My eyes flash wide in horrified realization as I—quietly as I can—rattle off, “Te! Don’t let those tendrils anywhere near the magic pocket or any of your packs! For anyone not part-Fae, Tiktik said, ‘at best, nothing will happen, and you don’t want to know at worst.’ It’s, it’s a ‘Twixt tear, I’m almost positive. How fast can you get to Solace, if I told you that I was one hundred percent positive that right now, you could survive ascending through the Worldstorm, as long as you told no-one about it?”

After some quick calculations, Te guesses, “If you’re sure, and if I can hit max speed, then maybe about ten to fifteen minutes maybe? I’m not sure the exact heading as the crow flies from this far out. Why?”

Do I do this? Can I do this? Should I do this? What if it’s a realm-tear to someplace other than the ‘Twixt? Or what if the ‘Twixt rules operate differently here, and time passes in a way I don’t expect? Te said there are multiple people to save. Or, well, mutated broodmothers, whatever horrific changes that that entails.

Before I can contemplate more, My Wings quietly, somberly adds, “I, I can’t tell which one is her, the mate, Jatrisiahl. They’re all… Nyssa didn’t say they’d be this bad. I don’t think Nyssa even *knew* they were this bad. What, what should I do?”

Hoping that these dragons either don’t overhear me, or don’t know the acronym, I encode it quickly, “Balthazar Relishes Thomas.”

Te’ll understand BRT. She’s quick on her feet and in her mind. She can rest assured that I’ll be right there ay to the ess to the ay to the pee. Alright Reggie, every last charge in Claiomh Solais, except enough to keep it from nuking itself out of existence, a non-spelliform empowered fire rune and frost rune. Summon the biggest body for FFS to manifest in you’ve ever summoned. While doing that, toss out every last consumable in your pack, gear FFS up in magical equipment. The only thing we’re not using is the SP in the Cosmic Roundsheath, and charges of Ravenporting.

Should we add undead to the chaos? Eh, what the hell, why not. There’s plenty of corpses around. The stories the survivors tell around the campfires tonight, are going to be either terrifying, epic, or just so dumb. Here ya go everyone, have fun fighting your dead comrades! Wow, that’s, that’s just a horrific thought Reggie.

Just, like, wow pal, that’s messed up. That’s dark. Dot dot dot. Oh well. Anyway, use up every last use of daily abilities, and go into unsafe SP. We need to clear a path for ourselves now, and catch up to Teuila, and dissuade anyone from following us, or even knowing that we’re off the battlefield. Also, did you just subvocally mentally narrate a mental ellipses by saying dot dot dot? Maybe.

Good freakin’ gravy this brain is fried. Mm, some good gravy would be—have I ever tasted gravy? Blinking, stunned, I can’t recall if I should or shouldn’t know the taste of gravy. Maybe focus on your exit strat Rej ol’ pal. Yeah. Yeah, you’re probably right.

Hopefully no one from last night saw the smaller version of this trick. Gladly paying the SP from the staff to coax FFS to this side of the veil between realms, I fill them in on the plan in an instant as our bodies and minds connect during the transfer. Same thing, stay alive, cause chaos, enjoy the ambient mana. To make it more convincing, I hand over Frostburn and Riptide to FFS, while they’re part of me during the transfer. Thankfully in that moment they technically are a Shellcracker, and can receive the soulbound equipment.

Lighting myself aflame, increasing the blaze to immense proportions, I utilize the void portion of my Honoris Causa to wipe my presence from the battlefield as FFS takes my place. For all the world, I appear to be a towering anthropomorphic flame, wielding my equipment, now enlarged. Only, that’s not me. I’m no longer aflame, I’m just a Reggie. Pft. Snrk. Heheh.

My Latent, “Nothing,” hides my presence as I flex my stealth skill from Can’Z’aas. Shapeshifting my flesh to have chromatophores and iridophores, I alter my skin tone, shifting it to literally blend in with my surroundings at a rapid pace. Urgh, flexing my flesh about my entire body in minute miniscule pigmentation changes at a microscopic instant by instant level is a whole new level of pain when all my nerve endings are screaming on fire.

Behind me, as I make my escape, FFS remains evasive, but strikes decisive blows against the ancients, as my little mini undead army rushes their former comrades. Thanks friend. Enjoy the mana while you can. Cast your senses out Reggie. Figgure out where this den is. It’s chilly, and damp. The moisture isn’t frozen, so Terrorzin isn’t right there.

