Today was not a day for walking. In fact, Lancet had never seen and could not imagine a worse day for walking. The sun was nowhere to be seen though her clock assured her it was the middle of the day. Instead, the sky was a roiling ocean of black and grey.

Rain fell in sheets thick enough to drown rivers and lightning flickered and beat the land with the speed and frequencies of sparks gushing from a broken generator. So at the very least, the spirits had decided to provide ample lighting.

It was the best thing she could say about the rapacious things she could feel racing so many miles above the world’s crust. They sung their joy in howling gusts and percussions of thunder, heedless of the little things below.

Heedless of Lancet, pain and anger beat in her chest and they danced along all the same. A procession of thunder lit the world, showing all the things that bowed and bent before the storm. Mighty towering trees swayed like drunks. Rivers raced down their flooded banks and gurgled as if they were chewing the rocks they caught in their flow. Yet a single gust reversed their flow.

Even those few things that stood stalwart against the storm were soaked utterly by its waters. With that single sight, her anger went.

It was… she refused to say humbling, though water had long soaked her to the bone and she much resembled a drowned rat. Instead, as she watched the revel of wind, rain and cracking lightning scour the world for amusement, she considered herself enlightened.

Enlightened for this was so far from home.

The world was a big place. So everyone said, from her teachers and their ceaseless lessons to the friends she bemoaned with. Even the nursemaid saw fit to remind her. So many lessons, shame she only listened to them now.

She glanced back into her rickety cart. A man slept in it, his body hidden under a blanket that did little but be wet. A nightmare twisted his features. She didn’t know how he could sleep during this, but she was thankful. She could feel enough of his turbulent essence to know that wakefulness would only hurt him more.

She sighed and stared up at the clouds, though they pelter her fiercely. Today was her second enlightenment, despite the thunder and pissing rain, she found it far kinder than the first.

She returned her eyes to the path and the brave stallion that carried them along. The creature was no true beast and would certainly be dead if not for the glowing runes that blunted the storm and lit the path. Yet under the gentle blue light and buoyed by Lancet’s aura the creature could walk through winds that would have torn its soul from its body and carried however many kilometres away.

Like they would to any mortal caught in their revel and should lancet walk into the clouds, the heart of their games. She knew they would pull her into their play.

Maybe that would be a better path than what was before her. It was a nice thought and carried a smile to her face, but she knew it wasn’t to be. She was conscious of her brother, wrapped in sodden cloth, in this excuse for a cart.

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Her smile grew crooked and now more than ever she envied the spirits, but it was far too late to change her path.

They crested a rise, and saw The City.

It leaned against or rather melted into a mountain. The lone earthen monolith jutted out from the land and the city that stretched from antiquity and myth were melted together by bloom and rain. A single behemoth that swallowed thin strings of light that trailed across the land into its unseen maws.

It was a place fed by roads and puckered with lights that endured the storm, but reason did not change what she saw. A lurking monster, its dark form pinpricked by bright eyes that watched her approach.

Despite herself, she opened her senses that stemmed not from her flesh, but her heart and soul. It was the only way to see it for what it was. The morbid curiosity that had pulled her into so many questionable decisions led her to one more.

The storm parted like a curtain, replaced by mingling essence and the spirits. While The City, The Fist City, loomed even higher and burrowed into the earth. Its vaunted walls grew precipitous, and water and wind were stripped of their essence becoming base and mortal. the spirits that dared to pass through the walls were diminished as well. Tree hurling gales were blunted into gusts, living torrents of water where render airborne trickles. Past those walls, the city continued upwards, a quiet monolith that did not scream like the storm but spoke with its mere presence.

And below in its bowl, beneath the earth, lurked networks of darkness and mistakes that should never have been made. Hateful, tired bitter things.

The trees weathered the storm’s curiosity. The swaying grasses submitted to their games. , she weathered. The roads streams of light amidst curtains of rain, warded off the heady essence.

The City drank.

Dread mounted with every turn of the cartwheels. The essence thinned as they neared. The rain became only rain, the wind became only winds and the road dimmed, its bright blue replaced by a weak glow.

Then it drank of her and her heart stopped and absent her urging the cart did as well.

“It’s okay.” A familiar hand rested on her shoulder.

“It sure doesn’t feel that way!” half a desperate scream half a laugh. Her heart mirrored her voice, broken into two warring halves. The part that pushed her forward, the reason she was here, and everything else.

The tumult spilled into her aura her essence painting the world in dancing colors that would shame the boldest rainbows. And the city, its maw ever open, took them from her, it drank the arcing lights were dimmed to death as it pulled them from her reach.

Essence, the emanation of her heart made manifest. The emotions she had nurtured all her life, were stolen like blood straight from her veins with all the care that one might take a breath.

He hugged her and Lancet laughed because she hated crying.

“You don’t have to do this,” he whispered words so light the wind almost stole them.

“But I do.” She answered back, and a part of her cracked. The city drank of them pulling twinkling steamers from her, and unseen essence from him. They mingled as they went, and with her eyes opened to immaterial, she saw what it took from him.

Essences laden with pain and irreconcilable disappointment gushed from the tear in him. She cried and her tears mixed with the downpour.

“I do.” But now there was something than loss in her voice. There was strength, wan and tenuous, but undeniable.

She returned her vision to the mundane and urged the horse forward. It took them to the city’s mouth. The road’s light finally gave out leaving them to the mercy of lightning’s mercurial flashes.

Chains upon chains fell upon, binding her essence even as more was drained from her. Her powers fell to heights it had not visited in decades. Strength fled her limbs her senses clouded and parts of herself she’d thought irrepressible grew distant.

But she did not falter again.

They entered The City’s maw.