That means you did not hold up your end of the bargain. How do you intend to fix this?”

“I’m not sure it is on me…”

“’Utterly idiot-proof,’ weren’t those your exact words?” the Eyge Stanox insisted.

“Yes, but…”

“Then, clearly, a lack of competence was not the issue! Now I insist, as your master, that you give me a way to make that fucking Delver dead!”

“What would you have me do?” the hole responded, a low growl of irritation entering its voice. “You know my limitations. I cannot enter your world until the ritual is fully empowered…”

“As you’ve been reminding me for years! And yet you still cannot even tell me how long it will still take!”

“I told you, this is an incredibly complex process. Bridging the Forbiddance between worlds is not like knocking a tree over a river. I cannot tell you, because I do not know. Soon. However, every time you demand my assistance for nonsense like this, it takes some of the energy I’ve been putting aside for this great work, thereby putting us behind schedule.”

“A schedule you cannot tell me,” the cult leader scoffed, shaking his head.

“Soon. Progress is being made, that much I can say. More than that you would not understand, yet.”

The Eyge Stanox took a deep breath, rubbing the bridge of his nose as he sought to calm himself.

“Enough word-games,” he stated. “I am instructing you, as per our agreement, to figure out a way that we can kill Gora the Destroyer. And that is the end of it.”

There was a sudden, surprised pause from the hole.

“Did you say… Gora?”

“Yes?” he snapped. “I’m sure I’ve told you before. She’s the Delver we’ve been talking about.”

“You never… gave me the name,” the voice replied, its whole demeanor suddenly changed. “You should have mentioned this earlier. No wonder your people failed.”

“You said the weapons would be sufficient for anything short of a Magelord! Why would the identity of the Delver make a difference?” the cult leader snarled, his fists tightening in frustration.

“That does not matter,” the hole spoke. “I will assist you. And this time I will make sure the incompetence of the people following you are no obstacle…”