Getting Amani back to Rissa and calmed down took a while even though Serenity and Amani took one of Ita’s portals back. Convincing her that it was fine if she didn’t accompany him the rest of the way to the Deep Gate took even longer. It was late enough that Rissa told Serenity to wait until morning.

He probably would have anyway. Well, he’d at least have waited until after dinner.

As it was, it was morning the following day when Serenity and Ita finally left camp. This time, Ita wasn’t silent as they traveled; she sang. Serenity had heard a few of her songs on their travels, but Ita chose a new one for this trip. The Sterath had a lot of songs about heroes (mostly dead), wars, and their Shameless Ones. This particular song showed that Ita didn’t completely remember it, as she occasionally missed or repeated a section, but she remembered enough for Serenity to get the idea of the story.

It was a song about the lost Sterath who became Tranquil Conviction. It was a strange song to Serenity’s ears, something like a triumphant dirge. It lauded his successes and power while mourning the sacrifices he made.

After a passage where Ita sang about a battle between Sterath Clans that was won by the treachery of one side, treachery that was defined only as praying to Tranquil Conviction and following his commands to win, Serenity stopped in the corridor and turned to Ita. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

Ita froze and seemed shocked. “I would never …” She trailed off as he kept watching her. After a moment, she lowered her head. “There are no songs about you. It is wrong. I should be singing your songs, but the songs of the Shameless you defeated are the closest I can manage.”

That wasn’t at all what Serenity expected. “There are songs about me. They just aren’t very good,” Serenity admitted. There were dozens of songs that at least mentioned his name and more than a few that attempted to tell a story around him. There were even words to the theme song of that terrible movie about the Battle of Denver.

The admission was almost immediately followed by the realization that he’d made a mistake. Ita was going to want to hear them now.

“Sing them to me!” Ita’s glee confirmed his fears; Serenity was doomed to hearing about his “heroic” exploits in song.

Serenity shook his head and started forward again. “I’ll … I know. Ask Rissa when we get back. I’m sure she has a playlist of them.” They’d be embarrassing and cringeworthy but they’d at least not be painful to listen to otherwise. “She’ll show you how to listen to them whenever you want.”

Ita bounced along beside Serenity, clearly happier than before. Serenity wasn’t thrilled, but at least Ita was happy. After a few minutes, she started singing again. It was another song about Tranquil Conviction, but this time it was about a war between the Sterath and the Empire. Serenity suspected the Empire had considered it a local brushfire even though it involved two Sterath Clans and three worlds; the Empire was ridiculously large.

The song wasn’t over when they reached the petrified wolfman.

Whether or not it was over when they passed the fourth didn’t matter; Ita stopped. She wasn’t unaffected by the evidence of past violence, though she was far less bothered than Amani.

A few steps after Serenity passed the fourth stone body, he finally saw what had to be the Deep Gate. Unlike the rest of A’Atla, it wasn’t plain and unadorned stone. Instead, it was a stone block carved with a bas relief of a literal gate. The gate had symbols on it; some, like the snake-headed woman that had to be a gorgon, Serenity recognized from mythology. Others were completely unknown, though he thought he recognized a couple of them from his travels after he left Earth.

It didn’t have the space for a warning symbol like the ones on A’Atla’s other doors, but Serenity didn’t think it needed it either. Not anymore. The gate was damaged; it looked like someone had deliberately melted it to force it to stay closed. Serenity’s guess was that that meant it had opened at some point during the fighting, then been forced shut and sealed. There were other options, but that seemed the most likely explanation for why there was evidence of fighting outside the door and yet it was closed.

The only slightly less likely option was that it was melted shut to prevent the inhabitants from being released after an attack from the outside. Serenity couldn’t completely discount that option, but it was telling that the wolfmen who were frozen standing fell facing a wall or towards the gate while the ones who were petrified while running were headed away from the gate. With only four examples, it wasn’t even close to definitive, but it would serve as a guess.

There was no sign of any Night Fire.

Should he go through the Gate?

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Serenity could leave it for another time or another person, but that wasn’t his way. Not when he had the time and this was his father’s territory, at least. He did conduct a quick search of the surrounding rooms first. They were clearly a guardpost. The records might prove interesting to someone, but a quick glance told him that if they held information on the prisoners’ abilities, it was scattered. Serenity suspected it wasn’t there at all.

