The Beginning After The End (Web Novel)-Chapter 515: Crystalline Curtain

ARTHUR LEYWIN

I clenched my fists as I focused on my new god rune.

Thirty feet in front of us, at the same point demarcated by the opposing Alacryan army’s previously conjured shields, space hardened.

A thousand spells—sickly green jets of acid, dark motes of void wind, winged summons of blue fire—struck the impassible space and ruptured, a chaotic entanglement of combusting magic like a badly timed firework display. Light oozed through the hardened space in a slow trickle, so that the sound of the impacts reached us before the visual cues.

The loyalist Alacryan army appeared frozen on the other side, stunned.

“Arthur, focus on Taegrin Caelum!” Seris shouted. “We will take care of the army.” With two fingers, she gestured forward, and a volley of spells fired in return, though far fewer in number.

I released the condensed plane of manipulated space, knowing that, on the other side, it would seem as if time leaped forward as a hundred spells manifested out of nowhere.

A wall of shields appeared just before the loyalist front line—wheels of fire, translucent panels of mana, rectangular blocks of stone like tower shields, among dozens of other unique implementations of their Shields’ runes.

I activated King’s Gambit and Realmheart, summoned my armor, which feathered across my body in an instant, then flew up toward the barrier wrapped around the entire fortress.

As Realmheart took effect, a shimmering bubble of pure mana particles, invisible to the naked eye, came into view. It emanated from the ground just beyond the loyalist encampment. I could sense that it carved its way underground as well, enclosing all of Taegrin Caelum in an egg-shaped field. Dark motes clung to the pure mana—basilisk Decay-type magic, hidden within the barrier. One could walk right through it without realizing, only to end up dead a few seconds later.

King’s Gambit began to unfold the various options at my disposal even as I kept an eye on the battle progressing below.

Tendrils of dark mana flew with our army’s initial volley, and wherever they touched the loyalists’ defensive barricade, the shields collapsed. Dozens of our spells slipped through, landing among the defenseless loyalists with screams of pain and shouted orders.

Strikers from both sides were surging forward, but although our forces were vastly outnumbered, Chul and Regis led the charge.

Flames wrapped around Chul, and he leapt in a spinning maneuver that sent flames out from himself in a wide arc. Shields flickered around the charging Strikers but shattered just as quickly, and in an instant, dozens of warriors were immolated, collapsing the loyalists’ front line.

They barely had time to acknowledge this crushing blow to their numbers before Regis set upon them. In his shadow wolf form, Regis suddenly became ethereal, his entire body taking on the texture and transparency of the smokey flames of his mane. His incorporeal body divided, separating first into two, then four, then eight identical copies of himself. Each copy erupted in Destruction as it passed into the lines of Strikers, running through conjured shields and into the oncoming bodies.

Each mage touched by Regis’s Destructive form was devoured by the amethyst flames. A dozen men fell, then two, and within seconds, a hundred or more loyalists had been unmade by Destruction.

The disparate, smokey forms of Regis wavered before all snapping back together into one, but the damage was done. The Strikers broke, their lines shattered, and hundreds of soldiers turned to run away individually instead of continuing forward as a cohesive unit. Their supporting Shields and Casters struggled to cover their retreat as more spells followed from our forces, our own Strikers rushing to catch up.

While one part of my mind tracked the action below, the bulk of my consciousness was bent on understanding and dissecting Agrona’s barrier. The most immediate possibility was to simply God Step beyond it, right to the front doors of Taegrin Caelum, but as I looked deeper into the occluded space beyond the barrier, I realized the deadly aura was not simply a shell, but the same motes of Decay-type magic clung to all the atmospheric mana inside as well. I could, perhaps, push through it undeterred, but I wouldn’t risk any of my companions without knowing more about it.

Next, I considered my new godrune. Over the last few days, I had come to understand and think about it only as the “Spatium godrune.” I envisioned tunneling through the barrier, creating a safe space for my companions and I to travel through. But, though the Spatium godrune itself represented manifested insight, I hadn’t had time to experiment with it extensively, and I couldn’t be certain Agrona’s spell would be affected by a manipulation of the space itself, nor that I could control an extradimensional space that would allow my companions to pass through.

Perhaps I could make a pocket dimension and move it around us as we passed through this…death field.

Directly below me, a fleeing Striker passed beyond the barrier. He travelled only two steps before his body stiffened, his eyes rolled up toward the sky, and he slammed to the ground, dead.

