By sheer coincidence or fate, the ones who had left to rescue the desert-born man had returned almost right after the others who had gone to save the psychic girl. At last, all were reunited at the base of the monochromatic pillars.

Except, their pale color had begun to drain. The towers that once were illuminated by a pale, white saturation had now become a raven black. They stood encircling the group like gravestones marking each one’s inevitable death, by time or otherwise. Then, one by one, they lowered into themselves, disappearing and sinking into the marble floor.

“What’s happening!?” Grovalt yelled.

“It’s becoming unstable. You’ll return to the real world soon.” A voice sounded from behind them.

“Lily!” Ceres exclaimed.

“Worry not, Ceres. Your sister’s heart is still beating. But you must act fast. Do not listen to Nia’s words. They are poisoned by the dreadful ringing in her head.”

The ground began to shake. The far reaches of the empty expanse melted like ice beneath a magnifying glass.

“Look!” Maxra pointed upwards. A pale staircase was slowly descending from the heavens.

“Enemies! Stand your ground until the stairs reach us!” Grovalt, eyes focused solely on the twitching abomination that had come out of nowhere, cut it straight in half in one flowing motion of his greatsword.

“Be calm, little one. They resemble those that we fought at that time, long ago.”

Nakir was right. Dozens of children, now identifiable as Academy students, lumbered towards them. Their lower halves were spiderlike, featuring eight jagged legs and rounded mouths on their abdomens. They were lined with sharp, hooked fangs that dripped with a sickening green fluid. Indeed, they were the same grotesque monsters they faced back when they had fallen into Archizend’s woods, before they met Raum.

“Help me!! Help me!! Stop!! Help!!” They cried out, but their piercing wails wouldn’t work on her again.

Ceres launched from one to the next with her dragon claw, ripping and tearing them to shreds with no more than a couple slashes each. They fell to the floor in bloody pieces, the green fluid they vomited oozing out from their wretched forms. A gurgling sound emanated from each one, as if they were still barely alive somehow.

Nakir burned them to ash with azure dragonfire.

Maxra and Venza, in a shadowy duet of dancing blades, eliminated half the horde in seconds. Their minced remains littered the once pristine ground, and a horrendous odor filled the air.

Grovalt threw his body into every swing, cleaving multiple foes in half with horizontal strikes. When they grew too close for comfort, he forced ice into the floor and froze them in place for easy disposal.

Raum sent brilliant white birds careening into them, burning winged holes through their hearts.

Once they’d thought the screaming was silenced for good, more came crawling up the pallid geometry. The neverending abominations continued to charge toward the Ravens with unrivaled savagery, despite their desperate cries. The world itself almost seemed to lose some of its luster, the shining heavenly white now darkening into a cold gray.

“It’s here! Climb! Now!”

Everyone scrambled up the staircase, the only thing that remained a beautiful, pure white. Apart from the lilies dotted around the landscape, of course.

“Lily! We can’t leave you!” Ceres screamed after her, but Grovalt picked her up and continued to rush up the stairs without hesitation.

“It’s fine! Nothing may harm me here. My sister would not allow such a thing, after all. Not when she has any say in it.”

“I’ll try! I’ll try to reason with her! As much as I can! I’ll-”

“Who are you talking to? Nothin’ but freaks down there! Come on, we’re almost out!”

The Lily of Nia’s mind watched as the prisoners left her world. They ascended the pearly stairs and up through the tunnel of light, never to be seen again. As they disappeared, so too did she, as she was not permitted to leave her garden sanctuary for long. The garden sanctuary locked within a previously invisible birdcage, now revealed under the dark influence permeating her older sister’s mind. As long as her obsession was ignited and her woes were chained, Nia’s memory of her dear little sister would forever be partnered with her endless loneliness. Echoes of the past chained in black.

“I can see the end!” Raum shouted with uncharacteristic elation.

The blinding white finally behind them, memories recalled and past embraced, the Ravens found themselves back in the Technicist ruins. The light gave way to the dark. The silence of Nia’s realm gave way to the distant aching and echo of the pit deep below Aza. Although, they were no longer at the center of the plateau at the bottom of it all. They were in a strange building, no doubt of Technicist design.

As each of them gathered their surroundings, they came to notice exactly what filled the room. Encircling the group like gravestones were the same wired Academy students atop their thrones of steel. The cables, of course, were severed. A haunting quietness swallowed all those present. Horrible though it was in the dream, it did in fact represent reality. They had been mutilated in the same fashion. The group could only hope that whatever lay in store for them among the Blissful Sleep was a fate better than what they had faced here. For the Sorceress to stoop so low as to butcher children to simply entrap her enemies infuriated Ceres. Her actions, though paved with the intention of resurrecting her dead sister, were inhumane at best. Could love really have pushed her this far? The question struck her brain like a mallet upon a slab of meat.

