> A great many things got lost or damaged when the Perilous Realm and much of the western Savanah was devastated by the opening gambit of the Holy Empire’s attempt at realm change. They succeeded, this much is true, but at the cost of almost a third of the Imperial Commonwealth’s most verdant landmass – and saw the annihilation of their capital city of Lothringar and the entire ruling echelon therein as the initial price.

>

> A less expected price, however, that certainly featured not at all in the minds of those striking out from the south, was the breaking of the ancient treaty between the High and the Low Realms. For in the aftermath, as all eyes turned towards that land, many saw that things which had been there, and had fallen silent, were now, in fact, not, and realised that the promises made to them had been as worthless as those given to the peoples of Ur millennia before.

>

> In the war that came, the new Emperor would find that those gentle folk of tree and dale, of river and meadow were every bit as fearful in their means and methods as the stern folk of mountains and stormy skies, and that the creatures we called goblins, Ghoblan in the old tongue, held more secrets than legions of our youth and libraries of our spells could stem.

The Fall of the House of Everkind

  By San Ren, Chronicler of the Ten Wings Sect.

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~ ARAI & SANA, MOUNTAIN SLOPES ~

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She saw other Ghoblan appearing out of the mist, some almost the size of small Ur’Inan… They carried mainly bone weapons and wore bone or spider armour. As she watched, uncomprehending, the wheels of her understanding spinning in the mud of reality, two cave centipedes the size of wagons with inscrutable auras blurred out of the rocks above them and several more burly Ghoblan covered in war-paint and sporting very unpleasant grins piled off them.

The old Ghoblan had an almost lazy air as it held her shoulder, pinning her in place completely. There was no malicious intent in its grip.

“I’s told interesting story by ancestral niece and nephew… very interestings,” the Ghoblan spoke slowly, if with a thick accent. “Says that ancient evils seep land while old man ponders heaven and earth… seeking auspice of good fortune. Makes old bones see that heaven puts grit in eye. Blinds to earthly matters when heaven is mocking like funny dance when he cannot see.”

The demon and the she-devil remained paralysed mid-fight… both staring in what she could only consider to be proper terror.

“Maybes Defiler spawn thinks old man croak? Chokes on old woman’s heaven-defying baking?” The pig demon physically flinched and looked up at the sky.

The old Ghoblan chuckled and looked at the grey demons… “You also awfully free for person I say not allowed over here, Ru’Kali. Maybe you think old man can’t chase you with stick and make you scream for father’s ghost?” It tapped its hat with a long wooden stick that had appeared in its hand from nowhere.

“…”

“Ancestral brats…” the old Ghoblan waved a hand and all the Ghoblan behind perked up.

“Chases them off my mountain, then go gives apology to Ancestor Black Rat and Old Thunder Axe Ur to south for mess you going to make. If kills any of them… brings back head, makes me good chamber pot. Old woman complains after last one she threw at dragon.”

With a hiss, the grey-skinned woman fled, grabbing her brother on the way. The Demon shrieked and fled so fast she was left with only an afterimage – and even that was far too much to remember it by. A dozen Ghoblan behind the old one shot off after them, blurring into shadows, summoning huge spiders and another centipede and… what she was sure was a five-headed black and blue serpent as they went.

Within seconds the mountain was silent apart from the whistling wind and the occasional rumble of thunder overhead.

“Ummm…” she managed weakly… trying to process this bizarre turn of events.

“Changeable… like mood of woman, not see things, children of trees get stupid, have short memories. Maybe if get old, they thank old man, save them from big calamity… from karma their ancestral forbears can’t melt,” the Ghoblan snickered… “Or maybe they weak and get killed by low people – that be big joke.”

“Honoured… Ghoblan…” she managed to gasp out, because she was, she realised, exhausted.

The Ghoblan turned to look at her, then at Sana. Her sister was no longer shaking, but her skin was pale and her breathing ragged. She was sure her sister had burned her newly acquired longevity-

“Come,” the old Ghoblan said, pulling her to her feet easily. “Is cold, old bones rattle in wind standing out here.”

Left with no real recourse, she could only follow after the old Ghoblan, helping Sana.

“Uh… will they?” she started to speak, but the Ghoblan waved a hand.

“They be fine, very bored sit up here, nobody comes by, likely forgets we live here with snow and all – does them…”

There was a ripple in the world and then another behind them. The clouds above shimmered faintly and she caught the faint echo of a miserable pig-like shriek.

“Maybe I should have told them not to be too noisy,” the Ghoblan muttered, dropping its more folksy way of speaking for a second as it hunched its shoulders at the noise.

“What is going on?” Sana’s voice echoed in her head.

“You…”

“If you say that I will stab you, fates help me,” her sister’s voice echoed sourly.

“I believe we have been saved,” she said weakly as they walked after the Old Ghoblan.

The trip after him was bizarre she could only concede. They must have walked for maybe ten minutes up slope, winding between rocks, past drifts of icy snow and the occasional stream before the Ghoblan stopped beside a random crevice in a cliff that was about as wide as they were. As they walked, she was treated to occasional flickers of purple fire and peals of thunder, along with agonizing shrieks from the pig demon down below – all of it obscured by the lower cloud level that had mostly returned after whatever the pig demon had done.

“Comes in. Warmer than out here,” the Ghoblan said, giving them both an appraising look before turning and stumping into the crevice.

They both stood there, staring at the dark fissure. She wasn’t sure what to think. Sana’s confusion through the link was also palpable. After they had stood there for almost a minute, undecided and confused, the Ghoblan reappeared and stared at them.

“You wants second invite? Or has somewhere else to go? Thunderstorm comes soon,” the old Ghoblan said dubiously.

“Uh… who... are you? Honoured Ghoblan,” she asked eventually.

“Hah… Honoured, yet you stand here and slight Old Bones hospitality, young people today,” the Ghoblan said with a slight scowl at last. “I Old Bones, person who saves two bedraggled things running for lives after hearing niece’s plea.”

“Niece?” Sana said weakly.

“Little girl who likes to gnaw on spiders, grows up to look like this tall, ran off to see world and got in trouble – saved by luck after tribe get hunted down,” the Ghoblan said with a shrug.

“The others survived? Honoured…”

“If you call me honoured one more time I hit you on head with stick and throw you in crevice. It cold out here,” the Ghoblan said flatly.

He turned and took two steps then tripped over a rock and fell flat on his face. They both stared at him dully.

What kind of old ancestor trips over a rock? her sister muttered in her head.

The Ghoblan muttered something darkly under its breath, picking himself up.

“I guess we can only follow… if he saved us because of the Ghoblan we saved…” her sister shuddered.

“Or we are walking from one disaster into another,” she scowled in her head.

“True, but stay or run we are totally shafted,” her sister said sadly.

Sighing, she stepped forward into the crevice and found that the way opened out rapidly into a somewhat larger space. They followed the Ghoblan down, with some trepidation, as the path became a set of steps then finally widened out into a deep gorge with buildings cut into both sides. Snow drifted in the opening far overhead while various trees and planted beds twisted between a few steaming pools. Lights flickered in some of the buildings but it was remarkably quiet – serene even.

The old Ghoblan stumped onwards, leading them past several of the rock-cut buildings to arrive at one door about halfway down that was slightly grander in its overall design. It paused to take off its hat and then surreptitiously wiped its feet on some rushes by the door before entering. They followed suit, also wiping their feet, having no other option really.

Inside, they were met with a narrow hall that was just too low for them to walk in comfortably. The Ghoblan headed down the corridor, pushing aside a thick fur covering without further comment. Following him, they ducked into a broad room that held a cosy fire, before which the Ghoblan was stood, warming his hands.

“Five Gods, why are they naked you idiot?” an old voice snapped, making her jump and the Old Ghoblan flinch. A wizened, white-haired old woman with tanned skin and a pointy nose, wearing thick white furs shuffled out of the side room and glared at their guide.

“Is not for me to say who is fashion–” the old Ghoblan ducked as the woman snared a piece of firewood from somewhere and threw it at him with a serious amount of venom.

“You two look like stunned rabbits. Sit down over there and be a bit modest. I’ll get you some furs, maybe two furs…” the old Ghoblan woman bustled back into the room after waving in the direction of one of the fur-lined benches that were close to the fire.

“…”

She found herself moving automatically, taking Sana with her to sit on the couch, curling up her legs and resting her chin on her knees for a moment before deciding to lean her legs sideways instead. Sana sat down right beside her, her wariness also palpable. The old Ghoblan woman bustled back in a moment later carrying two large furs which she dropped beside both of them.

The old Ghoblan had perched himself on a wooden chair by the fire, having discarded his Undren skull hat with aplomb and now stared at them over steepled fingers. She felt the symbol shift slightly in her mind to avoid notice somehow, but nothing on the same level as before.

“Would you shows me it?” he said abruptly.

“Don’t be rude! She doesn’t even know who you are or where she is and you’re already asking her to show things without even saying what and why? At best you sound like idiot and at worst like shady old thief!” the old Ghoblan’s woman’s voice drifted in from elsewhere.

*ahem*

The old Ghoblan winced.

“…”

The silence that came from the other room was actually oppressive, although not directed at the two of them in the slightest.

“I called ‘Old Horned Bones’, so called because I am old and I once took a bunch of bones as trophies chopped the horn of a big lizard, my Old Lady there is called ‘Old Veiled H–’,”

“Cailleach!” the woman’s whisper from the other room made the room actually chill in a way that somehow never touched either of them.

“She called what she say,” the old Ghoblan said with a shiver. “Anyway, I apologise for my previous ill demeanour, dear damsels. When the cold seeps into my bones, I get a bit cranky.”

“Jun Arai,” she whispered.

“Jun Sana,” her sister added.

“Might I perchance see the thread of red-gold fortune that ye have brought all this way from that accursed island city?” the old Ghoblan asked politely.

She stared at him, then remembered to shut her mouth because staring like that was rude. His whole manner of dictation and in fact his whole manner was transformed from one moment to the next. How he sat there on his chair looking positively noble just for no longer talking like an old herb farmer. It also allowed her to notice that he wore a dark gold twisted metal necklace.

It was also not the question she had been expecting in the moment – her first thought had been that he was talking about the symbol… or the leaf, or the Sana’s pagoda even.

“Why…” she said guardedly…

“What happened to it was wrong. These old bones could not intervene because of the plot that was spun, and when it was done and we saw the field for what it was, evil had won,” he sighed, the words almost singing in the air, now sounding like a scholar-poet of all things.

She glanced inwards – the thread was still around her Nascent Soul’s waist, as it was before, although now it was closer to a woven belt of deep red and dark gold. It even had a faint inscription picked out in the deep red-gold that read ‘To watch over you, as I hope you will watch over others – Elaria’

“To the end…” the words echoed in her head again making her shiver and her eyes water.

The emotions of that moment, when she looked at the sky had been… all encompassing… sorrow, rage… and disappointment with a world that had never amounted to what it should have.

It appeared in her hand almost without her doing anything, faintly warm to the touch.

“So it really is one of her workings, passed on from those children to you – through that saving grace have they passed on Good Fortune to you,” Old Bones said approvingly. “This is fitting, a reward across the generations, fortune from the east – invoked through a saving grace.”

The tone of his voice drew her gaze and for a split second she saw… the same sentiments in the old Ghoblan’s golden eyes as she had felt through the piece of cloth. Abruptly he sighed and the sense of inherent nobility within him vanished and he was just a vagabond old Ghoblan slumped in a wooden chair by the fire staring into the distance, looking sad… and tired. “I want to rage for them, but Cailleach she say that it not the time, that this vile place not worth my rage, not worth the price – that people who play with fire get burned anyway, that that kind of bad karma once sowed can only be reaped in very unpleasant ways. So I can only leave be… In end she right, it seems.”

“Of course I am right, old idiot,” Cailleach said with a sniff, shuffling back into the room carrying several bowls of steaming soup on a tray. “That is my thing… even when being right is not a nice thing…”

The old Ghoblan woman bustled over to her and proffered her a steaming bowl of soup which she took because the alternative would again have been rude. Her lethargy was… she distracted herself from it by sweeping the soup with her soul sense, which told her it was a soup – made of some kind of pink-fleshed river fish and a bunch of spirit herbs, most of which she had seen on the way in in fact.

Sana also took her bowl and stared at Cailleach and then back at her own soup. The old woman just sighed and patted the fur. Through the link she could feel her sister’s condition was the same as her own. It wasn’t that she wasn’t hungry, it was…

“It good that you have eyes, but you must also know when to judge,” Cailleach said, sitting down and picking up her own bowl of soup and taking a spoonful. “If I poisoned you, that would be big shame; you are guests here, beneath my roof.”

