Vayra chased after Phasoné around the side of the greenhouse. They ran, Vayra only a few paces behind the Goddess’ apparition. The others trailed further behind.

By now, they had made it a quarter of the way around the dome, and Vayra still hadn’t seen an entrance. The sun had set completely, and Phasoné’s form shone brightly ahead of them, illuminating the field for fifty paces in every direction. “You’d think…” Vayra panted, “...that your brother would’ve put the entrance somewhere closer…to the canal…”

“He put it halfway between two canals,” Phasoné replied.

On the other side of the greenhouse, another river plowed through the land. Vayra squinted. Was that a mast on the other side of the canal?

But there were no lanterns or ships’ lights—only an upright spar of wood peering above the ridge at the edges of the canal.

“Just debris…” Vayra told herself.

“Up ahead and to your left!” Phasoné called.

An archway bit into the side of the dome. It was nearly three storeys tall, but considering the size of the dome, it felt much too small.

Until Vayra realized that they would have to get the doors open.

Two wooden gates spanned the entire height of the archway, and she didn’t want to think about how thick they were—let alone how they’d get the tangle of vines and flowering plants off the door.

She stopped in front of it, ten paces away so that she could see the entirety of the door still, and placed her hands down on her knees.

Glade and Nathariel arrived a moment later. Nathariel nodded in acceptance, then said, “I should be able to heave the gate open if I push my body to its limit—and with a little help from Glade.”

After a few seconds to catch her breath, Vayra stepped forwards and placed a hand on the door just to test it. She tried pushing on it, but her feet just slipped back through the dirt and grass.

She’d leave it to the people with strength-based bodies, then.

“Vayra, watch out!” Phasoné called.

One of the vines snapped to life, whipping around on the ground like an angry snake. It wrapped around the ankle of her mechanical leg and hoisted her off the ground.

She let out a short yelp, then cleared her mind with a quick exhale. The plant had just hoisted her up. It alone wasn’t enough to be a threat, but more were closing in, poised to skewer or squish her. She needed to cut herself free. Holding out her hand, she called, “Phas, scythe?”

“I’m outside your body!” Phasoné yelled. The scythe appeared in her ghost’s hand as a white apparition, but that was it. Not in Vayra’s hand, so not useful at the moment.

With a grunt of effort, Vayra craned herself upwards and blasted a Starlight Palm into the vine. The explosion sheared away half the vine’s body. She let out another, blasting away the rest of the vine.

At least that technique still worked.

She landed on her back at the base of the door, then scrambled back to where the others were standing.

“A little help would have been nice,” she grumbled, pushing herself up.

“And allow you to miss out on a valuable learning opportunity?” Nathariel shook his head. “Not at all.”

“Learning?”

“What do you know now?”

“That…I can’t use our scythe if she”—Vayra pointed her thumb back at Phasoné—“is outside my body.”

“And?”

“And that the vines are hungry?”

“There you are.” Nathariel motioned towards Glade, beckoning him to the door. He took a step towards it, his arms glowing orange with a powerful Bracing technique. “With me, Disciple.”

Vayra sighed, then looked back at Pels and the Adepts. “Translation: he wants the rest of us to keep the vines off him…”

She ran up beside him and Glade, though made sure to stay closer to Glade—he would need more protection. Phasoné’s ghost, scythe in hand, approached on the other side. The Adepts held up their swords, making a semi-circle around the two pushers in a well-practiced formation. Pels drew one of his pistols and turned it over in his hand so he could swat the vines away without firing a shot.

As soon as Glade and Nathariel set their hands on the door, the vines surged towards them.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Vayra blasted the nearest vines with Starlight palms. They reached out with snapping heads—like a snake’s maw, but less rigid. If she annihilated the head with a single blast, the vine backed away, but sometimes, she hit the stem, and it took two or three more blasts.

More and more vines surged along the ground. The plants clinging to the gate had started to wake up as well, and now, she had to defend from two directions.

She traded arms, unleashing Starlight Palms as fast as she could. White sparks filled the air—from her repeated attacks and from Phasoné’s whirling scythe. She chopped up plants and flowers, and a little bit of overgrown wheat as well. The rest of the Adepts hacked at the plants, smashing off their heads and cleaving the vines apart.

The door creaked, then with a hiss, it groaned open. A gust of steam blew out, followed by a wave of humid air. Glade and Nathariel strained, and the doors kept shifting.

They weren’t just working against the weight of the doors, though. Over the decades, mud had accumulated at the door’s base, and they had to plow the gates straight through the earth.

When they opened the gates enough that even the bulkiest Adept could fit through, Nathariel and Glade stopped pushing. “In!” Nathariel shouted. “Get inside!”

Glade ran inside first, followed by a few of the Adepts, then Vayra, Phasoné and Pels. Nathariel was the last inside. Without the earth to work against him, he wedged his shoulder into one of the gates and slammed it shut, then pushed the other shut beside it. A few vines had reached through, trying to snap at the intruders, but the doors sliced off their heads when they slammed shut.