Where is—he’s plotting. He was hoping the five thousand, the high commanders, and the silt-odilians would be enough, but he’s wise enough to plan for if it wasn’t. He’s setting and staging rallying points for if he has to fall back behind the might of the rest of his horde. He was fairly certain he wouldn’t need to do that, before the first engagement. That’s why it wasn’t already in place. I’m sure he thinks that doubling up on us during his next offensive should be enough.

While I hope he’s wrong, it’s a tough call at this point. Depending on Lil and Lucky today means we can’t rely on them tomorrow. They need to keep up with the evacuation routes and bunkers. That’ll be as close to resting as they can really get, besides a bit of sleep. With Farzhis ill, Induul nowhere to be found again, Illy having been deployed in stealth ops most of the day, and Veril soloing siege engagements, the Dormir are essentially tapped out, and down for a day or more.

The Vivant—Gulping back a sob, I clench my eyes tightly. The Vivant is already down Orthral. Permanently, because of the Evil Claws. Gilmeshtu is in more or less peak condition. Prinrin was wrecked to $%17, but is hopefully being made to rest up by her daughter Miraina. Fenric seemed okay’ish. We might be able to have the Vivant at our sides tomorrow.

It’ll be me again, obviously, Teuila, and, well, maybe the Vivant. Most of the Spellknights seem alright, especially Yui and Yuri, since they were around for all of those daily-use sorcerous ability enchantments that got transferred through the hivemind. But it’s hard for more than two Spellknights to be in any engagement, because I need to be able to levitate my allies out of the way of enemy attacks, as well as my own. So me, Te, the Vivant, Yui, Yuri, probably Shiz and Zelshiz, as long as they didn’t get worn down too much at the second chokepoint today.

Are Shaylon and Boetah okay? Can they recuperate in their hardened Shield and Aegis forms? Can they nap in them? Can we rely on them being at every chokepoint from here on out? Or have I foolishly tapped them for the entire rest of the war, and now they need to lumber slowly back to Solace, the long land route, in order to make it back in time for the big fight?

Is that enough to hold out against ten thousand foes? What if Terrorzin manages to get back to his camp, organize them, and send them before I get at least a partial night’s sleep? We’ve shaken things up, and sent a lot into disarray throughout the column, but he is an eons old tyrant king. I’m not counting on him being utterly useless and stupid at commanding his own forces. What if my estimates are wrong, and he holds out until he can cluster the entire remaining thirty thousand, with some sort of power that demolishes chokepoints, like those plasma balls?

Accidentally cracking my head fairly hard against the lip of an overhang, I rattle my skull. I’m getting close to where Nyssa described the broodmothers’ den being. There are still some guards about, like Te said, and the reason she needed to engage in the first place. But oddly they give the den a very wide berth. Sneaking past them when they’re so spread out works out well enough for now. I don’t have the speed to escape the situation if someone notices my camouflage. Hell, at this point, I’d be hard-pressed to survive just getting away from Terrorzin’s column.

The name of the game, after all, is survival while buying time for Kinzul. It’s really all down to our Lady, my love, my wife. She needs the entire week, and we’ve got to give it to her, one way or another. There is no way she can cultivate enough dragonforce any faster than that. Even that, like she said, she’ll be sacrificing so much, so many centuries worth of her life, just dissipated, lost in the conversion process.

If we’re lucky, tomorrow, Lucky will have some of the advance bunkers, the false ones, complete. Hopefully Littlebit’s getting her bomb-making groove on and done. Reggie. Shush, I’m trying to strategize here. Reggie. I said shush. Reggie! What!? Are you ready in the slightest, to witness the kind of horror that could make Teuila beg and plead for your directions on what to do? The kind of horror that could make Teuila believe she might not be able to save someone?

My lower lip quivers as tears well in my eyes. Shut up, me. I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about it. Obviously. If, if what Nala said… You mean about spilling forth into a timeless realm from some cosmic interdimensional, or uh, pan-dimensional womb? Obviously I mean that. What sort of mutations, what pains and paralysis could Terrorzin have inflicted on someone, to have their—stop. Don’t speculate. Don’t distract. Just go.

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Follow the damp, the dark. The near-supernatural chill. That feeling? That tingling creeping down your spine? Don’t ignore it, but don’t focus on it. It’s a feeling like it’s going to shut my brain off though. It almost feels like, like being a transceiver, or bearing a message. It’s an incredibly odd sensation. My mind suddenly goes blank.

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Author’s Note: Below devolves into cosmic horror via sensory overload based on the author’s experience with hyper-photo-sensitivity, hyper-audio-sensitivity, hyper-tactile-sensitivity, hyper-gustatory-sensitivity, hypo-olfactory-sensitivity(little to no sense of smell), ADHD, & Autism(all were identified/diagnosed by various doctors many many years after the fact) & auditory->gustatory synesthesia as a child.

