Many scholars fantasized about the fourth and deepest level of the Institute.

Valdemar had asked everyone from Liliane to Iren about what the Dark Lord kept underneath his fortress, only to always receive the same answer: nobody knew. Lady Mathilde and Edwin seemed to have an inkling, but knew better than gossip about their master’s secrets. Liliane believed that Lord Och hid his phylactery there and that its power radiated outward like a furnace; while Hermann thought that the lich instead maintained a secret laboratory underground, where he worked on ghastly experiments.

Valdemar hadn’t expected ancient ruins, however.

The lich had teleported them to his lair’s depths, folding the very fabric of space; and unlike the Collector’s stasis effect, Valdemar couldn’t counter it. One instant they were in the hedge maze, and inside a gallery the next. The walls were made of the same oily, pitch-black stone as the great pillar at the Institute’s center, but carved from floor to ceiling with ancient glyphs and depictions of the Pleromians.

Valdemar had to cover his mouth as he inhaled a cloud of dust, to Lord Och’s amusement. “You will forgive me for the lack of aeration, my apprentice,” he said with mock concern. “I rarely get living visitors.”

“I suppose this floor…” Valdemar coughed. “It can only be accessed through teleportation?”

“Or by digging your way in. I can give you a shovel, if you want to build an air duct.”

Valdemar ignored the jab, and instead used the breathing exercises Lord Och taught him. He focused on the flow of air within his blood, using magic to maximize his respiration’s effectiveness. The summoner had to transform his hood into an improvised scarf to protect his lungs from the dust, but wouldn’t suffocate.

It’s not just the dust and the oxygen deficit, he thought. He sensed something putrid in the air, a foul humor that made him want to vomit. A relent of disgust, the hideous smell of abhorrent sex, and the suffering of something devoured alive. Horrors happened in these tunnels, and echo even millennia later.

Lord Och looked cautiously impressed. “Good. You understood the practical applications of my exercises.”

“Thank you, my teacher.”

“But you wouldn’t need to breathe if you had transformed yourself into an undead,” the lich said, immediately taking back his compliment. “You should at least learn to strengthen your organs.”

“Lady Mathilde started giving me pointers,” Valdemar said as the two walked down the gallery. The carvings represented the daily life of the ancient Pleromians; one showed a trio of cyclops’ offering a shining trapezohedron to a high priest of their kind, another a successful dragon hunt by spear-wielding warriors. “She said the easiest fighting spell is to reinforce my body, to make it hard as steel.”

Though their ‘training sessions’ had so far been limited to Valdemar punching a crystal golem in the chest and breaking his hand. Edwin had been quite happy with his creation’s resistance to damage, while Mathilde reassured Valdemar that he would progress with persistence.

“Wise advice, though Marianne would be a better teacher. You should ask her to give you lessons when she returns.” The lich touched the walls with his left hand, his bony fingers leaving a trail of dust behind them. “Your body is the only weapon you can rely on… behind the mind. Once you complete your training, you will extinguish lives with a thought.”

The carvings offered the most detailed representation of the Pleromians Valdemar had seen yet. Though most archeology books represented them as one-eyed humanoids, the ancient walls showed that they had sharp fangs for teeth, arms longer than their legs, and a gaunt, crooked body shape.

“Is it true some of them were more than ten meters tall?” Valdemar asked his mentor.

“It’s an exaggeration. The tallest skeleton I found barely surpassed five meters.” Lord Och pointed a skeletal finger at a representation of cyclopean priests praying before a black stone monolith. “The Pleromians were ruled by a powerful priesthood who guided their civilization by peering into the future. These seers determined the place of every individual from birth, selecting their job, who they would have children with, which cavern they would settle...”

“It must have been terrible.” Even the empire didn’t go that far in controlling its population.

“This system helped the Pleromians achieve internal stability for centuries. As far as I know, they didn’t even need currency, as the state organized everything. Their lineage selection process also greatly increased the number of sorcerers among their population, to the point almost every member of their population could spellcast.”

“And yet they never tried to reach the surface?”

“The Pleromians feared it,” Lord Och replied with a chuckle. “Their culture considered the stars to be evil forces, and that everyone living under the sky exposed themselves to their malevolent influence. Their mythology said their ancestors fled underground to avoid the sun’s dreadful gaze. Even trade with surface empires was shunned.”

Valdemar couldn’t understand the idea of retreating underground by choice rather than necessity. The Pleromians reminded him more of bats than humanoids, as afraid of the light as humans were of the darkness.

The gallery led to a broad hall as large as the ground floor’s cathedral, with colossal statues holding the ceiling. Each art piece was more complex than the last, and Valdemar suspected that they belonged to different artists. This collection included an intricate stone Pleromian warrior ready for battle, a geometric nightmare of metal triangles fused together, and a disfigured horror with more mouths than fingers.

