Every time Arkk closed his eyes, he saw a god.
That brief glimpse that he had gotten with his actual eyes before Vezta pulled him down replayed in his mind over and over again. Even just walking into a dark room made him feel like that looming presence was going to pop out of the shadows. It might not be harmful. Xel’atriss might have even been helpful.
Arkk didn’t think he wanted to go before any god ever again.
It wasn’t even that he was afraid that it would do something. Arkk feared that he would be unable to resist peeking even knowing that a split-second glimpse of the being had him lying in bed, awake and wide-eyed, the entire night.
With everything stable in the fortress—nothing was blowing up and no mass invading army came through the crystal archway—Arkk had called for a hold on the exploration. One night’s rest, ostensibly for magical recovery after the ritual. The others, with the exception of Agnete, had all been drained to the point of lethargy as well, so his excuse hadn’t sounded all that strange.
It was more that he just wanted to process.
And what a process it was.
“That was real, right?” Arkk asked as the door to his room opened.
“Master,” Vezta said as she stepped up to his bed. “Did you sleep at all last night?”
Arkk hadn’t even changed out of his sweat-soaked tunic before crawling into bed. He had stared up at the maze-like pattern that covered the ceiling, following the lines and pathways as they twisted about. Even now, with Vezta at his side, he still stared up at that maze, wondering why he couldn’t find a way out.
Vezta folded her arms across her chest, looking down with a disappointed expression. “Master.”
“Did you sleep?” Arkk asked. “Could you sleep? I mean, who goes and has a chat with a being like that and just goes to sleep.”
“I don’t sleep.”
“Oh. Right. I forgot.” Arkk’s head drifted to the side, looking at Vezta from top to bottom.
The servant was the picture of calm, standing with fully-formed legs and her hands clasped at her navel. The starscapes that surrounded the burning suns of her eyes shifted and pulsed as she looked him up and down. Her violet hair dripped a glob of dark tar onto her shoulder. The tar remerged with the rest of her body as soon as it touched. That little oddity made Arkk narrow his eyes, looking at her closer. Her face, drawn tight into a frown, looked somehow more liquid than usual. Like congealed slime. The eye at the base of her neck sagged, lopsided. When she opened her mouth, strings of that black tar stretched thin from her tongue to the roof of her mouth.
“Master? Are you alright?”
“Am I alright?” Arkk repeated, forcing himself up. The motion made him dizzy but he shook it off. “I should be asking you the same question,” he said, reaching out and poking Vezta in the shoulder.
His finger sunk into her body like it was a pool of thickened honey.
Her eyes widened and, with a slight glare at his finger, she firmed her body, forcing his finger out. He prodded a few more times in a few more places. She felt normal now, at least, but it was probably taking more concentration.
“We’re kind of a mess, aren’t we?”
“Time dulls memories,” Vezta said. “This will fade. In light of that, it may be prudent to delay this morning’s expedition for a time.”
Arkk shook his head, feeling another wave of nausea, before forcing himself to his feet. “Can’t. Shouldn’t have even delayed one day. Every minute that passes, the Evestani army and that golden-eyed avatar get closer. People die. Villages burn. Hawkwood says that the King is sending an army but it won’t be here anywhere within a reasonable timeframe.”
Pressing his lips into a shallow façade of a smile, he shrugged. “It’s up to us. Get the expeditionary team ready at the archway. I’ll be there shortly.”
Vezta stared a moment longer, eyes once again taking in Arkk’s stance and appearance. For a moment, he thought she was going to protest. To insist that he stay in bed for another day at the very least.
If Arkk were being honest, he would have appreciated the excuse.
However, another day of rest was not to be had. Vezta nodded her head. “I will see it done,” she said, bowing out of the room.
Arkk waited until the door shut behind her before moving to the basin of water in his room. He splashed his face, smacking his cheeks. All-in-all, he didn’t feel that bad. He had pulled a few sleepless nights in his time, usually when danger was spotted near the village. For most of those, he had been entirely wiped out by morning. Instead, he felt… not well rested but at least not exhausted. He entertained the idea that he might have fallen asleep with his eyes open at least at some points during the night.
Looking up in the mirror, frowning at the increasingly scraggly beard on his face, he took some solace in the fact that, at the very least, he wasn’t melting.
Taking his razor in hand, he decided to do a little something to keep his mind off other things. This was twice in the same thirty days that he had seen something impossible. Arkk wasn’t quite sure how much more he could take. And now he was headed off to some plane of existence that nobody knew existed, filled with who knew what?
He hoped that between the [STARS] and Xel’atriss, he was building up some kind of mental immunity to world-shattering experiences.
Based on recent trends, he would need it.
Beard trimmed—he would need a haircut as well one of these days, but that could wait—Arkk changed clothes, grabbed a sword just in case magic didn’t work in a different reality, and finally teleported straight to the archway room.
A quartet of guards, three orcs and one gorgon, were keeping watch on standby. All four jumped at Arkk’s arrival but quickly settled back down once they realized who had appeared in their midst. None of the expeditionary crew had assembled yet. Vezta was still gathering them up.
