“Close your eyes,” Sierra says. “There’s powerful magic at work in the entrance.”
“Dweller magic?” Adrian asks, reverent fear in his voice. “I heard of these, but…”
“I think not,” Sierra replies. “A different kind.”
He sucks in a breath. “Demonic?”
“Something of the sort,” she says. “Now close your eyes. If you have them open, we’re just going to descend into the darkness forever.”
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“Aunt Marie isn’t all bad,” Sierra says. “I’ve learned a thing or two. Also, two city guards got lost in this entrance a few weeks back. The search party for them gave up after five days.”
I raise an eyebrow at that. That’s… a little concerning.
“Just close your eyes,” the Blue Mage says, poking me in the forehead.
I follow her suggestion, though I bite down hard enough on my tongue to draw blood. With a quick usage of Shape Blood, I map out the area around me, sending out a few drops to slide over the steps as we make our way down.
Bit by bit, we descend, my eyes screwed shut but my blood keeping me from being completely blind.
Five minutes pass in silence but for our footsteps before the blood suddenly stops. It meets an impenetrable wall ahead of us, and my magic is met with the bone-deep sense of emptiness before it vanishes.
I stop short.
“Don’t open your eyes,” Sierra immediately urges as soon as she hears my steps stop. “Keep moving.”
“I can’t detect anything in front of us,” I tell her. “I’ve been using blood magic to map our route.”
“Stop that right now,” the Blue Mage hisses, surprisingly intense. “End it. We’re lucky we’re still alive.”
The ferocity in her voice convinces me to follow her instructions. I trust that she knows more about this magic than I do, and I’m personally not tempted to jump into the wall of nothingness above.
“Did you stop it?” Sierra asks.
“I did,” I reply. My blood magic is completely inert now.
“Good girl.” The sound of her steps starts up again, and for a moment, I’m tempted to pull her back.
But she keeps going. A second later, Adrian follows. This time, it’s me that starts moving last. Despite the fact that both of them keep going, I worry that I’ll take two more steps forward and run face-first into my death.
Then I shrug. It’s an irrational fear.
I continue on, and after only ten more steps, I feel the surface underneath my new shoes change from smooth, unbroken stone to uneven cobble. A weight lifts itself from my shoulders, making me aware of it for the first time as dark pressure turns to nothing.
“You can open your eyes now,” Sierra says, tension noticeably leaving her voice.
I do, turning around to take in the area around me.
The staircase—which apparently perfectly intersects this path—next to us looks completely mundane, though it does fade away into darkness just like it did from above. It appears totally unthreatening, belying the information Sierra shared about it.
Ahead and behind us is a winding tunnel, dimly lit by flickering lights in the concrete ceiling that must be magical. About a hundred feet down, it splits into two, one path turning ninety degrees left and the other doing the same in the direct opposite direction.
The area itself isn’t too wide, built of brick and cobble and concrete, and it’s almost uncomfortably warm. A thin trickle of water runs through the center of the tunnel aimlessly.
“The Unending Staircase is an undercity entrance?” Adrian asks, bewildered. “I thought we would be going elsewhere.”
“This isn’t the undercity,” Sierra corrects him. “It’s what Aunt Marie calls an anomalous fragment. The disreputable people who tend to frequent these call them in-betweens—for places in between worlds, you see.”
The jargon means little to me, but I record the information anyway. It could be useful in the future, especially since I do recall there being discussions of “anomalies” before. I recall the six-limbed jet-black humanoids, the way that Appraise didn’t even try to detect who they were.
“This fragment,” Sierra continues, favoring her aunt’s term despite her proclaimed dislike of Marie, “is the final resting place of an escaped corrupted dragon.”
The term corruption triggers something latent in my mind, and I flash through memories that aren’t mine, thinking of horrors from deep beyond crawling their way into our reality. I remember a hole that leads into a red reality, a monument that moves when you didn’t look at it, a being that flows through stone like water.
