The terrain in this dungeon was pitted an uneven as I stepped through, towering pillars of flora growing like a forest of stones. The world smelled like decay and moss, and distant cawing could be heard from birds— and creatures imitating birds, lurking along the sides of the giant pillars with hungry jaws.

I imagined they were imitating mating cries, calling out to birds to come close to their gargantuan reptilian bodies, hulking masses of scales, mimicking sounds like parrots to lure creatures into their mouths. A sudden cawing noise echoed above me, and I turned with a twist, snapping to look backwards and up into the towering pillars— just in time to see one of the creatures snap forward with unnatural speed, its hind legs digging into the pillar to hold it up right as it snapped a creature out of the air. It lifted itself purely with its back legs, despite being the size of a large car, and snapped the creature down its mouth, chewing and crunching and cracking.

I squinted at it.

“This is qualified as an Iron gate?” I asked.

“Iron, low bronze… its close. The lizards don’t attack humans unless provoked. We’re here for the birds.” Kim replied.

I nodded, but took a few steps farther back from it, well out of its snapping range. The lizard brought itself back to the pillar, climbing down the side and resting on the ground as it digested the meal. It watched us wearily with eyes of brilliant orange.

We were looking for weaker prey. Kim had consolidated her power in the first realm and was ready to move through the next. She rejected any suggestion that she used potions to change the aspect of the Qi— and she scoffed at the idea that starlight was enough to change it. She was intent on doing it the hard way.

And that was fine. The martial way was nothing if not arduous. Only those who embraced challenge and refused to shy away from failure could succeed. The easiest path cost the most in raw resources and wealth, but there were always other paths, each with their own cost: hard work, luck, or… other people. The Demonic cult was full of those who pursued power to the exclusion of all us, set against all other factions.

“We haven’t seen anything. Are you leading us the right way?” I asked. “Those birds should have been here already, no?”

Kim bit her lip. “Someone might have cleared out the area around the gate recently. We’re going in a spiral around it. Keeps us close enough to retreat, if we need.”

“Let’s head deeper.” I said, eying the lizard a second time. I told myself that this was an Iron rank gate. We didn’t have to treat it like such an obstacle.

Kim looked around. “Okay. Gate’s that way. So…” She pointed first in the direction of the gate, and then directly away, deeper into the world, and we began our true descent into the gate.

The area around the gate was rather mundane— in fact, the land almost seemed like it had been flattened at some point. But as we moved, the world twisted and changed. First it sloped upward, bringing us through the forest of towering pillars of stone-like mushrooms. From the ground, they looked like little more than rocks cemented together in some macabre art project. As the ground rose, they shrunk, and then we were descending a hill again.

After a few minutes, the terrain changed. The flora here was similar, still towering stone and mushroom like pillars, but they were different, maybe older. Great natural bridges laid between them, and the pillars held towering, latticed, hexagonal structures half the size of sky scrapers. Old moss and vines clung to the sides of the them. Kim watched the sky warily, and I followed her eyes, tracing the tops of the gargantuan structures.

Decrepit nests lined the tops. Piles of branches instead of twigs marked the remains of birds nests large enough to fit a human. Broken eggshells rotted here and there, mixed with bones. We stopped where the ground suddenly fell downwards, a cliffs edge meeting our advance. Lying across the open pit was a bridge of the same mushroom fauna.

I peered over the edge.

Pitch black water, dark and still as night, reflected my vision in what light filtered through the mushroom structures above. I could see shapes in the water lying beneath the surface, like rotting husks. Plants crawled all around the edge of the pit, mosses and lichens clinging to the exposed stone. Reeds stabbed out of the water. The smell of rot haunted the air.

“Do you want to walk around?”

I tested my weight on the slab of mushroom that functioned as a bridge. It was as wide as a road, and probably just as stable. White mycelium hung from its side, dipping into the water.

“If it hasn’t fallen yet, it probably won’t fall today.” I replied, taking my first step across. It felt like solid ground, and I cast a look around. Most of these gigantic structures had similar features; the plants seemed to carve out the ground beneath them, the shape of the towering mushroom latticework catching rain and draining it into still and fetid pools.

From underneath in the shadow of the giant lattice work, they seemed more like bone than stone, pale white and streaked where water had followed the path to the earth and left lichen and moss in its wake, plants clinging to it like a corpse. The bridge of stone dipped downwards before rising again to make contact with the ground, stretching out to meet one of the great pillars were it grew upwards.

The second I stepped back on the packed dirt I heard a rush of air. My eyes moved towards Kim, and I stepped back from her, raising my arms. Then I placed the source of the noise.

It was in my blind spot, falling towards me from above. I spun with my whole body, pushing blindly in its direction. I hit… something. A blurred shape of tangled limbs fell out of the air and rolled along the ground in the direction of my push. It squawked, somewhere between a chicken and the screech of a monkey. It had limbs, not wings, though strangely shaped as if at one point they were used to fly, and under its arms draped a curtain like a flying squirrel. The curtain pooled on the ground around it.

A curved, serrated beak opened on its mouth, which it made to open again.

I raised a foot and crushed its head.