Zenzi still struggled to her feet, clearly winded from whatever she and the other group had absconded from, as well as the desperate climb they all had just partaken in.

“Here, lean on me.” Grovalt grabbed hold of one of her light, skinny arms and held it across his shoulders.

“What are you…!” After a moment, she sighed and mumbled. “Thank you, I suppose.”

Maxra eyed the two with a strange, knowing look. Though she held back from bursting into laughter, it was clear as day that she was taking immense pleasure from what she witnessed.

“Wha-What the hell are you giggling about!? The least you could do is help me instead, dumb anisai.”

“Huh? You wanna say that again, shrimp?”

The two women bickered, but through their argument it was evident that they were happy to see each other again. Though she wasn’t very open about her past with Venza, Maxra didn’t seem too bothered by their repeat encounter with the Dark Court. Whether it was all a cheery facade or not, the gleam in her eyes when she spoke with her gloomy friend was nothing of the sort.

“So we’re really back, huh? The ruins,” Grovalt said.

“Yes,” Nakir replied. “But we seem to be quite far from where we once were. Observe.” He pointed through a collapsed portion of the metal plating encompassing the room, out to the middle of the abyss. “That rail there is what led us deep below. We seem to be in one of the structures on the outer rim, perhaps even in the Technicist cityscape.”

Stolen story; please report.

“It really is like Archizend’s woods,” Ceres chimed.

“Quite. Assuming where you woke up was akin to the abyss, my dear, then we must come out from such cognitive realms somewhat relative to the real world.”

Maxra scratched her head in confusion. “Eh, what? I don’t get it.”

“He means to say,” Raum explained in his calming voice, “that this world and the cognitive ones, such as what we were trapped within and where Archizend’s abode was, are layered atop one another, in a way. Though it seems as if it isn’t quite one-to-one.”

“Speaking of, where’s the cat?”

The group looked around to no avail.

Zenzi shook her head. “Master may only manifest completely within the mind or within his sphere of influence. That’s why the Greatwoods are his home. He draws power from them to momentarily appear on the physical plain.”

“What kind of power do the Greatwoods possess, I wonder?” Nakir looked at Zenzi expectantly.

“You’d have to ask him about that. All I know is that something important to him lies underneath.”

Ceres and Nakir passed glances at each other. Without a single utterance, the same thought surfaced to the top of their psyches.

The Goddess?

Grovalt tapped the wall with his sword, though it was much louder than any normal tap. “Hey, there’s a door here. And a lever.”

“A trap?”

Raum materialized his staff, closed his eyes, and pointed it towards the iron door. A faint chime rang out, and a warm aura radiated from its end. “I sense no trap. Of the mechanical kind, that is. This wall is much too dense for me to sense any life that may be hiding behind it.”

“I can’t sense any wavelengths, either. No thoughts or anything.” Zenzi had let go of Grovalt, having recovered somewhat thanks to Ceres’s amateur healing magic.

The warrior sighed. “Well, just gotta be ready for anything, I guess. Keep your eyes peeled.” With a ka-chunk, Grovalt heaved the lever downward and readied his blade.

The metal door raised slowly. It sounded like it was cutting through a mountain of rust and grease lodged in its frame. When the passageway had completely cleared, everyone made their way through while remembering to check every inch of the space ahead.

A steel catwalk led from their position to an enormous plate. It seemed to act as a landing pad for some forgotten vehicle of ancient times. There were no walls, only the rails of the catwalk keeping them from falling an unimaginable height.

Ceres teetered. She tried her best to keep herself from looking down.

“Afraid of heights?” Venza asked.

She nodded, her cheeks tinged by a faint pink.

The anisai exhaled through her nose, a sure sign of amusement. “Nothing to be embarrassed about, kid. I am, too. Just good at hiding it.”

“Really? How do you do it?”

“Hmm… I just keep walking forward, I guess. Find a single point in the distance and keep your vision trained on it. Don’t think about anything else. Once you snap out of it, you’ll suddenly be at the end. It’s like putting yourself in a trance.”

“A trance…”

She followed the cloaked woman’s advice to the best of her ability. Though she stumbled a few times, she knew she wouldn’t fall. Eventually, despite the fear, she reached the landing pad with the rest of them. Looking back at the catwalk, she realized how idiotic such a fear was, especially when she had so many people around her for support. There really was no way she could have fallen.

“Did that help?”

“Yeah, it did. Thanks, Venza.” Ceres grabbed the anisai’s hands and shook them lightly. “I haven’t known you long, but I can tell you and Maxra were good friends once, like her and Zenzi are now. Is it really too late for you two to make up?”

“I don’t think…”

“Have you asked her? Have you even talked about it?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know? Trust me, as predictable as people can be sometimes, they always find a way to surprise you. You can’t get stuck in your own head for too long, or you’ll start to hate the people that care about you the most.”