The only useful thing Serenity found was a box of mana-suppression cuffs. Most were made to fit around a prisoner’s hands or ankles, along with chains to make them difficult to remove, but some were clearly built for nonhuman physicalities. Serenity expected that he could get out of them without any trouble; his shapeshifting didn’t use mana the same way as most spells. He might well be able to get out of them without shifting; his mana control was good enough to contest simple tools like these.

He wasn’t going to try. He might have if they were pristine, but there was no point now. Most of the cuffs were nonfunctional, with enchantments that had degraded significantly from time. The few that were functional probably wouldn’t be after even a minor attempt to cast through them.

The only reason they were useful was that they were enchanted items that he didn’t think Earth had yet. Items that would stop people with lesser skills from using mana-empowered Skills or spells could be very useful. They could also be abused, but so could many other things.

The one thing that was completely missing was any sign of what happened after the fight outside the Deep Gate. Serenity could only assume that there wasn’t time to leave anything behind. Not that there was really a reason to; how could they know they wouldn’t be coming back?

That meant it was time to move forward. If the Deep Gate held anything like what the Lost Vault held, he wanted to know.

The first place to check was A’Atla’s controls. It took a little digging, but he was familiar enough with them now that it didn’t take long. This was deep enough into the damaged area that he’d missed the warnings, but they appeared to be about damage to the wall around the Gate from the fusion process. That was impressive; A’Atla’s materials were very strong and this area did seem to be made of stronger than normal stone.

Serenity estimated it at about Tier Ten, though material Tier was always hard to estimate. How a material behaved when it was sufficiently mana-infused to appear on a high-Tier world could be odd. Strength wasn’t even close to the only property that could change.

The odd thing was that the Gate itself didn’t appear on the plans. Instead, there was a gateway that looked like an open latticework. It reminded Serenity of the bars on a prison cell; perhaps this entire area was designed for secure storage of some sort. The question was whether it was designed to keep dangerous things in or to keep useful things safe from dangers outside; Serenity couldn’t tell which.

What he could tell was that he was going to have to break things if he wanted to get through the Deep Gate.

Serenity found he didn’t mind that. Destruction was easy and this was safe destruction. It was one of the reasons he liked delving; it wasn’t complicated. There wasn’t anything complicated about opening a door either. Sure, sometimes it was difficult and other times it had consequences, but either way it was just opening a door. This one was going to require significant magic to crack, especially if he wanted to avoid damaging the carvings, but it was easy.

…why didn’t he just teleport past it?

Serenity wanted to smack himself when he came up with the idea of teleporting. With his Affinities, it would be easier and cheaper. It would probably be faster and it would definitely have a lower risk of damaging anything he didn’t want damaged. It would also leave the Deep Gate welded in place to protect the area if there was something dangerous in there after all. The only thing it wouldn’t do was let him relieve his aggravation by breaking something.

Serenity was grumpy with himself as he quickly put together the runework for a basic detection and ranging rune. He’d tuned it for air quality and presence rather than anything else, though he did tie in a few other basics like temperature and a general check for some basic toxins; he couldn’t easily check for life, but there was a resonance with Death mana for anything that could kill. It was weak and almost never useful, but it was enough to let him fake it despite his terrible Solid and Vapor Affinities. They were also used and were in many ways more important, unfortunately, but including even a little tie to Death helped the cost.

He needed to know that there was space to teleport into anyway.

There was plenty of room. The air was fine, though the results indicated that it was probably a bit stale and dusty. That was very different for A’Atla; it must not have been covered in water.

The other thing that the runes told him, simply by the fact that they worked, was that there were no protections on active spellcasting, at least not the way he did it. That was interesting; it meant that either they’d decayed with time or some other method was used to prevent prisoners from simply leaving. If it turned out that he was wrong, he had ways to get a message out and there definitely was equipment that could, with time, get through the door. Serenity didn’t think that was a real concern, but it was good to know that even unlikely contingencies were covered.

Serenity told Ita what they were doing, then teleported both of them past the Deep Gate. It was dark, unlike the other tunnels in A’Atla, but Ita switched on a bright light she’d apparently thought to carry with them. Without her, Serenity would have been required to either do without light or pull something out of his Rift. Either could be dealt with.

The first thing Ita’s light fell on was a body. Unlike the ones on the other side of the door, this one wasn’t covered in armor; instead, whatever clothing it had once worn had turned to a layer of colored dust that scattered at Ita’s sneeze. Like the bodies on the other side of the door, it had been turned to stone. This one looked like a young man with his head turned to look over his shoulder, his face frozen in an expression of terror.

Well, there was one other difference. This stone body had several clear bites taken out of it.