“Reform ranks!” the one-horned Vritra-blood was shouting. A rain of spells from the Casters was falling down on our own Strikers and Casters, while the limited number of our Shields attempted to block them.

Spiralling dark voids and expansive panels of ice supplemented these shields, however, as Seris and Varay focused on defending our soldiers. Lightning and stones crashed among the loyalist army’s back lines from where Mica and Bairon had moved around the mountainside, flanking the encampment.

A small core of loyalist battle groups, seemingly more organized and synergizing better than many of the others, moved forward to meet the ten exoforms. A wall of translucent panels sprang up, flickering rapidly to allow spells from their Casters to fly through. Claire led the charge, her blazing, fire salt edged blade sparking and hissing as it impacted the overlapping shields. They collapsed, and she burst through, falling on two surprised Strikers.

I felt a thrum of small, vindictive pleasure at watching the nine non-mages, led by a young woman whose core had been destroyed, disassemble the well-organized battle groups in a moment. Spells rolled off the mana shrouding the exoform, and once its griffon-like form was through the front lines, there was little the Casters or Shields could do to slow it.

Spell cancelation was the next avenue I considered for removing the shroud of death that hung around Taegrin Caelum. Tendrils of purified aether released from my core and out my channels, tentatively probing Agrona’s barrier. The Decay-type field pressed back against the aether, condensing around it. I sought out where the black motes were bound to the purified mana, wedging aether between them like a prybar.

The spell fought back, the Decay clinging to the mana as it rolled like oil around my efforts to separate it. I pressed with a second, then third tendril, attacking it from multiple directions, simultaneously wedging, prying, and pulling, even as I realized that, if it took this much effort to unbind a single particle, it would be a pointless effort even if I succeeded. As if giving way in recognition of my understanding, the Decay-type mote of mana slipped free of the bond. The particle of pure mana was spit out of the barrer, but a bright green mote of wind-attribute atmospheric mana flowed in to fill the void, and the unseated piece of Decay grabbed ahold of it like a virus.

I frowned, following the many competing and entwined threads of King’s Gambit toward my next attempt to undo the spell.

Below me, the battle was well in hand. Despite being outnumbered ten to one, there was little the Alacryan forces could do against the combined efforts of Chul, Sylvie, Seris, Cylrit, and the Lances. The Alacryans simply did not have the force necessary to combat such power, and it was only a matter of time before they gave up or died to a man.

Even as this thought flickered across a disengaged corner of my mind, a horrible crack split the air like a thunderbolt.

The cliff faces to both sides rippled with mana, and the solid stone began to disintegrate, moving like sand as it collapsed. Suddenly the bulk of our army was in the path of twin landslides cascading down into the valley. I instinctively finched in that direction, but an instant later, Varay and Mica were already casting their own spells.

On one side of the valley, the stone hardened, fusing back into the side of the mountain, its momentum seizing suddenly. An unnatural, flowing shelf of rock was left behind.

Opposite of it, great buttresses of ice rushed to meet the avalanche, catching and pressing it back against the mountainside as a new iceberg was formed, freezing tumbling rocks and sloughing sheets of stone together into a single, motionless, gleaming tableau.

In the hollow spaces left behind by the rockslides, two twin, opaque portals gleamed with menace, like two thunderous eyes glaring down from the cliffs. I had only enough time to acknowledge their existence before creatures began to stumble out of them.

A handful of twisted, fused-together monstrosities of exposed sinew, mummified flesh, and grafted weapons chittered out torn-throat, gurgling noises as they flinched away from the sun, their misshapen faces panning jumpily. Within a couple of seconds, they spotted the armies below them. The reaction was immediate. A hateful bellow issued from one and was answered by the rest, then the chimeras—the very same from the first Relictombs zone I had ever discovered—were sprinting down the mountainside with wild abandon.

I hesitated, my striated consciousness momentarily slipping back into alignment as all of my disparate thoughts focused on those two portals. Had they been there all the time, or was this some new trap prepared by Agrona for our arrival? Did they enter directly into the Relictombs, or had Agrona been recreating the creatures outside of the Relictombs? I acknowledged the importance of this distinction with a certain amount of dread.

My hesitation continued as Cylrit flashed into the middle of the chimeras, his blade perfectly bypassing their meager defenses to flay grotesque flesh and bone. They tumbled lifelessly past him down the mountainside, their broken bodies shattering to pieces. And yet, above, more were already clawing their way from the portal.

