That the dragon’s nest was above the shaft into the hill didn’t seem concerning at first. Perhaps a coincidence more than anything else. She dug through the mountain of magical artifacts from the school and gold from the banks in the city to reach the shaft—apparently even becoming a warbeast couldn’t stop the wyrm’s propensity to gather valuable items. Leopold helped with his own psychokinetic spells, though he was much less efficient at the task.

When she scraped stone with her psychokinesis she even allowed her hopes to get up. Here was the shaft, she could sense it in the geography around her. The dragon had just randomly placed its horde directly on top. It wasn’t until she scraped more gold off that she saw the extreme vitrification of the stone. And the gashes from its claws.

“It tried to get in,” Leopold said as she shoved a small hill of gold away from where the shaft itself should be. Instead of a cut circle which would carry an inscribed cage elevator there was a sunken, molten pit that had been heavily scored by the dragon’s claws. Willow sighed.

“Maybe its fire didn’t ruin everything inside,” Willow said, but didn’t allow herself to hope. “Maybe—”

“Oh,” she gasped.

“What is it?”

“There’s a barrier here, ten feet under the hole. It’s still active.”

“Is it possible…” Leopold said.

“There could still be people alive in here,” Willow said, and gripped the sunken entrance to the shaft with her psychokinesis. Hundreds of psychokinetic spells heaved at the same time and the vitrified stone shattered, tearing huge chunks until they had access again to the carved circular shaft. Sure enough when Willow looked down she could see the shimmering of a barrier in the dark.

“We’ll have to break it,” she said, almost feverish with hope. “I’m sure they won’t mind.”

Willow jumped down the shaft first, digging her fingers into the raw stone to climb down the last few feet. Leopold appeared beside her in a blink.

“Alright, hold on,” Willow said, herself grabbing onto self-made handholds in the shaft, and she focused a sliver of her power on the barrier. It flexed for a moment, like a soap bubble, then popped.

Willow took a deep breath to shout into the basement levels, which is when she noticed the stink.

Leopold gagged and pushed his face into his elbow. Willow’s eyes watered and she wasn’t sure if it was from the smell or what it meant. The weeks that those trapped down here must have waited before they’d starved to death.

“Gods, I thought they were— But the barrier was—”

“It must’ve been running off of some essence tank,” Willow gasped. “The barrier wasn’t a spell then, it was inscribed.”

“They couldn’t leave,” Leopold said. “That thing was sitting right on top of them.”

“It waited them to death,” Willow agreed. “Whatever’s down here might have caught its attention. We have to go down.”

Leopold didn’t agree; he dug his fingers into the rock to descend. Willow followed on the opposite side of the shaft.

The first level turned out to be warbeast research, and some questions were put to rest right away. Apparently the researchers and students who’d been trapped down here were still alive when the containment barriers for the warbeasts ran out of essence. If brutal, at least their deaths had been relatively quick. The warbeasts, on the other hand, had starved to death afterward.

They continued down level after level, stopping briefly to discover whether or not what they sought was contained within. Willow had a suspicion that the most secret research would be on the lowest level, which turned out to be correct after they’d passed seven levels strewn with corpses in various stages of decay and mutilation, to the final level which was itself encased in a separate barrier—one that required some kind of artifact to pass through.

Willow pushed slightly on the barrier and the inscription overloaded with a shower of sparks in the room beyond. The tang of molten copper served as a palate cleanser as they reached the bottom of the shaft, or maybe it was the fact that there were no bodies here at all. The barrier above kept the worst of the putrescence out and had protected the level from the Arcanum’s own warbeasts.

Willow had expected a huge room with vaulted ceilings and hundreds of inscribed lights, but what met her was instead a space barely larger than the kitchen in the house on Grave street. A single desk and chair faced away from the shaft, and upon the desk sat a complex inscribed artifact and a large tome.

She spread herself out into the room to sense for traps, but there was nothing hidden in the walls ready to spring. The room really was as simple as it appeared. As the light from the white-hot copper died, Leopold cast his own magelight and threw it into the room to hover at the ceiling. Apparently whatever had been running the barrier handled the lights as well, as there was a single inscribed strip for light located in the center of the room, right above the chair and desk.

“Well this is anticlimactic,” Leopold said, looking around. He ran his hands over the walls as he circled the room, but if he was searching for traps or hidden doors he needn’t have bothered. All was as it seemed.

“No, it’s not,” Willow breathed. “What else would you expect of a place meant to discover god.”

“Um, a church? There are lots of people trying to discover the gods, Willow.”

“This isn’t that,” Willow said. “A church is for worship. These people, they were trying to uncover concrete truths of the divine. Not scripture, not catechisms, but truth. And it’s all right here, right in this book.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“You’d expect a little more equipment though, hmm? Something to punch through the veil, if you will.”