Arkk turned his attention to the archway. He had examined it the night before but hadn’t been in too much of a state of mind to really think about it.
The archway room was one of only two rooms that hadn’t been eaten by the lesser servants. The other being the [HEART] chamber. Aside from tidying up broken bodies and repairing cracked tiles, the lesser servants had left the archway alone.
It was a giant of an arch. Three times as tall as the doorways in the fortress, all of which could easily fit even the tallest elf without requiring stooping. Golden crystal, jagged and blocky, jutted up out of the ground on one side of the room. It didn’t bend so much as it had been grown up and to the side and up and to the side, over and over again until it reached its apex. At that point, it went down and to the side until it reached the ground once more.
Inscrutable runes and sigils covered the entire thing. Carvings that no one seemed to understand. Zullie and Savren hadn’t seen a single one of the runes before and Vezta couldn’t explain their origin. They weren’t even the same script as what Arkk had seen in the few salvaged books from the original fortress library.
Prior to the day before, the sigils had been inert. Little more than decorative carvings. If not for knowing that the archway was a magical portal to another realm, Arkk might have thought they were just decorative. Now, however, they glowed. Much like everything else in Fortress Al-Mir, they preferred a rich violet hue.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Of course, they were barely notable next to the portal. The opening of the archway formerly looked out onto the back wall of the room.
It lacked the spinning gold ring of stars that Arkk had seen Xel’atriss create. Nonetheless, it was the same place. A flat, desolate wasteland that stretched out as far as Arkk could see, broken only by the towering pillars of shadow. The main difference between what he saw before and what he saw now was that the perspective then had felt aerial, looking down on the world. Now, it was ground level, looking out over what anyone else might confuse with the Cursed Forest.
And there were buildings out there. Not built around the other side of the portal but in the distance, poking up as little nubs on the flat horizon.
That would be the first stop, then. It didn’t look like there was much else around. If Arkk had a harpy in his employ, a scouting flight might have found more. As it was, they would have to hope that some people did live in those buildings who might be able to connect them to the rest of the world. If the entire place was like this little desolate section, it wasn’t hard to imagine everyone over there joining up just to get a chance to see blue skies or grass.
Would scrying work over there?
Magic?
What did they eat?
And…
Curious, Arkk walked around the outside of the crystal archway, wondering if he could see in the other direction from the other side of the portal. Instead, he saw the four guards.
No back side to the portal then.
By the time Arkk made it back around the portal to the front, the door opened up. Vezta walked in first, leading the expeditionary group behind her.
The expeditionary crew had undergone a few changes over the night. Nothing major. Olatt’an stood at the forefront, dressed for battle with his crossbow-axe slung over his shoulder. He was one of the few orcs to still wear his old armor, not the new plate gear that the blacksmith had been making. Behind him, Dakka stood a head shorter even despite the short spikes on top of her helmet. Five other orcs, Zharja, and Joanne—formerly of the Claymores—rounded out the main warrior group.
In addition to the main warriors, Lyssa stood with the group. The formerly one-armed werecat still had a manacle around her right wrist. The chain, however, had been lengthened with spikes jutting off from the last few links. A heavy spearhead sat at the end of the chain. Her left arm didn’t match her right. As Hale’s grasp of the Flesh Weaving spell grew—and in need of a willing assistant to help her learn the spell—they had… fixed Lyssa’s arm according to the werecat’s specifications. Rather than the more humanoid paw that werecats normally possessed, Lyssa’s right arm terminated in a truly monstrous clawed gauntlet. Each ‘finger’ was about as long as Arkk’s hand, tipped with a razor-sharp protrusion of bone.
That was the kind of work that Flesh Weaving had truly been designed for. Not mere sealing of wounds. It was… Well… Arkk had to admit to being a little worried about Lyssa’s mental state. She didn’t talk much beyond making requests of Zullie and Hale for more ‘improvements’ to her body. Thicker muscles. Stronger legs. And so on. But she had yet to harm anyone at the fortress so Arkk was relatively content to leave her be.
Lexa, Alma, and Kelsey strode in behind Lyssa. The gremlin sported a cocky smile as she spun a blade around her fingers. Her eyes, already large for her smaller head, went even wider as she caught sight of the portal. Most of the orcs and gorgon had seen it the night before while standing guard but this was Lexa’s first time. She missed a step, almost tripping over her own feet.
Alma didn’t exactly look like she wanted to be present. But that wasn’t anything new. Of all of Arkk’s recruits, she was easily the most reluctant. Arkk hoped the half-werecat would eventually come around. Especially because the few bits of what she overheard during the recruitment session hardly seemed to matter these days. That said, neither she nor her companions had asked to be released or otherwise disbanded. They had volunteered for this job.
Zullie was the last member of the expeditionary group to enter. Her eyes gleamed with awe but not surprise. She and Savren had investigated the portal before Arkk sent everyone off to rest. They made sure that it was stable and not likely to cause any harm to the denizens of Fortress Al-Mir. She looked much better today; her steps were filled with energy rather than exhaustion.
