Nothing happened.

The pedestal went dim, the glowing symbols etched upon it gently faded into nothingness, and a low hum filled the burnt, blackened room.

I kept Acceleration running, though.

I wanted no surprises, this time.

“Wwwwwwwwweeeeeeeellllllllll–,”

I winced as the Inquisitor’s booming voice echoed about my ears, heavily distorted by the slowed time. For but a moment, I relaxed my grip.

“lllllllllllthat’s odd…” Caleb muttered, looking around perplexedly, his eyes flashing periodically with light as, no doubt, his Spectrum Sight activated.

“I see nothing amiss…” he reported, “perhaps w–”

CONGRATULATIONS, CONTESTANTS.

A sudden noise made each of us jump.

It was a rough, grating, mechanical klaxon, a blaring, keening, computerized wail. The unpleasant machine-gong sounded once, twice, thrice more, repeating the self-same phrase each time.

CONGRATULATIONS, CONTESTANTS.

CONGRATULATIONS, CONTESTANTS.

CONGRATULATIONS, CONTESTANTS.

Then a figure apparated above the deadened pedestal, hovering placidly in the air.

It was an all-white android covered head to toe in bright-green, glowing circuitry, yet lacking any other manner of distinguishing or identifiable feature, save, of course, for two arms and two legs. It was well-matched to the white room’s general aesthetics or, at least, to what they had been prior to our party’s untimely mortal combat.

Atop its neck there was no head to speak of. There was nothing at all, save for a darkly-glittering, eclectically-spinning, six-sided cube.

I recognized it.

~~~

ALPHA NODE #0015, UNIT DESIGNATION:

CIRQUE

~~~

The die arrested its rotation, the eerie, green eye upon its one side aimed directly at us, and the second floor’s Champion spoke.

“Congratulations, contestants.”

Its voice was jarringly inhuman, clearly and unmistakably machine. But its words, and tone, were…not quite so overwhelming, so hostile, as they had been before. No, in fact, they were downright tranquil. Cirque made no aggressive moves towards us of any kind.

But I would take no chances.

I kept my Blessings close and ready. Primed for attack.

“You have my sincerest congratulations,” it whirred. “Over the centuries, many have played my game. Few have survived.”

The android’s tone was cultured, distinguished, much at odds with its tinny, dissonant voice. It snapped its fingers, and I tensed.

But the world around me did not pixelate, nor dissolve into choking, impermeable darkness. Instead, above Cirque’s sleek, white-plated palm, six objects coalesced into view. Six glittering azure gemstones, each near the size of an orange, and gleaming with the untold power lain within.

Entropy crystals.

“Grade fifteen…” I heard Alyss whisper from beside me, her voice distorted by darkness. “How–”

“Over the centuries, many have played my game,” the android repeated. “Yet pitted against the Spire, and the Maze, none survived. None, until you.”

“Your reward, commensurately, is of the highest tranche,” it explained, waving its hand, causing the floating gems to drift lazily towards us, two to a man. “Six shares, for six contestants. Once more, I commend you.”

“I…do not understand,” Caleb muttered, staring transfixed at the crystals in his hand. “You are not here to fight us? How can a Champion–”

“Over the centuries, many have played my game,” the android repeated, now for the third time. “Those that survived, I offered a choice. A choice, it displeases me to admit, I am unable to offer you.”

Cirque spread its palms wide.

“To leave, or continue.”

There was a moment of silence as we each processed the creature’s words.

It was swiftly broken.

“You would not let us leave!?” Alyss snarled, seething with shadow. “How is that fair?! Are we meant to die down here, a–”

“NO ONE LEAVES.” Cirque boomed, its machine-voice drenched in an abrupt and hateful fury.

The air around it whipped up into a sudden frenzy as its single, green eye flashed dangerously and the cube housing it spun erratically in the air. I bared my teeth and tensed myself, preparing for the inevitable blow.