“True, this big shame,” Old Bones agreed, slurping down his own soup.

Cailleach just shook her head, her hair falling to reveal pointy ears and smiled at them both encouragingly. “Just drink. After, you feel better.”

She stared at it again – it was undeniably excellent soup. The problem was that she was just totally adrift here. Her body just wasn’t behaving right anymore, and it wasn’t anything to do with her presence here as far as she could see. Rather she was becoming more and more aware that she was…

“Ah, I see,” Cailleach, who was staring at them both intently now, said with a frown. “You are empty.”

“…Empty?” she said blankly.

“You have run on anger for so long you no longer know what rage is. You have been fuelled by intent not to die. Step forward one step – cut thing, step forward – cut thing, step, cut, step, cut, step.” Cailleach said simply.

“…”

“That dangerous path,” Old Bones nodded sagely. “Ends in empty place: you break into pieces and what walks on is not good.”

“Dear…” Cailleach said, shooting him a look.

“But it is truth, and you must accept, because is truth,” the old Ghoblan said simply. “I not save you with descendant niece’s pleading just to see you fall to pieces on old lady’s floor and never put self back together again.”

“In truth, your resilience is slightly freakish,” Cailleach said softly. “Drink it up, it will help.”

She stared at the old woman, because in her heart she knew she was right – in this strange moment of peace, in this place, she was… empty.

“Is this because of the pig demon?” Sana said softly.

“In part, you were able to resist it somewhat, but just being in its presence, seeing that abomination is enough to unman many,” Cailleach agreed.

That was also true, she knew. The whole ordeal – everything… Part of it was a side effect of the banners, part of it was cutting away what she had, or managing to free herself in that way. Even then, the understanding that came with it was hollowing in some strange way, rather than freeing. The last part, was surprisingly prosaic though – it was simply that they had gone from that near death experience to a bowl of soup and a warm fire in less than twenty minutes and she couldn’t adjust.

-What if it is all some terrible trick, that we never escaped the…

Closing her eyes, she crushed that aberrant thought and sighed – and took a sip of the soup.

It was good – creamy and with just right mix of mint and fish. The fish itself was tender and flaked nicely – the skin on it was still there, crisped to the point where it could be eaten. The vegetables were tasty and sweet with again just the right mix of crunch. It even had cereal grains in it, spirit grains. The quality was unfathomable; as pure spirit food went, she was suddenly certain that this was not a dish she could grasp if she lived in Eastern Azure for a million years.

By the time she was done pondering it, she realised she had drunk and eaten the whole bowl and was actually considering licking the inside of it.

“Umm…” Sana put her own bowl aside.

“You want to know why you were saved?” the old woman said with a sigh.

They both nodded.

“It is as good a place to start I suppose,” Cailleach said with a nod.

“I say before: it because descendent niece make me aware that things here were actively putting grit in my eyes,” Old Bones grumbled. “Simply put, I save you for several reasons: firstly, these old bones dislike the way younger generations doing things. They have no decorum, make mess, do evil, and give things bad name, even Ghoblan not immune.

“Secondly, you saved those three – promising youngsters who got screwed over by lazy elders who not take Defilers seriously, not tell people who they should – more interested in making own pile of loot and letting others carry smelly pot. Their good luck also your good luck; maybe we teach a bit, after they go to clans who lack shaman in mountains, become new strength. This is karma. If I let you two die after you do me favour of opening eyes like that, it will interfere with this old man’s good vibes,” Old Bones said with a cackle that was almost infectious, pulling a faint smile out of Sana at least.

She was about to point out that the old shaman in the Cloud Arrows tribe had seemed to be somewhat concerned, but before she could do so, the old Ghoblan continued on.

“Third thing, I detest ‘Defilers’ – they are the worst. They greedy idiots who threw away their chance and worshipped at a false altar. I offer proper prayer to Maker, that his ancestral memory send his Great Daughters to tear down their big pit and bury them on large birthday. Wife here say their luck run out soon, kick biggest board there is, so maybe my prayers do some good after all!” Old Bones started to laugh again at that as she looked at Cailleach who just shook her head as if this was perfectly normal.

After a few moments, the Old Ghoblan settled down and re-composed himself.

“If the three Ghoblan survived… did Rusula, Pezvak and Luz survive?” she asked steeling herself.

“The three Ur’Inan. All six survived, barely,” Old Bones said with a sigh. “They here actually; you can see later if you wish.”

“Later,” Cailleach said firmly. “They suffering much worse than you, although in different way – not have your… resilience.” The old woman just shook her head and took another sip of her soup.

“Anyway,” Old Bones said, continuing on, “as for final reason, your actions, moon mushrooms stir pot enough, made big enough noise that we have to go look personally what younger generations doing. When I go down I find lots of mushrooms, no trace of anything else – whole thing very fishy because no matter where we look there was nothing, just bunch of corpses and mushrooms and lots of people looking at nothing and big elders who meant to be watching things all doing own thing. When go look for them, start to find them missing or dead and nobody notice, clans just playing games with each other without anyone noticing collective tails were tied together and on fire. Only when five big lightning arrive on plateau did familiar ominous aura become obvious for a moment.”

“Oh,” she said, recalling the barrier they had bypassed. “The city we were in was surrounded by a barrier…”

“Yes,” Old Bones nodded. “Big Lightning show that pig devils got in via main teleport nexus, seized control of whole city somehow by sideways means, nobody noticed and they operating like that for five old primevals know how long…”

“The alignments in the city…” Sana spoke up, “they were really inauspicious. It felt like they had been doing whatever they had been doing for a long time, but the Ur’Inan, the Cloud Arrows tribe, only spoke of rumours of people vanishing in large numbers in the last few storm waves.”

“That they had been erratic,” she agreed.

“This is why Defilers are dangerous,” Cailleach agreed. “People who do not know them think only of the small ones, especially here. This place already divided on itself before they every pop up like evil spectre, and with generations short and other problems far too many not see the darkness seeping until big devils pop up and overturn whole board, because the big ones are not stupid.”

“They did something like that before?” Sana asked.

“Not recently, not on this landmass. On one of the southern ones, a few thousand years ago. Since then, barely a peep apart from some small incursions – we know they have special place, hidden realm somehow, but…” Cailleach leant back with a frustrated sigh.

She thought about matters for a moment and then held out the leaf. “The one who tormented me knew about the origins of this.”

Cailleach wordlessly took the leaf and considered it. “An Arborundum offcut, carved into a palm leaf. Marked with the sigil of the Earl of Van Jaal – this is from Evergrove.”

“Anyway, sacrifice not enough, clearly got rushed. They try to summon Original Big Devil, instead get his wretched sibling children. When arrive there, realise that was you. That last reason why – seem only fair,” Old Bones said with a humorous grin.

“That was… child devil?” Sana interjected with a shudder.

She noticed he was being quite scrupulous about not referring to it by name…

“Yep,” Old Bones nodded. “Honestly less you know about actual Defiler Devils, happier you be. Defiling evil worst evil of all things down here, and the ‘Pig Demons’ as you call them are probably the most insidiously disgusting of the three heads of that wretched thing.”

“Quite,” Cailleach said abruptly. “And speaking about them over mealtimes is not pleasant, so we can shelve that conversation for later. Such ancient history will make their brains dribble out their ears and become flavour for soup. Speaking of soup, I bring seconds.”

“True, main thing is that three arms all have bad origin,” Old Bones sighed.

“There are other types than the pig demons?” she said with a shudder.

“Yes,” Old Bones said with a deeper sigh. “Cloud Arrows not tell you about Orcnéas?”

“…”

Thinking back on it she did think that Rusula had mentioned them a few times, but always she had been kind of vague about them. She had said they were some ancient evil and a foe of the Ur’Sar and the Ur’Inan… and that they were a taboo, but that was about it from what she could immediately recall.

“Rusula said about Orc being an insult…” Sana said eventually.

“That different matter, but not unconnected,” Old Bones said shaking his head. “Well, did they tell you about Ur’Khal?”

“They are some other tribe that were deeply venerated and created by someone called Keramos who treated them like his sons?” she hazarded.

“So, not really,” the old Ghoblan snickered. “A long time ago a powerful Ur’Khal Chieftain called Mo’Kratha killed a powerful ancestor of the Ri of Earth-

“Ri?” her sister asked.

“How you come all this way not know about elves?” the Ghoblan said dubiously.

Monkeyshit, her sister’s voice echoed in her head glumly, her worry that that had been some kind of misstep palpable.

“Anyway, Mo’Kratha killed this Ri Chieftain called Orcus and ate his heart, taking his strength of oaths and claiming his name, becoming Orcus the Slayer. There was a big war and a lot of people died. At that time, the earth elves had no leader – despite Orcus telling them explicitly before his death that his wife would take over. She refused, breaking her oath to him – she then broke another two oaths in rapid succession and became defiled through the connection she had to the blood taint on Orcus.

“When Orcus realised what had happened he killed himself to try to absolve matters but that just made things worse because his corpse was seized by the lingering defilement in the curse that connected to the gestalt strength between the Ur’Khal, turning most of those in his faction who had followed his practices into bloodthirsty lunatics. They became ‘Orcnéas’, and Orcus the Defiler became the principal aspect of the Defiler. They specialise in defilement via rage, death, carnage, chaos, torture, ruin and so on...

“Tarantis, Queen of the Earth Elves, became the second aspect, but didn’t die, so she is… in a weird spot so to speak. A while after that, another shady dark elf called Akalaraltis also seized upon that power and became the second proper head of the defiler – that faction is called the ‘Corpse Lords’ – they specialize in all things defiling to do with death, bedevilment, corruption, decay, deceit and so on...

“The third faction, the pig devils – demons as you call them – came much later. They are descended from a bunch of humans who fell to the ‘Defiler’ through debauched desires, greed for power and so on. Big Human Emperor did all sorts of evil things then got killed, opened the door, defiler claimed him and opened up new nightmare for whole new era thereafter.”

“The evil man makes is best tailored to tormenting others after all…” she murmured softly. That was something her father had said frequently about the wars of 100 years ago, and the three schools conflict for that matter.

“Indeed,” Old Bones nodded. “Evil is usually its own best friend and excellent at finding new bedfellows.”

“As I said, it is old history. The important thing is that there are three factions and to know how they go about things,” Cailleach interjected, shuffling back in with more soup and some bread.

“…”

She could only nod at that, gratefully accepting another bowl of soup. They had been almost ruined by the fates-accursed pig demons.

“Their banners,” Sana said softly.

“Among other things,” Cailleach agreed, “because those that later idiots decided to call ‘Jash Ubri’Khund’ were descended from humans who fell to the Defiler through their debauched desires, staggering greed and an unshakable belief in their own status as living gods to whom no rules applied. They exemplify those attributes: they are cruel, debauched, bloodthirsty, utterly amoral and entirely deviant. They are also weak-willed, craven, cowardly, incapable of proper organisation without serious oversight and at lower realms entirely driven by instinct.

“Orcnéas – descended as they are from the original Ur’Khal – are also cruel, bloodthirsty and violently debauched, with an almost unshakable will for causing death and chaos, and an ability to get stronger the more pressured they are. Their weakness, if you can call it that, is that they are utterly lacking in subtlety and forward-planning, incapable of working together and as likely to implode on themselves as they erupt on others.

“The corpse lords are prideful, arrogant and deceitful sadists and bringers of ruin who delight in defiling everything and want to reduce the whole world to a state of undeath, to which they are the sole puppet masters. If they have a weakness, it’s in their pride and their need to build up their strength over time.”

“How do they not roll over everything?” she asked. “Their banners, that defiling principle, the way they twisted everything…”

“Here, this place is like a breeding ground for them,” Cailleach sighed, “But as dangerous as they are, they are fragile, the defilers at least. They lack materials to truly dominate. Their strength lies in the humans they turned…”

“What happens to other races if they… get corrupted?” she asked after a pause.

“They can be turned to pig demons, but they do not have the same potential, or affinity. Ur’Inan and Ur’Vash would work, but their leaders will not let them rise. They were human, and they are innately determined of their own superiority over other, more savage races as they would see it. The spawn those bear rarely advance past the fourth circle.”

“That is why they wanted… us?” she asked weakly.

“Yes, you would have been the key to a new dynasty in this land,” Cailleach said softly.

