Rainhorn: Chapters 27-29 (The Weirkey Chronicles) (Patreon)

More notes after the chapters.

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Chapter 27

"You've even penned yourself in like rats." The Deuxan Archcrafter lifted his pike as his cantae cloak flowed around him. "A convenient place to finally finish you."

"How did you find us?" Theo asked, less because he cared about the answer and more to buy time. Yet this deep in the cavern, their chances weren't good, and he saw several other soulcrafters coming in behind him. Not all the Deuxans, and not Esaire, but...

"I don't really get it, and I thought we'd lost you when we found the trackers, but you can't escape us. Those Deuxan sublime materials leave a trace going through Tatian, so as soon you left the city, we followed it." Delarde rolled his shoulders, apparently enjoying his superior position as his allies gathered alongside him. "Of course, I didn't figure out any of that, but Esaire showed us how to finish tracking you. Now I get the pleasure of taking you out personally."

"So he survived, but he must have suffered injuries. You're really still coming after us after losing so many of you?"

"Some of the others took him back home for treatment, but we can't go back without getting something for all our trouble." Finally he lowered his pike into combat position. "Will you survive if I cut off your legs? Time to find out..."

Fiyu struck, a silent shadow blurring through the light cast by the lantern. Theo was shocked by how quickly she moved and so was Delarde, barely managing to dodge back from the dark cantae thrusting at his face. But even if she could equal his speed, she couldn't match an Archcrafter's force, so when he slammed his pike into the cave floor, she staggered back.

Though Fiyu struck again, he was ready this time, sweeping his pike to drive her back. "Careful! You could hurt somebody with that..."

Clearly Fiyu couldn't stop him, and she'd be throwing herself into danger once the other Deuxans got their act together and struck at her flanks. Theo didn't see many options, but at that moment Nauda came up beside him, new blood coating her staff as she gripped it.

"I'm going to take down that cantae aura. You'll only have one second."

With that, she struck alongside Fiyu, thrusting out her fork and catching one of the soulcrafters in place. She swept both to the side, driving him into the others, but Delarde was far too quick to be caught by such a maneuver. He rushed forward with a mad grin, his pike sweeping into position for a fatal thrust.

Nauda let out a cry and cantae swept from her, not in an attack but nullifying the energy in front of her. For a moment, Delarde's burning cloak flickered out.

Theo's hand was already up, sending cantae into his opponent's chest.

Though Delarde let out a cry and tried to resist, his aura came back up too late. Theo's cantae created twisting planes of gravity trying to tear him apart from within. The Deuxan soulcrafter groaned and staggered, blood staining the front of his shirt and one of his arms going limp.

Yet instead of falling, he slammed a foot into the ground and kept himself upright. Grinning through bloody teeth, Delarde managed to straighten up and raise his pike with his remaining hand. Though Theo tried to send another torsion burst, it deflected off his opponent's aura, even though it flickered weakly. The Archcrafter was only keeping himself standing with raw cantae, but he had plenty to spare.

"Al... almost." Delarde grinned again, and swept his pike to gesture at his allies. "Stop staring and join me. This isn't a duel, it's putting the worms in their place."

The group advanced, weapons rising and cantae bolts beginning to flicker in their hands. Theo could have tried a gravitational field, but had to assume that they would all have soulcrafted Esaire's defenses. Acting would only spur them to attack, and it would go poorly... he didn't have good options, Nauda was barely on her feet, and Fiyu...

His answer was obvious, once he thought about it. Theo raised his hand to the side and used a cantae bolt to destroy the lantern.

All at once the cavern was plunged into darkness, lit only by the unstably flickering light of Delarde's cloak. Theo couldn't see anything except the Archcrafter, but he heard a cry of pain from one side of the entrance. Delarde whirled to look, flaring his aura, only to find one of the soulcrafters lying against the wall, blood flowing from the new wound on his chest.

"She's in the shadows!" Delarde called. "Don't give her any!"