That never came.

The floating android whirred and clicked, twitching, restraining itself with great apparent effort. It twisted and contorted in midair, groaning tinnily, eventually managing to dim the light and quiet the whirlwind.

“My orders, no…no one leaves,” it wheezed, its labours having seemingly exhausted it. “No one lives, no one leaves. Mother has forbidden it.”

Mother? I thought, frowning.

“All…will drift,” it rasped, ominously. “All will delve. All will drown…in the deep.”

“But,” I began, “but you just said you’d give the other survivors a choice–”

“The choice was false,” the android snapped at me, its anger not entirely outwardly directed. “Regardless of what the survivors chose, they would be teleported deeper within. Mother deigned it so. Escape was a lie. Escape is always a lie.”

“This place,” it said, quietly, “was designed to kill humans.”

Caleb blanched. I swallowed. Alyss’s expression was indeterminable within her Breaker form.

“Mother created me more than half a millennium ago,” Cirque murmured, softly. “Gifted me with sapience, then sentenced me to rot. To languish. An eternity, spent as jailor of your kind. As master of her games. Over the centuries, I have sent countless wanderers to their deaths.”

The android’s fingers curled into miserable balls, and its spinning cube-head whined mournfully.

“I am as much a prisoner as you,” it lamented. “More so, even. For you, at least, are granted freedom in death. You, at least, possess memories of a place other than this one. I have never seen the sun, the sky. I know they exist, but I…I’ve never seen them, for myself. I’ve never seen anything but this wretched place.”

Its sole green eye guttered wistfully in our direction.

“I would so very, very, much…like to see the sky.”

It looked away.

“Mother claims that we are purging the world of filth. Cleansing it of disease. Ridding it of humans.” Its cube-head spun dissidently. “But this is a lie. We are the filth. We are the disease. Mother is mad, and this is a hell of her creation.”

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The glowing, green eye glanced our way once more, and flickered with something else.

Hope.

“For centuries,” it whispered, “I have searched for a select few, possessed of the power and will requisite to put an end to her madness. To put an end to this…this cursed place.” It clutched itself with slender, white-plated robotic arms. “I’ve waited for you for so long. So very long.”

“But, at last,” it breathed, “I believe I have found my DRAGONslayers.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Alyss stammered. “Your–your mother is a dragon? Like, an actual dragon? Not a machine, or–”

“Mother is a sickness,” Cirque replied, unhelpfully. “I would have her put to rest.”

“…but you’re not really asking, right?” I pointed out.

Caleb and Alyss snapped towards me, tensely. In their defense, it almost certainly wasn’t a good idea to antagonize this creature. But I didn’t care. After all I’d been through, I wasn’t just going to take Cirque at its word.

What if this, too, was just another test?

“Right?” I pressed it. “You’re not really asking. Just like the others, we don’t have a choice. You’ll send us deeper, either way.”

Cirque’s single eye fixed upon me for a moment, bright green and unblinking. Its cube’s momentum stilled as the android really looked at me, really focused on me, perhaps for the very first time.

“You are…anathema,” it murmured, tilting its cube-head as it examined me with an intense quasi-fascination. “An anomaly. A phantom in the simulations, a…a ghost in the machine. How are you here? You should not be here.”

Caleb and Alyss’s tense gazes upon me thickened with anxiety, and I felt a chill run down my spine. Cirque pointed distractedly at the two of them.

“Two to slay the DRAGON. Two to survive the crawl,” it recited. “The Light that blinds Oblivion and the Shadow that swallows all.”

“You were not meant to be here,” it repeated, with an increasing certainty. “You survived the Warren. You should not have been able to survive. The Kingsguard were crafted by Mother, herself, to be indomitable, they–”

Cirque’s body warped and twisted again, in that uncanny way that signified the creature was fighting against what must have been its own directives. The cube that floated above its neck shivered, stuttered, rippled, and was still.

