The mood of the dinner became strange, while Fiona mulled over the news about her ex-husband and Randidly found no issue picturing Devick as vindictively annihilating an entire race of people.

Randidly at least felt the issue was settled with Fiona, while he mulled over his other complex and volatile inner turmoil. Which, to be frank, required a level of committed introspection that he couldn’t bear to spare at the moment.

Still, Fiona clammed up and also became intensely inwardly focused while the group cut into the chicken and carrots. Randidly hoped she wasn’t aware enough of Devick’s image to envision in lurid detail what that unhinged woman could do to someone as obviously out of it as Duulys had been, but the whiteness in Fiona’s face didn’t give Randidly much hope on that front.

Pullas tried to make conversation about Kharon and Neveah gracefully supported her efforts. Xershi, as usual, acted completely unmoored from any of the emotional tensions that filled the room. He barked out laughter and slapped his knee almost the entire time. In a way, Randidly admired his attitude.

The dinner finished in agreement, however. The entire Ascension Pact would continue to climb the following morning, heading through the areas with the inert infrastructure put there long ago by Elhume, to try and find the object the Patron of Feathers required. Randidly kept the exact goal somewhat vague, both because he wasn’t sure what he sought and because he didn’t want to reveal how expressly anti-Elhume his goals ran.

Which meant Randidly had one last night on Expira to ready himself. A very sizable portion of his personality urged him to address the tumor-ish problem growing within the Grey Creature, but he had wised up to his own bad habits of throwing himself, without pause, from one project to another. Besides, being right in front of Neveah for the night had made him uncomfortably aware of the worry she had for him.

Instead of any sort of focused training, Randidly just went back to the core area of the Kharon Academy Labyrinth and focused on the flow of Nether through his body. He sat down and existed, observing his own self.

After he began the self-examination, he discovered a lot of small defects and unpredictable eddies had made themselves a home within his body. Rather than an efficient system, he had become a mass of tangled brambles. Considering the clutter of his internal energy flow, he almost was glad his emotional problems weren’t even more catastrophic.

Randidly emphatically stomped out the inefficiencies and snags within the Nether flows in his body, marveling at the way Nether mirrored organic systems in their inevitable deviations. Judging by the shape of the flaws, most of them had been inflicted by Randidly’s finish of the Hierarchy of Burden. The process of handling all the layers at once had not been smooth, leaving him with lingering defects.

Yet direct attention could heal them. His body gradually returned to alignment.

As Randidly knitted together the flaws, he felt an unconscious tension in his body ease. The rotation of energy through him became increasingly smooth. He could close his eyes and just drift on that flow, going around and around through his veins, laying the groundwork for the next rotation of energy. Nothing else mattered but polishing that road.

His body had become an irreplaceable part of his continued growth. Giving it a night at this juncture felt like a solid investment. And the more he moved, the more the flow of energy eased. His Nether Core spun more quickly. The connection of energy became that much more natural. A humming sort of capability he almost didn’t know he had wandered away from now returned to him.

The world turned around him, leaving Randidly in a small step toward healing.

The process was enough that he only jolted out of the effort, remembering his father’s abrupt passage, a few times.

When the morning came, he stood and stretched. His back popped pleasantly. Waves of heat wriggled off his muscles, positively sizzling with energy. As he made to leave and gather the rest of the Ascension Pact, he noticed that suddenly a Scrawl had moved up onto the second level of his pyramid. He paused and examined it; the image tied to it was someone he didn’t know. Even from just a look, he could tell that the creator was young and full of fiery ambition. It must have been here last night, but he had been too distracted to notice.

Randidly closed his eyes and smiled. Yea. That’s exactly why I pushed for this place. Growth should be encouraged and rewarded. No matter how hard it is to journey on the plateau waiting for you at the top, we need more individuals to arrive and fight for their own personal power…

Just in case I ever falter. If it ever becomes too much-

He shook himself, keeping his thoughts from circling back around into a brooding cycle. He opened a portal to Neveah’s cabin and found the three other members of the Ascension Pact waiting for him. Xershi had largely changed back out of his hip outfit from last night, but still wore the letterman’s jacket, which earned an eye-roll from Randidly.

“Ready?” He looked around at them all. Each nodded. Fiona still wouldn’t meet his eyes, but he didn’t quite mind that. Nether flowed between them. Less than before, probably less to the point activating her tattoo would be almost impossible, but the connection remained.

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He shifted them all back out of the Alpha Cosmos and into the space around his body in the Sonara. Duulys’s tiny recreated house, with its charred out pantry, waited for them. Almost instantly, Fiona moved to the door and walked out toward the spot where he had collapsed before they departed. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders and kneeled next to that spot, her face hidden in shadow.

The rest of them gave her some time to herself. Randidly rolled his shoulders, already having somewhat forgotten how exactly effective the Sonara was at resonating and adding depth to an image.