All this, coupled with forced interactions with crowds/public schools, and loud spaces. The segment can be skipped all the way to Chapter 251, if you’re uncomfortable with the themes. CW: Strange sensations, sensory overload, sensory horror, creeping dread, physio…bio…psycho…logical horror? Also… temporal-spatial gaslighting?

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Returning to my senses, I rattle my skull, glancing around. How long was I out? It doesn’t seem like it was too long. Goosebumps raise along every inch of my still-sizzling flesh, which has thankfully regenerated mostly. Now I look more like lightly-cooked meat, instead of a charred corpse. Actually. What in the name of all the hells?

Peering at myself, my regeneration rate seems to increase with each step I take towards my destination. My flesh weaving itself back together, my bones knitting, more quickly each passing moment. This is unreal. What could—don’t, don’t think.

Remember. You can’t remember. Without Luni here, your head could literally explode. Argh, crap, you’re right. Let’s… let’s just hope keeping the psi-blocking circlet on proves beneficial against anything that might trigger that. Yeah? Sure. Copacetic. Time and tide Reggie Shellcracker, time and tide. Oh you’re one to talk… me. Argh. I’m trying to distract myself again, aren’t I? Yeah. Every instinct in me is screaming to turn back, to sprint, dash, fly, warp the hell out of here.

The coping mechanism, the schism-self of my inner monologue is less and less coherent. It’s more like it’s warning me to be prepared, but to also not know. To turn off my senses. To forget ever learning of this place. There’s twitching and spasming in my muscles, as if I were messing around with my cursed greaves, but obviously I’m not. My amygdala is in overdrive, and, despite not having the organs necessary, nor biological functions to even do so, I suddenly need to pee. Badly.

It’s like kidneys I don’t have are processing a flood of neurochemicals that should not be pumping out at the rate they are. I feel sick to my stomach, and a pinch where my kidneys would be. It’s as if they’re dehydrated, stuck with solids leftover from the chemical-spill of my brain’s fight-or-flight response.

The words wrong, and ruined, burble up within me, further pounding and repeating in my head with each step. Every sense that I have that can possibly scream out a warning is doing so. This place feels almost alive somehow, but in an ancient way, more like it was alive, but now is dead, heavy, haunted by the ghosts of what came before. Crumbled stone edges peek out of rough-dirt walls of this tunnel into the mountainside. There’s shreds of what must have been walls, scattered about, fallen stone segments that are flatter, smoother than the surrounding rough-hewn rock.

It’s almost as if this place was once a place, then was buried, and forgotten, intentionally. But then someone got the bright idea to dig it up. To disturb the dead, the husk of what once was. The path dips more steeply, perhaps once a stairway, now at best a spiraling ramp, slick and damp. I could virtually slide down it. I could literally slide or skate down it with my cryokinesis. Yet somehow the idea of even invoking my cold powers sends shivers I shouldn’t feel up and down my spine, and fills me with dread.

Strange, alien scrawling adorns the walls. Of course, this causes my universal translation enchantment to kick in, and I wish it hadn’t. It simply says, over and over, “The way is shut. It was made by the dead, and the dead keep it. The way is shut.” It’s simultaneously horrifying, yet forgettable. Like my brain BSODs every time I’m not looking at the scrawled text. Times when I have one eye on the text, and one eye on the path before me, I both know, and immediately forget the text as it’s translated into my mind.

Each moment, I creep closer, and each step I take, seems to knit me back together faster and faster. What should have taken at least a day, if not days, is happening right before my eyes. I should find comfort in that. Should being the operative word there. I want to rush to Te, to support her, to make it to her, for us to find comfort in each other’s arms. But somehow I know, that in this place, no comfort can be found. The damp is the worst kind, it sticks and clings, yet is somehow slick, like an oil.

The oppressive gloom of it all feels like it drapes itself about my shoulders, like an intimate friend, but one twisted and wrong. Sinister in a way I can’t describe. I vibrate intensely in discomfort, trying to shake off the feeling, and to not associate it with anyone who’s recently draped their arms about my shoulders. I try to blank out my mind entirely, because it’s harder than I’d like to admit, to keep from assigning faces to a newly-developing trauma that I can feel brewing.