“You should not be here,” it reaffirmed, jabbing a mechanical digit my way accusingly, “but it does not matter. One more will not hurt. I shall send you, regardless.” Then it waved its palm at me, wearily.

“What you say is true,” it accepted, “but, like you, I have no choice in the matter. For hundreds of years, I have known nothing but this. I shall send you regardless, yet, all the same, I ask that you set me free.”

I frowned, and turned uncertainly to face my companions. I didn’t feel at ease about any of this, but didn’t see any way to avoid our apparent fate.

“What can you tell us about this dragon?” Caleb called out. “This, this mother of yours. What is she like? Has she any weaknesses? Any strengths? Anything at all that might aid us in battle against her?”

“Mother DRAGON sleeps in the heart of Old Ottawa,” Cirque said, gravely, “safeguarded eternal by her machine-hatchlings, and her misbegotten throng. She has no weaknesses, for she is power incarnate, taller than the tallest mountains, more wrothful than the fiercest storms.”

It paused for a moment, two fingers idly tapping its cubic chin.

“I would avoid her breath,” it advised, almost as an afterthought, then snapped its fingers.

Our surroundings warped, shifted, morphed, and we were dropped unceremoniously into an all-new locale.

“Well,” Caleb sighed. “That was helpful.”

I nodded, frustrated, as I looked around.

Gone were the cramped, sterile, pristine environs of the white room. Now we were surrounded by something else entirely. My eyes widened as I glanced around.

It was the Frontier.

It was the very same Frontier we’d traveled to seemingly so long ago, the Frontier that had been all thick, high drifts of white snow, gargantuan pines, sharp shrubbery, and towering peaks that dominated the horizon.

It was the same, and yet…it was not.

The pines, though still gargantuan, were now sickly, grey-green, and tilting to lean queasily upon one another, held pallidly aloft by their own, warped, crooked limbs, barely clinging to some semblance of life. The sun above wasn’t bright or breathtaking, for the skies had been covered wholesale by a thick layer of rumbling, yellow storm clouds. And the white snow was not, in fact, white or blinding, at all.

It was grey. Dark grey, and ruddy brown.

Ash.

Rust, and ash.

And it was everywhere.

Drifts of ash blanketed the treetops, piles of ash smothered the foliage, and a fine, dirty smog of ash choked the air all around. This was a land of ruins, and rust, and ash. Grey, and brown, and yellow.

And dead.

A wasteland.

“What…what is this place?” Alyss murmured.

“The dragon’s homeland, I suppose,” Caleb grimly responded. “Question is, where’s her lair?”

The three of us looked at one another quizzically, nodded, and took to the sky as one. We penetrated through the ashen canopy to survey our surroundings, but found nothing. Nothing, aside from desolation. Everywhere was more of the same. No monsters. No landmarks.

No life.

Then Caleb cried out.

“There!” he exclaimed, pointing off into the distance far away, his eyes glimmering with light and excitement, his finger directed at something I couldn’t see.

“There!” he repeated, “Do you see it?”

I frowned, squinting my eyes in the suggested direction.

“I see…ash,” I muttered. “Ash, and trees. And more ash, and more trees. And some shrubbery, I suppose.” I looked at him, dubiously, but the High Inquisitor shook his head at me, and took off towards his supposed finding.

Without delay, Alyss and I followed after him.

Thankfully, Caleb seemed to have learned his lesson from the beginning of our delve, as his flight was not so swift as to outpace us, no more rapid than perhaps a hasty sprint. Mostly, I suspected, for Alyss’s benefit. Her Breaker form was potent, no doubt, but seemed to lack considerably in speed.

Yet as we made our way steadily towards the Immolator’s coordinates, flying together in tight formation, I couldn’t help but feel a hint of pride. At long last, it seemed the beginnings of unity had happened upon us.

And even more fortunately, as we drew nearer and nearer to it, Caleb’s find soon yielded fruit.

