It only took Leon and his team about a day to reach the end of the Rainbow Valley. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single hint remaining of the vibrant colors that had given the valley its name. Even after hearing Tiraeses’ story, Leon had quietly hoped that maybe a flower or two might’ve survived, but even in a place as magically strong as the Many-Flowered Hills wasn’t immune to the corroding effects of the Primal Devil’s aura. The hills were bare rock and dirt, the sky was overcast with black clouds that barely let in any light, and the ground was hard and dry.

Though, Leon supposed it was a mercy that the journey was fairly brief and uneventful. Much like with the Plains of Paradise, their jaunt through the Rainbow Valley had been unfettered by monsters, cultists, or anything else that may have laid in the dark.

However, as they approached the southeastern edge of the Many-Flowered Hills, Leon began to find himself instinctively tensing up. He hardly noticed it at first, though his eyes jumped from shadow to shadow as his heart rate slowly accelerated. His paranoia rose at the same time, made worse by the motion he kept thinking he was seeing in the corners of his eyes.

He couldn’t say exactly when it started, but when he realized how his behavior was changing, he flooded his body with the Thunderbird’s lightning, and almost instantly, his mind cleared. Fortunately, Mari seemed unaffected inside of her Ulta suit, though Tiraeses had been quiet and surly for a while. They’d been walking in silence for a few hours by then, but when Leon asked Tiraeses how he was doing, the monk hesitated a moment before admitting that the darkness in the air was getting to him. A quick shock from Leon was enough to clear his mind, too.

“Thank you,” Tiraeses gratefully stated.

“How long have you noticed this affecting you?” Leon asked. “I only just realized myself a minute ago.”

Tiraeses grimaced. “Almost an hour.”

“Don’t wait so long if it happens again,” Leon ordered with concern. He was armored, and his helmet had additional defenses in place to protect his mind from darkness magic. Tiraeses only had the enchantment with the ancient rune Leon had whipped up back in his monastery to protect him. “I admire your tenacity, but you put us all at risk when you don’t speak up about things like this.”

“Yeah, Fake Name,” Mari added, her tone rather uncharacteristically serious. “We had a lot of problems dealing with mood swings brought about by the devilish magic in the environment. It undermined teamwork. Made us fight amongst ourselves. Made minor disagreements into major conflicts. King Ard’Khun was barely managing to hold us together by the end.”

“By Mandious, Lord of All in Heaven; relying on Ard’Khun to hold an army together is asking to be abandoned by the brothers of war, Valiant Ashatar and Strong Ashagon.”

“Prince Ard’Nara did a lot of work on that front,” Mari explained. “I never spoke to either, but they frequently gave speeches to the Ultian units. Ard’Khun was always kind of a tiny little heffu shit, though.”

“Tell me more of Ard’Nara. His father was blessed in abundance by the gods, and especially by Wise Farangeun, but does his… did his son follow in his footsteps?” Tiraeses asked as they slowly trudged through the blasted landscape.

“He was hot,” Mari said, the smile on her face audible in her tone. “I’d definitely jump in bed with him. In a heartbeat.”

“Again, you trespass upon the sanctity of marriage,” Tiraeses grumbled.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Mari provoked. “Not like the gods are doing a thing anymore. And when have you ever heard of a King not taking a mistress or three? Hey Lele! You said you had multiple wives, right?”

“Yes,” Leon readily replied. Not wanting to get drawn too deeply into the nuances of his relationships, he simply said, “Four of them.”

“Ha!” Mari exclaimed.

“Man’Jia, Maiden of the Heart, blesses love as it comes,” Tiraeses stated. “So long as the two are joined in the light of the gods, then there’s no problem. The problem is when loose, shallow children such as yourself start getting ideas beyond their station.”

