Quet rolled along the balcony, distributing ice-filled glasses to the guests of the official Aztec Party This Time For Realsies (as it had been officially declared by Omet). She paused for a moment to watch Omet grip the railing with bone-white knuckles, trying desperately to stay upright on the rollerblades that they were borrowing from one of the Greeks. She cupped her mouth with her one free hand. “It’s easier to stay upright when you’re moving, like with bikes!”

Omet pushed off the railing, drifted forward for half a second, then stumbled and had to be caught by one of their siblings. When they were returned to the railing, they were grinning like a lunatic. “Hey, I actually stayed up for a second there!”

Rachna, perched atop the balcony railing like a monkey and alternating between every Aztec in his line of sight every few seconds, nodded calmly. “That might just be the lamest-best marionette I ever had the pleasure of meeting.”

“Ditto,” said Quet, rolling up next to Rachna with her tray of glasses extended to the side with one arm. “So, uh, do you have any plans on following the rest of your family? I mean, we could set up another room for you here, if you wanna just ditch them.”

Rachna shrugged. “I wouldn’t bother. Bedrooms won’t be in fashion quite soon. It’s not worth it anymore. Go downstairs.”

“Uh…” Quet noticed that the last of the glasses had been taken from the tray that she was carrying. “Okay then, I was gonna head down anyway. Stay weird.” She turned and rolled towards the door leading downstairs in order to bring another set of glasses up.

On her way to the spiral staircase leading to the foyer, Quet looked down and spotted Horan and Waia heading for the front door. “Hey, where’re you two going? You’ve already been invited to the Ap-ti-tiffer upstairs, everyone is.”

Horan and Waia sped up, opened the doors, and left the building.

Quet hurried down the stairs and followed the two outside, but by the time she made it to the front yard, Horan was already carrying Waia over the treetops.

“I was just starting to enjoy today,” muttered Quet as she turned and ran back inside the building.

-

Mark leaned over the balcony railing and stared out at the ruins of the forest, empty styrofoam cup in one hand. He felt someone tap him on the shoulder and turned to see Quet standing behind him, wringing her hands. “Uh, what’s up?”

“I hate to be the bummer for once, but, uh, Horan just left. With Waia.”

Mark’s eyes went wide. “Which way did they go?”

“Buh…” Quet’s eyes unfocused and she pointed in random directions for a moment. “…South.”

Mark rushed away from the railing and ran towards where Omet was standing. He grabbed them by the shoulder. “Horan just–” He lowered his voice and stood on his toes to be closer to their ear. “Horan just took off for the Seraphium.”

He heard a sharp intake of breath from Omet. He stepped away from them and let them wave at the group they were hanging out with.

“Yeah, guys, just give me a second, I gotta do something.” Omet turned and met Mark’s gaze, nodding towards the door leading downstairs. Mark nodded in turn and made for the door, Quet following close behind.

Once he was sure that he was out of both sight and earshot, Mark sprinted down the hall towards Quet’s room, threw the door open and picked the unfolded map off the floor. “Okay, we still have this, so…” He turned around to face Quet, who had just managed to catch up to him. “He didn’t take the ghost car, right? It’s still outside?”

“Uh, yeah.” Quet nodded hastily. “Horan’s flying the two of them there, we still have the car.”

“Great, the keys are still inside. We’re going now.”

“Hang on,” said Omet, waving at Quet, “You still have the thing?”

Quet nodded. She pulled out a section of the wall, rooted around in the drawer for a moment, then pulled out an off-purple contact lens, which she tossed to Omet.

Omet split in two, with the yellow-eyed copy still holding the lens. “We normally just use this for pranks,” explained Yellow Omet to Mark as they inserted the lens over their left eye, making it take on the color of Purple Omet’s eyes. “I wanna keep this low-profile, nobody here needs to know about where we’re going. We need to go fast, before those two get themselves killed. You can take Purple, I’ll try and make sure nobody notices that you’re gone”

Mark nodded and pulled Purple Omet behind him as he left the room with Quet, hurrying towards the front doors downstairs.

“I can’t believe him,” muttered Mark as he descended the spiral stairs two at a time. “Has that moron learned nothing?”