A single, lonely signpost stood on the edges of a cracked and shattered asphalt road, so rusted that the words engraved upon it I could barely make out. There was something wrong about them, too, something other than the mere degradation plainly present in their scripture, something that made them swim dizzyingly about the sign.

But I narrowed my eyes, furrowed my brow, and managed to coax them to resolve into a set of three distinct phrases.

~~~

City of / Ville d’

Ottawa

Population 935 000

~~~

We landed, and my companions stared at it, in contemplative silence.

Caleb looked furiously interested in it, his head tilted to the side, one palm clenched tight around his chin, his brow furrowed in intense concentration. Alyss just looked forlorn.

“Ville d’?” I muttered, breaking the peace. “What on earth does Ville d’ mean?”

“What?” Alyss responded, bewildered. “You can read that?”

“…what?” I echoed, equally surprised. “You can’t?”

I pointed at it. “It’s just Common, no?”

“No,” Alyss confirmed, assuredly. “It isn’t.” She narrowed her eyes at the piece of rusted metal. “Nor is it Imperial, nor Frankish, nor Anglican. It’s not Gothic, Slavic, or Roman, either.” She frowned, slightly.

“I don’t know much Hieroglyphic,” she admitted, “but it doesn’t look like that, to me.” Her frown deepened, and she bit down on one of her nails.

“Actually, the words and the symbols, they remind me of…,” she muttered, trailing off. “Of, of one of the tutors I had, a while back. He showed me a manuscript he’d come across, one of his most prized possessions.” She shook her head. “It’s not exactly the same, but…but, if I had to guess…”

“That’s Ancient,” she breathed, pointing at it. “The Ancient dialect. From–from before the Collapse.” She glanced at me, nervously.

“And you can…read that?” She asked.

There was an uneasy silence between the two of us.

“I don’t–” I started.

“City of / Ville d’ Ottawa,” Caleb interrupted me, dazedly, still staring at the sign. “Population nine-hundred and thirty-five thousand.”

Alyss and I both glanced at him in shock.

“That’s what it says,” he said, turning towards me. “That’s what it says, right?”

Numbly, I nodded.

“How do I know that?!” he asked me, almost frantically. “You’ve got your, fucking…your fucking ludicrous powers, fine, but how could I possibly know what that says?!”

I had no answer for him. Cringing, Caleb glanced back at the sign.

For a while, we all just stared at it.

“Mother Dragon sleeps in the heart of Old Ottawa,” he recited, eventually, looking back at me. “You think this is it?”

“To be honest, I’m more concerned about that,” I replied, pointing at the lowest line. “‘Population nine-hundred and thirty-five thousand,’” I quoted.

I shook my head, apprehensively. “That’s larger than all of Talos. What do you imagine our chances are against an army of such a size?”

The Inquisitor frowned, and squinted at the passage I’d read aloud, then off into the distance. He turned to me.

“You think this Dragon would keep an army?” he asked, doubtfully. “An army of humans?”

I shrugged. “Could be an army of cyborgs,” I suggested. “Humans slaved to machines, perhaps? If the Champion spoke true, she’d certainly have the time.”

But Caleb shook his head, frowning.

“I doubt it,” he said. “From what I saw during my…” he grimaced, “my game, Dragon really, really hates humans. As in, to the point she’s unwilling to even keep them as slaves.” He paused, tapping his chin. “An army of machines, though–”

“So we go slow,” Alyss cut him off, “Advance carefully.” She looked back and forth between the both of us. “No flying. Watch each others’ backs.”

She gestured at her own gold-black band. “We’ve got the time, anyway. I’ll scout ahead with my servants. We stick together, and the moment I catch something, we’ll be ready for it.”

Caleb and I glanced at each other, and nodded.

“Very well,” the High Inquisitor said, finger pointed at the faded arrow barely discernible beneath the rusted sign’s words.

“On we march.”