The top of Mount Baker was oddly inviting compared to the rest of the desolate landscape of Washington. As the Voidfish 1½ drew near to the lonely peak, the controlled green glow of one of the few remaining anti-gravity plates threw the small patch of land into ghoulish relief.
Dead trees sagged over the side of the peak, leaning over the small road that spiraled around the side of the mountain and led to the top. A short footpath led up towards a square wooden hut at the very highest elevation, which stood resolutely insular against the cold.
Mark frowned as the Voidfish 1½ gradually descended toward the peak. “No snow…”
“That’s not all,” said Waia. “Look.” She pointed towards the singular hut. A thin stream of smoke trailed upward from the slender steel chimney that jutted out from the otherwise featureless pyramidal roof.
“Great,” muttered Mark. “Someone’s got a hideout all the way up here.”
The Voidfish 1½ touched down next to an oddly well-preserved SUV. Quet ushered everyone off of the basket, then tapped the active gravity glyph and hurried away before the sail collapsed on top of her now that its own weight was affecting it once again.
Quet spared the Voidfish 1½, now little more than a lumpy pile of stitched-together camping materials, one final look over her shoulder. “It did good. Looks like we’ve finally arrived somewhere… after all this time.”
Horan nodded and looked ahead at the hut. “Looks like you were right, Mark. I dunno how, but you got us here.”
Mark began walking ahead. “Let’s just get in there before anything else goes wrong, huh? At least the most terrifying I’ve literally ever done is over.”
The five of them clustered around the front of the small building, the three Primoi giving Mark the honors of ascending the short flight of steps leading up to the door and knocking.
The door opened, and Mark was greeted by the tip of an authentic Roman gladius.
Mark’s hand immediately went for his gun as he moved back down a step, putting some distance between himself and the haggard-looking man blocking entrance into the hut. “Okay, I don’t–”
“Who’re you?!” cried the man, the blade of the gladius clutched in both hands trembling.
Quet nudged Waia to get her attention. “This is a fire lookout, right? Do those usually come with swords?”
The man aimed the tip of his gladius away from Mark and towards Quet. “I–I can’t– What’s she saying? Who are you people?!”
Mark’s hand went for the translation glyph in his pocket, though he didn’t produce it. “Okay, you can put that down. We’re not going to start anything unless you start it for us.”
Waia folded her hands and nodded. “I really wouldn’t recommend keeping us out of there.”
The man clenched his jaw and shifted his grip on his sword. “I’m warning you, last people who tried to come in here, I killed them! That was two years ago, and I haven’t lost my touch!” He looked at Horan and startled slightly. “His eye’s glowing!”
“Is it weird that the fact that he has no idea what we are soothes me?” asked Horan.
Mark stepped off of the stairs entirely and joined the semicircle that he and his friends formed around the door. “Look, we aren’t here to rob you or anything. We just need to get into there so that we can find something we need.”
“Oh, you want the hatch, don’t you?” The man stepped forward slightly, but refused to set foot on the other side of the doorway. “He told me about the hatch! He said it’s the whole reason I’m here!”
Mark rolled his eyes. “Look, buddy, we don’t know your whole life story or anything. We have no idea who you are. Who’s ‘he’?”
“I can take a guess,” said Horan.
Mark shut his eyes. “Figures.”
“Look, I don’t…” The man was, at this point, visibly struggling to hold his sword aloft. “I don’t remember what he looked like, or anything. But h–he came to me, okay? He came to me when the world ended, and he said that as long as I never leave this lookout, I’ll be protected from… everything out there. And it’s been working so far, right? I mean, I haven’t had to eat or drink o–or sleep in years!” He chuckled nervously, eyes welling with tears. “So don’t think I’m giving that up!”
Waia held up a hand. “Can I give it a shot?”
Mark shook his head. “If Deus put him here to protect this place, that sword probably shoots lightning or some–”
“I’m not gonna kill him!” Waia scoffed and stepped forward, planting one foot on the top of the stairs while the other remained halfway down. “What’s your name, buddy?”
The man pointed the tip of his sword towards the center of Waia’s chest. “D-Don’t come any closer! I’ve already killed three people with this thing!”
Waia shrugged. “So I’ve heard. If you want to get that out of your system, go ahead.”
The man thrust his sword into Waia’s chest. The instant it made contact with her shirt, the hilt was shoved to the side as the man kept pushing it into a surface that refused to budge. He fumbled his grip on the sword and it clattered to the ground.
Waia kicked the sword and sent it skittering into the lookout. “And just like that, I win. And I could’ve had that pocket knife melt the second it touched me, if I wanted to. Might’ve even be able to melt it from all the way back on the ground if I wanted to. Haven’t really tried anything like that yet in practice, but I tested it with Quet back there.”