One of the other soulcrafters lit up in a defensive aura, desperately searching for an enemy... but it only illuminated him for a moment before Fiyu appeared behind him, driving her blade of dark cantae through his back. In the shadows, the blade surrounding her hand looked like darkness itself, and when the man's cantae died, Fiyu was one with the shadows, even before she drew her veil of stealth around herself.

As one of the others let out a cry, dying in the darkness, the last soulcrafter rushed to go back to back with Delarde. It was a strategy, but not a good one. In the darkness, all Theo could see was the two of them illuminated by aura, so he slammed all his gravitational fields down on both of them, dropping the soulcrafter and even staggering Delarde.

Though he still burned with an Archcrafter's cantae, his focus was waning and the blood loss was beginning to slow him down. His soulhome still overflowed with more cantae than he could use, but that was exactly the problem: it wouldn't do him any good if his body gave out before his soul did.

An invisible blade suddenly sliced through the back of his leg and he went down with a cry. He tried to swipe backwards, but Fiyu was already emerging from the shadows in front of him, a hail of light slamming into his cloak, battering it down, throwing him to the ground.

"Please, don't..." Delarde struggled to scramble backwards away from Fiyu as she walked toward him. "You've won, alright? If you let me live, the Armeau family will reward you... you'll get the bloodprice and the prestige of-"

"I don't know what that is." Fiyu drove her blade into his face and the last light was quenched.

Though he was now in total darkness, Theo could finally breathe easy again. Being completely unable to see left him unpleasantly vulnerable, wishing he had his old techniques, but Fiyu was the only one who could take advantage of it. 

"That was smart, Theo." Her hand patted the back of his before flitting away, nothing but a sense of motion in the darkness. "You too, Nauda. I could not have defeated him if he had been uninjured."

"I'm glad this is good for you," Nauda said wryly, "but I could use some light."

"Oh, of course. There was a second lantern, was there not?"

Soon enough, Fiyu appeared beside the sleigh with the lantern's light flickering around her. Her smile was broad, even when she twisted the device to increase the light to flood the entire chamber. Nauda dropped into a seated position, letting her staff clatter to the floor again. Though her hands would recover, he didn't envy her all the torn skin.

All around them, the chamber was filled with the bodies of soulcrafters, blood pooling around them. He'd assumed that Fiyu's blade was generated from darkness, but not realized that it might be designed for it. Combined with her stealth, it would make her a dangerous hunter on Ichil.

Out of habit he looked over the bodies, wondering if they had anything useful that could be taken. Presumably they had a sled outside, at least. Yet when he counted them...

"Fiyu, there's one more!" Theo was already running after the smear of blood that went around the corner. Though Fiyu looked surprised at first, she rallied her weary senses and then her eyes widened and she rushed after him.

All of Fiyu's strikes had been fatal except for one, and the surviving Deuxan had managed to crawl his way surprisingly far. Theo spotted him outside the entrance and raised a hand to strike, but the last Deuxan let out a cry and his cantae exploded from him, lighting up the cavern mouth like the sun.

For a moment, Theo was stunned by the foolishness of it. His dying cantae had been potent, but too far away to hurt them. Once, such a burst would have blinded Fiyu, but her soulcrafting and mask reduced it to nothing but a wince. There was no one outside to warn, just an empty sled floating beside the cavern, and Theo didn't believe any of the other Deuxans had remained...

He understood just a little before he heard the roar. The enormous form of the eryo bounded over one of the nearby hills, rushing toward them.

There should have been more than enough time to retreat, but they were both exhausted from the battle. By the time they realized that escape from the cavern was impossible and turned to run, the eryo was already almost there. As Theo sprinted back inside, he heard the sled be smashed apart into splinters. Even when they got deeper, he felt a massive claw scraping against the stone.

When they retreated to the dead end, they discovered Nauda sitting there, watching them numbly. "I take it the eryo can't get in?"

"Not as far as I can tell," Theo said, "but we're trapped inside."

"That's fine. I just hope it stops roaring." With that, Nauda lay down and shifted into a comfortable position to sleep. Honestly, he couldn't blame her.

