Even as the diviner slowly helped us get to our feet without breaking contact with one another, without me putting weight on my pulverised foot or jarring my bad elbow, the enchanter started asking again what was happening, what the sound was.

We’d only covered about half the distance to the wall – I could still feel flakes of mizelikon drifting off my legs when he grumbled, “Look, if you don’t want me to check inside your minds –“

“Mr. Cossoran. Please.”

It wasn’t Rath asking anymore – it was Duskdown’s all-knowing voice, its threat barely hidden.

Temcar didn’t speak again for a while and when he did, it wasn’t to ask questions.

Following the seer’s directions, we put our backs to the wall of the box, trench, cathedral – wherever the hell we were – and sat down again.

We waited, as the sound increased in volume, doubling and redoubling, so loud that it didn’t even seem possible –

But we were in Infernum. Anything was possible.

Fifteen minutes, at least. Fifteen minutes, and for the last three we couldn’t even talk, could barely even sit still as the floor shook, shook like a bed-sheet in the breeze, jaws filled with a million iron teeth grinding down on a million mail-clad warriors. Grinding closer, closer.

I trust Rath, I realised. I wasn’t looking for other avenues of escape. I was content to let him guide us.

If we die here, it’s possible our souls stay here forever. No one really knows for sure.

I was glad to be alone with my thoughts, my terror; I would’ve thanked Yune that Temcar didn’t think of creating a link, but I very much doubted she’d hear me from here.

When the mountainous object approached around what must’ve been a bend, I thought I was seeing things. Suddenly the darkness looming over us on our left was two-tone, something glinting there, a silver-blackness coming closer, lit by some source of light I couldn’t perceive – it was as though the darkness was rolling towards us and falling, always falling, like a metallic waterfall of shadow –

It was a wheel. A metal wheel. More metal in a single object than should’ve been contained in a hundred mountains. It was facing us, oncoming, spinning right at us.

It had to be over a thousand feet high. This trench would only hold its very base, I imagined.

The ground didn’t tremble – it quaked. The sound was intolerable.

“Hold on!” I thought I heard Rath scream.

Surprisingly, it was my sylph’s hand that trembled the most, it seemed, clutching at me with a desperate strength to match his shaking.

Then we were all screaming. The wheel was so huge that its curve hung over us for seconds – then it cut off the world in front of us like a dizzying wall, giving us less than a foot of breathing room as it rolled on past us. In the one instant Zab’s light was bleeding out into the emptiness – then suddenly it illuminated the side of the unfathomably-huge metal disc. The off-black metal surface was a whirlpool of night, gleaming like a dark mirror.

We were being tossed about so we gripped each other tightly, and it was only by virtue of the fact we had to hold onto one another that one or more of us weren’t pulled in to touch the thing. Touching it would surely shave away the offending limb, at least…

Was it the wheel of some yet-vaster cart, with us simply being in the rut of its tracks? Or was it a tool of some kind, fixed to a central gear and set to trundle around a – what? – several-mile-long groove?

I had no idea, could hardly imagine such immense machinery…

Nor the creatures who might put such inventions to use.

Yet, perhaps it was just a demon – a very strange demon that didn’t even register on my scales. There were apparently thirty-three ranks… and the eolastyr had only been a twentieth-rank fiend. Well, according to a lying liar I used to know, at least.

Then it had passed us by, the dark wall vanishing off to my right, Zab’s light flooding once more across the emptiness. The dust-clouds stirred to and fro even more-violently in its wake.

The clamour quietened more quickly than it had built, but the ringing in my ears was so complete that only one thing was coming through.

“Avvie! You can stop screaming now!”

“Aaaiiaaaaiiiaaaiaaiiaiaaaa…!”

“Essel majhar! Nevae ma!”

By the time I got him to shut up, my ears were hurting more from his incessant shrilling than the remembered pain of the metal wheel.

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“Sweet Nentheleme, man,” I complained, “have you been practising your yodelling or something? That was insane – what’s wrong with you?”

“I – am – not – comfortable here, Feychilde!” The sylph sounded far more distraught than I’d thought him, even given his shakiness. “I was not made for this!”

“I think I might need healing again, after that,” Temcar muttered, and poked at one of the several ugly bruises hanging out on his chin.

I tongued the empty spaces in my mouth, the newly-sealed gums. “So what’s the plan now?” I asked Rath, trying to ignore the enchanter. “I could do with finding an arch-druid and getting fixed up before too long.”

“It’s Fangmoon you want to see –“

“Fang? Are you certain?”

He paused for a moment, then started over, as though he were speaking to a child. I tried not to gulp the fetid air while he ran through our options. I’d forgotten what it was like to listen to an arch-diviner when their abilities were flowing.

“Its Fangmoon you want to see for your healing. Spiritwhisper won’t enter her head for anything pertinent for a minimum of fifty-seven days, and in all likelihood never will. However, I can’t see into Etherium or Nethernum, which is troubling. I don’t know if that’s because planar travel is too dangerous, or if it’s just a quirk of the future-sight tripping over the dimensional boundaries… I have never plotted a course that led to such places before. In this it is revealed that I am no sorcerer in spite of my knowledge, and I would defer to your wisdom, but I see you have no idea either… ha. And so to other considerations.