Across the valley, dark shapes emerged from the twin portal at the same time. These winged forms had thin legs and bulbous bodies, long necks, and spear-like beaks. Unlike the chimeras’ mindless bellows, a dozen Spear Beaks immediately leaped into the air, whirled around, and lobbed poisoned weapons down upon our army.

In a single motion, I conjured my blade and swept it from right to left through a dozen individual points revealed by God Step. The blade reappeared to carve through each of the attackers, and all twelve of them cried out and plummeted from the sky.

Our forces were now facing enemies on three sides, and there was no way to be sure how many or for how long enemies could pour from the twin portals. Seris was already recalling the forward Strikers as she and Varay focused on protecting the fighting force. Chul continued to wade through the loyalist army with Regis, while Cylrit and Bairon each took a portal, hacking through the monsters that continued to appear.

I looked back at Taegrin Caelum, teeth gritted in frustration. If I got bogged down fighting here…

Sylvie, who should have been supporting the others, was floating slowly toward me. A few stray spells targeted her, but she batted them away effortlessly. There was something strange in the cadence of her progression, as if she’d forgotten where she was or what she was supposed to be doing.

Sylv…? I sent, projecting her name questioningly.

She didn’t answer until she was close enough to speak. “Hello, Arthur.” Her eyes flashed ruby red.

I let out a bitter, huffing scoff. “Agrona.”

“Lovely day for a battle, isn’t it?” The words, though they came from Sylvie’s lips, sounded nothing like her. The wry quirk of her lips, the awkward way in which she hung in the air, all spoke to the truth: she was no longer piloting her own physical body. “I’m glad to see my little barrier has proven an interesting challenge for you. Ji-ae and I have had ever so much fun considering ways to counter your various abilities.”

Sylvie-Agrona chuckled. “She thinks very highly of you, Ji-ae. And I suppose her esteem isn’t without reason. You’ve proven to be far more competent and interesting than I’d originally expected. I wonder what might have happened had I accepted your surrender back then, as the war came crashing down around you. Hubris, Arthur. It is inevitably a painful downfall of my kind. Thankfully, each time I begin succumbing to it, someone like you comes along to remind me of my own fallibility.”

“What do you want, Agrona?” I asked, my mind racing as I considered ways to break Sylvie free of his control. I’d been so certain that her resurrection had removed his ability to take over her body from a distance.

Sylvie-Agrona laughed, a cruel sound that I found disorienting coming from my bond. “To talk, obviously. I felt as if this form would be better suited to the task. In person, it seems you would be likely to ‘shoot first and ask questions later,’ as I believe the expression goes.”

My eyes skated past Sylvie’s form to the battlefield below, but Sylvie-Agrona dipped down, face bright and manic. “Oho, no getting distracted.” She rotated around me, putting her back right up to the deadly barrier. “Let your friends do what you brought them to do: fight, die, be the fodder you see them as.”

“I don’t—” I cut myself off, refusing to be manipulated by his taunts. With Realmheart and King’s Gambit active, I followed the progress of the battle below with my other senses, even though I was forced to turn my back to the battlefield.

“The crown looks good on you, Art my boy,” Sylvie-Agrona continued, as if in recognition of my own thoughts. “You just can’t escape it, can you? That urge to be in control? To be…king?” She laughed again. “You carry it from life to life in the same way the Legacy carried her potential. That was quite the trick, by the way, severing Cecilia from the Legacy.” Sylvie-Agrona’s eyes darkened. “How’d you manage that?”

Agrona’s words stirred a thought inside me. I let myself relax and my eyes go unfocused as I looked for the golden threads that I knew connected Sylvie to all those whose lives entwined with her own, including Agrona. But the connection to Fate wasn’t there. Instead, I sent a quick command to Regis.

“I’m glad you asked. Your continued ignorance is more than I had dared hope for,” I answered firmly. “No matter what you do, the power of the Legacy is beyond your reach.”

Sylvie-Agrona looked up at the wound, brows raised in a question. “Maybe, but you should not speak so confidently when you’ve still seen so little. The universe is very large, Arthur Leywin, and there are oh so many ways to skin a cat.”

A scream punctuated the battlefield as I sensed the chimeras, numerous enough that Cylrit’s blade couldn’t find them all, crash into our Alacryan forces. I started to look, and Sylvie-Agrona drifted backwards, breaking the plane of the Decay-field.