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Chapter 28

Technically they could have started thinking of a solution to their predicament immediately, but after enduring so much, the group wasn't eager to throw themselves into yet another problem. Their cavern shook a few times as the eryo tried to find a way in, but when it failed, they decided to leave aside that issue for when they were better rested.

Nauda got her hands fully bandaged, while Fiyu curled up and slept, exhausted after the encounter. Theo was actually the one in the best shape, for which he felt vaguely guilty. He'd made the best choices he could, they just hadn't required as much from him.

One night of sleep left everyone feeling much better, but it didn't fundamentally change their situation. Early in the morning, Theo ventured to the mouth of the cave to check, only to find the eryo waiting outside. It had again curled up on itself, forming the lumpy shape that had first made him mistake it for a building... but he saw one vast eye watching from between its claws.

When he returned, he found that the other two had finished eating. Nauda gingerly set down her bowl and regarded him somberly. "Still there, I take it?"

"Yeah, I think it's waiting. I'm surprised it would still come after us, given how small we are, relatively. What do these things eat, anyway?"

"Soulcrafters." Nauda glanced toward the corner where they'd disposed of the bodies. "I can understand why they might pursue us this far, but I can't believe the last of them sacrificed himself just to trap us here."

"Oh, you should believe it. There are a lot of Deuxan stories about mortally wounded soulcrafters killing their opponent with their last breath, poisoned lovers pulling knives, and so on." Theo sat down and looked between them. "The question is what we're going to do about it. Fiyu?"

"I do not have an easy solution." Through her mask, he thought that her eyes were closed. "I have examined the caverns carefully and there is not another exit route. I am unsure if it is able to see through my veil of stealth, but testing that could be very dangerous."

"We still have supplies, but I'm guessing that it's patient?" He glanced to Nauda, who only nodded, leaving them in silence. Setting aside the search for a solution, he decided that it was finally time to raise a different issue. "Nauda, exactly how do you know about a sublime beast like that?"

Nauda stared back at him, resolute, but eventually eased back with a long sigh. "It would be easier just to show you, if we live through this. I became an adult in Nlukoko, but I wasn't born there. We're almost home. You'll see then."

"Your home is right beside the gate?" Fiyu asked.

"Not exactly."

Since he had already trusted Nauda with his life, Theo decided that he could trust her with a few secrets. He was skeptical that they really required a demonstration over a simple explanation, but since she said it would be soon, he didn't even have to wait that long.

Assuming they found a way to get past the eryo.

Though Theo began soulcrafting out of habit, carving more on his feast table, it was just to keep his hands busy while he thought. Their group might barely be able to keep up with Archcrafters in some respects, but they had no chance of overpowering a Ruler-tier sublime beast like the eryo. Either they needed to find a weakness or they needed a path around it.

The frustrating thing was that he didn't think his blueprint was flawed: when he reached Archcrafter, he could forge chambers that drew from his four cornerstone techniques to use gravity in truly devastating ways. But even if they had supplies to stay in the cave for a year, he didn't have the sublime materials to build chambers on his second floor, and that was setting aside ascension.

Stopping his efforts temporarily, Theo walked to the sleigh and looked through everything they taken from the Deuxan soulcrafters. They'd carried assorted money and weapons, along with some minor armaments and Delarde's pike. Those might sell for a bit of money, but they were unhelpful in the short term. None of the soulcrafters had been foolish enough to carry around sublime materials, and all those within their souls had been destroyed upon death.

Beside their supplies, Senka still slept, snoring obnoxiously loudly. She hadn't even done anything in the chase or fight, so he wasn't sure what right she had to be so exhausted. At least she had consistently stayed out of the way when things got difficult.

His gravitational fields had had some effect, but not enough, and... and abruptly Theo realized his solution. Using gravity against the eryo had been the only time when they'd been even close to matching its strength. Esaire with his resistance cloak had been a terrible matchup for him, but this sublime beast might actually be the opposite.

It was far from his original plan, but Theo was going to ascend to Archcrafter.

He eagerly went through his soulhome, putting away any minor materials left out and finishing off a few final details. Several of his chambers were completely unfinished and he needed strong sublime materials to serve as a focus for his techniques, but he could fix those problems later. The fatal problem at the moment was that he didn't have raw strength, and that was one of the few problems that could be solved with more intense cantae.