“You have at your disposal a diverse array of demons, capable of travel within Infernum; capable, moreover, of conveying us upwards. You have far fewer fey of note – you do disappoint, Master Feychilde – but if our luck holds and Etherium also has an open means of ascent, well… Etherium is the more appealing notion, obviously. Nethernum is the worst of both worlds, given the comparative strengths of your eldritches, the relative danger of each world…”

“In other words, you don’t know what I should do,” I grated. “I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get the power together to create a portal big enough for the lot of us – it might be I have enough already, enough for ten goes! But I won’t know till I try and if I try and I fail…”

I tipped my head back, shuddering, remembering the feeling of the huge beast up there, looming over the trench, the track, whatever the cursed pit we’d found ourselves in was designed for…

I tipped my head back, looking directly upwards.

I managed to choke the strangled words out even as I started putting together green sparks. “Y-y-you couldn’t s-see that?”

I sensed it as the others also looked up.

“No,” Rath breathed. “No, I could not.”

Any notion of scale I might have once possessed was thrown off. A pair of colossal red eyes were gazing down at us, glowing of their own eerie light, and even if as I’d fancied at first that the walls of the trench were only a hundred feet high – even then these eyes would describe a monster capable of crushing Ord Ylon underfoot. But I suspected – I suspected I had it all wrong: that the trench walls were far higher; that this thing loomed so far above us, we were ants on a table before it.

Thousands of times bigger than Ord Ylon. Eyes alone bigger than Leafcloak at top size.

I brought up a wide green seam of ethereal energy to consume us, and, as I did so, the two vast eyes blinked. It almost felt as though the creature up there were recognising me, somehow, like dipping your hat or touching your hood.

Then the verdant wave receded, and we were sitting on a bed of glowing white mushrooms and softly-stirring moss. The gremlin-lit air was musty with warm scents, like a harvest breeze in autumn. The living lichen of Etherium crawled slowly about the cavern’s rocks, itinerant pillows of waxlike vegetation ambling here and there, trailing their colourless gossamer webs. The ceiling was covered in the same creatures, save for where shafts of pale crystal jutted through the rock, descending like stalactites. Or was it stalagmites? I could never remember. I’d never actually been in a cave, not until I woke up beneath Zadhal.

This was far nicer. Other than the cavern’s current shambling occupants, we appeared to be alone.

My sylph immediately spread his wings and beat them experimentally in the air, a perfect shining smile on his perfect bronze face. Zabalam, who’d seemed less bothered by Infernum, started hunting a particularly fast lump of lichen around. Rath took a few seconds to locate a suitably-sharp rock which Avaelar retrieved for us; once the diviner had speedily sharpened it on the stone about us, I got to work on my fellow-escapees’ arms, providing them with the seal of an arch-sorcerer. Tem was remarkably calm, given where he’d just been.

Once I was done Rath helped me stand, and, between him and Avaelar, I was able to hobble along. The sylph was forced to carry me at times when it proved impractical for the pair of them to hoist me between them, but I did my best to keep on my own two feet as much as I could, even if one of them was useless now.

We traversed a narrow span across a chasm, made slightly more tolerable for the three of us weary plane-walkers by virtue of the fact my sylph could’ve easily caught anyone who fell. We washed ourselves in the crystal-clear waterfalls, avoiding those streaked with fluorescent pink light. We renewed the sorcerer’s-marks regularly. And we clambered up steep inclines of stone – twice, Avaelar had to leave me on an outcropping and go back for Temcar. Rathal made each ascent seemingly without effort, often appearing early at the crest of the climb, awaiting my arrival seated in a bed of phosphorescent fungi.

“What’s there to eat around here?” Temcar eyed the mushrooms as we sat down for a rest after a particularly sheer slope.

“Eternal condemnation to the plane, for a kick off,” I said. “Drink, but don’t eat, unless you want to become part of the furniture.”

“Now that just doesn’t make any sense.” My fellow Sticktowner was clearly struggling with the concept. “How does the plane know the difference?”

“Does drinking fill you up?” I asked rhetorically.

“Sort of…” he answered, still staring at the weird, incandescent mushrooms. “You keep cutting us with ethereal stone, don’t you? I really fancy… just a few…”

“Come on, Avvie, before Tem turns into a mushroom-goblin.” I lifted my arms to the sylph, who dutifully bent, hefted me up. “The only thing that’s going to fill me up is up there.” I flicked my eyes to the ceiling, high above the quartz-speckled galleries.

When we get high enough, I’ll bring an imp through and mark it. Send it back and forth, look for a way up and out… check that we’re far from Zyger…

If I remembered correctly, sorcerer’s marks were almost unaffected by most druidic healing. A quirk of the type of wound. An imp’s natural regeneration was unlikely to affect it too quickly… It could get several trips off a single seal, I was certain.

And then… the thing that would fill me up better than a basket of Hontor’s pastries, better than a high-lord’s banquet table.

Seeing the twins again.

* * *