With Duulys out of commission and gone, his tight grip on this layer began to waver. Randidly felt all three of his images subconsciously stretch out, rubbing themselves against the image-friendly environment like a herd of cats against legs. He restrained them almost immediately as he walked out and squinted up at the sky. Fiona crouched in the area Duulys had been, sensing for his and Devick’s image.

“You don’t have to climb with us if you don’t want to,” Randidly offered.

Fiona visibly flinched. “No I- if you’ll have me, I want to keep climbing with you. Besides, against Devick… well. Her image just finds mine amusing. For that woman… almost nothing is taboo. I won’t be able to face her alone.”

The uneasy tension between them passed as Xershi stomped forward. “Elhume himself is blocking our path, eh? Let’s see what sort of defenses he had.”

“Probably should continue to use the exterior staircases,” Pullas offered. “Not that the defenses around those areas are probably any less than the central staircase. But at least we will have a shorter distance to run, should we get caught.”

The group left Duulys’s high palace, ignoring the gorgeous cloudscapes and carefully manicured gardens, rushing across the massive layer toward its edge. Randidly allowed his three images each some time to solidify themselves in the increasingly favorable environment, but tried not to get used to it.

The worst part of the Sonara was how upwardly resonant images became. It was hard to imagine that it was possible to sneak up on whatever fortifications Elhume had while also training your image below them.

While loping across a massive, glittering starscape, Randidly turned and looked at Pullas. “Do you have any information about where the defenses change?”

She shook her head. “None at all. Dozens of individuals passed through while I was running Idylla. Each promised me to plunge the depths and return with a report. Not that I really believed them; most were vaguely suicidal or unstable. But exactly zero of those individuals ever came back down to brag about their accomplishments.”

Randidly grimly nodded. He had sorta expected that sort of response, but it made it difficult to know how to approach. They were on the 40th layer currently and Elhume definitely dominated the few layers around the 50th. But how many layers in each direction? Were they safe until the 48th? Or the 45th?

After an hour of intense travel, the group found the exterior stairwell and ascended. However, while they were climbing through the most resonant edge of the Sonara, something immediately caught Randidly’s attention. The Nether content in the air had begun to thicken. With this extra bit of energy content, Randidly breathed deeply in through his nose, trying to peer up through to the next few floors-

He scowled when he failed. Still, they arrived at the 41st layer and the Nether continued to thicken, giving him some hope.

Pullas released a soft breath as they arrived in almost total darkness. “This is… pure chaos. An untouched space to hone an image… Duulys Ambar must have had more self-control than I thought, if he left this place untouched-”

Then Pullas flinched slightly, perhaps realizing the partial insult she had thrown at Duulys. Xershi rubbed his neck. Fiona looked around, her eyes luminous in the gloom. “Perhaps, perhaps not. Everyone has things that they fear in the world.”

The group began to move. At least with the Nether content in the atmosphere, Randidly moved without hesitation toward the exit. And certainly, it was a strange sort of torture to pass through the space without releasing his images at all to stretch and empower themselves. As Pullas had said, the layer around them felt like some sort of cosmic womb. A place where his images could gestate and be reborn into a more powerful form.

And yet.

Perhaps it was the silence. Perhaps it was how absolutely perfect the environment felt. Perhaps it was the lack of any sort of current in the growing concentration of Nether, which should have been present if this area was as empowering as it seemed to hint.

Because of Randidly’s hesitation and caution, he kept his images inside of himself. Out of respect for him, the other three did the same. Xershi even began to use some of his strange tricks to erase his presence, making it easy to forget he was there with them, letterman jacket and all.

When they reached the next exterior staircase, all four drew up short. Randidly grimaced. “Well, I suppose this is the sign we’ve been waiting for. Avoiding Elhume’s attention… has already started.”

The stairwell ran along a glittering, metallic wall. Randidly wasn’t sure whether it was artifice or the actual exterior of the drill, but hanging along the wall were about a hundred crystal orbs. Complex metal apparati used Engraving covered tubes to connect to the orbs, siphoning out energy and drawing them up along a weird ventilation system to the next layer.

Within the orbs were curled-up bodies. Living, breathing, image refining bodies.

“What the hell is this?” Xershi whispered.

The group crept closer to the humming display. With a thought, Randidly summoned Neveah’s consciousness to him. She rapidly began to interpret the Engravings that he could see while he also breathed again through his nose. Here was the dark whirlpool of significance, sucking away meaning from the rest of the layer and greedily keeping it all in one spot.

Fiona pointed to the ground. “Look. You can just see the Engravings on the ground by the edge. I suspect… the whole layer is Engraved. So when you start training your image, getting lost in the process, triggering the whole layer to tighten this… bubble around you. You stay in that perfect moment of epiphany, maybe under some sort of illusion, until you get bottled and then connected to… that.”

“Where Elhume steals your image?” Pullas asked in disbelief. “Uses you like a battery?”

And with a hundred powerful image users providing the juice, what has Elhume been powering for so long? Randidly solemnly followed the massive cables running up through the wall.