After making the portal with Ash, Crystal–pads over to Karanos’ side. He glances at Ash, who smiles at the fish and places his hand upon her back. Then, together, Ash and Karanos zoom forward through the veil, Crystal pulled along behind them by an effortless combination of Ash’s practice–Life affinity and earth elementalism. I sense him controlling her flesh, employing a strategy similar to my own to pull her forward, with the earth giving her an initial shove.

Reality unzips before the duo, splitting around the wedge of their power.

“The path is stabilized by the energy of two,” Crystal says, still within communication range–but probably not for long. “Even so, this is already part of the pageant–make haste!”

The other proteges are momentarily frozen by surprise. The chosen mentors don’t seem surprised by the tunnel-like tear in the veil, but they don’t make the first move. Next to me, Ketu approaches the veil with a perplexed expression, energy covering his fingers as he pulls at the edge of the tear.

I suddenly realize the advantage Maria and I have–we’re possibly the only ones accustomed to Karanos’ brand of travel through the veil. Maria and I lock eyes and we sprint forward. I drag Sah along behind us with my practice. As we approach, the drake glares at the portal in distaste. Thankfully, after visiting the void for the first time, he seems to have lost some of his aversion for spatial apertures. I decide to try leaving him conscious, rather than knocking him out like in the past.

Our movement shocks the ascendants out of their momentary stupor and they flood into the passage with us. I sense the mentors starting to move, languidly taking up the rear of the procession.

Maria propels herself forward on jets of flame as I fling myself and Sah forward with my practice. The ground flashes beneath us, slivers of different-colored terrain from a menagerie of worlds. Maria and I increase our speed by skipping across the ground, kicking off with legs empowered by ascendant energy. Her energy is better suited to that purpose than mine, and we soon slip into a rhythm where she pulls me forward, gripping my hand tightly, blue energy coursing just beneath the surface of her skin, almost perfectly internalized–Karanos would be proud of her control.

Unsurprisingly, Ketu Bryant progresses from the back to the front in only a few seconds. The straight path forward meshes well with his strategy of wicking the ground in a layer of ice and using ascendant energy to empower his legs and skate forward. When he reaches us, rather than continuing at his unmatched pace, he slows down.

“Karanos is your sponsor,” he states. “Do you often travel like this?”

“In the beginning,” Maria says. “But now he forces us to do most of the work.”

Ketu stares at us appraisingly, then puts on a surge of energy and pulls ahead, ice blooming around him.

And for a moment there, I thought he’d shed his competitive attitude.

—

Vizier’s Crown is as I remember it–a barren waste of ashy, violet-gray dust interspersed by gnarled trees that look like the petrified aftermath of a forest fire.

I rub Sah’s flank as he sniffs the air and chuffs, fluttering his wings. As we traveled through the veil, we managed to coax him into flying next to us. He’s not fast enough to keep up on his own, so Maria periodically grasped onto his back and boosted him forward. If he really started to fall behind from fatigue, I took over and dragged his body along beside us.

Maria leans on the dragon and runs a hand through her hair, surveying the other ascendants. Off to the side, the mentors stand clumped together, talking idly.

But Karanos and Ash are nowhere to be found. They left Crystal behind by the tear in the veil, but she refuses to reveal their plan.

Suddenly, Ash and Karanos reappear, landing in front of the mentors. Ash takes a step forward and holds out his hands. “Behold, Vizier’s Crown, an example of a plane destroyed by ascendants.”

Behind him, a massive Light projection takes form, displaying two ascendants facing off against each other in battle. Since Ash doesn’t have a Light affinity, it must be Karanos’ work. The scale of the battlefield is huge, rendering the ascendants themselves little more than tiny specks. One rides upon a centipede that cannot fit within the projection, it’s body on the same order of size as the riftbeast leviathan. The other calls forth a sinister conflagration of red, blue, and black flame, razing the earth. The remains of a pastoral village are visible through thick plumes of smoke and fields of what might be wheat burn like torches.

The scene expands out to encompass our surroundings, becoming three-dimensional. Long, yellow-green grass and knobby trees overlay onto barren soil and tree husks.

Is this what Vizier’s Crown used to look like–a savannah–or is this simply a dramatic imagining?

While the terrain around us remains transformed, the gray sky above distorts to reveal the image of the entire flat plane. Craning my head up, it’s like I’m looking at a detailed terrain map. Even the edges of the plane are visible, precipitous cuts that lead into the abyss.