Normally, it wouldn't be possible without a considerable amount of time building a temporary platform to ascend, but the first barrier was by far the weakest. The frame of his first floor was rock solid, with a suitable roof, so he had options. In fact, he thought back to some tricks he'd only discovered after they were too late to do any good and realized he had a clear plan.

To start, he grabbed his supplies, climbed up to the roof, and examined the ridges marking the central chamber. He'd put those blocks in at the end, since he'd intended to remove them as an Archcrafter to allow the cantae to flow through the center of his entire soulhome. When he carefully pulled the blocks aside with his spirit, the singularity within roiled, but he was glad at how effectively it contained cantae, instead of wasting it into the air. The very concept was about trapping energy, after all.

Still, he needed all of it for his ascension. Theo unrolled the Deuxan fairysilk and spread it over the top, pinning it down with excess sunbronze. That was enough to contain his cantae while he worked on the rest. The springy branches Nauda had used would actually be very helpful, just not in the way she'd used them.

Though he wanted to rush, he forced himself to work methodically as he built a framework that could hold the fairysilk in place. It needed to be stretched taut, but not so tense that he risked breaking it. For a while he wasn't certain how to affix it to the stone and settled for chipping out a space of exactly the right size for the frame.

Eventually he'd done what he could and just stood on his roof, staring at the limits of the sky.

The barrier to Archcrafter was just pressure, and his willpower should be far stronger than when he had been a teenager, yet he remembered just how hard it had been at the time. Actually, he remembered more how hard he thought it was, but how much suffering had he really experienced back then? It wasn't a challenge he could take lightly, but would it really be an obstacle? He supposed he'd find out soon enough.

First, he removed the silk frame and dropped down into the central chamber, spending a while meditating under the singularity. It didn't help directly, as far as he knew, just got him into the right mindset. He was his soulhome, he embodied gravity itself, he stretched far beyond these small bonds.

Then he rose, thrusting his hands skyward, casting his will into the heavens. Willpower alone could never ascend, but his cantae floating upward became a hammer that beat against the barrier. It bent back, just a little, so he quickly scrambled up the side for his main attempt.

Setting the frame into its position, Theo stepped out onto the fairysilk, knowing that it could take his weight but still apprehensive. It gave way beneath his feet but held, just as he'd hoped. Once he reached the center, he began to bounce - yes, he'd created a spirit trampoline. The method might not be dignified, but Theo would care about that when dignity helped him tear down the barrier overhead.

Once he built up momentum, he truly leapt, throwing himself skyward - he was immediately caught by the pressure and pushed back down, but he'd been prepared for that. Theo hit the fairysilk hard, and for a moment feared its elasticity wouldn't be enough, then it flung him upward again.

This time he struck the barrier even harder, driving his will against the pressure, but it closed around him and threw him back down even faster than before. When he struck the fabric, it held, but on his way up he heard something snap.

It had to be now. Theo sucked all the cantae within his soulhome into himself and made his body an arrow shot against the heavens.

The pressure tried to stop him, but he snapped through it, exploding into new heights. As the gray clouds flooded downward through him, he was surprised that they resonated with his fundamental design. It wasn't just raw power, his soulhome had shifted to more perfectly embody the gravity he sought to control. Instead of plummeting downward, he descended at a fraction of normal gravity, the clouds whirling around him before they suffused his soulhome.

This pleasure... so many other things about his time in the Nine had faded over the years, but the rush of ascending was completely unchanged. Theo smiled within his soulhome and opened his eyes in the real world.

There, the other two looked at him in surprise. Archcrafter ascensions weren't overly dramatic, but sitting so nearby, they had no doubt felt the surge of cantae. Once he opened his eyes, Fiyu beamed and clapped her hands together once.

"You're an Archcrafter now, Theo!"

"I didn't think you'd built enough," Nauda said, "but I should have known you had a trick."

He could only shake his head. "It really was just a trick, not something that will work in the future. I didn't even intend to ascend yet, but we need to get past that eryo."