Demons. Anomalies.
Monsters.
And I wield their power.
“How’d Ravendale cover that one up?” Adrian asks, his white-knuckle grip on the hilt of his still-sheathed sword growing ever tighter. “Dragons aren’t supposed to be here. Demons are even worse.”
“They didn’t,” Sierra replies with a shrug. She gestures for us to follow her as she heads down the left tunnel, and we follow. “The fragments under Ravendale are merely parts of a greater system of in-betweens. The dying dragon was chased here from hundreds of miles away by… security personnel.”
The lengthy pause before those final words tells me all I need to know. When she says “security personnel,” she means the guards from the UCC. Briefly, I wonder if Sapphire was involved in taking down the dragon she speaks of. I can’t see any of the guards I’ve killed even standing a chance in the face of one, especailly not one empowered by corruption.
“But it laid eggs,” Adrian said. “Why didn’t they flush the fragment out?”
“Time, money, bureaucratic constraints, pick your choice,” Sierra tells him. She pauses as we come to another fork in the tunnel, then directs us to go right after consulting the spell she must be running. “They might come calling when word of the disappearances here gets around. Fragment dwellers tend not to be the most communicative folk, so it could be a while.”
Disappearances? I suppose that this place looks like a perfect area to conduct illicit business in—it’s incredibly hard to find, after all—and given the power level of the Crowned Islands, a surprise attack from a baby dragon could probably take down most people here.
I assume Sierra knows about this thanks to connections she’s made through her aunt. There is the question of how she knows about the illicit activity along with the associated disappearances, but that’s an academic question.
For now, we have monsters to hunt.
“Ah, broken gods,” Sierra mutters as she turns a corner ahead. She turns to face us. “Go back. We’re taking a different path. The corruption got to this part.”
I make my away ahead just to see what she means, poking my head around a corner to take a peek at the continuation of the tunnel.
It ends less than ten feet from me, tapering off into a starless night. Absolute, infinite darkness fills the remainder, and the same crushing pressure that I felt from the seemingly endless stairs settles back on my shoulders.
“Yeah,” Sierra says as I return, shaken. “The void stares into you. I would advise you don’t spend too much time in the direct presence of one.”
“The dwellers can access these… fragments?” I ask. From my admittedly somewhat limited knowledge of their culture, it doesn’t seem impossible.
“Dweller magic is particularly good at sneaking into the cracks between worlds,” Adrian explains, pitching his voice higher and making it more nasal. I think he’s trying to impersonate the Blue Mage. “That’s what she says, at least.”
“Essentially,” Sierra says. “There shouldn’t be too many dweller-holes poking into this fragment, but it always pays to be vigilant.”
We continue onwards. The novelty of this space existing outside the standard plane of existence wears off fast. It’s still overly warm and growing warmer by the second. I think that means we’re getting closer.
“Locate Creature isn’t going to be completely accurate,” Sierra warns as the heat increases to levels that should be distinctly uncomfortable for humans. She’s not sweating, though Adrian definitely is. I’m not either, but my unique physiology helps with that. “I’m using it based off a sample of the corrupted dragon, not the—“
As she rounds one final corner, she abruptly trails off. I find out why when I catch up to her.
The tunnel tapers off sharply ahead. This time, rather than completely ending in the void of nothing-space, it connects into the remains of a large room. Remains, because two of the walls and half the floor lead into the lightless emptiness. It’s wide enough to comfortably fit ten soldiers walking side-by-side and long enough that I’ll probably run out of magic before I can Bloodstep all the way through.
In the center of the room is a single baby dragon. Fragments of shell still cling to its scaly grey body, and its red-flecked skin is soaked in clear fluid that might be from its egg. Its wings are stubby, not nearly large enough to support it in flight. Even from a distance, I can tell that it’s no larger than a particularly tall man might be.
“It’s a newborn,” Adrian says, finally drawing his sword with a quiet hiss of steel against leather.