“However you not become pig thing. Image is very important,” Old Bones said with a sour look at them both. “You become something different, not quite same path, but just as dangerous: parallel thing gobbled up by Orcus the Defiler long ago.”

“Image?” she asked, somewhat confused now.

“Men who fall become those pig-like demon; inner greed is ugly but they believe in perfection. Women who fall become demoness who feed on torment and lust. Just as ugly in its own way, just as superficial as well,” Old Bones stated. “It better you not think about it too much.”

“We were lucky… We had a way to use the moon mushrooms against them… The miasma protected us but they still tormented us mentally…” Sana said with a shudder that was visible under the furs. She felt the turmoil shift in both of them for a moment before settling again as she took another gulp of the soup and Sana nibbled on some of the bread.

“Yes, use that crazy rat’s moon plague to do that is big style,” the old Ghoblan snickered. “Very brave, but also very stupid – that thing is unspeakably dangerous in its own right, if given the right opportunities. A living host it could control would be a weapon of ruination comparable to any Defiler plot. I cannot say you lucky, or unlucky, but heavens here and in general maybe hate Defilers more than hate you so it all balance out with a cost paid.”

“Fortunately there are not many ‘men’ down here who fell,” Cailleach added.

“The wizened old pig demons?” she said, finally making the connection. The demons had been nurturing them in hidden places she could only presume.

“Why were they all weak though? The ones we encountered had strong bodies but their souls were…”

“They will have mostly been prisoners,” Cailleach nodded.

“Prisoners?” she blinked. “We thought this was an ancient mine?”

“It’s that as well,” Cailleach said, before asking, “More soup?”

She looked down and found her second bowl was empty and could only nod; it really was helping a lot.

Cailleach went off to get more soup and they sat there in silence, watching the fire for a while. It was hard not to dwell on how narrow an escape they had just had, listening to these two old Ghoblan explain concisely how terrifying the Defilers were. She could see even more clearly now, how they had been pulled on, their sense of judgement subverted by their presence, but those banners… in a weird way it also made her think of the mists and their devouring…

“Do the mists behave in the same way?” she asked.

“Mists?” Old Bones said looking up.

“From the serpents. They had a ‘principle’ in them that devoured qi, and even vitality.”

“Principle, huh… That’s not a term these old bones have heard in a long time,” the Ghoblan mused. “Yes, they are very similar, but the Defilers are… Their ‘Principle’ is about defiling yes, but the strength within it is closer to an actual rule, a fundamental concept that subverts anything it touches. It is dangerous to anything below the 8th Circle, give or take. The mist are similar, but they are not an unnatural thing. They come from the great serpent in the middle of the mire, far to the south of here – many of its children draw upon its strength.”

“We should have just holed up in the Cloud Arrows tribe for as long as they wanted and cultivated to Immortality,” she muttered under her breath.

“You say that like they didn’t pack us off with remarkable haste after your third meeting with that old Shaman,” Sana muttered in her head.

The old Ghoblan blinked and started at them both… “Cultivate? You are both practitioners of the Heavenly Dao… Ahaha…”

They both stared blankly, soup bowls in hand, as the Old Ghoblan cackled madly in in place for a full minute, tears streaming from his golden eyes until he fell off his chair.

“Those changed pigs really kicked a big plank… That’s too good.”

“Metal brick?” her sister said dully.

She was equally confused, both by his reaction, which was not what she had expected, and also by how them being cultivators had anything to do with anything… As far as she was aware, while the systems here were a bit different, the Ur’Inan and the Undren both did a kind of ‘spiritual’ cultivation that tended heavily towards body refinement. Rusula’s own strength was not dissimilar to their own in some ways and the Shaman of the Cloud Arrows tribe…

“Hah… I know Heaven’s Path practitioners from Ten Wings Society, and the Moon Dream Pagoda from long ago. They all like cockroaches: very hard to kill. They make an art form of walking the line between disaster and triumph. As long as keep mind-set right, very dangerous to try to kill – have to bring a big stick, always worry about rule of two: Master and Disciple. That a harsh lesson this place learn hard way in distant past.” Old Bones said with a nasty laugh.

“It’s hard to refute,” she muttered.

“Won’t those others come and make trouble?” Sana said, changing the topic back to the events of their ‘rescue’. “Or the powers behind them kill Ghoblan?”

She let her sister talk, running back through the previous conversation, thinking through what they had said now that her head was a little clearer.

“Hah,” Cailleach barked a laugh at her sister’s question. “This is not their continent. They showed up commendably fast for that evil old thing, but it’s more likely they had already come over here for some reason.”

“They were also here for us?” Sana said dully.

“The city,” she interjected absently, still thinking about what Old Bones had said about the teleport nexus and comparing their experiences to what the spear had said.

“The city?” Cailleach blinked.

“The ruined city off the coast, that the Sar… Sar’Katush had held,” she said looking up, thinking about what the spear had said about powerful forces coming out of the west to investigate.

“Oh… Ohhhh…” Sana said suddenly, grasping what she meant.

“Hmmm, yeah, that might do it,” Cailleach mused. “They have long war with Sar’Katush. They built up like a fortress with many strengths squatting on it. I wonder how you managed to free that little spear actually… and the big one up above.” The old woman stared at her searchingly and she could only shift a little… uneasily.

In truth, she was… conflicted now. These two had grasped that they were ‘cultivators’ but not, it seemed, that they were from ‘outside’ this place from what she could see. Thinking back on it, there were other things that were not adding up as well. These two were clearly powerful, very powerful, yet… both had made reference obliquely to ‘limitations’ in passing.

“Who can say how those lunatics think,” Old Bones said with an eyeroll. “In any case, this not their continent, only them two and a few others can come easily over land. Underground now mostly Undren territory and they really dislike both people here and people on that continent. It takes big style to ride the storm – they only do it because they see opportunity to try to grasp pig devil, which have bad history with their group due to the humans here.”

“I see,” Sana nodded, before growing silent again

She could feel her sister’s thoughts, however, rattling around much as her own were. It was a strange feeling actually. On the one hand they were linked much more profoundly, yet there was a control and a separation to it that she hadn’t realised was missing before.

“Has the link between us… stabilised?” she asked in her head.

“Eh…” her sister’s voice echoed in her mind, considering. “It… does look like it, doesn’t it?”

She considered it a bit more in silence as their hosts looked on, now slightly amused. In order to break up the silence as much as anything, she went back to the cloud serpents, because that seemed like a topic that could be asked about with ignorance on her metaphorical sleeve.

“So what about the cloud serpents? Are there no other strengths that would have pushed back at the Defilers?”

“Other strengths…” Cailleach sighed.

“There some, but they not care in the same way,” Old Bones shrugged. “Cloud Serpents, as you say, or as some call them, Hydra or Neonates, they dangerous to everyone.”

“So the Cloud Arrows tribe said,” she agreed. “Would the serpents not move against the Defilers though?”

“The big serpent in the south might, if it was awake, but it is sealed up. The lesser ones dislike leaving their caves and those that control territory in the actual wetlands are mostly three and four-headed ones. They quite lazy and content to just deal with things that bother them, not go looking for other problems. Spider Queens are the same, and Eldritch Slimes not leave deep pits unless something goes to bother them,” Old Bones mused.

“As to others, as I said before – all easily distracted, big elders mostly worried about other things and Defilers, especially the pig head ones are excellent popping up like mushrooms unlooked for. Especially in this place, which steeped in bad juju anyway.”

“All I say about serpents is that big ones very bad tempered, if any of big three in swamps rouse, even we not necessarily match for them alone. They also all badly injured – mostly not leave deep nests in lakes to the south. The nine-headed serpent not thing to mess with – even defilers not that stupid. Middle of the wetlands here are its absolute kingdom… the mist is thing it make to help nurture those who go outside, to strengthen four and five-headed spawn that hold territory there.

“Indeed… Cannot exert power beyond twisting the laws of this place a little. The density…” Cailleach trailed off, frowning.

“Anyway, we talking about weird things again. You finish soup and rest a bit. Always time to talk after.”

“Uh…” she nodded quietly as the old woman got up and took the other plates away.

“I go check on things outside. They take long time to come back,” Old Bones mused, also hopping up.

“Where… can we go see the others?” she asked abruptly.

“…”

“Yes, sure, why not, but you are not walking outside like that,” the old woman said, looking from the door. “Give me a few minutes.”

“This is still like some kind of dream,” Sana’s voice echoed in her head.

She could only nod. She was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak, but it resolutely was not.

“You think that the great teleportation thingy, this nexus that Old Bones said, is what the spear spoke of?” Sana said after a further moment’s consideration.

“I rather fear it was,” she agreed. “The spear made no mention of the Defilers at all though…”

“It was sealed up for a long time, I guess, and this seems like a new threat…” Sana mused.

“And the arrays that were sealing up… us… refining us…” she trailed off, in her own head of all things.

“You think that the Defilers were also behind that?” Sana said softly.

“The spear did say that the old habitation areas would be dangerous and we shouldn’t linger there but focus on the mountains…” she sighed, leaning back against the fur-covered couch and looking around the room.

“…”

Sana fell silent as she considered again where they were sat – it was very homely, for all that it was carved mostly from rock. The walls had beautiful scroll-work of forest leaves that merged with beautiful geometric designs that put her in mind of snowflakes tracing their contours. Exposed panels not devoted to shelves, cupboards or the odd trophy depicted mountains and forests with figures running or dancing through them. Or scenes of figures mining below the earth, holding up various minerals and other oddments, carrying them in procession through scenes until they all arrived at the fire place.

The fireplace itself was like a work of art in its own right, something between a gate between two tree trunks and a cave mouth. The figures clambered up them to deposit their offerings into the fire itself, which burned merrily. Above it were carved two figures: the one on the left had antler horns and wore animal skins and was dancing hand in hand with the one on the right, who was a woman shrouded in wind and cloud between the forest scenes and the mountain scenes.

“Do you think that is the two of them?” she said as they considered the scenes, not needing to put names to Old Bones and Cailleach.

“It does look like it,” Sana murmured. “They must lead this tribe, the White Depths peak was what he called it, didn’t he?”

The rest of the room’s decorations were very mundane: the plates and bowls they had eaten from were wooden, but the furniture was all stone, shrouded in furs. Doorways were curtained off with tapestries and furs and the floor, which was also carved she noted, was also covered in them. The shelves had collections of this and that: plates, statues, a few bowls of spirit fruits, some books even, with covers that were just strange runic scrawling.

She was still working up the courage to stand up and walk around when Cailleach bustled back in through that door and put down two bundles on their couch.

“You can wear these. They are a bit small, but they will do,” the old woman said, pushing one bundle towards her.

Unwrapping it she held up the dress which was white, hemmed with blue and grey patterns of snowflakes. It would fall to her knees and leave her arms exposed. The lack of undergarments was… she guessed it was what it was, so shrugged it on. Cailleach was right as well, because it was a bit small on her but not uncomfortably so. It was, however, a weird feeling to wear actual clothes again after so long. Sana pulled on the other one, which was very similar in design.

“Thank you,” she said, proffering a formal bow to the old woman who just shook her head and chuckled.

“It’s nothing. Others here would not care, truth be told, but they know little of humans or human concerns in that regard.” Cailleach said with a wave of her hand. “Now… you wished to see your… companions?”

“…Yes,” she said after a pause.

“They are not in the best shape, but they will live,” Cailleach said, waving for them to follow her.

They traipsed back outside, grabbing some cloaks that Cailleach offered them on the way and crossed the still mostly dark gorge to the other side. There, the old Ghoblan woman led them along the path, past a large stone that was embedded in a gnarled old thorn tree that grew in the middle of the gorge. On it she could see runes carved that gave her a comfortable sensation as she glanced at them even if she had no idea what it actually meant.

Cailleach stopped before another doorway a little way down that had a lantern hung outside it. Pushing her way in, they followed. She waved them to go on through while she went into another room off to one side. Passing through the atrium, which was much like the one in the abode they had been in before, if less ornate, Arai found herself in a room that was a bit smaller than Cailleach’s hall, in which several familiar figures were sat. The two Ur’Inan were Ragash and Luz – who both looked very on edge. The third was one of the Ghoblan, who was missing an arm and nursing several scars that had not been there before.

“Ah, youse live,” the Ghoblan said, perking up as they entered before also noticing Cailleach who had come in behind them with a bowl of fruit.

“Lady of White Depths,” it bowed very deeply to Cailleach, who just waved a hand.

“You… how…” Luz stammered, looking at the pair of them as if they were ghosts.

