Truth ran. Fast as he could, he ran. They knew he was in the sewers. This whole place would be flooded with golems and seeker talismans and demons in a hot minute. So he had to run. Get his head down and push. Ignore his aching channels, sore from being pushed so hard. Ignore how his body drew in thundering gasps of cosmic energy, trying to replace what he burned in just a few minutes of combat. Ignoring the burn of that energy coming in too. Ignoring the cuts. The lingering damage the needlers left behind. The caustic burns. The biting pain where curses tried to burrow in. Obliterate had destroyed any ongoing magical effects, but the damage left behind was still there.

All he could do was ignore the pain, and run. Pass as many intersections as he could. Expand the search radius as wide as he could. Push Abner’s Amble to the limit of its ability and blurr through the tunnels. Pour more strength into the Blessing of the Silent Forest and hope like hell it was enough to keep the diviners from getting a lock on him.

Shit, the diviners! Truth came to a slamming halt and urgently cast Cup and Knife. All my blood, hair and bits belong here, with me! Oh there was a hellish struggle! It seemed someone that knew what they were doing had got a hold of something, and wasn’t about to let him have it back. Still, he must have been quick enough- gasping, he collapsed to his knees. Complete.

I have not managed today well. In fact, I suspect I have not managed my return to Harban particularly well. The identity of the Prince has its uses. Very informative. Helped me grow as a person. Which is super, but this is Harban. Social attacks are probably least effective here. At least against already wealthy and powerful people. What are the odds the Hotel contacted Internal Security as soon as the Succubae checked in?

Too damn high, he figured. Way, way too damn high. He pulled himself to his feet again. Took a few more gasping breaths. Let his body pull in a little more energy. And pressed on. Deeper into the sewers, and whatever dreadful thing lay beneath them.

The sewers of Harban were a modern wonder. While other places made do with toilets that simply desiccated and sterilized waste for later disposal, in Harban, waste flowed through a series of pipes into long tunnels. Tunnels big enough for people to stand in, with walkways running alongside the canals of filth. Not lit, but then, that had long ceased to be a problem for Truth.

He grinned mirthlessly. When he got out of the well, it was just massively improved low light vision. Now? It was damn dim, but he was able to navigate. Well. He was able to run without falling into the sewage. “Navigate” would imply he knew where he was going. He just followed the current.

Truth moved like a speeding ghost through the dark. No fences to jump here. No cameras to evade, or personas to maintain. Just speed. Speed, and fading into the dark. He had been the Prince. Now, it was time to return to his roots. Just another slumrat. Though this sewer had no rats, nor vermin of any kind.

Truth watched the air demons dart around, consuming the miasma that should be reeking from the sludge. Water demons toiled below them, keeping everything flowing, breaking up any jams or blockages that threatened to form. The sewers were accessible by humans, but in truth, there was little need for human intervention at this point.

Truth watched an entire ecology at work. Demons, most barely more than imps, happily kept the system working. They got theirs. This was, literally, their calling. Servants of a vast system they neither understood, nor cared to understand. And naturally, they knew better than to overstep their bounds.

There were more intersections now, the sewage channels wider and deeper. At the speed he was moving, kilometers must have past under his feet. He didn’t let that give him a false sense of security. If he could run this fast, how fast could Clavegaugh? Or some purpose built golem? Enormous rooms, circular, with high walkways, where the rivers of sewage met and combined, carefully channeled by architecture and demons alike into a wide, rushing torrent. Waterfalls of poisoned blackwater, millions of liters a day. Tens of millions. More? He didn’t know. Onward. And down.

The number of demons here increased, though not their strength. They were weaker, stupider. Insects compared to the clever animals or humanlike intelligence in the imps higher up. They coated the sides of the canals, clung to the railings, the ceilings. They knew enough to keep the walkways clear, but that was the limit of it. All gorging themselves on the city’s waste. Hoping to grow enough to become something greater than they were.

The energy grew denser and more chaotic here too. Truth hesitated to call it Cosmic Energy, though it must have been. This was energy bearing the taint of Hell. He remembered Thrush describing Hell as a place where reality was decided every fraction of a second by the tumbling of trillions of billion-sided dice. The analogy became more tangible here.

What was real- the causeway, the sewage, the demons, the air, the sewers themselves, all seemed to take on a more provisional quality. As though enough sixes were being thrown to keep things going, but sooner or later, the universe would roll snake eyes and then where would you be?

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The river of piss and feces roared faster, running deeper into the heart of the sewer system. The walls transitioned instantly from covered in demonic insects to perfectly clean. Every surface became a tracery of spell formations. Active, inactive, redundant, supportive, with functions and structures vastly beyond Truth’s proletarian understanding. This was the work of highly skilled specialists. He had no idea what they did or how they worked.

