“I can’t.” Sil whimpered as another of her constructs shattered when she tried raising it, its support too thin or misaligned. “Tallah, I can’t. I need… I need to rest.” Blood flowed down her chin, bubbled against her lips with every word.

“Just a little more. We must be near something. There must be a bottom to this.” She tried to sound reassuring, but her own anxiety prickled the words. “Go as slow as you need.” Bianca remained quiet, deep in the work, with Christina unable to help or take over. The last thing she needed now was Rhine distracting her.

Sil teetered on the precipice of burnout. Already the built shelves were only narrow enough for them to cluster together, the effort too large for anything wider.

“It can’t be far now, Miss Silestra. You’ve nearly gotten us there.” Ludwig spoke through his terror, failing to keep it out of his voice. “The gate should be near now.”

Sil whimpered and was silent. She drew in a shuddering breath. Her face twisted in agony as she concentrated still.

“Forward,” she urged.

Five steps forward. Another break. Another bag of ink-nettle. Five more steps forward. The constructs swayed and shuddered under their weight.

Horvath’s draw on Tallah hurt now, the familiar pressure between the eyes growing while the strain mounted. She didn’t dare take any of the dust even as Sil shied away from it.

The next step did not find solid surface.

They pitched forward as the support underfoot shattered. And hit the bottom of the chasm two panic-strewn moments later. Impact knocked the wind out of Tallah and she lost her hold on Vergil.

She came to her feet immediately, panic flaring that they were about to drop off the world. But no, there was black rock underfoot, and a cloud of fine dust lifted into the air by their fall. She scrambled over to Sil, to where Vergil had dropped her. He was slower to find his feet.

“I couldn’t hold the last one,” Sil said, bloody tears streaking her face. “I couldn’t.” Her breathing was fast and ragged.

“It’s all right, Sil. We’re on the ground. It was enough.”

“I could’ve killed us!”

“You got us down. It’s enough.” She kneeled by the healer and cradled her head in her lap. She wiped away at the bloody streaks of tears. “Breathe slower. Easy. We’re all fine. You can relax now.”

Vergil came up, shuffling and raising a cloud of dust behind him. He had his helmet in his hands and looked flushed. In the end, even the ghost had strained with the effort.

“We’re still alive,” he said, half-amazed and half-relieved. “Did I do good? I tried to fight him for control, but I’m not sure what I managed. It all gets weird when I’m under.”

“He behaved,” Tallah confirmed. “If that was you, or if it was him not being suicidal, I can’t say.”

It seemed to satisfy Vergil.

Sil had drifted off to an exhausted sleep and her breathing eased into deep sighs.

“Drench a cloth in water and give it to me,” Tallah instructed, her voice low.

She gently wiped off the residue of ink-nettle mixed with drying blood. Sil had fallen face-first into whatever that fine powder was, but Tallah didn’t dare go through her vials for some preventative mixture. Only Sil knew her mixtures and would get murderous if they were disturbed.

“Is this ash?” Vergil asked as he ran a hand through the dust. “Smells like ash.”

“There will be more ahead,” Ludwig confirmed by his side. “We’re some distance shy of our mark, but at least we’re here.”

“Vergil, help me lift her.”

A small shove and dance between Tallah and Vergil saw that Sil ended up slung over Tallah’s shoulders in the fashion of a soldier’s carry. Tummy would thrash her if he saw how her knees wobbled even under Sil’s nothing weight.

Eat some meat. Do the exercises. You will always have your muscles on you, but what good will they be if you ignore them? She grimaced and felt the poke of his rough finger against her chest.

“Are you sure?” Vergil asked.

Tallah shifted Sil’s unconscious form until she could stand unassisted. Had to stumble twice before she could properly carry the healer.

“You’ve done your part. It’s my turn,” she said as she took the first step towards Ludwig. “Let’s get to this blasted gate of yours, old man. I expect we can rest more easily there.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Ash rose with every step, drifted lazily in the sprite light, and quietly settled to cover their tracks once they were past. It was knee-high in places, but soft as if it had just freshly settled. Like dunes, it spread across the bottom of the chasm to form an endless black desert. Its only visible edge was the rock wall and Tallah kept them close to it lest they lose whatever sense of way they still had.

Ruins rose from the ash. The remains of dwellings littered the dunes, their walls tumbled and shattered into unidentifiable chunks of crumbling masonry. A settlement had once occupied those depths, its remains stretching away as far as the light would touch. Shadows twisted and danced with their passing.

Illum pooled here, as it did in most places where death had come suddenly and violently. She avoided drawing it in. Like in an open field after a battle, the stench of death and rot hung suspended on the tides of power, gagging to anyone sensitive enough to it.

Ludwig had been optimistic. It took what felt like two bells more of walking before Tallah stumbled onto the first stone steps rising out of the ash. She would’ve dropped Sil if not for Vergil on her elbow catching both of them from stumbling.