“That makes it no less dangerous,” Sierra says, blue flame dancing over her fingers. “Do not let it fall into the void. Demonic creatures dislike the void, but unlike most mortal species, they can survive. I need not tell you why an adult void-touched demon is dangerous.”
“Understood,” I say, baring twin knives from my new belt. I tilt my head at the thing, trying an Appraise.
Name: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Age: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Race: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Class: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
It’s corrupted. Somehow, I’m not surprised that Appraise failed on it. I think the skill might be able to make more sense out of these monsters when I level it up more, but for now, it’s not strong enough to bypass even the most basic corruption. Demonic influence messes with skills, I know that much, and I won’t question how I know it.
That does raise the question of how Sapphire was so easily able to see straight through me. I stow that line of inquiry for later, and then I raise my knives.
The baby dragon still hasn’t moved. Four pure black eyes are set into the side of its head, but either the dragon hasn’t noticed us or it doesn’t care.
I decide to test it, dashing forward. Each of my steps is light and carefully-placed to avoid crumbling pieces of the stone floor beneath me. As someone with Demonic Heritage to my name, it’s quite possible that the void beneath won’t actually end my existence. Still, the crushing pressure has returned, and I’m not keen on finding out what exactly it’ll do to my body.
The room is at least three hundred feet long, and it’s almost exactly in the center.
When I get within a hundred feet of it, it finally acts, all four eyes flicking to track me. From the sound of the footsteps behind me, Adrian isn’t that far back, though Sierra is keeping a good distance. Of the three of us, I’m the furthest in front, so of course it’s me that it targets.
The baby’s jaw unhinges, faintly reminding me of a crocodile, and it belches black flame.
It’s newborn yet, but the pillar of tainted fire that shoots forth is anything but weak. I hit the floor, instincts screaming at me to avoid it no matter the cost, and I nearly tumble off into the darkness below.
The attack goes wide, shooting too high to hit either Adrian or Sierra, but the uncomfortable warmth turns to searing heat as it passes. When I roll to my feet, I look up to see the air still on fire where the demonic breath weapon was.
“Wraithfire!” Sierra cries out, the tone of her voice a confusing mixture of awe, excitement, and fear. “I’ve never seen that in real life before!”
“Don’t touch it!” Adrian’s warning is superfluous, but I appreciate that he at least cares enough to tell me.
I Bloodstep up and around the still-burning section of the air, spiraling over and under it as the entire world tints the same color as the enduring flame.
The skill takes a chunk out of my magic, and for a second I consider Siphoning away the lingering wraithfire. Deep instincts scream at me to stop, so I shy away from it. Whatever that flame is made of, I’m not going to try absorbing it.
Not yet.
“The fire burns souls!” Sierra warns. “Under no circumstances are you to touch it! Stay well away!”
That sounds like something that could actually kill me. I’ll keep it in mind.
I give the pair of them a nod, and I dash closer. Behind me, Adrian’s footsteps increase in frequency, and the sound of his breaths grows loud enough for me to hear. He must be drawing on a skill of some kind.
The demonic dragon baby—gods, I need to find a quicker way to say that—apparently can’t immediately use wraithfire again, because it starts scuttling towards us. It’s not afraid of any of us three, that much is plain to see, and it’s deceptively fast for its size, short limbs propelling it along cracked rock with stunning dexterity.
A hundred feet between us becomes fifty, then twenty.
For all its speed, I’m still faster. As it opens its mouth to unleash its breath weapon again, I Bloodstep over it entirely, sending myself speeding above it. I end the skill midair, twisting and drawing on Knifefighting to maximize my next blow.
Then its head twists all the way around, forcing its oversized maw at an impossible, neck-breaking angle, and it fires the breath weapon once more.
For a second, I watch a pitch-stained inferno explode towards me.
It overwhelms my vision, and then all I can feel is the burning.
