Some things in life are done simply and without much thought. Eating, breathing, walking down the street, climbing down a ladder. They’re automatic.

Ike climbed down the dingy wooden ladder without thinking much about it. Everything was dark around him, and wasn’t that normal for a barkeep's basement? The transition from claustrophobic wooden boards to walls of packed dirt and jutting roots didn’t bother him until he hit the bottom. Wasn’t he on the second floor?

When he asked himself this, he turned around. Which was, decidedly, a mistake.

The ceiling had turned into a sky, and as soon as he noticed this the ladder and any trace of the Black Palace was replaced by a sheer cliff of foreboding cracked stone. The cliff towered into this new sky, a sea of rapidly twirling white clouds and flashes of green lightning. The scale of the area was the most awesome, as he felt like barely a speck yet could see every crack in the sky as if it were a painting.

Then he tripped over a crag on the rocky floor. Backing up in foreign land was always a bad idea, which Ike had to learn again the hard way. The ground wasn’t even forgiving. All dark gravel and sharp edged obsidian.

When he eventually pushed up to his knees and brushed the gravel bits out of his hair, he looked up, and muttered, “Oh, fuck.”

Ike was kneeling in the middle of a basin, a flat half circle between cliffs that overlooked an endless expanse of shifting fog and one stunning symbol. What else, Ike thought, could it be besides a massive and haunting recreation of the Carrion Cross that seemed to dwarf life itself. Some giant had draped a ragged cloak over the symbol, which lifted and sagged with the wind. It took the breath out of his chest and replaced it with a shock of adrenaline.

He was almost convinced this was hell he’d stumbled into. Really should’ve just listened to himself yesterday. Why did he trust the butler? Never trust the butler!

Here he was though, and now he had no way out. Surrounded by the stench of something acrid and rotting, strange cries in the sky and the sound of collapsing rock all around him were his only companions. The only real light he had to go by was the glow of the sky which did more to illuminate the foreboding Carrion Cross than the ground around his feet. Any old demon could come crawling across the stone to rip him apart and he’d be aloof.

About the time he decided to sit back and wait for some sickly death to take him, he heard a voice.

“Guardian? Guardian, you idiot, where are you?”

Because stumbling through hell wasn’t enough he had to do so with Nerinai knowing.

“I, um, I’m here! Hello!” He called out into the darkness hoping she would appear there, but nothing. Then when she spoke again, he felt the vibrating on his chest.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Op-yeah-just-”

“Where are you?”

He stumbled in the dark for a moment until his hand finally reached the small metal brooch on his chest, which he pulled off the pin and lifted up to his face.

“I don’t know,” he answered, looking around for a way out still. “The, uh, butler guy showed me a trapdoor leading down.”

“And you followed it?”

“Well, yeah. He seemed nice. Don’t worry about the Martial and them, butler-guy has them out cold for now. So plenty of time.”

He could hear a sigh over the connection. Hearing her voice was barely a whisper in the back of his mind, but distinctly her voice. Her bittersweet tone was basically a cold whisper in his head.

“I have the key already, Guardian, yet now I am missing you. Had I any other choice I’d leave you in that hole to think about making stupid decisions without me, though I doubt you’d survive very long.”

How very comforting.

“Describe this place for me so I can tell you how to escape.”

Ike did, carefully standing and trudging around the rocks to get a better look at the place. Unsurprisingly the basin was massive, and almost totally devoid of landmarks to move by. Just sloping hills of broken up obsidian rocks and the occasional gravel pit.

“Alright. Look to the Cross, then turn right slowly. Do you see the light?”

At first he saw nothing, just more black walls and stone. Then following a series of shocks in the sky, in the following darkness, he saw a pinprick of yellow light in the cliffside. For the first time since falling down here he took a breath of relief and started off in that direction.

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Still feeling unnerved he started talking again, a terrible decision by any metric.

“So, where am I exactly? You seem to know.”

“It’s complicated to explain. You’ll see more when you get there.”

Right, of course, the Raveness wouldn’t be the Raveness without being cryptic at every possible turn of a conversation.

“Can’t you just, I don’t know, zap me out? Magic hands? Another one of those rituals of teleportation, coming down the trapdoor, anything?”

“I suppose I could leave you down there and you could figure out how to get home yourself. Cut the chatter until you reach the shelter, Guardian.”