“You… survived?” Ragash said faintly.

“So it seems,” she said. “I am glad you are okay…”

“Are Rusula and Pezvak?” Sana said, looking around.

“They still badly injured, Luz said softly. “Pezvak fight big evil, get hit for it, barely survived. Shaman Rusula do forbidden art, buy time for Ghoblan to…”

Both glanced at the Ghoblan who shrugged. “I Bright Fungi-seeker. We introduced before, but probably impression was slight because necessity.”

She sat down at the table, followed by Sana, before asking Ragash, “What of the other two… Jelas and... Rukuala?”

“…”

“They live,” Cailleach said absently, bustling around a sideboard before putting the bowl of food on the table. “As Old Bones say, they experience three big evil in very quick succession, this big shock.”

She blinked, because Cailleach’s tone was… folksy, just like Old Bones, whereas before she had been speaking much more normally.

“Thank you… for-the… hospitality, Hold Lady,” Luz said with a nervous bow speaking with stilted La’taan, which Ragash followed.

“Just speak normally; all understood here; this is the blessing of this hold,” Cailleach said blandly. “If I have to listen to Eastern Latin butchered like that I send you outside with stick to learn letters in mud like child.”

The Ghoblan sat at the table snorted into her food then recovered herself quickly.

“What of the Undren?” she said looking around.

“They go separate ways,” Bright Fungi-seeker said with a wave of her remaining hand. “They grateful, but run back to big rat elders and tell them to buck up ideas, wage battle properly.”

“Youse want to see Cloud Arrows’ Shaman?” Cailleach said to her, giving her a speculative look.

They both nodded, and the old Ghoblan woman just sighed and waved for them to follow. They left the room, leaving the others to their thoughts and food, following her down a side corridor and into a smaller room that turned out to be a bedroom. The room was so brightly lit she actually had to squint for a moment.

“No shadows…?” Sana said looking around.

“Yes, she cannot be healed with shadows present,” Cailleach said as they stared at Rusula.

The young Ur’Inan was pale and drawn – her grey-brown skin was nearly as pale as parchment and her features were shadowy. Someone had drawn a lot of symbols over her body that traced her meridian gates and her qi circulation system she could see from a cursory examination. Those lines were somehow augmenting them, gnawing away at a sense of wrongness within them.

“Your skill with the Ancient Symbol Scripts is remarkably good,” Cailleach said softly. “Without the talismans you carved for them, they would be dead already.”

She realised she wasn’t really sure what to say to that…

“Do we actually tell her?” Sana said in her head.

“We were free enough with the Cloud Arrows tribe,” she murmured.

“…”

“Oh, on the name of nine accursed generations-!” she said stopping abruptly.

“What?” Her sister said in her head before reaching the same realisation. “Oh. That’s…”

“How long were we held captive for?” she asked Cailleach.

The Ghoblan woman looked at them with a frown… “I think one storm front came and went between the time Old Bones descendant niece came to him and lightning.”

“…”

“That can’t be right…” Sana said dully.

“No… that really can’t be right,” she agreed, unless something had gone very wrong with her understanding of time…

“Why do you say that?” Cailleach frowned.

“We were held captive for… months? The Defilers were trying to refine us in…”

“They tried to refine you?” Cailleach said flatly. “How?”

“Like the spear…” she supplied. “They had this array, in a room. I was pinned to the wall with...” she shuddered just remembering it.

“Same,” Sana said. “They couldn’t get close because of the miasma of the moon mushrooms though…”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“…”

The Old Ghoblan woman looked pensive for a moment, then suddenly stared at her very hard indeed. The symbol shifted subtly and hid itself just a fraction.

“Oh, is that how it is…” Cailleach murmured, her eyes glimmering purple faintly.

“Uh…” her sister’s voice echoed her own flash of concern in her mind before Cailleach just sighed and the tension faded away.

“That stupid old bag of bones, he was so caught up in the moment and too worried about the flashy pig with big style – this, this right here is why they are so fucking dangerous!” They stared at Cailleach blankly as the small Ghoblan woman almost quivered on the spot, then physically kicked the wall, leaving a foot print in it.

“We go back to my house. I think we need to have a proper talk about this – I assumed they just grabbed you because of this whole Ur’Sar bollocks or because you are human.” Cailleach looked this way and that, clenching her fists as if she wanted to hit something, before turning on her heel and stalking out again.

By the time they made it back to the room with the others in, she had recovered, and they left after bidding some quick goodbyes to the others, heading back to Cailleach’s house. When they got there, she found several more Ghoblan sat around in the gorge cleaning off their weapons, looking a bit tired.

They all stood and looked respectful as Cailleach led them back through.

“You’re back?” Cailleach said.

“Some, the D’Varad run really good,” one of the older Ghoblan who had a bone sickle for a weapon said with a shrug.

“The ones who go after the old sin-children not back yet; it even better at running and not want to take penalty I think,” another said with a sigh.

“*tcch*”, Cailleach said with a frown.

Without further comment she led them back into the house and waved for them to sit at the table.

“Sorry, I am not angry at you,” the old Ghoblan woman said after a moment, “I’m annoying at myself – it’s too easy to get caught up in a certain pace of thinking.

“You said you experienced months of imprisonment?”

“Yes,” she said as Sana also nodded.

“And you broke out by calling tribulation lightning, manifesting all five Supremes in sequential order as well…” Cailleach said softly as she walked over to stare in the fire.

“– What Scripture do you practice?”

“Scripture?” she said, confused.

“Actually, before that–” Cailleach said abruptly, turning to stare at them both. “Who are you and why or how are you here?”

“We…” she was suddenly without words, as the old Ghoblan woman’s gaze held them both – even in her own head she was unable to…

The symbol shifted and she narrowed her eyes.

The symbol shifted again subtly and Cailleach’s gaze gained a very faint intensity before she sighed.

“You are not from in here, are you – you came from outside somehow,” Cailleach said softly.

She gulped, wondering if this was the point at which the ‘shoe’ finally dropped, but against all expectation, Cailleach just sighed again and came and sat down at the table and rubbed her temples with her fingertips, staring at both of them as if they were strange things that just crawled out of a pond.

“We aren’t from here,” she said softly nodding, there being no point in hiding it.

“Such fear,” Cailleach said with a sigh…

“BY THE BREAKER!” the old Ghoblan woman suddenly shrieked. The eruption of her sudden, incandescent rage made her yelp and try to scramble back, but it wasn’t directed at her, or either of them.

The stared dully as Cailleach stared up at the ceiling, her face twisted with… proper fury – frost coated the walls and the fire had turned blue-black, even though the cold itself never touched them…

“This… this… now I see.” the old Ghoblan hissed, putting her hands back on the table top, which started to crack beneath her palms as she lent on it. “Little villain, you overstep. You dare to mess with this seat’s view of the world… beyond everything else?”

She stared dully as actual white fire started to flare around the Ghoblan woman for a second before she exhaled and the room became normal again, the ice vanishing, the cold that never reached them dissipating and the fire returning to its merry shades of orange.

“Sorry,” Cailleach said with a dark look at nothing, “I had to clear my head.”

They both sat there, totally off balance now. She was desperately trying to work out where this conversation might be going, as was Sana, but suddenly it felt like there was a fog slipping between her and her ability to rationalise things.

-Why am I hiding that we come from the outside? She found herself wondering suddenly.

Her intuition told her it was dangerous for others to know, that the symbols were a powerful inheritance, that they had too many secrets that might be coveted by others… It was all very rational, very logical – they had been pushed by everything, barely avoided calamity and disaster… and yet..

And yet…

Yet they had spoken of that to the Cloud Arrows tribe…

“We came out of the west, we crossed under the ocean, and then got flooded out after we triggered an eldritch bloom to escape a calamity,” Sana said softly. “Then we got attacked by a serpent thing, and after killing it found that it was an unchained. After escaping that, it went to attack the Sar’katush, destroyed their city, and then dragged us to it, trying to find a way to possess us…”

Cailleach nodded, pensively.

“But where are you from?”

“What?” she said dully. “Where are we…?”

Something about the woman’s tone made her afraid, and yet the things that she had severed gave her the most subtle of hints that that was not the problem here.

“We are from Eastern Azure Great World,” she tried to say, but could not…

She was, she realised, terrified of what might happen if they realised she wasn’t from this place, and the most inexplicable part was that she didn’t understand WHY she should be terrified of sharing that knowledge. They had been hunted ever since they got here, pushed by everything one way or another, used in some way…

-Except for the spear…

And yet even there she suddenly wasn’t certain. The Bell had sent them onwards… and they had met the spirit... The Spear had sent them onwards, and it had been being refined by the defilers… and had not mentioned the defilers…?

-TOO NEAT! She screamed in her own head suddenly.

-TOO FATE-THRASHED NEAT!

It was, in fact. She could see Sana wrestling with the same problem, the same knot.

“Strings?” Cailleach whispered suddenly.

“Strings?” she said even as she ‘understood’ what Cailleach meant – the threads some of them had felt twisted, some of them greedy, others manipulative.

“You were put in here, were you not?” Cailleach said.

“…”

She opened and shut her mouth, wanting to say yes, but realised that she didn’t trust Cailleach enough…

“…”

“Okay,” Cailleach said, a frown creasing her old face. “Why did you come here?”

She blinked at the rapid vanishing of that sense of resistance and nodded, mostly forgetting, even as the symbol shifted weirdly and seemed to narrow its own sense of perception in some way, that she had been prevented from speaking to Cailleach about how they had ended up here.

“The spear…”

She trailed off realising with horror that while she had been somehow able to talk to the spear about this, something was also stopping her from wanting to tell Cailleach about their desire to escape here.

This time she struggled… and then stood up.

Sana stared at her in surprise as she pushed her hands against the table and then… grabbed a plate and smashed the spirit wood plate straight into her face in impotent fury. It made her recoil, because it was far more durable than she was…

“The little spear… that child sent you out here. You were able to talk about this with the spear weren’t you,” Cailleach said suddenly.

“Yes.”

“I see… I see… That’s quite the knot,” Cailleach murmured. “You have Physiques don’t you?”

“…Yes,” she said as much to convince herself that she WASN’T being prevented from saying that.

She stared inwards at the symbol, who gave her the sense that this was this and that was that, which didn’t quite make sense, but she could feel inner anger there as well – it was also displeased in some way with their circumstances. It took her a moment to realise why: the sensation when they first acquired it, of being unfettered and the manipulation of others were antithetical to it, even beyond its nature as a Mortal Physique, and yet it was weak, so it could only…

“Oh…” she said suddenly, as the words that the spear had told them, cryptic as they were, returned to her.

“You know about Physiques?” she asked Cailleach.

“I can be said to have some familiarity with them,” the old Ghoblan woman said with a nod.

“Mortal Physiques – what are they?” she asked.

“…”

“You… you…” the old Ghoblan opened and shut her mouth, staring from one to the other…

Cailleach stared at them both and then suddenly burst out laughing – it was a mad, cackling laugh that echoed bizarrely and put frost back on the walls as the old Ghoblan woman held her sides until tears actually came from her eyes. Eventually, she calmed down and stared at them again, considering.

“Both of you?” Cailleach said staring at Sana, who nodded.

Cailleach stared at Sana then at her again for a long moment; she felt the symbol shift in her mind faintly to avoid the complete scrutiny. In doing so, she had a moment of further epiphany as to why they had such a ridiculous resistance to soul attacks… Her soul was not just her Nascent Soul?

“Can you show me them?” Cailleach said with a considering look. “I won’t force you – that kind of thing is very personal after all. But if you do, I might be able to better understand what it is you are dealing with here.”

The symbol gave her an oddly specific follow-up sense, to the effect that the array it originated from was something that Cailleach could shed enlightenment on, and that she would not covet it – the symbol had an important connection to the Ghoblan woman’s heritage and also a connection to a very scary thing that didn’t like that sort of thing.

“It won’t show itself to you,” she said eventually. “But we can show you the symbol it was derived from?”

“The thing it came from?” Cailleach raised an eyebrow.

She took her qi and drew the design that Elaria had used at the last, complete with its simple array framework not joining up the final point.

“You…” Cailleach stared at her as if she were some weird fish before shaking her head.

After that she just stared in silence at the array on the table.

“What kind of insane thing did you do to get a Mortal Physique out of this?” the old woman said, shaking her head eventually, then she reached over and quietly dispersed it as if it had never been. “Now I see why you called down extermination lightning, and why it won’t show itself. I cannot credit that that villain up there, who must be responsible for this somehow, would actually dare to put strings on something like that. It had to have been out of pure ignorance… pure unlettered ignorance.”