“Why would any woman want to fuck ya…?” Mari rhetorically asked as she turned away. However, after a moment, she turned back to curiously regard Tiraeses—and not for the first time, Leon was surprised at just how well he could read the young woman’s emotions just from the body language that her Ulta suit could convey. “Man-of-the-Uncreative-and-Extremely-Fake-Name, when was the last time ya had someone ride your rod?”

“By all the gods—none of your business!”

“That long, huh? No wonder you’re such a judgy, wrinkly ball bag.”

“By Mandious, Lord of All in Heaven, will you answer my question?”

“Heh. Touchy. Is this what I should look forward to in my old age? Or are ya actually really young, but your attitude has aged you prematurely?”

Tiraeses sighed and looked like he was almost literally biting his tongue to keep from snapping back.

“Enough!” Leon interjected before they could continue bickering. “Mari’Kha, it would be better to answer his question rather than constantly trying to poke him with a metaphorical stick.”

“Fiiiine. So, Ard’Nara. He was a handsome Prince. Charismatic, too. Like, really charismatic. He led from the front, cutting through the swarms of husks like he was born to do so.”

“Good,” Tiraeses whispered. “His father was blessed by Valiant Ashatar, though he was fortunate to have rarely required it.”

“So, ya knew the old King, didja?”

“I knew him well. Ard’Khil was a good man, and a great King. His only failing was in not seeing the worthlessness of his brother.”

“Ard’Khil was a distant King who stuffed his face with pastries and rarely left his palace. Or so my father said, anyway. When regions starved from the devil’s magic, he grew fat. It’s no wonder he was taken by the Red-Eyed Bitch at the age of nine hundred. He could’ve lived another half millennium, but noooo, he had to be a degenerate.”

“You blaspheme against the gods and now slander royalty…” Tiraeses spat.

“I only speak the truth, Fake Name. Your King was shit. Ard’Khun at least made nice with the Red Sky and led our armies himself, even if he wasn’t in the vanguard. From what my father told me, Ard’Khil could barely get off his throne he was so fat.”

“Impossible,” Tiraeses muttered. “Impossible. Mandious, Lord of All in Heaven, close my ears to this nonsense.”

“Bury your head in the sand all you want, Fake Name, it doesn’t change the fact that your beloved King sucked ass.”

With that final statement, the two fell into a deep, contemplative silence. Leon felt awkward walking between them, but fortunately, the perfect opportunity to get everyone’s mind off what had just been discussed presented itself.

“How close are we to the Gates of Farangeun?” He knew where they were, of course, and Tiraeses’ answer didn’t surprise him at all.

“Wise Farangeun’s Gates,” Tiraeses corrected. “Just beyond the hill ahead of us.”

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The hill in question was quite tall, blocking all view of everything beyond it. As with most of the other hills around them, it had quite sheer slopes. They’d stuck to the Rainbow Valley thus far, but Leon decided to change things up a bit.

“Let’s get to the top and see what we can see,” he said.

“Don’t expect much,” Mari said. “I didn’t take this route to the Plains of Paradise, but the gates are probably in a similar state of ruin as everything else.”

Leon nodded, and he took off at a faster clip than they’d been traveling at. The hills were fairly low, and he and his team were either powerful, or operating a powerful suit of armor, so scaling the hills wouldn’t be that difficult. However, as they picked up speed, Leon noticed the darkness magic around them coalescing more intensely than before.

By the time they reached the summit of the hill and could see what lay beyond, the darkness around them was pressing in quite firmly on Leon’s defenses.

‘Much like it did when approaching Yu Nok Tor,’ he silently noted, the accompanying realization sending chills down his spine.

However, the words that started forming in his throat died before they reached his mouth as he lay his eyes on Wise Farangeun’s Gates.

Thanks to Tiraeses, he knew that the gates weren’t actual gates, but rather a pass through the Many-Flowered Hills formed by a pair of cliffs on either side. There was also supposed to be a colossus of Wise Farangeun himself carved into one of them, mirrored by a statue of the King that had ordered the colossus’ construction. In better times, a small town built around a military outpost called Naxor Adell kept an eye on who came and went through the gates.