“I… I kind of get Waia,” mumbled Omet, “But Horan? I just did this whole thing for him… What did I do wrong?” At the bottom of the stairs, they looked up at their counterpart and gave them a nervous wave before continuing after Mark.

Mark opened the doors and ushered the two Aztecs towards the car parked outside. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Omet. Horan just can’t learn how to make good decisions if his life depends on it. And I can actually say that now, because he may actually be in life-threatening danger.”

Omet shifted into their human form in order to fit inside the car, strapped themself into the passenger seat and leaned against the dashboard. “I… I’m gonna throw up. I totally convinced him to do this somehow, didn’t I?”

“Yell at yourself all you want.” Mark turned the keys in the ignition, propped the map up against the gearshift, pulled a compass out of his hoodie pocket, placed it on the dashboard behind the steering wheel and slammed his foot on the accelerator, making the car take off through the trees in front of it with a screech. “As long as it doesn’t slow us down.”

“Where’d you get the compass from?” asked Quet, leaning between the two front seats.

“Lost my main one in the Servant city,” mumbled Mark, “that one’s my backup.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“…You have a backup compass?”

“I’m proving that having one is a good idea right n– Can you just not say anything? I need to maintain the right direction.”

Quet slunk back into her seat and looked out the window, watching the halo of blue light around the car fade in and out as they drove through tree after tree. “Not the right time, got it…”

“We’ll be there in a little over ten minutes,” said Mark, “since we can go as the crow flies. You have that long to prepare for people shooting at you.”

“You…” Omet’s eyes unfocused for a moment. “…Uh, you’re pretty dead-set on this being an ambush by the Servants, huh?”

“With us getting the sketchiest lucky breaks I’ve ever seen for the whole day? It’s a guarantee.”

“…Yeah.”

-

When the three of them arrived at the spot marked on the map, it was surprisingly free of any traces of the Servants. What was actually there was… something.

A perfectly circular hole, hundreds of feet across, had been cleanly scooped out of the earth, its perfectly smooth, vertical slopes continuing downwards into impossible darkness. A dozen fifty-foot-wide stone pillars emerged from the darkness, connected by narrow wood-and-rope bridges as they slowly lowered in height from the side closest to where the car had arrived from, down to the opposite side of the hole, where twenty feet below ground level, a small doorway had been cut into the earth. The distant shapes of Horan and Waia stood in front of the doorway, on a small, perfectly flat ledge that was connected to the network of pillars by only a single bridge, just as the pillars were connected to the rim of the hole.

Quet got out of the car and stared out at the sight in bafflement. “This… This was just here? For how long? And nobody’s found it?”

Omet stood beside Quet and nodded slowly. “…Well… If Deus doesn’t want something to happen, it’s not going to happen.”

Quet glanced at her sibling. “…You think the map was legit?”

“Look at this place,” said Omet. “How could it not be?”

Mark rushed past the two Aztecs, dead set on the indistinct dark blue spot of Horan on the other side of the pit. The moment he set foot on the bridge leading into the hole, however, Horan was right there.

Mark blinked and stopped for a moment. Horan was not right in front of him, that could be seen after a split-second’s pause. But whenever Mark focused on the other side of the pit, distance was eliminated and he could see and hear the far-away point with the clarity of someone standing only a few feet away.

Mark hesitantly continued across the freely hanging bridge. “Horan!”

Horan jolted and turned around, looking at Mark in terror. “You guys? Seriously? I d– You weren’t supposed to…”

“Told you we shouldn’t have just taken a photo of the map,” said Waia.

“Don’t you dare move,” said Mark, continuing across the bridge towards the two Primoi on the other end. “This place is a death trap, we’re getting out of here right now. You don’t go to a place this sketchy unless you absolutely need to, and you definitely don’t do it alone!”

Horan glanced at Waia, who shrugged apathetically. He turned back to face an approaching Mark. “Look, I… I know we agreed not to go here unless we were out of options, but I… There’s something up with this place. I mean, you can see the hole, but… Please, just come here and hear me out.”