Venza’s visor stared unemotionally at Ceres. There was no way to tell what she was thinking. “...Right. I’ll take that into consideration.”

Ceres flashed Venza a bright, childlike smile. She wondered if she’d ever seen her smile like that until now. She wondered just how much pain such a young girl had been through, only to survive and give someone she barely knew such a purehearted grin. She could almost hear something deep within her mind crack.

“How… old are you?”

Ceres’s smile faded, and she cocked her head slightly to the side. “16. Why?”

A brief moment of silence passed, then she patted Ceres’s head a few times. “It’s nothing. For what it’s worth, I hope your sister is alright. That’s all.” A revolting, tangled feeling of pity grew in her stomach following those words.

“Stop. I can sense something.”

“Yes, I as well. A dark, ominous presence past this way and into the following structure. Not only that, but another one as well, even more powerful. Magic I’ve never sensed before.”

“No,” Zenzi replied. “Something else…!” Before finishing her thought, Zenzi called upon her telekinesis to throw the group away from the landing pad’s center, near its dangerously rounded edge.

As if to validate the girl’s hunch, a hole high above punched through the labyrinthine pipes and tunnels hugging the surface. A swirling mass of magical energy entered through it into the underground at a blazing rate. It shot through the desolate air like a bullet, then dipped downward towards the landing pad. A deafening explosion followed, challenging the structure’s stability. Miraculously, it withstood the overpowering ball of lightning, but not without its fair share of shaking and creaking.

Once the dust settled, a figure that was instantly recognizable emerged from the crackling smoke. A man wreathed in starlight, wearing a similarly constellation-filled mask on his face. Another man, coughing up blood and struggling to stand amidst the dented debris, emerged as well. He wore a white garb given only to Altruin mages.

“Have you given up, codger? If you swear your life to me, I will allow you to be my personal apprentice. I wouldn’t want to waste such magical talent, after all. Even if it has no more room for growth and belongs to a dying man.”

The old man laughed, crimson droplets dripping from his mouth and nostrils. “Me? YOUR apprentice? Hahaha!” He hacked up more blood. “You’d be a better comedian than you are a mage.”

Like a brushstroke, Zandos made a striking motion with his hand, gray sigils flying from his palm. Following it, a powerful gust of wind with the force of a haymaker launched into Esternn’s core. It lifted his body up a bit, then he fell all the same. The pain prevented him from scrambling back to his feet. “I dare you to say that again, old fool.”

“Stop it!” Ceres shouted. Everyone had finally climbed up the broken structure and regained their posture.

“Ah, at last! You’ve found it. I take it that you all made it through the Sorceress’s trials, then?”

“Yep, that’s right!” Grovalt yelled across the arena, his greatsword leaning on his shoulder. “I hope you didn’t cry too much from your precious city being destroyed. Though, I guess that’s what she wanted all along, huh?”

The Archmage chuckled. “Yes. To tell the truth, Aza’s sacrifice was a lamentable one, to be sure. It isn’t all bad. You saved most of it. I have to thank you for that.”

“You can shove your thanks up your ass! Do you know how much pain and suffering that shithole up there has caused me!? I’ve been wanting to kill you for a long time.”

“Me? Whatever did I do to you? I think you’ve already slain the source of your woes, mercenary. Our late Graves went and killed himself for the sake of one delusional woman’s dream.”

“What? You mean Fatalinya?”

“Yes, his daughter. Did you not even know that?” Zandos erupted into a fit of laughter.

Grovalt gripped his weapon, anger coursing through his veins. “Doesn’t matter. I ain’t guided by that dumbass anymore. He’s gone forever. All that matters is killing you, killing that boss of yours, and saving this girl’s sister.”

Ceres eyed Grovalt’s heaving back with admiration. He was standing up against someone he had never fought before, that he had little chance of winning against, just for her. But it wasn’t unbelievable. She had done the same for Nakir.

“Then we are fated to clash, it seems. I, too, live for someone else’s dream.” Zandos’s robes began swirling in circles, like wind in a storm. Jagged, violet lightning shot out of his body like fireworks. His long, slender fingers grew in size and sharpness, becoming akin to ten whetted kitchen knives. Electric currents rose up and down the spaces between them.

Grovalt swapped to a defensive stance, his gaze trained on the foe before him. Would he really be able to fight a living thunderstorm?

“You face Archmage Zandos, a celestial elemental born in the thunderous hellscape that is Stormbridge! As long as you are in the eye of my storm, warrior, I will not let any of you reach Nia! Lily will be reborn through the Aspect! The Black Sorceress will rend this land asunder, and claim Ymiris’s title of Goddess once and for all!” His shout boomed like a thunderclap that left a ringing in his enemies’ ears. A fierce wind tore across the scrap metal battlefield, threatening to push all of them off to their doom.