My fist snapped out, grabbing Sylvie by the front of her black-scaled armor and yanking her back out of the barrier. My face twisted into a wrathful grimace. “Enough, Agrona. Your daughter is not a bargaining chip, or an experiment, or—”

A grotesque grin spread across Sylvie-Agrona’s face. “My daughter. You said the key words yourself, Arty. I think, between the two of us, what Sylvie is or isn’t will be up to me to decide. But I owe you my thanks for keeping her well fed and cared for up until now. And, of course, for bringing her so close.”

My eyes widened as a pulse of aether rippled out from her. My own aether crashed back against it, attempting to hold her aevum abilities in check, but in the moment in between, Sylvie-Agrona wrenched free of my grip and threw herself into the Decay-field, her arms flailing and legs kicking as if she were swimming through the air toward Taegrin Caelum.

The time-stop shattered, and Regis, already rushing toward Sylvie at my earlier command, shot past me, through the barrier, and into the Decay-field behind her. God Step flared, and I plunged into the aetheric pathways, appearing next to Sylvie. Black liquid was already leaking from her nose and eyes as she grinned. I grabbed her just as Regis shot into her body.

“G-gotcha,” Sylvie-Agrona croaked, spitting up black bile over pale lips.

Tens of thousands of dark motes struck me simultaneously from every direction. My core burned as it pumped aether to my skin, reinforcing the layer that always clad my body against the impact. My concentration slipped, and all my godrunes went dark. Sylvie-Agrona’s fingers clenched around my throat as she laughed.

I struggled to find God Step, to pull us both beyond the edges of the spell, but I couldn’t grasp it. My skin was aflame, the black motes burrowing into every inch of me, Sylvie-Agrona’s laughter like a saw blade behind my eyes.

‘Hold…on…princess…’ Regis’s voice fought through the pain and disorientation. I realized the world had gone dark, and I could feel it spinning, spinning, spinning—

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A gasp. Fluttering light. Sylvie’s face, smeared with inky slime, eyes clear, expression pure desperation. Violet flames dancing from her skin. Destruction. She was burning from within.

We were falling.

“Arthur!” Sylvie screamed, her voice piercing my ears and my mind at the same time.

Black motes writhed across my skin, burrowing between the scales and joints of my armor, through my aether, and into my flesh. I could feel them clogging my aether channels and scrabbling at the gates forged in my aether core.

The purified aether within me fought to purge the attacking Decay, but unlike straightforward wounds, it seemed to struggle. It was as if the motes were driven by a consciousness that encouraged them deeper and deeper into my body.

Sylvie took my weight as we struck the ground hard enough to buckle her knees. Where she touched me, Destruction ate away my armor and body, and she quickly released me. “Regis, go to Arthur!” she ordered, pointing down at me. “Use Destruction to burn away the Decay.”

I attempted to stand, but pain wracked my body so intensely that the world went black, then white, and I came to once again on my back.

‘I can’t!’ Regis exclaimed in our linked minds. ‘Destruction is the only thing holding Agrona and this fucking Decay-field at bay. You’ll die—or turn against us.’

Sylvie knelt beside me, her hands outstretched as if she wanted to touch me but was holding herself back. “I’m sorry, Arthur, but this is going to hurt.” Then, she grabbed me.

Destruction again devoured flesh, armor, aether, whatever it could. Sylvie began to drag me across the rough ground, back toward the sounds of fighting and explosions of mana. She held me gingerly, first by the pauldron of my armor, but when that was gone, by my arm. We were halfway when Destruction had taken more of the arm than the tissue could manage, and the arm came apart in her hands.

My bond screamed in fury and heartbreak as she switched to my other arm.

We moved another hundred feet, then stopped. I felt something coming closer and, despite the agony, twisted my head around to look.

A writhing orb of dark light approached through the gloom. The golden light of the wound was dimmed within the Decay-field, and two forms of darkness snapped and bit at each other around the orb. Within it, I could just make out the shadow of a silhouette.

Sylvie released me, pulling her Destruction-wreathed hands away from my disintegrating flesh. Then the orb wrapped around us. At its center, Seris looked down at me. A thin sheen of perspiration gleamed on her brow, but she appeared otherwise unharmed by the ongoing battle.

“A hook set with bait, a trap sprung,” she muttered, staring into and through me.