The man stepped away from Waia in terror. “…What are you…?”
“The same type of thing as the guy who gave you this job.” Waia moved past the doorway and shifted into her true form, her head almost brushing against the ceiling. “I’ll ask again, because I feel like being social today: What’s your name?”
The man stumbled backwards, tripped over his own feet, and fell on the unadorned wooden floor. He looked up at Waia’s towering form, then furrowed his brow and looked down. “…I don’t… No, I–I know it, it’s just…”
Outside the lookout station, Mark sighed. “Looks like it’s got a radius to it. No wonder why Deus stuck the Seraphium here, then, of all places.”
“Looks like what has a radius?” asked Quet.
Mark glanced over at her, face unreadable.
“…Right.” Quet looked back ahead.
Waia stood over the man, her eyes bathing him in orange light. The similar glow coming from the small metal fireplace off to the side was drowned out by the light of the dominant Primus. “So,” she said, “sounds like my original plan’s off the table. Wanna hear something off the dome?”
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The man shuffled away from Waia along the floor, eyeing the sword a few feet away.
Waia went down on one knee in front of the man. “Today’s been a very bad day for me, even in the context of a very bad year. And that’s in the context of a pretty hit-or-miss past eight centuries. My friends outside have been plenty reasonable with you, but let me just say that I, as an individual, lean a fair bit more towards the ‘bad cop’ end of the spectrum. I know what’s at stake around here, and I know what I have to prove, so if you think I’m some alien monster here to put my eggs in you or something, feel free to go for that sword and see where it takes you. Or, alternatively, you could stand aside, let us do our thing, and bank on the hope that I’m not, in fact, some alien monster. The dice aren’t in your favor, but I’ve made it quite clear what’ll happen if you refuse to roll them.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the man looked away from the sword and bowed his head.
“Smart.” Waia stood up and looked over her shoulder. “Alright, Mark, you’re up. Show us the money.”
Mark nodded and headed up the stairs into the lookout station, Quet and Horan close behind.
The man looked up at Waia as she shifted back into human form. “So you… aren’t a bunch of monsters?”
Waia shrugged and leaned against the square fire finder in the middle of the room. “How I answer doesn’t change what I am.”
Mark moved to the opposite end of the station’s single room, which was completely bare save for a bed, the fireplace in the corner near the door, the fire finder in the center, and a small umbrella stand right next to the door, used for holding the gladius. The windows, which wrapped around the circumference of the station, were covered with thick wooded shutters, and seemingly had been for some time.
He approached a hatch in the ceiling just above the bed, waited for Waia to melt the padlock off, pulled on the handle, and climbed up the ladder that opening the hatch had allowed to slide down.
It led to an attic.
Mark frowned and looked around the tiny, dark space. “I don’t… No, i–it’s supposed to be here!”
Waia screwed her eyes shut and did her best not to yell. “You said…”
Mark scrambled back down the ladder. “No, I know it’s meant to be there!”
Waia folded her arms and made air quotes. “Right, yeah, you ‘know’ that. Because naturally, Deus would put the portal to his secret weapon in the attic of a fire lookout station. For most of its history, this place was never more than fifty feet from a divorced forty-year-old at any given moment. why would he hide anything here?”
“Well,” mumbled Quet, “Maybe he convinced people back in the 1930s or whenever to build this place around the portal so it would be harder to find?”
“That isn’t the point!” exclaimed Waia. “Mark sent us all the way out here because of magic NDA reasons, I guess, and now that we arrive and find out that there’s nothing in a random lookout station in the middle of North America! The Italian Primus, thousands of years ago, hid his favorite toy in America. Obviously.”
Horan pushed the ladder back up the hatch.
“Okay,” said Mark, “but, like, this place is protected from the snow and everything, and I don’t know if you can tell, but it’s way less cold here. And Deus put that guy here, so clearly he–”
“Yeah,” interjected Waia. “He put some guy with a sword up here, because it wasn’t worth any more effort. Because this place is bogus. Just like the last place. Who even told you to come here in the first place? Rachna?!”
Horan closed the hatch.
“Wherever the Seraphium is meant to be,” added Quet, “we should probably figure that part out fast. I’m under no pretenses that putting a bunch of dirt and rocks and snow on top of Torch will let us see the last of them, so mayb–”
Horan pulled the hatch back open and looked up. “…Yeah, it worked.”
The four immediately crowded back around the ladder and looked up. True to Horan’s word, the hatch now led up into a blank misty expanse.
Mark glared at Horan. “What did you do?”