He was the wrong sort of rat for that kind of work. Pinnacle of his dreams didn’t even reach the depths of the sewer.

The dark river roared now, and lights started appearing. Red, gleaming, warning signs with their own lighting. Descriptive pictures showing drowning, dismemberment. Being flung into hell. “Warning. Do not enter. Entry Forbidden. No personnel authorized for any reason. Wrong way. Go Back. Lethal danger. Spiritual danger. No Compensation will be paid for any injuries suffered for any reason past this point. Trespassing beyond this point is a Felony, punishable by twenty five years in prison.”

Below that last sign, someone had spray painted- “Don’t worry. You won’t live long enough to see a cop.”

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Truth had no idea what part of his mind threw up that garbled noise, but he got the gist. If you go in, don’t expect to come out again. He grinned mirthlessly and kept moving forward.

He could feel the tumbling dice of Hell spinning around him, and he needed some luck. And that was the other thing Thrush had told him- in Hell, the game is rigged from the start.

Into the chasm, an enormous underground lake, so large Truth couldn’t see the far wall. Not even with all the light. Truth paused to take it in. There was no more running to be done.

The room was a sphere into which water flowed in, but not out. Light and dark were carefully delineated, the waters bathed in the light, the walkway around the lake in shadow. From that water below rose steam, shimmering with energy. Mad, chaotic, Hell-tainted, it shimmered like the light spots in your eyes after staring into the sun. The mind imagining meaning in a void.

The dome of the ceiling was covered in thin constellations of spells and dotted with constellations of Names and abjurations, a spell-bowl sky pressing down on the waters and earth below. Trapping the demon within.

Truth quietly watched the demon. It floated between heaven and earth. The only God of this tiny world. A serpent, vast, far bigger than the limited dimensions of this room could express, consuming its own tail. It gently turned through the air, the steam rising through the annulus it formed. Becoming purified. The chaos of Hell pacified and transmitted through the sky to the world above. For what purpose, Truth didn’t know. He just knew there had to be something at the end of the sewer. He found it.

The serpent… his mind skittered away from the word. This wasn’t a snake. It wasn’t a snake even to the extent that Botis was a snake. This was some terrible principle. Some distant echo of a being so profound, language broke down trying to describe them. Like trying to describe the entirety of a galaxy, in all its minute detail, using only the language of the streets.

The shadow of the Eminence pressed down on this place. It defined what was, and was not. The city’s waste flowed in, processed and refined by endless demons into the very stuff of Hell. Then that Hell-stuff was refashioned under the Eminence's will, and returned to the world above.

Some faint, screaming part of Truth’s mind wondered what happened to all the water. The water level neither rose nor fell. There was no rain coming down from the dome of the sky. So where did those hundreds of millions of liters of water go? Then even that thought broke down.

The Serpent that Ate Its Own Tail was slowly spinning in the air, turning like a millstone. Truth felt himself being ground down by it. He had thought himself terribly real. That he was surrounded by ghosts. By the ghosts of ants. Beneath the Great One, he wasn’t even a larger ant. He had no more significance than the rising steam.

The millstone turned, turning wheat into flour. Truth desperately fortified himself against the pressure. He embodied the scales as strongly as he could, established the area immediately next to his skin as his zone of orthodoxy, even dropped into the Meditations. There was no shortage of cosmic energy here. There was more than he could use, almost more than he could stand. There would be no cultivation here. Not under this crushing pressure. If he dared try to do more than survive what he was passively enduring, he would surely explode.

He didn’t know how long he stayed there, locked in a losing struggle against the refining pressure. Between everything, he kept the impact to a tolerable level, but it was wearing him down. This was something greater than Truth. To destroy and remake was its nature. Someone as insignificant as Truth couldn’t dream of stopping it. But he had to endure it. The longer he could stay in the one place he couldn’t possibly be, the wider search would have to spread. He had just been looking for a place to hide. In a sense, this was better than he had hoped for.

In a sense.

In another sense, this was going to kill him. It might make something purer or “better” at the end of the process, but he, Truth Medici, would be quite dead. Still, the grinding process was slow. He could endure it for a while. Hours. Maybe a day. It wasn’t all bad. The Meditations struggled against the pressure, making the improvements somehow more solid. Truth got the impression the nine angelic worms approved. They were big on refinement through pain.

Truth slipped into a mindless sort of meditation, visualizing a strong, powerful body. One unstainable by curses or evil magics. One strong enough to survive what was to come, that could seal cosmic energy inside itself without letting it escape. Creating a body like spell armor for the end of days. The minutes trickled into hours, flowing downward to an awkward end, like pissing in the sink.

Blissfully unaware of the chaos that had exploded across Harban.