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“Close your eyes,” Sierra says. “There’s powerful magic at work in the entrance.”
“Dweller magic?” Adrian asks, reverent fear in his voice. “I heard of these, but…”
“I think not,” Sierra replies. “A different kind.”
He sucks in a breath. “Demonic?”
“Something of the sort,” she says. “Now close your eyes. If you have them open, we’re just going to descend into the darkness forever.”
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“Aunt Marie isn’t all bad,” Sierra says. “I’ve learned a thing or two. Also, two city guards got lost in this entrance a few weeks back. The search party for them gave up after five days.”
I raise an eyebrow at that. That’s… a little concerning.
“Just close your eyes,” the Blue Mage says, poking me in the forehead.
I follow her suggestion, though I bite down hard enough on my tongue to draw blood. With a quick usage of Shape Blood, I map out the area around me, sending out a few drops to slide over the steps as we make our way down.
Bit by bit, we descend, my eyes screwed shut but my blood keeping me from being completely blind.
Five minutes pass in silence but for our footsteps before the blood suddenly stops. It meets an impenetrable wall ahead of us, and my magic is met with the bone-deep sense of emptiness before it vanishes.
I stop short.
“Don’t open your eyes,” Sierra immediately urges as soon as she hears my steps stop. “Keep moving.”
“I can’t detect anything in front of us,” I tell her. “I’ve been using blood magic to map our route.”
“Stop that right now,” the Blue Mage hisses, surprisingly intense. “End it. We’re lucky we’re still alive.”
The ferocity in her voice convinces me to follow her instructions. I trust that she knows more about this magic than I do, and I’m personally not tempted to jump into the wall of nothingness above.
“Did you stop it?” Sierra asks.
“I did,” I reply. My blood magic is completely inert now.
“Good girl.” The sound of her steps starts up again, and for a moment, I’m tempted to pull her back.
But she keeps going. A second later, Adrian follows. This time, it’s me that starts moving last. Despite the fact that both of them keep going, I worry that I’ll take two more steps forward and run face-first into my death.
Then I shrug. It’s an irrational fear.
I continue on, and after only ten more steps, I feel the surface underneath my new shoes change from smooth, unbroken stone to uneven cobble. A weight lifts itself from my shoulders, making me aware of it for the first time as dark pressure turns to nothing.
“You can open your eyes now,” Sierra says, tension noticeably leaving her voice.
I do, turning around to take in the area around me.
The staircase—which apparently perfectly intersects this path—next to us looks completely mundane, though it does fade away into darkness just like it did from above. It appears totally unthreatening, belying the information Sierra shared about it.
Ahead and behind us is a winding tunnel, dimly lit by flickering lights in the concrete ceiling that must be magical. About a hundred feet down, it splits into two, one path turning ninety degrees left and the other doing the same in the direct opposite direction.
The area itself isn’t too wide, built of brick and cobble and concrete, and it’s almost uncomfortably warm. A thin trickle of water runs through the center of the tunnel aimlessly.
“The Unending Staircase is an undercity entrance?” Adrian asks, bewildered. “I thought we would be going elsewhere.”
“This isn’t the undercity,” Sierra corrects him. “It’s what Aunt Marie calls an anomalous fragment. The disreputable people who tend to frequent these call them in-betweens—for places in between worlds, you see.”
The jargon means little to me, but I record the information anyway. It could be useful in the future, especially since I do recall there being discussions of “anomalies” before. I recall the six-limbed jet-black humanoids, the way that Appraise didn’t even try to detect who they were.
“This fragment,” Sierra continues, favoring her aunt’s term despite her proclaimed dislike of Marie, “is the final resting place of an escaped corrupted dragon.”
The term corruption triggers something latent in my mind, and I flash through memories that aren’t mine, thinking of horrors from deep beyond crawling their way into our reality. I remember a hole that leads into a red reality, a monument that moves when you didn’t look at it, a being that flows through stone like water.