Mark groaned and walked silently from pillar to pillar, arriving in front of Horan a couple minutes later with Quet and Omet behind him. “Fine. What’s so catch-free about the giant hole?”

Horan turned to look at the rectangular passageway that penetrated the earth behind him. Above the doorway, a hazy line of glowing white letters formed a sentence in an unidentifiable language that Mark was nevertheless able to understand.

“‘Into this vessel of forbidden history’,” read Horan, “‘shall no Domain but Rome be granted passage’.” He stretched his arm into the passage, only to be blocked by a rippling wall of dim white light that appeared from nothing and vanished when he pulled his hand away.

“White light in a place like this?” Horan stepped away from the passageway and stared into the darkness that it led to. “This place is Deus’. No investigation needed.”

Mark folded his arms. “So, what? You think that the magic fix-everything button is just sitting here?”

“It’s something that Deus wants to keep hidden,” said Horan. “That’s not exactly a small list, but… Well, why not the Seraphium? The only problem so far is that barrier.”

Waia directed the group’s attention to a fist-sized hole in the wall next to the passage. “Can’t get in from the side, either. It just… doesn’t exist from any angle except the front.”

Mark approached the passageway and put his own arm forward. He passed through the space where Horan had been halted, with no barrier to be seen. “…I’m no Domain.”

Quet furrowed her brow. “No, it’s… It’s not that. It can’t be that easy.”

Mark stepped fully into the passageway and pulled his gun from his waistband. “It’s not.” He pressed the button on the handle, and the apparatus unfolded into a pump-action shotgun with a flashlight attached to the end of the barrel. “Here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to go in there while you stay here and make sure no Servants flood in after me. If you need to run, run. I’ll see what’s inside here, come back, tell you the disappointing news, and we’ll all turn around, go home, and never speak of this again, having all learned a valuable lesson. Any objections?”

The four Primoi stayed silent.

“Great.” Mark flipped the flashlight on and pointed it into the dark passageway. Right beyond the point where it had been too dark to see, the passageway turned to the right. “I’ll be back in ten minutes tops. If it’s been half of that and I still haven’t seen the end, I’ll turn around and come back. If I’m not back in ten minutes, you can cremate a pillow with my face on it or something.”

“Please don’t say that,” croaked Omet.

“Ten minutes,” repeated Mark, before walking into the passageway and turning the corner.

The passage, only enough to admit a single person at a time, widened considerably shortly after the corner. Mark emerged into a sandstone tunnel wide and high enough to fit a train car, which was illuminated by… something. It was bright enough to see, and shadows were cast under Mark’s feet, but no single light source was visible.

Crude bas-reliefs covered both walls, with hundreds, if not thousands of painted humanoid figures standing in front of an array of large buildings with architectural styles from all over the world. The three-foot-high figures were not given individual detail or any distinct features, each simply a collection of basic shapes arranged to form a torso and limbs. Each was painted in a single, unbroken color. Most of the figures were orange or a color close to it, but enough variation was displayed to turn the walls into a kaleidoscope of color. Every single figure, without fail, was kneeling, bowed circle-heads pointed towards the far end of the passage.

Mark walked past clusters of these figures, presented before towers, palaces, hillforts, mounds in the earth, and more. The echoing thuds of his boots hitting the immaculate sandstone floor stopped when he saw a group of figures near the floor, in front of a smooth-sided pyramid. His fingers brushed up against a figure painted dark blue, ever-so-slightly larger than its neighbors.

After another three minutes or so of walking, Mark noticed that the massive hallway ended abruptly in a small silk curtain with something written on it. He jogged the rest of the distance and approached the curtain, noting the ‘CHAMBER OF THE SERAPHIUM’ embossed onto its indigo surface.

Mark pushed the curtain aside and stepped past, entering a cavernous pale cube of a room, featureless except for the bas-relief on the opposite wall.

The words ‘WRONG GUESS. WE HAVE BEEN ALERTED TO YOUR ATTEMPT.’ loomed down at Mark, carved into the sandstone. Flanking the block of writing were two more figures, both well over a hundred feet high and striking authoritative poses.

The figure on the right was painted white, and the one on the left was the pale blue of the sky.

Mark turned around and started running.