"More importantly, now we're waiting on Fiyu." Nauda turned to her with a playful smile. "Can we count on you to join us as an Archcrafter soon?"

"Oh no!" Fiyu rapidly shook her head, apparently oblivious to Nauda's tone. "My first tier is not fully prepared. I will join you when I am ready."

It was a warm moment, but Theo couldn't help but think about the fact that all these fights had delayed them for too long. They needed to move forward, and now he finally had the power to help them do it. When he got to his feet, the others understood and joined him. 

"Your hands still need to heal..." Fiyu brushed the air near Nauda, giving them a look of concern. "You shouldn't risk yourself to help."

"I won't act unless there's an emergency." Nauda did hook her staff with her elbow, though, and watched him as they left. "I assume you're going to use gravity again, but are you confident that it will work?"

"Confident enough. We should be able to escape it." He hoped that they might do more than that, but didn't want to boast before he was sure of his new limits. After being so confident of his power in his past life and dying miserably, he hoped never to be that arrogant again. Going up against a Ruler-tier sublime beast with only his current strength certainly seemed like arrogance.

He'd find out soon enough.

-

Chapter 29

Outside, they discovered the eryo waiting as always. It appeared to be watching them, though he wasn't sure if its odd gem-like eyes could even close. He certainly wouldn't have wanted to try to sneak around it, but escape was no longer his goal.

Stepping to the mouth of the cavern, Theo raised his hand and cast a single gravitational field. His technique hadn't changed, but his newly intense cantae generated a field of more than one multiple of Tatian gravity. The eryo grumbled and began to get up, weighed down but not impeded.

As soon as it did, Theo raised his other hand and hit the sublime beast with everything he had. This time, the massively multiplied gravity took it down, dropping the beast with only leg firmly placed. It roared and tried to struggle up, its body still obscenely powerful, but only took one step before it collapsed again. That slowed it for only a moment before it glared at them and continued to struggle.

Theo winced, his fingers trembling as he struggled to maintain the fields at their maximum intensity. Strong as he felt, it was a brutal reminder that the eryo was a Ruler-tier sublime beast. Even though it had no natural defenses against his techniques, it was still taking everything he had just to bind it in place.

"I can't... for long... we need to try..."

His words weren't very coherent, but Fiyu understood and unleashed a hail of light into the beast's face. Unfortunately, even with a sustained blast, the eryo's rocky skin remained undamaged. Frowning, Fiyu instead generated a shadowy blade around her hand and began to creep forward toward the creature's neck.

Before she could arrive, the eryo let out a roar, concussive cantae that sent Fiyu tumbling backward and nearly knocked Theo from his feet. His control slipped and the eryo lurched up, taking two earth-shaking steps toward them, its maw opening...

Just before Nauda acted, Theo managed to cast his gravitational fields again, slamming it to the ground. But now, closer to its prey, the eryo struggled harder, slowly rising to a crouched position.

As quickly as he could, Theo reversed the gravity to try to send it into the air. The eryo grabbed the ground on instinct, but he almost thought that he had succeeded, until the creature's tail slammed into the rock. Using that immense strength, the beast pulled itself down to the earth again, still staring at them hungrily. Even when he tried to reverse back and forth, he only shook the eryo up a bit, the movements failing to dislodge its grip on the ground.

"Rocks." It was getting harder to talk and his shirt was soaked with sweat, but he thought he could hold on long enough. "On it."

They gave him an odd look, but obeyed. Fiyu cut apart some of the nearest rocky surfaces with her blade, producing jagged pieces that she threw on top of the eryo. Nauda didn't use her hands, instead kicking rocks from the edge to bounce over the creature's hide. It growled and struggled harder, as if offended that they were uselessly throwing pebbles.

Ideally he would have wanted more, but Theo could feel his soulhome emptying and couldn't risk running out of cantae. He reversed gravity again, which did nothing to the eryo but sent the rocks falling into the air. This time he didn't let go, sustaining the field as far as he possibly could until the rocks sailed upward beyond his range, propelled now by nothing but their momentum.