Their initial stone path had fallen and cratered the ash dune around the raised platform. The only way back would be by portal. At some point they’d need to face that particular risk and hope for the best.

“Do you know… how much… I hate… being carried like this?” Sil groaned as Tallah jolted her with each slow step. “Put me down… I’m going to be… sick.”

“Swallow it until we’re up these bloody stairs. You’re heavier than you think and these are slippery.”

If Sil had any more indignant responses ready, she didn’t get to voice them. They reached the top and Tallah stepped onto empty air where she had expected one more step underfoot. This time Vergil wasn’t quick enough as she and Sil spilled onto the smooth stone floor.

“Ow,” Sil groaned.

Tallah echoed the sentiment and accepted Vergil’s hand to get back up.

“Not one word, bucket-head,” she warned.

Vergil swallowed whatever he was about to say and went to help Sil stand. She wobbled as she rose but pushed away his help, casting a bleary gaze around at their new surroundings.

“So, it’s actually a city,” she said, looking at the shadow-clad ruins on the edge of the spritelight. “Fancy that. Still, smaller than I expected.”

Double stone doors were cut into the rock ahead at the end of the platform. Taller than Valen’s Fortress Gate, and again as wide, they were carved with intricate patterns so life-like that it seemed to Tallah as if their entire surface moved and slithered when light touched it. Winged beings crowded the stone and rose in ranks towards a distant sky filled with stars and floating cities.

There was something human about the depictions, and also something not-quite. The scene of ascension filled her with an odd sense of longing that confused both she and Christina enough that Tallah looked away from the carvings.

One door was ajar just enough to allow one person to slip through the gap.

“Twenty men dragged at that,” Ludwig said. “Twenty and we barely managed to move it so much in days.”

It wasn’t the size of it or the old man’s recollection that drew Tallah closer to the gate. Again, the sense of poisoned power, but stronger here, cloying to her senses. If she focused, she could see a kind of vapour quietly emanating from behind the opened door, carrying with it a faint, almost imagined stench of blood and rotting offal. No, not quite. Mould more like, and something aged beyond the point of putrefaction.

With a shudder, she took a step closer to peer beyond.

“It’s whispering,” Sil said as she came within paces of the door. “Or is that just me?”

“Sounds like static to me,” Vergil said.

It was whispering, but not in words, not as such. More a background hum, an insect-like insistent noise that bypassed the ears to lodge straight into the brain and claw at it.

“Faer place,” Tallah murmured in spite of herself. The old git may not have been exaggerating.

Ludwig answered with a low chuckle. “It does seem that way, doesn’t it? And yet, the real wonder still waits beyond. We’re merely on the threshold. Halfway there, as it were.”

A ripple in the illum flow. A sense of bottomless, desperate hunger. Anger. Despairing loneliness. Tallah drew sharply back from the entrance and Sil rushed behind her.

“Our host stirs,” Ludwig said, unperturbed. “Be not alarmed. It doesn’t go beyond the gate.”

Something moved on the other side. Vapour roiled out of the opening and then ceased to flow as if the passage beyond was blocked. A low, angry growl thrummed in the air and made the ash rise in clouds. Hot breath roiled out carrying a cadaverous stench, wet with the promise of violence.

Tallah counted ten quick heartbeats before the creature slunk away from the doors. Had it seen them? Or was it simply patrolling its territory? A sense of wrongness washed across her, diminishing the beast’s departure.

“I assume that is what you need my help with?” Tallah said, finding her voice just a shade uncertain.

Even without the Ikosmenia Mask she had felt the sheer bulk of power that wreathed the creature. An illum leviathan in the truest sense of the words, it beggared even Falor’s display of strength. How she’d deal with it she couldn’t fathom. Christina remained pensive, turning over the captured sensations of that instant of contact.

Something's very wrong with that beast, the ghost said. I need information before I make up my mind on it.

“Oh, I’d say rather not,” Ludwig replied. The git chuckled at her. “The guardian is a nuisance for sure, but it is the crossing that is the real danger. Beyond the gate there is poison in the air that kills in the most horrifying fashion I’ve ever had the misfortune of witnessing. Your mask will guide us through. It is what I truly need from you. If the beast could be killed, in a century I could’ve worn it down.”

“And the beast won’t bother us?” Sil asked, still reeling from the assault on her senses.

“It will, if we are foolish enough to channel. It smells it. And if it gets a whiff of that, we will all die.”

“Lovely.”

Vergil set down his pack and rummaged loudly in it. “Well, since we’re going to die, let’s at least have a decent last meal. I, for one, am starving. Nothing like near-death to whet an appetite.”

“Get me wine,” Sil said without taking her eyes away from the doors. “May be my last meal. I aim to enjoy it.”