Demons. Anomalies.
Monsters.
And I wield their power.
“How’d Ravendale cover that one up?” Adrian asks, his white-knuckle grip on the hilt of his still-sheathed sword growing ever tighter. “Dragons aren’t supposed to be here. Demons are even worse.”
“They didn’t,” Sierra replies with a shrug. She gestures for us to follow her as she heads down the left tunnel, and we follow. “The fragments under Ravendale are merely parts of a greater system of in-betweens. The dying dragon was chased here from hundreds of miles away by… security personnel.”
The lengthy pause before those final words tells me all I need to know. When she says “security personnel,” she means the guards from the UCC. Briefly, I wonder if Sapphire was involved in taking down the dragon she speaks of. I can’t see any of the guards I’ve killed even standing a chance in the face of one, especailly not one empowered by corruption.
“But it laid eggs,” Adrian said. “Why didn’t they flush the fragment out?”
“Time, money, bureaucratic constraints, pick your choice,” Sierra tells him. She pauses as we come to another fork in the tunnel, then directs us to go right after consulting the spell she must be running. “They might come calling when word of the disappearances here gets around. Fragment dwellers tend not to be the most communicative folk, so it could be a while.”
Disappearances? I suppose that this place looks like a perfect area to conduct illicit business in—it’s incredibly hard to find, after all—and given the power level of the Crowned Islands, a surprise attack from a baby dragon could probably take down most people here.
I assume Sierra knows about this thanks to connections she’s made through her aunt. There is the question of how she knows about the illicit activity along with the associated disappearances, but that’s an academic question.
For now, we have monsters to hunt.
“Ah, broken gods,” Sierra mutters as she turns a corner ahead. She turns to face us. “Go back. We’re taking a different path. The corruption got to this part.”
I make my away ahead just to see what she means, poking my head around a corner to take a peek at the continuation of the tunnel.
It ends less than ten feet from me, tapering off into a starless night. Absolute, infinite darkness fills the remainder, and the same crushing pressure that I felt from the seemingly endless stairs settles back on my shoulders.
“Yeah,” Sierra says as I return, shaken. “The void stares into you. I would advise you don’t spend too much time in the direct presence of one.”
“The dwellers can access these… fragments?” I ask. From my admittedly somewhat limited knowledge of their culture, it doesn’t seem impossible.
“Dweller magic is particularly good at sneaking into the cracks between worlds,” Adrian explains, pitching his voice higher and making it more nasal. I think he’s trying to impersonate the Blue Mage. “That’s what she says, at least.”
“Essentially,” Sierra says. “There shouldn’t be too many dweller-holes poking into this fragment, but it always pays to be vigilant.”
We continue onwards. The novelty of this space existing outside the standard plane of existence wears off fast. It’s still overly warm and growing warmer by the second. I think that means we’re getting closer.
“Locate Creature isn’t going to be completely accurate,” Sierra warns as the heat increases to levels that should be distinctly uncomfortable for humans. She’s not sweating, though Adrian definitely is. I’m not either, but my unique physiology helps with that. “I’m using it based off a sample of the corrupted dragon, not the—“
As she rounds one final corner, she abruptly trails off. I find out why when I catch up to her.
The tunnel tapers off sharply ahead. This time, rather than completely ending in the void of nothing-space, it connects into the remains of a large room. Remains, because two of the walls and half the floor lead into the lightless emptiness. It’s wide enough to comfortably fit ten soldiers walking side-by-side and long enough that I’ll probably run out of magic before I can Bloodstep all the way through.
In the center of the room is a single baby dragon. Fragments of shell still cling to its scaly grey body, and its red-flecked skin is soaked in clear fluid that might be from its egg. Its wings are stubby, not nearly large enough to support it in flight. Even from a distance, I can tell that it’s no larger than a particularly tall man might be.
“It’s a newborn,” Adrian says, finally drawing his sword with a quiet hiss of steel against leather.