More recent devices occupied the hall besides these ancient statues, including crystal globes glowing with bottled lightning, shelves of books protected from decay by spells, and glass vats bubbling with green liquid. Valdemar noticed husks inside the containers, such as a mutated, single-eyed humanoid and a giant skeletal undead with steel for bones.

“I owe Hermann money,” Valdemar mused out loud. “He thought you kept a laboratory downstairs, my teacher.”

“This isn’t my true den, apprentice,” Lord Och replied absentmindedly. “It is a specialized workshop meant to serve a very specific purpose.”

“You attempted to recreate the Pleromians,” Valdemar guessed as he examined the experiments. The skeleton was around the same size as most statues, and the mutant’s single eye was a giveaway. “Did you succeed?”

“I am afraid not. I have tried to summon soul echoes the same way you did with your grandfather, but the centuries erased whatever trace of sentience they had left. Only the pain remained.”

The pain… it was faint, but Valdemar sensed an aura of suffering suffusing this place’s walls, too ancient to have been the Dark Lord’s work. “What happened here?”

“I have spent centuries translating the Pleromians’ glyphs and understanding those who wrote them,” Lord Och explained as he led his apprentice further down the hall. “The Pleromians were among the first to delve into the secrets of the Blood, though they specialized in biomancy rather than mastery of the soul. At the apex of their civilization, they had unlocked the secrets of extended longevity, outgrew the need for manual labor thanks to homunculi slaves, and ruled their empire without competition. But immortality comes with a certain downside…”

“They grew bored,” Valdemar guessed. The hall led to a stairway made for giants, each step forcing him to take a leap down. Lord Och simply floated through telekinesis, amused by his student’s struggles.

“Indeed apprentice, immortality bored the Pleromians to death. The centuries are long, but unlike us humans, the cyclops didn’t have troglodytes, dokkars, and derros to contend with. With no need to struggle for survival, they focused inwards and embraced every vice possible. Exotic curiosity turned into debauchery, as their harmless pleasures devolved into vile practices.”

The stairway led them down to a vast corridor with two vividly detailed frescos of statues on each side of the path. The creators had exquisitely chiseled every facial expression, capturing the subtlest shades of emotion.

Though an artist at heart, Valdemar wished the sculptors had been less thorough.

Each scene depicted on the fresco was more obscene than the last, and it started with a cyclopean dinner with an especially loathsome main course.

“Parents held feasts with their children as the appetizers,” Lord Och said with the same passion as a museum guide. “Priests fornicated with alien things. Sorcerers reshaped their bodies into esoteric art pieces. I will spare you their other practices, as they would make even a dark elf blush.”

Valdemar didn’t need to imagine, though he would rather forget what he saw. This gallery of excesses disturbed him more than any Qlippoth, especially when he noticed the statue of a Gnawer physically stitched to a Pleromian sorcerer. Worse, Valdemar felt the agony in the stone.

Whoever had sculpted these horrors used live models.

Eventually, the sightseeing became unbearable, and Valdemar focused on Lord Och rather than the statues. The lich showed no disgust at the horrific scenes around him, which his apprentice found infinitely more disquieting.

Lord Och stopped floating above the ground, his steps echoing through the sinister gallery. “As you can see, young Valdemar, the Pleromians pushed the boundaries of immortality farther than even the most depraved cultists. But no matter the excess, it was never enough. After a time, they realized this world had nothing left to offer them in terms of pleasure.”

Valdemar suppressed a sigh of disgust, and focused on the mystery at hand. Now, he started to see the pattern behind the Pleromians’ disappearance. “And once they grew bored of what this reality had to offer, they went off to look for another,” he guessed.

“Exactly, apprentice. And this…”

Lord Och stopped at the end of the gallery, and the entrance of the floor’s final room.

“This is the door they used.”

Valdemar took the first step into the chamber, and held his breath.

An underground, colossal dome as large as the Institute’s courtyard stood before him, its black stone ceiling shimmering with purple, fiery Pleromian glyphs. Unlike the rest of the structure, the room lacked any piece of art or any type of device... save one.

Valdemar’s steps echoed in the dome as he approached the towering archway at its center; a door large enough to let an army of giants through. It looked so simple and yet so intricate, a twisted tangle of black stone, purple metal cables, and shining crimson crystals. The archway thrummed with power and purpose; it hummed a low-pitched song rippling through the fortress, inviting the living and the dead to cross it. Yet this door was closed, and led to nowhere.

But a dreamer could always wake up, no matter how deep the slumber. The magic remained vibrant in this old device, waiting for the day when a wise mind would unleash it again.