“In what way?” she asked.

“Okay, setting aside the questions of the origins of that symbol for a second.”

“Uh… about that…” Sana said, reminding her at last of why they had had that original moment of worry.

“Oh… shit,” she agreed, groaning.

“We…” she opened her mouth and felt the weird fog-like inability to want to talk about the scrip return…

This time she paused and directed her query to the symbol, who shrugged and said that she already knew the answer sort of, to which she realised she did. It wasn’t that whatever was restricting her from speaking about outside was focusing on it specifically. Rather, it was because it was tangentially associated with that.

She closed her eyes for a moment and then tried to sunder a bit of whatever it was that was restri-

She spat blood, literally, and staggered backwards as her whole cultivation base screamed at her and something recoiled on her.

“SIS!” Sana shrieked, flinching herself as some small part of the recoil travelled through the link they shared.

Cailleach darted around the table and caught her with remarkable speed before she hit the floor.

Kneeling, she shook her head, trying to disperse the ringing in her ears.

“You cannot break that kind of thing with Intent,” Cailleach said, helping her back to her seat. “Even I could not, maybe not even the person who made the charm for the…”

-The charm for the spear! She face-palmed mentally

Focusing on it, she managed to suggest that it could…

Words, memories, and a vague grasp of a sort of sideways means appeared in her mind.

“The” she drew on the thread and sundered the word even as she drew it, in the air.

“Jade,” she repeated the same process for jade – just the word, eliminating her connection briefly to the wider meaning of the thought.

“Work,” the imperial character for ‘work’ hung beside it, not linked to jade except in the literal reading

“Pig,” she managed to get that one out as well, even as the fog started to shift her thoughts weirdly.

“Have,” she had to settle for just that.

In the end she had ‘the jade-work pig have’, hanging in the air. The effort had nearly crippled her in some profound way as the instincts in her mind screamed at her not to reveal those scrips and the things in them to anyone because they would say about where they came from. The doublethink in it was infuriating, like a part of her was stuck, like a drooling idiot in her own head, and she had just tolerated it before without ever thinking.

“The jade-work pig have?” Cailleach said tilting her head to the side to read it.

“The demons took all our gear,” Sana said and then blinked.

“Oh.” Cailleach said blankly.

“You had the means relating to that symbol physically on you… and now they have it…?”

They both nodded.

“That stupid old bag of bones of mine… and he just let those kids go do clean-up.” Cailleach said abruptly.

“Do you have any means to track any of your belongings?” Cailleach asked.

“We did… before…” Sana said slowly. “Since we arrived here though…”

“You stopped thinking about it weirdly until now,” Cailleach said softly.

When she put it like that, she could only nod.

“Interesting, very interesting… most interesting,” Cailleach scowled. “I return in a minute, then we're going to go on a trip, probably its good for you as well, in your current state.”

Cailleach stood and stalked off, deeper into the abode, leaving them sat there.

“What exactly is going on?” she muttered, running a hand through her hair.

“No idea, although Cailleach seems to know…” Sana grimaced. “As near as I can guess though…”

“Oh for fate’s sakes!” her sister suddenly gasped. “That’s utterly obnoxious!”

“It is, isn’t it,” she muttered.

“Is it the same thing as the Defilers?”

“No, not quite,” Cailleach said, returning. “We can talk more on the way. It will be easier out there, ironically.”

They both stared at the woman who had walked back into the room. It was still... demonstrably the same person, but different. Cailleach was no longer old for starters, and she was also taller, although not quite as tall as either of them, and still of a height to fit through doors without ducking. She had pale grey skin and her silky white hair was plaited behind her in a loose fashion. The Ghoblan was no longer old though, and no longer… a Ghoblan either she was suddenly certain, if she ever had been to begin with. She could have passed for a pale human in the right light, if not for her thin features and her pointy ears. The only thing that hadn’t changed were her eyes, which were still a deep purple – except her left eye had a scar running over it. As they watched, tattoos were swirling up from under her skin in the patterns of birds, clouds, mountains and snow. Her robe was still as it was, but she now carried a wicked stone hammer about a metre long.

“Where were those items of yours last?” the not-Ghoblan Cailleach asked with a slightly chilly tone.

“Quite a long way north…west of here, I think,” her sister hazarded.

She just continued to stare, then involuntarily looked at the fireplace.

“That is me, yes, when I was younger and a bit more unruly,” Cailleach said with a toothy grin. “If you’re wondering about the change in appearance, this form is much harder to interfere with, and I can exert some control through it.”

They followed her outside and after her as she stalked through the passage they came from… The various Ghoblan who were still milling about doing various things all froze as they saw her stalk out of the abode with the two of them in tow.

“Get some weapons – you, Hogni? Give the girl your spear, and you Uvsdffa – give me your blade.” Cailleach said pointing to two Ghoblan who were dicing by one of the rocks.

Without comment, they passed over a bone blade that was about as long as an arm, and a spear carved of some kind of long bone of a huge creature which Cailleach then passed to her and Sana.

“Uhhuh?” she stared at it dully then looked back at Cailleach.

“Where is that old idiot?”

“You speak of these old bones?” Old Bones said, appearing almost as if by trickery from the stairs that lead to the exit of the gorge.

“You’re an idiot!” Cailleach said flatly, “You dragged them all the way here and never thought to wonder if they were captured with anything despite having that thread on them and all the tales that Bright Fungi-seeker said?”

“…”

The old Ghoblan looked… abashed, then confused then suddenly very angry. “This is?”

“That little villain has some big handiwork in this, but they kicked a huge plank by accident.”

“They have, oh light of my years?” the Old Ghoblan said with a grimace.

“Yes, look at those two clearly, and this time try not to trip over any rocks ogling them in the process,” Cailleach said.

They both stood there, awkwardly the centre of attention for several seconds before the Old Ghoblan nodded. “I see, I see… I see… they like walking brick to drop on other people’s feet at this point.”

“Ogling?” she said distantly.

The other Ghoblan all looked away as the old Ghoblan had the grace to look awkward for a moment.

“Is it good idea for you to go out?”

“It’s fine,” Cailleach waved her hand dismissively. “You killed the demon?”

“Yes?” he said, pointing to one of the pools which she noticed was now bloody and smoking faintly.

One of the Ghoblan grinned and reached into it, hauling out half a spine and with three bloody pigs heads still attached to it for a moment, before dropping it back in.

“Just see that you clean up properly,” Cailleach said absently, “And maybe not let the Ur’Inan out while you’re doing stuff that Ghoblan shouldn’t be doing. If that thing contaminates my ponds I’ll kick you all out in the swamp and make you run away from Quzetzaurvass!”

There was some more shifting and a few mumbled acknowledgements that that wouldn’t happen, nope, not at all, that all but confirmed in her head that while all of these figures might look like Ghoblan, they were not. Looking around, she saw a few other faces at windows and in darkened houses as well, peering out with respectful gazes.

After Cailleach got a brief hug from Old Bones, they followed her out of the valley, now armed with weapons, still a bit lost in the pace of things.

“You have every right to look like two lost lambs,” Cailleach said drily as they stood on the snowy mountain slope, which was rather different-looking to where they had walked in, she couldn’t help but notice.

“First things first,” Cailleach mused, staring down over the clouds. “We go check out the city that was ruined before.”

Before she could even speak, there was a ripple and they were stood on the grass just outside it.

“Well, that answers whether or not teleportation is a thing,” her sister said as they both found their feet.

“It’s not a common thing,” Cailleach said, staring at the walls. “Even I can only do so over short distances.”

“Then how did those two come from-?”

“They rode the storm – very fast and they only came from the Island City to the west,” Cailleach noted. “If this was outside of the somewhat unique circumstances of this place, even you could achieve that feat.”

“Really?” her sister said, perking up a touch as they all considered the walls.

Staring at them, she could see that the barrier was no longer in effect. The whole landscape around them was desiccated, ruined even. Trees were rotted, the grass beneath their bare feet was dust and the soil below it was slimy. The walls of the city… she reached out a hand to the qi-repelling rock and found that it was brittle, akin to what had happened…

“This is just like the island city,” she said.

“…and there are no spores,” Sana added, looking around. No, no evidence of contagion at all.

“Yes, probably it consumed them as well,” Cailleach said, walking over to a wall and giving it a poke as she watched a bit of it crumble away.

“Consumed? It wasn’t affected by the miasma?” She realised it was a stupid question even as she said it, but Cailleach just shook her head and started walking around the perimeter.

“Those things are, under their optimal conditions – the Eldritch Moon Plague that is – the peak ‘predatorial’ force in this little slice of sealed up hell we all call ‘Under Grove’,” Cailleach said as they went on. “However, that thing that was summoned is fundamentally no longer… how do I put this… a part of the proper order of things. You hosted them in your body, I assume?”

“We did,” she conceded.

“A brave, if foolish, thing to do,” Cailleach affirmed. “You avoided two disasters just by being in the middle of them and even then you nearly died without knowing how.”

“Yeah… it seems our judgement wasn’t… the best,” she conceded with a flash of anger that was quite a bit stronger than she realised as her intent swirled out around her turning the withered grass to dust.

“That you got as far as you did is already a testament to your convictions,” Cailleach mused as they finally arrived at the gates.

“And yet…” she trailed off as Cailleach waved her hand and actually cut her off.

“It was not enough?” Cailleach said softly as they stared at the carnage within.

“…”

She glanced at Cailleach, who was staring a little blankly at nothing and had trailed off...

“We can only try as best we can in the moment, no more or less,” the grey-skinned woman said with a soft sigh.

They stepped through the gate into a rotten city. That was the only way to describe it, really. The buildings were crumbling, there were corpses littered everywhere and it all gave off this sense of being decayed and inauspicious. That was the only way she could rationalise the twisted, desiccated forms of things that would have once been colonies of moon mushrooms feeding of swathes of pig demons. She swept out her soul sense and rapidly found a big mushroom colony in its pit of corpses, yet it was destroyed, devoid of its previous presence and warped almost beyond recognition.

“Did the summoned one do all this?” she hissed.

“Yep,” Cailleach said as they went onwards. “That it was weak enough for Old Bones’s drinking buddies to go rip up is because you likely forced the ritual to come to completion too soon, probably a combination of the spore plague and breaching the isolation of this city.”

“So the fact that we experienced months of captivity is because time was flowing differently here?” she guessed.

“That’s a remarkably astute guess for someone of your circle,” Cailleach nodded.

“We… have had some experience with weird time-based stuff,” she was surprised to find that she was able to say that.

“Perilous Realm,” she said out loud suddenly, and found she could.

“Evergrove,” Sana said suddenly, catching on.

“Huh… how weird,” her sister said.

“Eastern Azure,” she whispered.

Cailleach had stopped to look at them. “How... curious, so it its reach does not follow here, or…?” their companion trailed off again, looking distant before shaking her head.

“Well, that simplifies things. I was worried I’d have to take you somewhere that little villain up above really wouldn’t be able to pry, but its ties on you are only this much.” Cailleach said nodding her head.

“So, now that you can speak freely, why don’t you enlighten this big sister on exactly who you are and why you are here in Under Grove, a place that hasn’t seen any Heaven’s Path Practitioners in over 30,000 years?”

“…”

In the end, she found it took, between them, a depressingly short period of time to give a summation of their experiences up to that point, starting with their arrival in the anomaly, their progression through its weird spaces, then their trip into Evergrove and their encounter with the Bell, before winding up in the academy, where the spirit – who was, as she expected, the ‘little villain’ that Cailleach kept cursing – had sent them down here.

When they were done, Cailleach, who had sat on a ruined wall to listen and asked almost no questions just nodded.

“I see what has happened now. It’s a funny thing in truth, although I doubt you would see it that way.”

“Funny?” Sana said a bit sourly.

“From a certain perspective,” Cailleach agreed. “Before, I would have been wary of explaining too much about Mortal Physiques to you. They are… complex beasts for what they are, able to go in various directions, but it seems you are well past that point, and it is knowledge you should know before others find it and use it against you to ruin you given you are at the Unity Realm now, or very close to it.”

“Unity Realm?”

“You don’t even know the names-?” Cailleach said a bit dubiously.

“We are at Early Stage Dao Seeking,” she said.