Which soon reversed as normal gravity took over. Theo took a final breath and switched his fields one last time, accelerating the rocks downward with everything he could muster.

The explosion of dust and stones knocked them off their feet and Theo struggled back up, trying to find the others, afraid that the eryo would be coming for them. But when he could see again and his head stopped spinning, the eryo finally lay broken. Many rocks had speared deep into its body and even the dull ones had struck with immense force due to their raw speed.

"Is it... dead?" Fiyu brushed off her robes, looking at the beast nervously. Theo understood her concern, since even dead the eyes remained open. But he could feel that the sublime beast's soulhome had dissipated, so it was truly over.

When he tried to take a step forward, he stumbled in exhaustion, but Nauda caught him. She helped him forward with a broad smile. "Killing an eryo as an Archcrafter... I haven't seen it done before."

"I was just a good match for it." Theo was already feeling much better, but didn't mind her supporting him. "We can't get overconfident."

"Oh, I wasn't thinking that. I was thinking that we need to harvest it for sublime materials."

Fiyu bobbed her head in agreement. "Yes, it should not go to waste."

That proved to be more difficult than expected, because even dead the eryo was surprisingly durable. Fiyu's dark blade proved capable of cutting it with some work and Nauda managed to pry apart a few pieces of the rocky skin. Once Theo had better recovered, he experimented with lifting and dropping large pieces to soften them up for the others.

Judging by his spiritual senses, the rocky body was a reasonably strong sublime material, suitable for walls and ceilings. It would probably have been highly valued if it wasn't so hard to work with - they were barely able to draw the stone into themselves, much less build it into their soulhomes. By the time they could, it would be less exceptional but still worthwhile.

The real prizes were the body parts with the most concentrated cantae. Those gem-like eyes proved to be actual gems, filled with focusing intensity. Each claw held a shocking density of cantae, the one material they couldn't break up or absorb at all, forcing them to carry them in the sleigh. Finally, Fiyu extracted a massive heart the size of her head, obsidian rock flowing with magma that was still cooling.

When they had absorbed all the main body, they were left staring at those pieces. There was no question of actually integrating them, as the pressure from the sublime materials would blow apart their early soulhomes. Fiyu looked the fragments over and finally sighed.

"All of these are valuable, but I am not sure which would be most valuable for each of us. I certainly cannot use them in my soulhome at this time."

"None of us can," Theo said. "Let Nauda store them for now."

"But... it is not easy to extract such materials again. If we hired someone to do it, they would see the value of the materials and perhaps charge more."

Theo smiled and turned back to the cave. "I'm not worried about it. By the time we can use these sublime materials, we'll be able to do those things ourselves."

It took them some time to prepare to leave, but at long last there didn't seem to be any pressure. Fiyu focused on cleaning up the camp and he realized that she was regretting leaving the darkened cave. Senka had slept through the entire conflict and now yawned hugely, which was overtly obnoxious. Since it took Nauda a long time just to draw the eyes and heart into her storage room, Theo took over all the rest of the work.

By the time she was done, he had the sleigh out of the cavern and everything packed up. They wearily climbed in and returned north, hopefully for a more peaceful trip. Theo still made the sleigh travel as fast as it could, but there was no violent skipping over the hills this time. Instead they just slid through the wasteland, finally alone.

Maybe it wasn't so far, or maybe his mind just needed the rest, but it didn't seem to be so long before they spotted their destination. Nauda noted it first, an arc in the distance. They'd gotten slightly off track during the chase, but not so far that the gate was out of sight. 

He should have been glad, but he was distracted by a subtle shift he couldn't quite pin down. The air was getting hotter, he thought, the warmth of Tatian being replaced by a fierce summer heat. When he peered toward the horizon something seemed a little off about it, but that was far away compared to the rapidly growing gate.

"Go past it for now," Nauda said. "I'll keep my promise first."

So they glided on past, though they passed close enough that Theo could see that the gate didn't stand alone. There was a small outpost there with several Fithan guards, looking bored out of their minds. When they saw the sleigh they waved wildly, not so much to get their attention but just because it was the only thing breaking up the monotony.