Vayra sucked in a slow breath of humid, peat-smelling air, and spun around in a slow circle. They had arrived in a foyer of sorts, though it was still large enough to fit a cathedral inside it. But, compared to the rest of the dome, it was still miniature. The walls were glass, just like the outside, except inside, the frame was cracking. When Vayra looked at it with her spiritual sight, there were cracks in the Moulded Arcara shields.

Vayra tilted her head. “Phas? Is this place gonna fall apart on us?” The air caught in her throat, as if half of it was made of water. It was twice as warm inside as it was outside.

Phasoné’s projection put her hands on her hips. “The inside structure, maybe…” she said. “The Arcara here doesn’t look as firmly Moulded here as the Arcara outside. Without my brother to maintain it…it’s starting to come apart.”

Phasoné walked across the foyer, and Vayra followed her. The floor here was still mud, and a thin layer of moss had started growing on it. The floor sank with each step.

Phasoné placed a hand on the wall. “I remember him bringing me here…when I was really little. He was still building this dome. Velaydia still ruled the galaxy, and there was peace…”

A glass wall divided the entire dome in half, and the foyer had been inserted in the very middle of the wall. All the way along the wall, it was the only gap in the dividing wall.

“He was putting up the central wall,” Phasoné said. “It was there that he helped me break through from Mate to Quartermaster. I was…three decades old, maybe? He showed me Arcara formations and taught me how to compress and Mould it.” She placed her hand on a section of glass-Arcara that was especially cracked in Vayra’s spiritual sight. “I helped make this one.”

Vayra could tell, but she didn’t say that aloud—

“I can still read your thoughts.”

“Shit…” Vayra whispered.

“It’s alright.”

“Are you alright?” Vayra stepped up beside Phasoné and leaned against her outline. “You—”

“I’m fine. We need a direction to go, and…” Phasoné pointed to a smaller doorway in the side of the dome. It led to the eastern half of the dome. “On that side, we’ll find the refineries.”

Vayra peered through the glass of the foyer. By now, the others had caught up, and they were looking through the glass as well. There was no artificial light anywhere in the greenhouse, but channels of Stream water ran all around the glass structure, flowing down along wooden tubes, hanging platforms, and terraformed slices of land.

On the eastern side of the dome, the Stream water started at the top. The enormous roots wound all the way up the wall like a twisted tree. It deposited Stream water out into a basin at the top, which flowed down between hundreds of different pitcher plants and vine systems until it reached the bottom.

Where the bottom started and began was hard to say. The land formed a neatly-arranged metropolis—hundreds of miles of terraformed land, laden with oversized trees, grass, and flowers.

Vayra rubbed her forehead. “So, I suppose we’ll find elixirs on the east side,” she said. “If we can find a well.”

“It’ll be at low ground, where the purified and partially-cycled spirit water ends up,” Phasoné said.

“So you’re feeding the kids plant guts, eh?” Pels asked. “Which side?”

On the western side, even larger plants grew. A few deciduous trees reached up to the very top of the dome, burdened with so much orange fruit that Vayra couldn’t even see the leaves. Orchards covered the terraformed ground.

“Spirit fruits,” Nathariel said. “Top grade ones—for improving bodily constitution and further refining. And those conks clinging to the wall will make for some excellent…experimental material.”

“Which way should we go?” Vayra asked.

“If we head east first, you can gather as much refined spirit water as you can find,” Nathariel said. “We will accumulate as much as we can, then head west and see if we can’t find some more precise solutions with the spirit fruits.” He turned to Phasoné. “Goddess, is there any way through the central wall?”

“Only here,” Phasoné said, “and at the upper observation platform.” She pointed up to the very top of the dome, where a smaller sphere much like the foyer hung.

Before Nathariel could respond, the roof above shattered.

Shards of wood, glass, and Arcara rained down. A wedge of glass smashed down through the center of the room, spearing straight through one of the Adepts and slicing him in half. Glade, Nathariel, and Pels leapt to the west, and Vayra and Phasoné leapt to the east.

It was a wedge of the outer dome—strong and perfectly formed, and large enough to divide the entire foyer in half. Three of the Adepts made it to the same side as Vayra and Phasoné, and one ended up on the other side.

Vayra ran down the length of the glass wedge, trying to find a gap in it. But it had jammed straight into the ground, leaving no gaps to slip through. Even the door to the outside had been blocked. Nathariel tried blasting it with a pulse of flame, but just like the outside wall, it repelled him.

Incredibly inconvenient, and horrible luck.

“I…wouldn’t put that down to luck,” Phasoné said.

The door to the eastern half of the dome opened, and a tall woman in a coat strode through. She wore a tricorn hat. A plume of water-Arcara flowed out of it.

“Not luck, I’m afraid,” the woman said. “Not luck at all.”