“Uhuh, we just crossed Severing Origins,”

“…”

“Devil Accursed Daoists and their weird sets of names for things,” Cailleach sighed. “Okay – as I understand it, the realms go as such: First Circle is Foundation Establishment and Bodily Refinement; Second Circle Qi Condensation and Qi Refinement; Third Circle is Core Formation and Core Refinement; Fourth Circle is Soul Foundation and Soul Manifestation. The final stage of Manifestation is ‘Severing Self’ which leads you into the Unity Realm, which is the very start of the Fifth Circle. Beyond that there is Seeking Principle and then Lesser Unification.”

“Uh…” she ran thought that in her head and stared at the woman, because that tallied up flawlessly with their advancement up to this point.

“Setting aside the question of how you got in here, where are you actually from? What supreme world? With a foundation like yours…”

“Oh… uh…” she looked at Sana who just sighed.

“We are in this far, we might as well explain the rest of it,” her sister said in her head.

“We lost our cultivation and reformed it in desperation using that symbol we showed you… by accident,” she said.

“By… accident.” Cailleach said blankly. “What realm were you before you came in here then?”

“Pseudo-Core Formation,” she said. “This place is somehow connected to a forbidden area in our world. The place we worked in gathering spirit herbs had a huge realm suppression that meant anyone who entered it was limited to the Golden Core at best. Our way seems a bit like what the Ur’Inan use, and was passed down from our mother, not really a bloodline, but a method of cultivation that only we can use.”

She gave a quick rundown of Physical Cultivation without ever really touching on the forbidden specifics that their oath to their mother prevented them from disclosing, while Cailleach just sat there pensively again, looking at them.

“This thing that came from your mother… was it sealed to your bloodline? Did you need between 3 and 5 words to make it turn?” Cailleach said when they were finished.

“…”

They both stared at her. Their reactions were probably enough of a confirmation really, that her ‘guess’ was basically spot on…

“Don’t look at me like that. I am not some unlettered idiot. My background would impress you, if it meant anything to you,” the small woman said with a rather childlike smirk suddenly. “I assume that you cannot speak the words out loud?”

“Yes,” Sana nodded.

“And they can’t be taken from us by any heaven-sent force or… trickery,” she finished, although she was less and less sure of that last one as time went on.

“…”

Cailleach gave them both a look that was almost like an older sister judging her younger siblings for saying a silly thing before sighing and smiling wryly.

“I know of the thing you speak of – the words that speak to the soul are a thing of the Cult of the Great Mysteries. They have their origins in the Honoured Five. You should hold those words close as you walk forward, for they will open remarkable doors for you in time that would otherwise remain unseen and unsought for. Treasure them, for however slight they may seem, they are something that is a fundamental part of you and your connection to your past generations as well as the gift given to your people. This is a thing you cannot buy with money, or seize through violence, or be born to through privilege. Your mother was right though – they cannot be taken from you, not by God in Heaven nor Sage upon Earth or Devil below,” she finished rather cryptically.

“What I will say though, is that while they cannot be seized directly, at your current realm they can still be subverted after a fashion – the words in the soul cannot be taken, but the soul itself is still vulnerable,” added as an afterthought.

“Ohh…” she filed that away in her Sea of Knowledge, because in truth her mantra had been perplexing her more and more as time went on. She kept telling herself she needed to find time to look again at what it was now doing to her body, but somehow other things always kept becoming more pressing and so it had just been doing its own thing along with the symbol.

“Anyway,” Cailleach said hopping off her rock and starting to walk again towards the central square, “We are digressing. I was talking about Mortal Physiques, and because you are at kicking on the door of the Unity Realm, this is important.”

They walked onwards through the ruins of the streets, avoiding looking at the twisted, malformed death that was devoid of any sense of harmony or propriety within natural order, listening as Cailleach talked on.

“Unity Realm isn’t really a realm; it’s more a threshold between ‘Manifestation’ and ‘Path Seeking’. What you Heaven’s Path practitioners call ‘Primordial Soul’, ‘Nascent Soul’… or whatever else – where the spiritual and physical vitality of a body swap places – and ‘Principle Seeking,’ ‘Path Seeking’ or ‘Dao Seeking’ as you call it, the realm of the ‘Quasi-Immortal’, in the Eastern Heavenly Orthodoxy. Path Seeking, we shall call it, is where you melt the disparate elements of your ‘Accumulation’ and ‘Foundation’ and form it into a ‘Principle’ by which you interact with the world.”

They nodded in agreement, that tallied mostly with what she had grasped so far, although…

“What is 'Accumulation'?” Sana asked, beating her to that question.

“…”

“The wage of your life experiences to this point and their general worth,” Cailleach said. “Anyway – Normally this is a serious threshold, even if you’re not a Heaven’s Path Practitioner. Most systems have a big bottleneck at this point, because it’s the first time you have to stop copying and actually create something of what you have acquired to that point. The four general different categories of Physiques all have a different strength. Heavenly Physiques, or God Physiques as they are otherwise known are absolute, flawless things, powerful without compare…”

“Yes, the spear explained the difference between Mortal and Heavenly it with the metaphor of teaching someone to fish as opposed to giving them a magic fishing rod that catches all the fish,” she mused.

“That’s not a bad one, but I would actually say that’s Heavenly and Earthly Physiques personally,” Cailleach shrugged. “True Physiques give you a guaranteed wealth of accumulation but at the cost of a well-defined advancement track they are mostly blood lineages and the like.”

“And Mortal Physiques?” she asked, unable to help herself.

“…”

“They make your accumulation thresholds trivial compared to every other method bar one. They do the hard part for you, but the price is truly cruel compared to every other method, for the most part. The rest of your path will be a never-ending torrent of near life ending calamities, and the end result is that you either succeed in forming a principle or, more often than not, you die.”

“…”

“But by the look on your faces you were close to working that bit out already,” Cailleach said with a half-smile that never reached her eyes.

“So… everything we have experienced is because… the physique is actually drawing… disaster to us?” she whispered.

“That’s half of it,” Cailleach said with a sigh. “Mortal Physiques have a second trick, or better to say that it’s the dark side of how their other trick works: ‘Free and Unfettered, I wander far and wide, no man, no devil, no god, shall impede my path, this is the path I choose.’ Do you grasp the meaning of that saying?”

She did, kind of, she thought, linking back to what Cailleach had said about strings. But if that was the case… she felt a sudden chill even amidst the humid muggy air.

“Does it ensure that we will never lack for accumulation that we need to make the next step forward?” her sister said quietly.

“Nearly,” Cailleach said with a truly otherworldly smile. “They can’t be pushed, if you push them they push back, slip like karmic eels in the bucket of reality, and they feed off each other. They will take every misfortune thrown at them and spin them as best they can. They feed off others, draw disaster and ruin around them into the eye of the storm. You two feed each other and that foolish spirit, that sent you down here with death in its artificial heart, twisted your fate to try to consign you – and so you have blazed, because you cannot help but feed off of it. The greater the imbalance, the greater the odds, the more terrifying the pressure, the more you will be forged and the faster you are forced to advance.”

She could only stare in silence, understanding at last.

“We survived… because…”

“You survived because you were worthy of surviving. Karma is a terrible force that is the judge of Gods themselves and Mortal Physiques are the original path. They were the very first path that gave birth to all the others. The Heavenly was born of Mortal Perfection, the Earthly of Mortal Wisdom and the True of Mortal Promise. They are the template from which all the others are stamped,” Cailleach said simply.

“And that leads me to why you are back out here, with me. Where, from here, is the gear you have marked?”

Still trying to process the knowledge that she had been turned into a walking calamity attractor after, she was rather caught off guard by that question.

“Uh – 200 miles maybe north east-ish?” Sana answered before she could.

“But it’s gonna be more than that I guess, given how weird space is?” she added

“You even noticed that huh?” Cailleach frowned and then sighed… “It’s probably closer to 900 then, the spatial shift is weird when going lateral to the old mine extraction lodes…”

“That would put it… huh…” Cailleach stared at the sky for a moment then frowned a second time. “First things first, the main square.”

“That’s…” Sana echoed in her head as they followed after Cailleach, trying not to look like drifting ghosts.

“Terrifying, and also explains so fate-thrashed-much!” she moaned in her own head.

They both turned their gaze inwards towards the symbols, which symbolled rather too innocently she had to think. It really did explain an awful lot, because looking back on it, they had been thrown like skipping stones…

“Wait… we met that bell tied to the spear,” she said.

Cailleach stared at them both and then just started to laugh… again.

“That bell and that staff are sly and difficult, but they are masters at what they do – even compared to most others you could measure them against,” the white haired woman said when she recovered herself she shook her head. “Really, amateurs should not show slight knowledge in front of masters.”

“Is this all because of… it?” Sana said dully as she recalled that it had found them and then said it would send them on their way.

“It said it was going to send us out of there but instead we ended up…” she said dully… bits of their circumstances suddenly crystallising in her mind in a way she had never even thought to seriously consider.

Sana scowled and muttered “I knew we shouldn’t have…”

“Trusted it… nah, and anyway, at your realm what could you do. Truthfully, it likely did you a real favour. It tends to take after its maker, someone who is very peculiar in their world view at times. By putting you in the path of that spirit like tasty bait before you had time to grasp your strength you likely avoided a calamity,” Cailleach said with a wry smile.

“–Ah, here we are.” They all stopped and stared at the ruins of the square.

The teleport platform was still there, but the three giant totems were just warped ruins scattered through the walls. The arrays they had put up were–

Cailleach swept out her hand and swatted a shockwave of Yin Fire that swept out from one and then earthed the thunderbolt that followed as if it was a flicked ribbon.

“These were your doing?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“…Er… yes,” she nodded.

“Not bad... bit scruffy, and the reasoning is crude. Are the comprehensions that allowed you to make these also on those items in your possession?”

“…”

She grimaced but couldn’t bring herself to say anything other than nod, thinking back on it would have been smart to give them to Rusula or Pezvak, or just seal them in a wall somewhere and hope to recover them later.

“I’ll take your silence as an awkward yes,” Cailleach sighed, staring at the arrays as they looked at the wider devastation.

“Right, I’ve seen enough,” Cailleach said after she had blocked two more lightning bolts with a wave of her hand. “To the north-east would have been… Sandar Gate.”

Before they could do or anything more, the space just shifted–

She hit a tree and cursed as they all appeared in the middle of the tropical forest.

“Bah,” Cailleach shook her head, picking herself up.

They both scrambled up and looked around at the forest that was strewn with the odd ruin. Within the distance, she heard drums start to pound and horns blare.

“Seems they have indeed seized the whole city,” Cailleach grumbled.

“They noticed us?” she asked rather redundantly.

“Well they noticed a local teleportation,” Cailleach said with a shrug. “The speed of that warning though means that there are likely Defilers of a high rank within the city; the smaller ones would not be so proactive until we actually kicked the door in.”

“Our… gear,” she was surprised to see that she could speak of it.

“It’s about five miles north-west,” Sana said helpfully.

It only took a few moments to make it above the trees, whereupon she just saw open forest and scattered ruins, nothing more.

“Great,” Cailleach sighed staring around.

“The city is hidden from the outside?” she said, finally understanding how the other city had escaped notice of its occupation.

“Not normally… I should have asked the Ghoblan how long it’s not been here, or if anyone remembers Sandar. If they got the defences back online, it will be deeply annoying. No wonder they skulked here for so long under their noses.”

“How… did you not notice? Lady Cailleach?” she asked, with a wince.

“Good question,” Cailleach said with a sigh. “Beyond this place, I would have noticed easily, but as it is… I am also imprisoned here… or maybe it’s more accurate to say I am part of the lock on this place that was then subverted by that little villain of an arcane spirit.”

“Like the spear was?” she asked, surprised at that.

“No, that’s a bit different – there are two sets of seals here. The big one is on this whole place. Keeping it intact in fact. That seal, which is what the twelve weapons, the little spear included are… were regulating,” Cailleach said, staring at the forest and ruins in front of them.

“That seal is designed to prevent a mana vein exploding – when the original owners of this place mined it out, they were quite uncaring of the damage they did and didn’t realise that there was a mana tide running through the remnant world roots of this place. When they cut out the world roots the mana tide went out of control.

“Oh… is that why the qi of the world is so… pure?” she asked finally putting two and two together. “The whole world here is one giant… mana… qi vein?”

“That’s a very good way of looking at it. The calibre of the world is also higher,” Cailleach said as they continued to drift across the treetops as the smaller woman looked for something, she guessed.

“We assumed we ended up in a higher world…”

“You have,” Cailleach said absently. “Setting aside that this place was already close to a cultivation paradise, as you might call it, it was a mine for Void Stone...”