Horan shrugged. “I trusted you, so I figured there was just a trick to it. This place probably uses the same no-Primoi rule as the fake one, so I guessed that it might be like those nuclear missiles that take two people to fire. It’s like a double wrapping; you need to be a Primus to get to wherever the Seraphium is kept, but you can’t be a Primus if you want to enter. And I was right.”
The man curled up in a ball on the other side of the room. “My mind is a glass pane slowly cracking…”
“You know it, man.” Waia brushed a hand against the creaking metal ladder. “Well, Mark, you were right after all. You’re up first.”
Mark stepped away and gestured to Horan. “The honor goes to the guy who figured it out.”
“Alright then, dude.” Horan forwent the ladder, instead floating straight up the hatch. “…Whoa…”
Horan emerged from the hatch and touched down on smooth stone. Looking around, he was reminded of the grand monuments of Deus’ old civilization. Two rows of massive square pillars held up a large oval ring hundreds of feet in the air, the far side looming over a vertical edifice of stone with a single small doorway carved into the middle. The entire structure, from the floor to the pillars to the far wall, seemed to have been hewn from the same massive piece of stone, but when Horan looked past the pillars and over the edge of the floor supporting them, he found that there was no landscape for said stone to have come from. The entire structure floated suspended in an endless misty void.
Quet joined Horan on the brink of the abyss. The two of them looked down at the near-vertical side of whatever structure the four had found themselves on. Buttresses, towers and hallways jutted out of the vaguely circular megastructure at angles that suggested intention, but were too disconnected from the flying castle’s main body to have any conceivable purpose. How the fifty-ton masses of stone extended sans any possible support without falling into the void remained unknown.
“Deus…” muttered Horan. “Where even are we, anyway?”
Quet absent-mindedly raised a hand and drew a single small glyph in the air in front of her. The mist around the glyph ignited with the same green glow that comprised the glyph itself, then returned to its normal coloration when the glyph vanished.
“Been a while, old friend,” said Quet. “At least I didn’t get annoyingly tired for no reason this time.”
“But…” Horan looked out into the expanse of fog. “If this is the Down Below, where’s the Pillar supposed to be? That’s, like, the one defining feature of this place.”
Quet peered into the gloom beyond the mist. She decided to not look any closer when she saw something start to slowly move on the edge of what the fog allowed to be visible. Something very, very big. “…That thing’s light only goes so far. Let’s just get the thing and get out.”
Horan quickly nodded and turned away.
While the other two looked over the edge, Mark and Waia approached the entryway cut into the vast wall before them. Words had been carved into the stone above the entryway.
“No Domain but Rome, yadda yadda, I get it.” Mark stepped halfway through the entryway, then turned to Waia. “Want to give it a shot? Just in case?”
Waia shrugged and waved her hand at the doorway. As before, ripples of blue color blocked her hand from going any further in, this time sending small waves of white pulsing through the surrounding fog. “Yeah, figures. You think that same problem as the last one is here, where the passage doesn’t exist if I try to melt through the wall?”
“Most definitely.” Waia stepped away from the entryway. “Well, Torch is gonna come through that trapdoor any second now, so–”
“I actually closed the hatch behind me,” said Mark. “So whatever Torch is, unless the rule for that hatch is specifically ‘anything besides humans’, we’re probably fine.”
Waia stared blankly at Mark. “Is now really the time where you’re going to start being optimistic about things?”
“Yeah, no, of course, go ahead.” Mark turned around and began walking down into the darkness of the passageway. “See you soon.”
“Right. Sure.” Waia turned around and waved to try and get the attention of Quet and Horan. “Alright, folks, Torch is coming up that hatch any minute now! Sit back and watch the fireworks.”
-
A lone, dirt-covered figure landed atop the pile of fused-together tents and sleeping bags, their sword moving from their feet onto their back. Staggering towards the hut a few dozen feet away, Torch was wracked by a coughing fit and spat a smear of thick blood onto the ground. Streaks of blue flashed momentarily within the blood before vanishing, leaving the stain on the ground motionless and seemingly mundane. Torch moved on.
The door was already open by the time Torch ascended the steps into the lookout station. Before they could pass through the doorway, however, they were blocked by a man brandishing a gladius.
“What, you too?” demanded the man. “I shouldn’t have let those–!”
Torch grabbed the man by the wrist and twisted, snapping his radius and ulna into a total of four pieces. The sword clattered to the floor and the man screamed in pain as several shards of bone protruded from his arm. Torch released the man’s arm, took him by the throat, stepped fully into the station, and hurled the man outside with one arm.
They didn’t look back as the man gurgled briefly on the ground before crumbling into dust, his promise to Deus broken. They simply went to the corner of the room, pulled open the hatch that only a Primus could open, and climbed up.