Valdemar couldn’t resist touching the archway, his fingers shuddering at the contact. The stone and the metal making up the structure gave off a faint warmth. Even millennia after the Pleromians vanished, their work endured. Whatever depraved horrors they had inflicted on each other, Valdemar couldn’t help but admire their genius.

This was the ultimate expression of his dream made real.

“Is it still working?” Valdemar asked his teacher.

“Yes... and no.” Lord Och put his hands behind his back as he joined his apprentice. Even this ancient master of the dark arts looked humbled by the device. “The Pleromian Gate can be reactivated under the right conditions, but I haven’t figured out how… yet.”

Amazing. Simply amazing.

“It’s a stable portal,” Valdemar realized as he analyzed the structure with his psychic sight. The inner workings of the device were a mystery to him, but its purpose was as clear as water. “A doorway into another universe.”

“Into multiple universes, with the right tweaking,” Lord Och corrected him. “I haven’t had the opportunity to study the other gate for some time, but I assume it had the same function.”

Valdemar’s head snapped in his teacher’s direction. “The other gate?”

His answer amused the lich. “You think the Pleromians could fit their entire civilization through one door? I know of at least another gate like this one in Ariouth, though I haven’t been able to examine it since my previous apprentice and I had a…”

Lord Och’s voice turned cold as ice.

“A disagreement.”

Valdemar remembered the tales of the Dark Lord Phaleg’s rise to power, and how he had been Och’s apprentice before becoming his sworn foe. If only they could cooperate, we might have reached other worlds by now, Valdemar thought.

“We might have.” Lord Och’s voice was heavy, though Valdemar didn’t detect any remorse in it. “Alas, the living hold grudges better than the dead. In any case, if two doors exist, why not three or more? The Pleromians’ empire wasn’t as large as our own, but it covered a large part of Underland.”

An idea formed in Valdemar’s mind. “If there are other portals, maybe my grandfather used one.”

“Now, you’re getting it.” Lord Och nodded happily. “Did your grandfather tell you how he ended up in our fair empire?”

“He didn’t know himself,” Valdemar admitted. “He said he was there as a medic-soldier, fighting a war between many human countries in trenches of churned mud, hungry rats, and sharp shrapnel. A living Hell, he called it. His hands shook whenever he remembered it.”

“My sympathies,” the lich said without really meaning it. “Did these human countries use magic?”

Valdemar shook his head. “They hadn’t discovered the Blood, but their firearms were better. He said they didn’t break half as often as ours, and some could kill a dozen men at once.”

“You look a bit tall for a half-derro, child,” Lord Och teased Valdemar. The derros couldn’t use the Blood, but their engineering prowesses far surpassed that of mankind. Many technological advances came from reverse engineering those madmen’s inventions.

“Derros can’t mate with humans,” Valdemar replied, vexed.

“Not naturally, but everything is possible through the Blood.” Lord Och turned serious again. “It does not surprise me that humans from other worlds do not practice magic. Our civilization learned of the Blood from troglodyte tribes after the Descent. We feared the dark and its wonders back then.”

“My teacher, you speak as if you lived during those times.”

The lich chuckled.

“You did?” Valdemar asked, his eyes widening in shock. He had heard Och was older than the empire, but he would have to be nearly a thousand years old to predate the Descent.

“If your grandfather’s civilization hasn’t discovered the Blood,” Lord Och said, superbly ignoring his apprentice’s question, “then how did he end up in our world? What did he remember?”

“Not much,” Valdemar admitted as he remembered his grandfather’s tales. “He and his unit were sent to hold a village destroyed by the Kaiserreich tribe. When they arrived, the place was a blasted minefield. Grandpa remembered working to remove the mines when a booming sound interrupted his work. He thought it was the Kaiserreich tribe attacking, but a light swallowed him before he could flee. He lost consciousness, and woke up in a tunnel.”

“Which color for the light, and which tunnel?”

“Grandpa didn’t remember well, as it happened quickly. As for the location, he woke up in the tunnels between Horaios and Sabaoth.”

Lord Och considered his apprentice’s words for a few seconds, before speaking up again. “I suspect the sound came from a short-lived spatial rift opening. The sudden change in air pressure between an open space and our caverns could have triggered an explosion. As for what caused this rift to open, a red light would have been a telltale sign of a Blood magic ritual. Question your painted echo until you learn all its secrets.”

Valdemar flinched at the ‘its’ part, but didn’t comment. “Someone could have opened a Pleromian Gate with a ritual?”

“Perhaps… though I entertain another solution.” Lord Och joined his fingers in a thoughtful pose. “The region between Horaios and Sabaoth is close to the Derro Kingdom of Andvari. King Otto Blutang spent the last decades clashing with our forces in the area. Considering his fondness for esoteric machinery, it’s possible one of his devices opened the breach.”