While the expeditionary group moved up closer to the portal, more people entered the large room. Rekk’ar and Khan made up the defending group along with the rest of the orcs and several of the new hires from Cliff City—mostly beastmen. They would be securing the portal from the other side to the best of their ability, with the aid of lesser servants, to ensure that Fortress Al-Mir couldn’t easily come under assault. A smaller contingent would be waiting as backup inside Fortress Al-Mir, led by Agnete, both as a last line of defense in case something hostile did come through and to support any retreating that had to be done.
And to incinerate the bandits, or Edvin, if they caused problems in everyone else’s absence.
Arkk clasped his hands behind his back while waiting for everyone to assemble. Despite having practically the whole of Company Al-Mir present, it didn’t take long. Despite recruitment, they still weren’t anywhere near the level of a large organization. It was a bit depressing but…
No, it was much too soon to get his hopes up about possible recruits from the other side of the portal. First of all, it looked like a desolate wasteland. Was anyone even alive over there?
“Thank you all for coming,” Arkk said as the movement and shuffling died down. “Sorry for the delay. In case you missed the explanation, that ritual was a bit more draining for those of us involved than expected.”
Zullie let out a commiserating scoff, drawing a few eyes.
Arkk just gave her a nod. “You all know your tasks so I won’t bother with another explanation or long speech. This is… quite literally the adventure of a millennium. I think we’ve delayed long enough.”
Rekk’ar cupped his hands over his mouth. “So which idiot goes through first to see if it is safe?”
Arkk opened his mouth.
Vezta beat him to speaking. “I will,” she said.
Arkk glanced to his side. Vezta didn’t look quite so melty now. Whether that was because she was feeling better or because she was concentrating more, he couldn’t tell. Either way, he considered objecting. As the leader of Company Al-Mir and the Keeper of Fortress Al-Mir’s [HEART], it felt like it was his responsibility to go through first.
It was also his responsibility to ensure the safety of the people who placed their trust in him. Not to mention, he didn’t exactly want to die. Especially not before seeing Ilya again. And if anyone in this room could survive in a hostile environment long enough to get back safely, it would be Vezta. Her unique physiology gave her that advantage. Not to mention her unique perception. Perhaps her eyes could see dangers that everyone else would miss.
Arkk didn’t think that Xel’atriss would intentionally open a portal to somewhere dangerous after all that he had experienced yesterday. Why offer a warning against performing that ritual a second time if walking through the portal would get him killed? That said, a being like that might not even realize that the ants beneath its feet required air to breathe.
Was there air on the other side of the portal? He didn’t know.
But Vezta was significantly more valuable than certain other test subjects he had in stock.
Holding up a hand to stop her from going forward, Arkk pulled one of the lesser servants from elsewhere in the fortress. A wave of his hand commanded it through the portal.
There was some hesitance as it crawled forward. The faint shimmer of the portal grew more intense as it approached, almost turning opaque in the small area around the lesser servant’s body. But it kept going, puncturing through the film of the portal.
It made it to the other side and… seemed fine. It moved. It didn’t seem in distress. Interestingly, he could still see it through his Keeper ability. However, he couldn’t teleport it back to the fortress despite it being a mere few inches away. The way he plucked up minions to teleport them simply slid off, like trying to grasp water from a bucket. Another command had it return, slinking back through the portal. Unfortunately, it couldn’t talk or communicate much about what it had felt over there—if anything. So Arkk looked to Vezta and relented with a nod of his head.
Vezta turned on her heel, marched toward the portal, and stretched a hand out. Her hand stretched further and further, coming apart in a thick strand of oily flesh as she pressed it through the membrane. Arkk could see the resistance. There wasn’t much, like pushing through a curtain hung over a doorframe. Just enough to be visible.
Her arm punctured through and, after waving it about for a moment—during which she opened both eyes and mouths along its length—she pulled the arm back. Giving Arkk a shrug of her shoulders, she said, “Seems okay.”
With that, she stepped through fully.
Arkk watched for any sign of distress. He could see her on the other side, pacing around the dead landscape.
At one point in time, there might have been a building around the other side of the portal. Maybe a fortress like Al-Mir or maybe just a housing structure. It had long since withered away, leaving mounds of brown dirt up against the remains of crumbled walls. Vezta moved up to a carved pillar and brushed her fingers over its surface. She looked down, rubbing at the residue between her fingers.
Her fingers turned into one jagged mouth which she used to take a small bite out of the pillar.
After a few more minutes of walking about on the other side of the portal, she stepped back into Fortress Al-Mir.
“The air seems breathable and I am not sensing any toxins in the ground,” she said, hands clasped in front of her once more. “I doubt the environment will be deleterious toward mortal life. At least in the short term. Without further exploration, I cannot confirm that there is a source of water or food.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem as long as Fortress Al-Mir remains intact,” Arkk said. “Though, Zullie, your first task on the other side is to ensure that the portal structure over there is stable and not likely to collapse. Physically or magically.”
Zullie nodded her head, excitement unbridled in her expression.
“Well, people. A whole new world awaits.”