If they could maintain an outpost there without any fear of beasts like the eryos, then that meant the city on the other side had a formidable military. As a hub city, it no doubt had multiple factions with Authority-tier soulcrafters, and potentially some who were even higher, so sparing a Ruler for a risky gate probably wasn't excessive. Entering the city would certainly be a higher level of competition than they'd faced so far.

"Almost there." Nauda gripped the seat in front of her, eyes set grimly. "You might want to slow down."

As they finally drew close, Theo began to understand and his eyes widened. Ahead of them, the rocky landscape simply... ended. He could see something burning beyond it, but his sense of distance utterly failed to capture what he was seeing until they had reached the edge.

"Oh." That was all Fiyu said, staring out. Theo swerved the sleigh to a halt and stumbled out, trying to comprehend the scale of what he saw.

The wasteland ended in a cliff that dwarfed any he had ever seen or even imagined, plummeting straight down for what looked like miles. Theo wasn't afraid of heights, but getting anywhere near the edge still overwhelmed him with a sense of vertigo. Such an enormous cliff couldn't possibly exist on Earth or any normal world: not only was it taller than should be possible, it stretched as far as he could see in either direction, practically a straight line.

And below... that was almost worse than the cliff. The blackened land below made the wastelands they'd traveled through look like the bounty of Tatian. Large parts of it were obscured by clouds of ash that moved in vicious storms, but elsewhere he saw rivers of lava. From such a distance he couldn't see any details, but everything gave off an aura of pure danger.

"Welcome to Tatian." Nauda stepped past him, walking much closer to the edge than he dared and staring straight down. "As near as I can tell, this cliff runs around the entire world. Half of it is the Tatian you've seen, the other half... is what you see below."

"How can that be?" Theo asked, still trying to wrap his mind around the distances. "If it's a planet, the entire thing would be so unbalanced..."

"I have no idea, I just know this is the way reality is."

Fiyu walked up beside her, voice again very soft. "Nauda, are you from the world below?"

Nauda didn't answer, only stared downward grimly, which was answer enough. Since they were both so close, Theo dared to get a little closer. In theory he had nothing to fear, since he could control his fall via gravity, but he still hesitated. Such a massive cliff defied enough laws that he wondered if it might crush his gravitational fields too, the cliff itself a barrier beyond the merely physical.

"We're not going down there, are we?" he asked. Nauda laughed and turned away, walking back to the sleigh.

"Of course not. We couldn't survive even if we found a way down, and the city is still our best way forward. I just wanted you to see it before we left Tatian, so you don't get the wrong impression."

He nodded, accepting her experience with the area, but still kept looking. The region below the cliff appeared to be abandoned, just like the wasteland above. When he strained to look further, he thought he saw what might be a city. It seethed with violence, utterly unlike a Tatian city... at least, the Tatian cities he knew.

Just before he left, Theo looked more to the side, trying to get a better view of the cliff. It was uneven and filled with strange crags that should defy any climber, yet he saw something moving. Again his sense of scale faltered, leaving him wondering how large those far-off cliffs were. They might be able to contain whole cities, but the beings he saw were much too large to be humans.

All at once he realized the truth: there were eryos crawling over the cliffs. Not swarming, but just from his present position he could see at least three. It became much clearer why Nauda had been so certain they needed to take the gate to the city.

As he walked back, Theo tried to focus on everything that had gone right. They'd survived a serious challenge and paved the way forward for themselves, so he should have been happy. He wasn't unhappy, either, he just couldn't stop thinking about what he had seen.

-

There's still an epilogue, hinting part of the conflict for the third book. More about that later.

I tried to make this book end with a convergence of multiple elements: an ascension, an incipient rivalry ended, a revelation about the world. Maybe not the best idea to have curveball endings in the first two books in the series, but the third book resolves more conventionally.

Next week I have a book release (plus the epilogue). After that, the timeline will be weird for TWC2 due to cover issues. I may do the soulcrafting AMA that some talked about. Expect at least some fun stuff, anyway.