“You think Otto the Demented experimented with planar travel?” If so, Valdemar was thankful that his grandfather rejoined human civilization rather than falling into the derros’ clutches. If even half the tales about Otto’s brutality were true…

“The Demented? Lesser minds call him that, but having had the opportunity to confront him, I find this nickname demeaning. Otto the Nail possesses a superior intellect, the kind that only comes once every few centuries. He operates differently than most.” Lord Och shook his head in genuine contrition. “It’s such a shame that he was born a derro, or he would have risen to become a Dark Lord. Truly a shame.”

“How is impaling your countrymen along a road a show of intellect?” Valdemar asked mirthfully.

“Weeding out idiots is a favor to the universe,” the Dark Lord replied dismissively. “The information gathered by Hermann indicates that our late asylum prisoner saw a portal similar to the Pleromian gate and painted it on his cell’s wall. He might have belonged to the same warband as your grandsire.”

“I thought the same,” Valdemar said. “It’s possible that my grandfather passed out during the planar transport.”

“Perhaps… or maybe something separated him from the others. We will have to locate the tunnel where he landed, but not now. You would not survive the journey in these tunnels.” The lich examined his apprentice head to toe, and clearly found him unsatisfactory. “While you continue to assist young Hermann on his pictomancy project, we will focus your studies on combat spells. You need to broaden your perspectives beyond slamming knights against walls and summoning thralls.”

Though Valdemar considered fighting a last resort, he had to admit he wouldn’t mind getting better at it. His life would have been very different if he had been powerful enough to fend off the inquisitors. “Will you teach me combat spells?”

Lord Och shook his head. “I have a better combat instructor in mind for you.”

Valdemar thought he had misheard. Did the arrogant lich just admit to being second best at anything? “A better one?”

“I give credit where it is due, but the person I have in mind is less…” Lord Och hesitated on the right word, “delicate than I am.”

Valdemar shuddered. Considering Lord Och’s idea of a test was to pit him against monsters, he dared not imagine what the lich considered indelicate.

“Young Mathilde will teach you the basics of spellcasting combat for now, as will Marianne when she returns from her latest errand,” Lord Och decided. “I will send you to my chosen tutor afterward. Once he has made a proper battle mage out of you, you will be ready for my direct tutelage.”

“Thank you.” Valdemar bowed slightly. He was always eager to learn. “If I may ask, who else knows about these gates?”

“The other Dark Lords, and some of my most trusted lieutenants. Count yourself lucky.” The Dark Lord waved a hand at the Pleromian Gate. “How do you feel, now that you learned of this secret?”

That if Lord Och was correct about the device being capable of reaching multiple universes, then Valdemar’s quest might finally reach its end.

Earth awaited beyond these doors, alongside mankind’s hopes for a better life.

And yet, a cynical part of Valdemar’s mind remembered a common saying all too well.

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

“You will forgive me, my teacher,” Valdemar said, “but I found an inconsistency in your tale.”

“Do you accuse me of lying to you, apprentice?”

“I believe you are withholding some elements.” Valdemar crossed his arms. “We all know that in a population, there are always headstrong individuals who go against the majority’s wishes. Cultists are proof enough of that. Even if most Pleromians had grown bored with Underland, some would have elected to remain behind. Maybe not many, but a few.”

The lich listened in silence.

“I can only see one reason for why the entire population would willingly move away, down to the last man,” Valdemar said. “It wasn’t a migration… but an evacuation order.”

The Dark Lord nodded in satisfaction. “Your insight does you credit, young Valdemar. Indeed, the Pleromians first built the doors in the pursuit of a higher understanding… until their seers predicted a disaster that would soon befall their empire.”

“What disaster?”

“The Pleromian glyphs do not give details,” Lord Och replied with a shrug. “Though according to my research, the Pleromians escaped a few decades before the Whitemoon entered our solar system.”

“They predicted its arrival?” It still didn’t add up. “We survived it well enough, albeit at a cost.”

“Perhaps they overestimated the danger, or predicted that we would slaughter them like we did the troglodytes once we made our way down,” Lord Och said with a ghoulish, skeletal grin. “Though truthfully, I have no answer to this mystery. Whatever disaster the Pleromians predicted, it didn’t prevent us from surviving a thousand years.”

He had a point. The Pleromians had good reasons to fear the Whitemoon, as mankind learned to its sorrow, but it couldn’t extinguish the light of mankind. The cyclops had run away rather than stand their ground.

“The Pleromians left these artifacts and all their secrets in our capable hands,” Lord Och continued. “I know that together, we will uncover them all.”

“Is this why you revealed this gate’s existence to me?” Valdemar asked while gazing at the gate.

“Skills can be learned,” Lord Och declared, “but a drive is innate.”

“One day, we shall open this door into humanity’s new home,” Valdemar replied with firm determination. “I swear it.”

His people would finally see the light.