“Maybe that’s what this is for,” Willow touched the artifact which spun freely in three dimensions on floating bearings. Whatever it was, the inscriptions were so dense and the device moved in such an unpredictable way that she had no chance of unpacking it. It might take weeks of intense study just to get the basics, and she didn’t have the reference materials.

“Hey, are you sure that’s a good idea,” Leopold said as Willow slid the chair out and sat down. No traps sprang, no hidden artifact activated. It was, to all intents and purposes, just a normal chair at a fairly normal desk.

“Apparently,” she said, and opened the cover of the book.

On God, was the simple title inscription on the first page. She smiled and flipped to the second.

Leopold busied himself behind her with sealing up the shaft with a stronger barrier.

🜛

“Incredible,” Willow breathed as she read the last printed page, flipping to a whole sheaf of blank pages before reaching the back cover. She slowly hinged the tome closed and it made a soft whuf as it closed.

“What’s it say,” Leopold asked. He was sitting with his back against the wall busying himself with spell experimentation. The core of essence between his hands evaporated as he sat up straight.

“Almost nothing,” Willow said.

“But… it’s been hours.”

“There was a lot of material on how this artifact works, a lot of hypotheses they’d like to test out given time, but not much actually written down. Strangely enough they seem to have crossed over into death research a little bit, focusing on the thing that draws souls in as their primary evidence that there is a god. This artifact is meant to exploit that.”

“Wait, how,” Leopold asked. “How could an artifact possibly shine any light on that phenomenon. Unless…”

“Unless it duplicated the effect well enough to draw that same force,” Willow said, and reached out toward the artifact. It was hooked up to the same essence tank that had powered the barrier and lights, which was now completely ruined. That was fine, she had more than enough essence.

“Willow, stop. What are you doing? You aren’t seriously considering—”

“The only information they ever got was from studying the portal itself, and they didn’t get much at that. They discovered a high essential volume on the other side of the portal, but not what it was or why it existed. I’m going to find out for them.”

“But why does it have to be you? There’s nobody left, but that’s no reason to continue what they were doing. They never learned enough, maybe there isn’t anything to learn. Maybe the truth is unknowable.”

“I don’t buy it,” Willow said and squared her shoulders to the artifact. She laid a finger on the copper wire which had previously supplied the instrument with essence.

“There has to be something more. Some other reason why all of this is happening. Something to combat… that.”

“If you’re looking for divine intercession, go to a church,” Leopold shouted. “Don’t do this!”

“Be back in a second,” she said, winked, and jolted the wire with a burst of essence.

The artifact pushed her out of her body as if shoved by a strong wind. She immediately recognized the effect as the same one from Andrew’s dagger when he attempted to turn her into a warbeast. Similar to then, she felt a thread attaching her to her body pulsating with life.

So there hadn’t just been some kind of essence-rejection inscription on that dagger. He had pushed something much more substantial out of her body at that moment: her soul itself. Perhaps that was how he’d been planning on having a mostly-sentient warbeast created out of an essence shadow. It wouldn’t really be an essence shadow because the soul would still be entangled with its essence.

Willow saw Leopold rush to the desk, the air parting before him and slamming back together behind. He must be running so fast, but it was all slow to her. He grabbed her shoulders and looked into her eyes.

She felt something appear behind her and she turned. Where the elevator shaft had been was now a hole in reality. A portal, perfectly circular, and shining with bright light. But it wasn’t essence—that was one thing the researchers had gotten wrong, even in their minuscule experimentation. Willow’s second sight showed that there was no essence there, not even around the edge of reality keeping the split open. Whatever was happening was a natural phenomenon, and the light was something else entirely.

Leopold’s voice rose in a low timber and she recognized that he was beginning to scream her name, but she headed toward the light instead. The effervescent glow was so inviting. Sparks of something flickered past on the other end and Willow moved in closer to see what they were.

Something stopped her, and when she looked back she saw it was the vital cord connecting her soul back to her body. She wasn’t dead yet, just like the time with the dagger. Her soul was still tethered, which kept her from going through the portal, which she’d just been about to do.

But even from that far away she saw that on the other side of the portal was a vast, white space. Sparks ignited and died in the cavernous emptiness and wisps flew into and out of the volume. As she watched, a spark ignited close to her own window and she saw that it wasn’t a spark at all, but another portal. Within the glowing circle was a desperate darkness from which a flash of white escaped, only to dive into another portal adjacent.

The tether pulled her away from the portal, and she looked back to see Leopold focusing on the artifact. Essence streamed from him toward Willow’s finger as he screamed, disrupting the pulse she’d sent. As the two essence streams interfered, the artifact’s force died and she was reeled back into her body, essence and all.

“—illow!”

Willow gasped, as if she’d been underwater for an eternity. Leopold bent down to look into her eyes and grabbed her shoulder. She put her hand on his.

“They—,” she gasped, then swallowed thickly. “They had no idea. None at all.”