My throat is somehow dry, parched, despite the damp, yet my tongue, thick, swollen, sticky, fills my mouth, tasting the acrid scent in the air, a rusty metallic tang with a hint of molds, fungi, other things I’d rather not identify. I have to swallow my saliva in order to breathe, but it carries that sickening taste all the way into the pit of my non-existent stomach. Now the taste is here to stay, traveling with me, like an uninvited guest.

It’s around now that I notice something I should have been noticing all along. My shadow? Is not my shadow. It’s bent, twisted, distorted, and though I’m standing still, with no moving light source, it’s growing longer and longer. I try to convince myself it’s my mind playing tricks on me. That my brain’s fritzing and fried from all the combat and lightning. That seems to appease my shadow enough for it to stop growing at least. But not to resume the shape it should be. It’s unnerving on levels I can’t even describe.

As my boots scuff the corner of a bit of stonework embedded in the rough dirt wall, the sound echoes louder than my slow shuffle, in a way that I wish I could take back. It feels like this place has a heartbeat, that it’s breathing, and beginning to wake up. That I’ve woken it up. Rattling my skull, I convince myself I’m being paranoid. I notice my breathing is ragged and loud, another sound I wish I could silence, and take back. I try to convince myself that the pulse, the heartbeat, is just me hearing my own breathing, and my own heartbeat. I’m not very successful.

What little sense I have is still screaming at me to turn back. Turn back now. Cry out for Teuila and flee with all haste. That taste, that passenger I was forced to swallow in order to breathe, it coils up inside me and nests, growing a sickening warmth that’s accompanied by chilly claws along its edges. I’m forced to gulp again, to breathe once more, and the taste now has a partner, a sweeter one, but no less sinister. It’s more like water, like life, rather than rusty death and decay. The two spiral and nestle in deeply, ingraining themselves in me.

The breathing I tried to convince myself that this place wasn’t doing, can’t be doing, picks up its pace. As it does, the tunnel seems to twist and squeeze, like muscles, an esophagus. I blink forcefully, and that simultaneously fixes it, and makes it worse. Somehow, I know how I should be perceiving things, a simple, ordinary tunnel ramp. But either that is an overlaying image, or this living undead husk of a place is an overlaying image. Or, I guess the third option could be I’m just having a horrible, hallucinatory fever dream nightmare. I’m not sure which is more disconcerting.

Rattling my skull, the tastes that settled into my stomach seem to be growing, branching out, extending their limbs and testingly worming their way about me. They reach my tearducts, and the tastes well across my eyes like tears. I virtually vomit at the sensation of tasting life and undeath with my eyeballs. Trying not to gag or dry heave, I mostly just succeed in keeping my convulsing throat from pushing anything up, or pulling anything down.

The waxy buildup in my ears now shares the same disconcerting *flavor* that’s dripping along my eyelids, and settling into my stomach. All of my senses are slowly being distorted, warped, homogenized into a single sense, a single, disturbed, revolting sense. Gustatory. A sense I couldn’t even remember the name for, yet it’s that sense all the same. The knowledge of its name is somehow almost more frightening, or at least the way it came to me, like it was whispered in my ear by a traveling companion that I don’t have.

My pulse quickens, and I can’t take it anymore. Breathing, no, panting rapidly, I struggle to maintain a hold of my thoughts, to think of Teuila. My love for her, her eyes, those emerald ringed tunnels that lead straight to the depths of her soul. It’s no help though, if anything, it makes it worse, because it brings to mind the tremor I heard in her voice. A needy fear, the likes of which she’d never show.

I’m stuck picturing what she must have looked like, her hand covering her mouth as it was agape in horror, her face contorted in disbelief of whatever she’d seen. For her to feel helplessness, to beg for directions, to call for backup in such a way, when the mission was rescue, and rescue only… I try not to, but I gulp again, and I thank all that is good in the world that a third flavor doesn’t join the other two in dominating my senses.

Suddenly, the flavors are *excited* as I reach the entrance to some dank pit. They squirm about within me, with a fervor. I nearly black out at the sensation. Rank, sour notes tinge the air, joined by one familiar scent, one sane aspect of this place, ozone, burnt oxygen, lightning. To think, the crackle and spark of lightning would be the one thing tying my sanity together, after having it shock the crap out of me for the majority of the day.

Despite my sanity seeming to return, and it begging me to turn around and flee, I have to press on. Also, despite how unruly, unnerving, and unsanitary my slow walk, tasting everything seemed, at least Te won’t have been waiting long. It was only about seventy seconds from the foothills to here. Whatever this is, whatever it is that’s here, that awaits, it’s close, and the flavors dancing about my system, distorting my senses, are clamoring to reunite. To enter the room in which I’m sure Teuila currently resides.