I couldn’t manage a response, my jaw locked tight in a rictus of pain. The scene around me faded in and out in red and black waves.

Hands pressed against my cheeks. I stared up into Seris’s face. I had no thoughts. Everything but the barren edge of my senses was locked behind pain.

In my eyes, dark light. In my skin and blood and bones, cold void.

I gasped.

Seris pushed her void magic through me, alongside my own healing aether, and the Decay-type mana was expelled in a sudden rush. It swarmed beyond the edges of her void shield. Balling like a fist, it crashed down against the shield, which quaked and began to crack. The swarm retreated, balling up again, gathering more dark motes to itself.

I struggled to stand without working arms. With the invading Decay expelled, I was already healing, but replacing a lost arm was not instant, even for me. “Thanks,” I said to Seris as I regarded Agrona’s mana building toward another attack.

“I won’t be able to hold against another blow like that. It’s time to get out of here, Arthur,” Seris said firmly.

Time, I thought, the word resounding in my skull. I pulled, from my earlier musings, one of many ideas, potential ways in which to counter the Decay-field. But I had lacked the time to try them all; my King’s Gambit enhanced thoughts moved far faster than my physical form ever could.

“Sylvie, can you give us time?”

Through the aura of Destruction, she gave a single nod and uncertain shrug at the same time. “I will try.”

With my body back under my control, I reached for Aroa’s Requiem. Time.

Violet motes began to emanate from my flesh and roll down my arms. They jumped and danced like little bugs of my own. I forced more aether into the godrune, and the motes continued to appear, continued to build upon my skin.

Outside, the dark sparks of Decay moved as if the air itself were viscous. The consistent battle between Seris’s void magic and Agrona’s Decay-field was waged in slow motion. Seris herself seemed frozen, her body a lifelike statue. Already, Sylvie’s eyes were narrowed as she struggled.

“He’s…fighting back…” she groaned through bared teeth.

I was running out of time, but I knew I would need every prolonged second, every single particle of aether. My entire form seemed alive with the motes conjured by Aroa’s Requiem, like I was a dropped piece of meat covered in ants.

Sylvie gasped, and I sensed her aevum ability quake.

I stepped out of Seris’s protective bubble, directly into the line of attack.

Time snapped back into motion, and the thrumming cluster of Decay slammed down around me. Like a wave, it simultaneously struck and broke, the particles swarming around me, again trying to push their way inside me, to clog my own biology and rip me to pieces from within.

But they impacted the barrier formed by Aroa’s Requiem first. Wherever the dark particles of Decay impacted a bright amethyst mote, they…were scrubbed clean. That essence of Decay—the mechanism by which a basilisk housed and “purified” mana through their core, imbuing it with their natural affinity with the Decay attribute—was cleansed. What else is decay, if not the act of decomposition over time.

I laughed as I watched the process work: each Aroa’s Requiem particle leapt on a dark fleck of Decay-attribute mana, reversing the decay until a bright, colorful particle of water, earth, air, or fire remained. In moments, the attacking swarm dissolved into nothing but a dense cloud of atmospheric mana around me. But, the Decay-field remained.

I thrust my hands outward, willing Aroa’s Requiem to reach into the air. The darting violet motes took flight, attacking the Decay, breaking its bonds, and reverting it back to its natural form.

The Decay-field popped like a bubble, and the remaining Decay-attribute mana was retracted back into Taegrin Caelum. The path forward was clear.

As the violet sparks of Aroa’s Requiem returned to me, I felt my insight deepening, cascading layers of new understanding into the nature of progression, decay, entropy, and rejuvenation overlaying my initially limited insight into the godrune. My fingers twitched, and all that energy jumped to Sylvie.

Reading my intention, Regis doused the flames still cladding her form and hopped out of her body.

Aroa’s Requiem hesitated at the barrier of her flesh. Sylvie, of course, knew exactly what I was doing, and so she embraced it. Aroa’s Requiem sank into her skin, the particles searching through her body in much the same way I’d done with the Lances when releasing them from Kezess’s bond on their cores.

The curse laid on Sylvie by Agrona was much deeper, but my understanding of Aroa’s Requiem now was much greater. In moments, I had scoured away the dark mark inside her mind at the base of her skull—a piece of Agrona’s magic implanted there when she’d been only an egg. I had to give it to him: inventing a piece of magic that subsisted beyond even her death and resurrection was an impressive feat, and it had very nearly been my undoing.