“The qi-repelling rock?” Sana cut in.

“Yes,” Cailleach nodded. “And a whole bunch of other things besides – but the key thing is that a side effect of what they did in their very ad hoc, illicit mining – pretending they never heard what happened to Renwald – the mana density of this place is much greater than the sum of its whole now.”

“What… happened to this ‘Renwald’?” Sana asked.

“…”

“It exploded, put half of the mountain range in the middle of Renwald into high orbit, devastated the country and gave Aertha Majoris a new asteroid belt and two new moons,” Cailleach said blandly. “We felt the explosion on the other side of the world. It went around the planet ten times and killed millions across two continents, and they barely disturbed the mana tides running below it.”

“It… exploded?” Sana repeated dully.

“Oh…” she said weakly, she did know what happened when spirit veins destabilised, but to actually get one to the point where it exploded?

It was a secondary point that the world this originated from was apparently a spherical one. The only spherical world she knew of was Shan Lai, and she had never seen it. They were not that uncommon, but tended to be more a thing of lower realms.

“Quite,” Cailleach nodded grimly. “This is not a normal spirit vein. At first they were able to suppress it, then they kidnapped that giant serpent in the mire to try to seal it up, then they tried to make the mine bigger, and in the process pierced the Undren Mare, flooding half of this place. They eventually got it under some semblance of control, and turned this place into a prison. Eventually, politics above forced them to flee the Imperial Commonwealth. As a final screw you they hid as much evidence of the destabilisation as they could, so it wasn’t noticed for a good while.

“When it was noticed, the Academy above set up the system of the twelve weapons, a project led by the 2nd Imperial Princess, who decided to use the excess mana as a means to raise twelve new reliquary weapons to be the nation’s strength in times of peril, they set up a great formation in this place, regulated by several powerful treasures and set those 12 artefacts to watch over it.

“And then the Academy was attacked,” she said softly, thinking back to what she had seen courtesy of the thread.

“Yes, and then the academy was attacked, and the depths here were attacked as well. I was one of those who came down here to defend against that attack,” Cailleach said sadly. “Before we could repel them, something happened above, likely some vast dimensional quake and the entire academy and the surrounding lands were likely dropped into the void. We barely kept the seals intact to protect those trapped within this remnant and, when it stopped falling, tried to rectify things, but in the process of trying to strengthen the seal, the spirit betrayed us, made us part of the seal and locked everyone above a certain realm in this place into it.

“As to who was sealed, there are a few others and not everyone was part of the war: some of the old Undren Ancestors from Clans who had been quietly invading, some old Ur’Inan and Ur’Vash, the eldest and most obtuse of the D’varad and some others on the western Islands.”

“So you cannot actually… leave?” she asked, feeling her stomach drop at this revelation.

“Well… kinda… there is a solution of sorts,” Cailleach said with a sigh. “It is just that it’s not a good one. This place was a mine, a prison, then a blood pit – but it was also a testing and hunting ground for their nobility before it changed hands. It became a place that held many evils and saw much sorrow, each worse than the last and that has stained its karma. The seal that now binds everyone here is in a facsimile of a certain infamous jar – if we open it we will be condemned, just like her.

“This world will crumble, and all those who were wrongfully put in here by the actions of others would be consigned. The person who broke free would be stained with the Karma of a World Slayer for their own selfish ends and any they took with them would be similarly ruined. Assuming they survived the onslaught that would come, they would become criminals, condemned by all sides, righteous and self-serving.”

“Oh…” she said weakly. “Then… how did that demon get in?”

“Their means are different, defiling, and I cannot swear that given what happened to the weapons and that sealing that the spirit above was not in pact with them and maybe the servants of the Unspeakable Evil as well.” Cailleach sighed. “You two got in, didn’t you? Other things have come in over the years as well, and none ever left – that I am aware of anyway.”

“Does that mean… we cannot leave either?” she said eventually.

“Hard to say, I guess that is why the spear sent you this way. Unfortunately, I guess its knowledge was lacking on account of being sealed for so long.” Cailleach said with a considered sigh. “Possibly, because you are not ‘of’ this place, you might be able to leave at Immortal Crossing – as you Heaven’s Path practitioners call it – but I very much doubt it.”

“Tribulation lightning from our world made it here…” Sana said hopefully.

“Yes, but it came in; it never left,” Cailleach pointed out, “there is a big difference there let me tell you – possibly you might be able to leave if you reached the eighth circle and grasped worldly laws, but that might just see you chained here like everyone else at that realm.”

They walked on in silence for several more minutes, lost in their own thoughts. The idea that they might be stuck here was not an appealing one in the slightest.

“Ah-!” Cailleach said with a triumphant yell, suddenly swinging her hammer at a random bit of air.

For a second nothing happened, then strange spiderweb cracks rippled across it and the space around them just collapsed like a vast broken mirror. The sound of haunting drums and horns suddenly snapped into focus and they were stood on the outskirts of a vast city.

“That… is a lot of pig demons,” she said weakly.

“Yes, it is,” Sana agreed as they stared out at the scenes before them.

There had to be tens of thousands of actual demons, rushing down avenues, dragging columns of thousands of slaves out of buildings, ordered around by Nascent Soul pig demons. In terms of scale, it had to be as big as Blue Water City, she guessed. In the distance between tall towers festooned with macabre flags and the evil banners, she could see three totems rising. Looking at the layout of the city itself…

“It has the same feeling as the other one,” Sana said beside her.

“Are they trying to summon another one?” she asked, looking at Cailleach, who was looking on with distaste written all over her face.

“Maybe, it’s hard to say this early into the ritual,” Cailleach muttered. “Old Bones’ mates dragged that vessel back and dunked it in a pond, but you can’t kill those things so easily down here. What you met was just its physical vessel made of blood sacrifice holding a summoned shard of its consciousness. A clone in effect – it can do what it wants and if it dies nothing of value was lost in its eyes… usually.”

The way she inflected the ‘usually’ made her suspect that Cailleach had other plans in that regard.

Without further comment, Cailleach drifted up into the sky until they were maybe a mile above the ground and then sat cross-legged and began making strange gestures and humming under her breath. Almost immediately, the clouds above that were part of the next slowly massing storm front swirled down out of the mountains like white rivers and within moments had sealed off the whole city.

The feng shui of the world itself started to shift and within thirty seconds a shrieking blizzard was swirling within those clouds. Just looking at it made her soul ache. She could sense a fearful principle in it, akin to the devouring one in the mists of the wetlands. The depths of Yin Qi in it were beyond anything she had believed was possible and there was… winter in there. Earth Qi and Thunder as well that was even more profound… Yin Fire, flickering like lights in the gloom, little dancing figures on the edge of the storm. Yang Wood as well... something old and primal that whispered to the symbol in her soul gently.

Exhaling, Cailleach opened her eyes and stared at them. “So, I should explain why I brought you here. Two reasons: I can’t actually intervene all that easily.”

“Because of the sealing,” Sana said.

“Exactly.” Cailleach said with a lot of distaste. “This place had its rules twisted when that little villain turned the seal on everyone who was trying to reinforce it. It shifted the nature of the seal itself unto everything else within the world. To move our strength, we must move the whole cage, and unless it is moved as one…”

Cailleach made a cutting motion and mimed everything collapsing. She shivered, grasping what she meant without words. So many disparate forces linked together, presumably as at odds with each other as they were with the seal…

“But why, if everyone is…”

“Why don’t we bury our differences and all sing songs together?” Cailleach said drily. “Ur’Inan, Ur’Vash, Ghoblan and even the D’varad might be able to and the Undren – possibly the serpents – but you also have the evils that were already in here – they are also part of the seal, and there are parts of the seal that are wholly controlled by the spirit. The old guardian beasts are all greater than the eighth circle, and they will never work with anyone else, nor will the old slimes down below, or some other dark things that were imprisoned here that will not end themselves nor help anyone else crawl out of here, knowing full well what awaits them if the world above recalls they still live.”

“…”

Truly, it was a good prison she had to acknowledge – a massive ‘Gu Jar’ of competing interests with just enough…

“And if anyone looks like they would escape… wouldn’t it just get one of those guards to break everything?” Sana added.

Cailleach nodded sourly and continued. “As a result I cannot do much overtly – it will draw unwanted attention and you do not want that kind of heat right now. This manipulation of a thing that is already extant…”

They all looked up at the clouds which were now properly manifesting the features of a huge supernatural blizzard.

“This manipulation, I can do, so long as I don’t go too far. The issue is that my use of mana will make the seal as a whole less stable as well, putting more burden onto others, the whole thing is tuned on a razor’s edge and the artefact that sits at the middle, the big spear you unsealed, is in no way affable towards anything else in here at this point that wasn’t an artefact weapon it was teaching,” Cailleach said with a sigh.

“The final nail in the seal of this place is actually these vile things and some other things,” Cailleach added with a dirty look at the Defilers. “If we weaken the seal, they are the first things that will run out and the bad karma matters not a whit to them. We would be sat here looking stupid and reaping all the bad karma that comes from facilitating them and others like them.”

Cailleach laughed rather bitterly after she finished speaking and made another sign, leading to the storm once again intensifying. As they both looked on processing this, Cailleach waved a hand and the descending blizzard faded into the thunder front directly and the storm’s entire nature changed subtly.

“Which brings me to the crux of what I must ask of you here,” Cailleach sighed. “This is not… unbeneficial to you in fact, and necessary anyway if we are to get your gear back. These things are, as we explained earlier, one giant, aberrant loophole in this place. They are part of it, they were born from those imprisoned here, or who managed those who were imprisoned here and later just born within here since the seal was placed and the world chained after the collapse.”

“But their power is aberrant,” she said, thinking she grasped an edge of what Cailleach was implying.

“Exactly,” Cailleach agreed. “It is aberrant, not a thing of this place at all. Nothing in here that emerges naturally had been able to fully match the defiling power of those that fell and were seized by it thousands of years ago – especially those who were part of the original order of this place.”

“And anyone who could already is sealed?” Sana added.

“Yep, and part of that lock is a bar on killing anything directly or indirectly born to this place unless they are able to harm us in a fundamental way not of our design or intent.”

“Oh….” She had to concede that it was a seal and prison with a very big style to it. Lock everyone in, make it self-supporting, then make any attempt at damaging those within it reflect back on those supporting it?

“So pretty much everyone who is sealed just has to sit around looking bored while the world goes to shit and there is nothing they can do unless they want to incur a hugely disproportionate penalty,” Sana concluded.

“Indeed, but it gets better with these five-accursed beings,” Cailleach said with a nasty grin. “My beloved said he detested them for a reason, and that is because they managed to refine their own demonic sub-plane into the space by mass sacrifice early on, so they have the ability to summon facsimiles of their defiling paragons, as you saw.”

They both stared down at the city below. So basically Cailleach was asking them to be her proxy in ruining this place.

“We are not linked to the seal and can resist the strength of their banners and broke free from it once already,” she said at last.

“We can fight against them where most others cannot,” Sana murmured.

“Exactly,” Cailleach nodded. “You are not unique, but in this instance the others would not move. The two you saw before, the children of the D’varad old ancestor are such – however they despise my husband for his role in their own father’s imprisonment down here and are too few in number that they would move. They would also take all of your gear and that knowledge for themselves and likely you as well. They hate humans in a way that you cannot understand. The Undren are the same, humans are their greatest enemy.

“So no waving her hand and wiping out this abomination,” Sana’s voice echoed in her head.

“Indeed not,” she agreed.

“What I can do, however, because that spirit has no idea that I am down here, is level the playing field for you to act,” Cailleach said. “I can also prevent them from using other sideways means or taking advantage of another trick they can deploy to move here – make no mistake, for you, killing these devilish things en masse is only a good deed. You need to cement your breakthrough to Unity Realm, and that means you must grasp what you have severed away and confront your circumstances, find the answer within you. That demon tried to hollow you out, in passing – break the momentum of your wave, just because it could.”

She stared at Cailleach dully, finally understanding with those words…

“Even in breaking your connection to that darkness, it left a pit for you to walk into – do you understand?” Cailleach said grimly.

“We broke the connection… but the thing we escaped from unwound all the… suppression on our physiques?” Sana whispered.

“So what happens if it fully falls, this momentum?” she said, already fearing she knew the answer.

“Your path will have been defiled and you will become its thing, just as it wanted all along,” Cailleach softly confirmed.