“That makes it no less dangerous,” Sierra says, blue flame dancing over her fingers. “Do not let it fall into the void. Demonic creatures dislike the void, but unlike most mortal species, they can survive. I need not tell you why an adult void-touched demon is dangerous.”
“Understood,” I say, baring twin knives from my new belt. I tilt my head at the thing, trying an Appraise.
Name: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Age: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Race: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Class: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
It’s corrupted. Somehow, I’m not surprised that Appraise failed on it. I think the skill might be able to make more sense out of these monsters when I level it up more, but for now, it’s not strong enough to bypass even the most basic corruption. Demonic influence messes with skills, I know that much, and I won’t question how I know it.
That does raise the question of how Sapphire was so easily able to see straight through me. I stow that line of inquiry for later, and then I raise my knives.
The baby dragon still hasn’t moved. Four pure black eyes are set into the side of its head, but either the dragon hasn’t noticed us or it doesn’t care.
I decide to test it, dashing forward. Each of my steps is light and carefully-placed to avoid crumbling pieces of the stone floor beneath me. As someone with Demonic Heritage to my name, it’s quite possible that the void beneath won’t actually end my existence. Still, the crushing pressure has returned, and I’m not keen on finding out what exactly it’ll do to my body.
The room is at least three hundred feet long, and it’s almost exactly in the center.
When I get within a hundred feet of it, it finally acts, all four eyes flicking to track me. From the sound of the footsteps behind me, Adrian isn’t that far back, though Sierra is keeping a good distance. Of the three of us, I’m the furthest in front, so of course it’s me that it targets.
The baby’s jaw unhinges, faintly reminding me of a crocodile, and it belches black flame.
It’s newborn yet, but the pillar of tainted fire that shoots forth is anything but weak. I hit the floor, instincts screaming at me to avoid it no matter the cost, and I nearly tumble off into the darkness below.
The attack goes wide, shooting too high to hit either Adrian or Sierra, but the uncomfortable warmth turns to searing heat as it passes. When I roll to my feet, I look up to see the air still on fire where the demonic breath weapon was.
“Wraithfire!” Sierra cries out, the tone of her voice a confusing mixture of awe, excitement, and fear. “I’ve never seen that in real life before!”
“Don’t touch it!” Adrian’s warning is superfluous, but I appreciate that he at least cares enough to tell me.
I Bloodstep up and around the still-burning section of the air, spiraling over and under it as the entire world tints the same color as the enduring flame.
The skill takes a chunk out of my magic, and for a second I consider Siphoning away the lingering wraithfire. Deep instincts scream at me to stop, so I shy away from it. Whatever that flame is made of, I’m not going to try absorbing it.
Not yet.
“The fire burns souls!” Sierra warns. “Under no circumstances are you to touch it! Stay well away!”
That sounds like something that could actually kill me. I’ll keep it in mind.
I give the pair of them a nod, and I dash closer. Behind me, Adrian’s footsteps increase in frequency, and the sound of his breaths grows loud enough for me to hear. He must be drawing on a skill of some kind.
The demonic dragon baby—gods, I need to find a quicker way to say that—apparently can’t immediately use wraithfire again, because it starts scuttling towards us. It’s not afraid of any of us three, that much is plain to see, and it’s deceptively fast for its size, short limbs propelling it along cracked rock with stunning dexterity.
A hundred feet between us becomes fifty, then twenty.
For all its speed, I’m still faster. As it opens its mouth to unleash its breath weapon again, I Bloodstep over it entirely, sending myself speeding above it. I end the skill midair, twisting and drawing on Knifefighting to maximize my next blow.
Then its head twists all the way around, forcing its oversized maw at an impossible, neck-breaking angle, and it fires the breath weapon once more.
For a second, I watch a pitch-stained inferno explode towards me.
It overwhelms my vision, and then all I can feel is the burning.
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