However, Leon saw none of this as he beheld the gates. The cliffs were still there, tainted blacker than the primarily basalt Border Mountains between the Bull and Talfar Kingdoms. The colossi were piles of stone rubble on the valley floor, only a few barely recognizable features to be seen amidst the pile—a fragment of a face here, a digit or two of a finger there—but most of it was dust and fragments no larger than the palm of his hand. Of Naxor Adell, there was no sign.

However, the gates were now much more literal than they were in the past, as now there was a low wall of black stone barring passage, and a curtain of oily black darkness above that extended across all the space between the two cliffs. There was no way through the gates without either blasting through the wall or jumping through the curtain of darkness.

Neither, it seemed, was going to be easy, and Leon didn’t even need to rely on intuition or guesswork to know that: there were piles of bones strewn about the valley floor, amidst piles of weapons and armor. A quick estimate put the number of skeletal corpses at several hundred, and judging from their gear, at least some of them were of respectable power or station.

It initially seemed like some kind of battle had been fought here, though Leon had to revise that assumption when he realized that the armor and weapons were in relatively good shape.

“Those bodies,” he pointed out, “they look relatively new. Their armor and weapons aren’t as distressed as I’d expect if they’d died violently.”

“There are some creatures conjured by the devils that don’t kill with physical touches,” Mari explained, fear dripping from every word.

As if on cue, a terrible, and terribly familiar, screech filled the air, tearing into Leon’s eardrums like nothing had since he was a child, and sending his blood into momentary turmoil. It didn’t sound directed, but it conjured enough visceral fear in Leon that he understood completely why Mari sounded so terrified.

Far above the curtain of darkness, dipping out of the clouds for a moment, came a huge figure, cloaked in smoky darkness. It had a rotten face with empty eye sockets, emaciated, almost skeletal limbs, and a lipless mouth from which the occasional terrible shriek emanated. The creature was about fifty or sixty feet tall, far larger than a human, startling Leon—he was far more used to these creatures being much, much smaller.

It was a banshee.

The banshees he knew were essentially pets of the ice wraiths of the Forest of Black and White. Nasty things, dangerous even to relatively powerful mages. However, they were small, having been created from a mass sacrifice of children, whose corpses they puppeted. This one, while appearing human in features, was altogether too large to be a standard banshee, and from what Leon could sense, possessed at least ninth-tier power.

“Shit…” he muttered as the banshee scanned the region around the dark curtain, then pulled up and vanished into the black clouds. The banshees he knew were little more than weapons the ice wraiths used against him and his father. This one seemed far more intelligent, though he was sure it was still slaved to a Primal Devil. “That’s a big banshee.”

“Ya know these things?” Mari asked.

“The place I grew up was filled with the things, though none nearly so large. This is going to be a problem.”

“Yeah. These things are the reason the army of the Two Skies lost in our last battle. Or that’s what I think, anyway. Whatever the fuck they do when they scream causes magic to get all wonky, and many of our mages were then killed by the husks or other monsters we were trying to fight.”

“Definitely sounds like what a banshee would do,” Leon whispered with a sigh. “Let’s find some cover before it comes back. We’re lucky it didn’t notice us here, as it is.”

With a wave of his hand, Tiraeses conjured a dome of light around them, which distorted the light around them for a moment before everything resolved back. “We’re invisible now,” the monk said.

“Maybe,” Leon replied as he scanned the skies for a reappearance of the banshee. “I wouldn’t put it past them to sense something like this.”

“I may not be favored by Wise Farangeun, but I’ve picked up a few tricks over the past two centuries dealing with this devilish curse,” Tiraeses said. “It can’t move, but my dome will shield us from sight.”

Leon held his breath for a moment, but no banshee appeared. Either they didn’t care, or Tiraeses’ ‘trick’ worked.