He screwed up his face in mockery while she couldn’t see him. The threat of being left here without her help, which was already a miracle, was enough to get him heading in this new direction. The little light got closer and grew into a patch of the wall hollowed out sitting at the top of a ragged slope that Ike climbed with some difficulty, grunting enough that Nerinai could hear, apparently.

“Are you there yet? This shouldn’t take so long.”

“Well,” he said, then cut off as his foot sank into another patch of loose gravel. “You try walking around here. It sucks. And- wait. Have you been here before?”

“Walk.”

He crossed the last few steps in silence and passed through the torch-sided gap. Inside was like stepping into another world all over again, down to a brush of softer wind on his cheek.

The inside of the path in the cliff wall was a cafe. Ike had to blink and rub his eyes a few times just to believe it himself, but there was no mistaking it. Brown upholstered booths along the wall, gentle pendant lights hanging unlit around the counter, and even a long line of cakes preserved behind a case of glass. Ike stepped in, nervously checking every corner and shadowed space he passed. There were even windows overlooking a grassy plain that looked distinctly out of this world.

Thankful to be out of the storm and exhausted from the foray, Ike sat down on a stool. He set down the metal brooch on the counter for Nerinai.

“I’m, uh… I guess I’m here. As long as by ‘here’ you mean a very conveniently placed pastry shop.”

“Precisely. A safe room for the Raveness in a place you really shouldn’t have access to.”

“But I do.”

“Yes, otherwise life would be much simpler. The cafe is- safe.” Her voice cracked just subtly over the brooch, which could have been the connection or her own voice. “Now, obviously the butler had some reason to send you there, and he won’t answer a single one of my goddamn questions with anything but a tight lipped grin. One more look at him and I’m going to do something incredibly improper so look around and figure it out for me.”

He found himself smiling, got out of his chair and rolled his shoulders. Nerinai was once again forced to entrust herself and the mission to Guardian Ike. The cafe didn’t even look so big. He’d be-

“And please, Guardian, don’t ruin anything else while you’re there.”

Apparently it was too much to hope that she would let him go without an added insult. He clipped the brooch back on his robe and set out to explore.

There was a candle and match on the table that he lit, tested the weight in his hands and started exploring deeper into the cafe. The front room was calming, open, all the things you’d expect and desire from a safe room. Deeper in the walls felt a little tighter. When the bar cut off and the booths stopped multiplying, he stepped into the middle.

There was a stone altar. Closer, and he felt a sharp pain like a knife ripping through his gut. The pain lasted only a second but it wasn’t something he’d easily forget. He got a little closer to the altar, a single piece of obsidian with a smoothed out stem and flat surface, and put his hand on top just to test it for whatever new sort of magic might be blessed or cursed on the toucher.

There was nothing. Unless you counted the slight tingle of his fingers on the cold stone. When he lifted up his hand and brought the candle closer, however, he could make out part of a bloody handprint where he had touched the altar.

He brought the brooch up to his mouth. “Ok, so: rooms gone. Don’t suppose that was part of the safe room. Anyways there's a, er, thing here. Black altar. Sound familiar?”

There was a moment of pause long enough for Ike to start fidgeting. Then, “No. Break it.”

“I mean, really? Are you sure I should just go around-”

“Break it.”

He shrugged, put the candle on the ground and grabbed the shovel off his back. The altar took a few good whacks from the shovel, but a crack formed down the middle soon enough. One last jab in the center and the thing exploded into a shower of dust that exploded into the air.

He coughed on it until he heard Nerinai’s voice in his head telling him to come back. She’d explain everything later, she said, but Ike was curious. The room didn’t end at the altar.

He grabbed the candle off the ground and carried it with him. The light didn’t mean much when the air choked around him and the glow barely passed his feet. Something surrounded him that was neither wall nor open space, but he wouldn’t be prying into it any time soon.

The path led to an open space where Ike finally stopped to gawk at the wall ahead.

Bloody hands had once, long ago, painted messages to warn the next person to step into this room. That just so happened to be Ike. He walked down the side of the wall, holding the candle up to get a better look and occasionally touching where the blood was still damp. Ignore the calling, one wrote, then, fearitallthesame. There were more. So many more words detailing the worries of what looked more and more like every Raveness who had ever come back to this place to sketch them out.

Above it all was one word. JUDICATOR.

“Guardian? Guardian, you should be on the ladder by now, what's going on?”

“Nothing. Nothing, just, ah… We’ll talk about it later.”