I looked up at Taegrin Caelum. “Not out of tricks just yet, are you, Agrona?”

“It’s gone,” Sylvie said, rubbing at the base of her skull. “We’re certain, this time?”

I nodded. “He’ll never control you again, I promise it.”

My bond’s eyes shone fiercely, angry tears building in the corners. She wiped the dark ichor from her lips and nodded in understanding.

Despite the weight of the moment, I could not give it the time it deserved. While I’d been struggling against Agrona’s trap, the battle had continued in the valley behind us. Despite the appearance of the Relictombs’ beasts, it seemed as though things were under control. I hesitated to take the next step, but this battle was a distraction. Our real target was still inside.

Projecting my voice through my own aetheric aura so it rang out across the battlefield, I gave the command to progress to the next phase of the battle.

The Lances broke away from their positions, flying in my direction with Tessia safeguarded between them. Seris returned to the fight, helping Cylrit to hold back the tide of creatures still spilling out of the Relictombs.

Sensing Chul begin to follow them, I led the way up toward the closest of many balconies that protruded from the sheer walls. Aether built in my fist until I reached it, then released as an aetheric blast. The glass front exploded inward, the mana warding and hardening it unable to hold up against the force.

I strode into what appeared to be a small office. It was sparsely decorated and seemed to have been ransacked at some point. The rubble of my entrance did little to improve it.

Stepping aside so that Sylvie and Regis could enter, I waited for the rest. Tessia would be our guide through the fortress. I couldn’t sense Agrona’s mana signature, but I knew he was here.

The Lances alighted on the balcony with Tessia, and the four stepped in, looking around.

“So, this is where the dark god rests his head at night, huh?” Mica said, kicking away a splintered shelf that had fallen from the wall. She nudged Bairon and grinned. “I expected a stronger smell of manure.”

Varay’s cool gaze flicked to Mica before returning to the room. Wryly, she said, “Eyes open, Lance Ohmwrecker. You can still step in it, even if it doesn’t stink.”

Tessia ran her fingers through the dust that had settled on the desktop. “This must belong to one of his researchers. We’re quite a ways from his private wing, but—” Her voice cut off with a sharp gasp as several mana signatures suddenly appeared throughout the battlefield below.

I spun, flying out through the shattered entrance I’d made. Below, a large hunk of metal was skipping across the hard stone of the valley floor, sparks and slate gray feathers flying with each impact. Chasing the gray blur was a man with gray skin, blood red eyes, and spiraling horns. He drew back a long glaive, ready to strike.

In an instant, I made out not only this single Wraith, but five others scattered throughout the battlefield. Chul had reversed course, diving back down into the battle.

As I tensed to fly after Claire and Chul, mana lurched behind me.

Stomach clenching painfully, my head jerked around as the office’s interior door began to unfold, the space suddenly not space, but ten thousand crystalline shards that rolled over and past each other like a curtain of glass. I recognized the sight immediately: each entrance into the Relictombs ruins had been guarded by an identical portal.

As I hovered frozen between the portal and the attacking Wraiths, suddenly the curtain rolled forward, the crystals wiping away the room and absorbing everything they touched. It was fast, far too fast. Tessia, standing only a few feet away, barely had time to stumble, eyes flaring, before the crystals were wrapping around her.

The Spatium godrune activated. Reaching down, I condensed the space between Claire and myself, pulling her away from the Wraith even as I lunged toward Tessia’s outstretched arm as the rest of her vanished inside the crystalline curtain. The walls around the crystals were transforming, rippling, pushing out from the fortress itself—no, more like new walls were forming and extending outward, as if a second structure were merging with Taegrin Caelum, or being born from it.

My fingers wrapped around Tessia’s hand, and she screamed as if she were being pulled in two.

Claire’s griffon-like exoform skid across the floor toward me. Mica, who had been closest to the balcony, flailed as she sped backwards out of the shattered wall. Varay, too close to the expanding portal, turned as if in slow motion to push Bairon back, but he was lunging forward, attempting to pull her away. The portal rushed across the room, the purple-veined stonework melting into reality as if from nowhere.

I can’t pull her back out, I thought to my companions, letting Tessia’s fingers slip through mine as she disappeared into what could only be the Relictombs. Without hesitating, I stepped in after her.

The crystalline curtain parted easily.