“Fine,” he said. “Let’s strategize, then. We have to get through that curtain. Have either of you seen something like this before?”

“Yeah, yeah. Multiple times,” Mari said. “Our engineers usually blasted through them. Break that dinky little wall down there and the darkness can be walked through. It won’t be pleasant, but the three of us will get through just fine.”

“Just like that?” Tiraeses asked skeptically. “By the gods, it can’t be that easy.”

“I never said it was easy, old man. Just that that’s how we did it. We had to cover the engineers while they did it, and it often took multiple blasts. These Black Veils are usually heavily guarded, so we’d be attacked the whole time.”

Mari paused a moment and lowered herself closer to Leon. Whispering conspiratorially, she said, “Lele. We shouldn’t mess with this thing. It’s designed to catch armies. We can just go around. Let’s climb the cliffs and bypass it.”

Leon grimaced as another, though more distant, banshee screech filled the air. He did not want to face that thing, even if his power gave him an advantage. He glanced at Tiraeses, silently asking the old monk for his opinion.

He answered with cold conviction. “Wise Farangeun’s Gates have been desecrated. We should not allow this ‘Black Veil to stand.”

“That’s stupid, Fake Name. And dumb. And suicidal. If ya want to avenge all the desecrations on Arkhnavi, you’ll die of old age before even getting halfway. Or at your age, maybe you’ll only get like… a quarter?”

“I’m more inclined to go with Mari’Kha,” Leon stated. “If we don’t have to deal with this thing, then let’s go around.”

“We should not—”

Leon raised a hand and silenced Tiraeses’ protestation immediately. “My priority,” he said, “is to get to Tell Kirin. We’ve already bypassed the other cities of the Plains of Paradise even though we knew there were other foci within them. Passing this place won’t be any different.”

Tiraeses scowled deeply, but he didn’t argue. “As you say…”

“Good. Then let’s get ready. We’ll peel back a bit, then go directly over the hills…”

They did just that, retreating through the Rainbow Valley for several miles, Leon practically staring at the sky the whole time. Now that he knew there was a massive banshee flying about up there, he practically saw their eyeless faces in the shadows of every black cloud.

But, as with their journey through the valley thus far, they encountered nothing as they swung back around, jumping and climbing their way up the steep slopes of the Many-Flowered Hills and taking a more circuitous route to bypass Wise Farangeun’s Gates.

With their power and armaments, they moved quickly, moving through the rough hills with relative ease, though still at a much slower pace than they moved through the Rainbow Valley. And in the distance, Leon could see the edge of the Black Veil, and that they were close to bypassing it. They just had to get over one last line of hills…

They jumped down a hill and then scaled a cliff across a rocky valley. Once at the top, Leon could see much shallower hills before them, as well as many settlements large and small tucked between them. The largest of these settlements had foci if the purple light shining from within them was any indication.

These were the Mandian Lands, the center of civilization on Arkhnavi.

Without much further ado, Leon ran forward, intending to jump down the hill and be on the other side of the Black Veil. However, just as he reached the summit of the hill, he sensed a sudden and dreadfully powerful spike in darkness magic. He threw himself back just in time for a curtain of darkness to fall from the clouds above, separating them from the Mandian Lands.

“Shit!” Mari yelled as she jerked backward, while Tiraeses came to a skidding halt just before the smoky surface of the Black Veil—and it was clear it was part of the Black Veil, for the curtain extended far, connecting to the curtain of darkness that sealed off Wise Farangeun’s Gates. “I didn’t know they did that!” Mari exclaimed.

Leon didn’t get a chance to respond as an ear-piercing screech resounded from far above them, followed a moment later by another, more distant screech, and then a third. Three enormous banshees came rocketing out of the clouds, smoky darkness streaming behind them, all of their eyeless faces staring directly at Leon’s team.

They were going to have to fight their way through, after all.