----------------------------------------

~ CAILLEACH, SANDAR GATE ~

----------------------------------------

Watching the two young woman drop down like bolts of Karmic judgement into the unsuspecting horde below, Cailleach sighed. She actually felt bad for that last nudge, in spite of the feeling of being haunted that today was giving her – it wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t really right either. Their momentum had been broken and they would not have regained it without this impetus. Mortal Physiques fed off of the injustice of forced karma as much as they thrived off the actual manipulation. Even if you left them alone, they found ways to make trouble, never mind what was going on here. Poking both of theirs in the right direction, playing up the fact that they might be stuck in here, explaining the horror of this place.

She sighed again. It had been a long ‘day’ already and in all likelihood it would get longer.

“I hate coming out here,” she grumbled to herself, avoiding looking at the blazing orbs that were once again ‘hidden’. The light only pretended to come from them anyway, its source couldn’t be stopped just by her drawing down the veil of her Reason, her season’s wish of winter upon this place.

“What kind of evil present is this, on today of all days…” she sighed, staring at the sky, vexed suddenly.

-The arrival of these two was…

“…”

She let her thought trail off, unfinished and rubbed her temples as the divergent moment passed and her control over the blizzard stabilised, not that she felt any better watching the scenes of carnage below.

Grimacing, she distracted herself from dwelling on such things by admiring the rapid progress of the two young women from the outside world. There was only so much you could dwell on before things started seeking you out to deliberately dwell in your company after all. The chaos following Arai and Sana was more than enough there already.

“Ahh…”

She could only nod in appreciation as Sana used a close combat art to lock down a whole bunch and twist them into shredded gore. Her sister was rampaging through a bunch of the tiny vile little things. The dying nightmare of many a mortal human and elvish woman over the millennia.

“A smart idea to give them weapons," she muttered, sweeping her eyes over the rest of the city, looking to see what. “That at least works out in all our favour.”

She caught herself before it became a second divergent moment, because two of those was enough for a day and went back to keeping an eye on Arai and Sana – they really were the most interesting thing to appear in this horrid place for thousands of years after all.

“And they landed right in my lap,” she muttered, still not sure if it was a good or a bad thing.

“No… Wrong way to think of it,” she remonstrated within herself, “it’s an opportunity: you get to watch a disturbance like this unfold, just like those scions of old, born in eras of adversity…”

“What are your limits, in this place?” she sighed. “What terrifying heights can you rise to, cast by that malingering old bell through this place, like a piece of grit into the evil eye of past trauma?”

It was a tantalising thing, truly, but this amount of poking was probably already the safe limit, especially given…

“Better to just let it play out, Cailli,” she sighed again. “There is totally more going on here than is being shown in one sitting, or even two.”

“Talking to yourself is a sign you’re going senile,” she closed her eyes and rubbed her temples, wishing she had sent her Old Bones on this task instead.

“He does have a better way with people,”

“Are you not–”

“Cut price Beira,” the voice whispered and vanished properly, leaving her to grind her teeth and wish that she could diverge that moment, but to no avail.

It was true though, Old Bones had a better way with people, despite being incorrigible. His lack of tact was almost an offensive weapon, like asking about the charm. She exhaled and looked down at the city.

“Please, don’t you lot come down here as well,” muttered Cailleach. “One objectionable old…”

“Cut price Beira… in a-”

She groaned and stopped thinking about it. Given that this was happening on the day of the solstice, or what would have been the day of the winter solstice, she was sure the world was actually out to mock her in some small yet profound way in any case.

“It sucks to have conceptual awareness of your own existence beyond your fundamental self!” she declared to the world at large.

“It’s why I prefer looking like an old goblin,” she went on. “That appearance at least makes the monotony passable.”

That was the problem with being stuck in a place like this… Your power was more than just physical aspects... and your worries were literally able to become manifest things if you let them…

It didn’t help, she thought as the storm shifted around her, that she had been feeling that something was off for months.

“It would be very ironic if I caused this just by not prying back then when that niggling feeling of ‘wrongness’ first appeared,” she muttered to herself. “Maybe I should have just gone the whole hog, followed Shussu’s path and found a warm hole to sleep in with Old Bones until the world collapsed around us and we can just walk out of the wreckage.”

“You honestly think that would have helped?”

“Probably not, no,” she said, considering the day’s events as she had seen them to be.

Her momentary shift in mood was reflected in the intensification of the storm, which twisted just a bit tighter...

“Ancestral Mother, I wish I could just flatten this place with a thought and drag the hundreds of thousands of devil souls down into my domain and refine them for a weapon of ruination,” she sighed.

“You know they would probably just enjoy that.”

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” she snapped back.

“Unless you’re going to be childish and diverge THIS moment as well…” The sense of mockery was almost manifest in it.

She twisted the principle of the world within her domain just a fraction more. If the world was going to make her feel like shit… she could pay that favour on appropriately.

Shaking her head, she set to work properly, focusing on the seventh circle demons in the square. It would be embarrassingly awkward at this point in time if the pair died because one of the fallen human lordlings cheated from a distance. The two in the city currently were otherwise occupied, which was a small mercy for all the other chaos going on.

Out of the corner of her perception, she could see Arai and Sana butchering their way through a screaming horde of devils. They had been… lucky wasn’t the right word, nor was it destiny… They had survived others gambling with their lives, even when the odds had properly been stacked against them. They would never be able to un-see the things they had seen either.

The rage, the shadow, everything about these things was a pit, no matter where you looked. It was how they lived on despite being an enemy to all. Compounding it, of course, was the ability for humans to move unfettered in any direction of the Karmic Compass, as they had termed it, as a built-in feature for better or worse.

That, as much as their genuine use in ruining this place, was why she had brought them here. To provide them with an opportunity to see the rage that that experience had built in them for what it really was. The effect of the soup would help; it was her proudest creation over many eons, but it was just another tool. As such, they had to reach that understanding on their own. Telling them of the danger would be self-defeating in this case. That was certainly the case when it came to the ‘words’ in their souls: those had also been subverted subtly, but in a way they would need to work out for themselves, such was the supreme geas upon those. She had given what hint she felt she could, the rest was again up to them.

As the combat progressed, she found more surprising aspects to it – they clearly knew the Ancient Symbol Scripts, and from what she had garnered from their explanation they had recorded several instances of people talking about them that they had encountered in those dreamlike anomalies they described. They had been scant on the details, but she couldn’t blame them; they had little idea of what they had, both in how precious it was to them and how… much she already knew of them.

She watched as Sana used a Power Symbol to unleash a torrent of positive lightning into a wave of pig demons. There had been no hint of her for-

“Oh come on…” she sighed and shook her head as the girl literally emblazoned a five-symbol array with her mana onto the ground – this one poisonous overgrowth… an interesting one, to be sure. The Thermobaric detonation demolished a small neighbourhood and left the perpetrator unharmed courtesy of the Sanctuary Symbol she was also using as part of most of her casts.

With a roar, a sixth circle pig devil descended towards her from a nearby tower, acting as they did. She watched with interest as the girl used… she had to watch it a second time in her mind’s eye to be sure she had just seen what she saw as the girl used the opening form of the ‘Dance of Enki’ to strike it. The devil itself attacked back with a very crap fate-seizing principle and she observed it flow away from Sana like water off the back of a meta-physical duck, which was odd.

From what she could see of her Physique it was powerful and could shield her soul, but it had no means to resist actual Fate Seizing unless.

“Oh.”

There were two ways that you could do that, at their realm – the first was to condense a Unified ‘Mortal’ or ‘True’ Boundary Physique after the teachings of the Ash Clan, or you managed to sever something of your Minor Fate Chain. The former was unlikely because their Physiques were not ‘Boundary’ but something related to ‘Change’, which left the latter, which while not that rare in her eyes, was…

“Stupid devils, you made the thing you least wanted while seeking the thing you desired the most,” she could only sigh in appreciation.

Had they not been cultivators, and had they not been insane enough to gamble with the Eldritch Spore Plague, they would have been violently screwed, in so very many senses of the word, before ever being permitted to arrive at that point though. At that point they would likely have become Aesh Tanri’khand – in pointless scholarly terms – or a deviant Succubus to anyone else.

Instead, the devils had played with their food, trying to be overly smart and allowed their quarry that opportunity and they had, she had to admit, seized it gloriously. Utterly subverting the plan by the three – two now, because she had felt Raslon’s death qi in the city they had left – fallen young lords, to find themselves proper brood wives.

She could only concede it was impressive, both in its recklessness and also decisiveness to the predicament they had found themselves in. Also, almost certainly ignorance, because Fate Severing at their realm was like doing conscious brain surgery on yourself having to rely only on a blunt spoon – but sometimes that was what was required.

Watching this, she felt kind of vindicated really. If you didn’t tell people how things ‘should’ work, and kept the specifics of ‘how’ and ‘why’ kind of vague, occasionally they came back and, in moments like this, surprised you pleasantly. It was something she had been very much in favour of when teaching graduation years in the academy, and it made her a target of much angst and anger by those who just wanted to be told how to become strong.

The ritual in the main square was gaining pace, she noticed. They were indeed trying to open a gate to the city on the far south-western continent where the other two fallen young lords still resided rather than summon another aspect of the progenitor demons. It was a smart move, smarter than expected actually. She held her gaze on their workings for a while, letting her passive presence inexplicably erode the inauspicious ‘good fortune’ of their dark arrays. Really, there were a remarkable number of ways to exploit the locks’ parametres if you really needed to.

Looking back at the pair, she focused on Arai a bit, who was more of an enigma in many ways. Sana had certainly gotten something from the pagoda. That was irrefutable based on the evidence, and also interesting knowledge, because even she hadn’t known that one of those was down here.

Both girls – young women, she sighed, for that innocence was dead here, one way or another – were making steady progress towards their gear and whatever had the knowledge of arrays on it. She half watched as they had killed another 6th circle pig demon. Arai who wielded Sundering Intent, which she could only assume came via the charm – which was surprising, mind you – managed to cut its crude principle then stab it with the verdant loci shard through the head, ruining its mana core and crippling it long enough for the two to tear it down and kill it in a flurry of blows.

They were getting a handle on their rage, trauma and urges as well, slowly forcing them out of their minds, she was pleased to see. She applauded mentally as they moved up the tower levels rapidly. The killing was brutal, merciless and remorseless, but also efficient and practiced, between their own comprehensions, the soup and the cooling effect of her domain. The emotional rage was no longer fuelling them in the same way it had been.

She watched on, still keeping the ritual in mind. Their use of ‘Intent’, although not outstanding by any means, to her at least, was still excellent for their age and the opportunities provided.

“Everyone has to start somewhere…”

She flinched and sighed. That was true, everyone did have to start somewhere, and the pair were basically self-taught, limited by their worldview, pushing forward with desperation as much as design and finding what worked and what didn’t as they went.

“How nostalgic,” she sighed.

“On that at least we agree.”

She eyed the other voice, dubiously, before ignoring it again. A vexatious day brought vexatious things after all. She wouldn’t let the joy of seeing strength properly acquired be ruined by other things.

She watched as they grew more confident in their strength, dispatching yet another 6th Circle pig demon in a desperate melee on the slide of the tower, skipping its enraged strikes by hair’s breadths and whetting their intents on its principle before… finding the opening to cripple it with their Verdant Loci ‘dagger’ in support of the loaned weapons.

“Indeed, it’s not a thing you can teach in a school,” she exclaimed out loud.

The learning of power in a school or teaching as they had on Aertha Majoris, in Academies like Saint Roberta’s, was a good way to get soldiers and scholars. It was also an excellent way to coddle noble scions whose families valued their blood more than their futures. They were, by and large, a terrible way to raise people who could truly carry forward new beginnings and make new paths.

As they killed another 6th Circle demon – casting its beheaded corpse off a ledge, she considered that these two were slowly shaping up to be prospects in the vein of those primordial forces of old: terrible monsters who tore open new eras with their bare hands and left the guts and broken limbs of the previous ones on the floor in defiance of their detractors and deniers. It certainly explained why they had such a remnant of that era…

“Cut price Beira…” the distant childlike voice sniggered.

“…”

She sighed and pushed the voice away again, so it wouldn’t distract her returning good humour.

Yes, if you rose to the top on your own, like these two young women were just about managing in spite of everything being thrown at them – you deserved your position, be it through slaughter or virtue. It was also an approach that opened up future doors that would remain otherwise unsought and unwondered at. Unfortunately, it also got you noticed, and not always in ways you expected.

She scowled and looked back at the ritual, waiting and hoping one of those two remaining would be stupid or arrogant enough to come through.