The centipede is visible on the sky projection, its black, chitinous form writhing, though the scale of the projection makes it seem small, the size of a normal centipede.

Around us on the ground, the world shifts from the unmarred savannah. In our midst, the two ascendants reappear, separated from one another by only a hundred feet. Several ascendant proteges dash backward as the centipede–large enough to scrape into the sky projection–manifests on top of them.

Time slows as the centipede on the ground surges forward on a tangle of limbs, the centipede in the sky projection mirroring the motion. They’re two angles displaying the same scene–the climax to this conflict.

The Life practitioner’s adversary glows red from within with ascendant energy, his eyes almost molten in his sockets. He almost looks like he’s being electrocuted. It’s like when we forced Karanos into making the return beacon. Energy had similarly poured into him, and the end result?

A blast big enough to kill Maria.

But this isn’t quite like then. This fire elementalist ascendant isn’t making a return beacon. He’s–

Suddenly, a plume of fire flares skyward. In the sky projection, it’s thin but luminous, like a glowing thread. In the main projection around us, the ascendant is engulfed by a pillar of white hot flames that crackle with ascendant energy.

There’s no way he survives that, even with the fire resistance afforded to Sun practitioners. The suicide tactic isn’t surprising, giving that he’s an ascendant, but the glowing lance doesn’t even hit the centipede. The insect rears its body back away from the molten pillar, its mandibles chittering. Hovering by the centipede’s eye, and smaller than even one of the facets of the insect’s compound eye, is the frowning Life practitioner.

A wash of flames explodes out a moment later, with the first flaming pillar serving as the epicenter. The fire sweeps over all of us like a tsunami, red ascendant energy crackling within the flames and giving them superlative speed and strength. The centipede screeches and tries to escape, but there’s nowhere to escape to–its body, longer than some rivers, is engulfed. Looking at the sky projection, my stomach drops–it reveals that the fire courses over the entire plane like an alight oil spill. The swiftness and totality of the destruction is mind-numbing.

The scene shifts to later, when the world softly smolders, the last embers dying out. Around us, the centipede’s corpse sticks half out of lava, its limbs still twitching.

Snarling with rage, the Life practitioner’s narrowed eyes survey the destruction. Having already revived, the fire elementalist faces his adversary, grinning with malice. He says something, but Karanos provides no sound to the projection. Spitting, the Life practitioner tries to tear the veil, only for the way to be closed to him, the fabric of reality unyielding.

“This plane was so thoroughly ruined that its connection to other planes weakened,” Ash says. “And as a result, its veil is tough and pliant–difficult to pierce.”

I can tell that Karanos slows time for what happens next, so we can see. The Life practitioner frantically moves to cut into the centipede and withdraw a series of eggs. No insect’s anatomy would ever have them so close to the exoskeleton. If I had to guess, the Life practitioner stimulated the cells of the centipede to rapidly differentiate into ovum.

The eggs disappear into a storage ring, then the Life practitioner flies away.

The fire elementalist shoots him with impunity. His fire bolt destroys the entire right side of the Life practitioner, but the man repairs the damage and continues on. The elementalist trails behind while raining fire down on him, short pops of energy that melt and ruin body parts with uncanny precision.

Karanos cuts to the future, showing the battered Life practitioner escaping through a veil vulnerability. The fire elementalist huffs and crosses his arms, then darts into the same tear in the veil, continuing his pursuit.

Then the scene pans back to the centipede corpse, embedded in dark, cooled lava. Part of its chitin begins to twitch. Then, thousands of centipedes emerge and crawl into the ruined world.

The projection fades.

“Vizier’s Crown is inhospitable, even to centipedes. But there is one that has managed to survive, a mutant kept alive by its ability to leech off of the ambient energy of the nether.” He nods to Jeseria, and the woman punches at the heavens. A gale of wind cuts through the dark, oppressive clouds, revealing a sky dominated by a coil of violet.

It hits me then–it’s like the violet and green skylights from the nethereal rift in which Euryphel and I took refuge. And the centipede, a mutant able to live off of the energy of the nethereal light...it’s like a riftbeast.

Perhaps it is a riftbeast. I still don’t know how rifts form and develop attachments to mortal worlds, but maybe what Ash was saying is a clue. It’s connection to other planes weakened... and it isn’t a stretch for its connection to Eternity itself to wane, as well.

“For the hunt, you must find the centipede and kill it. The victor wins rights to the centipede’s body. This isn’t as much of a challenge if you’re all allowed to die as many times as you want.” He holds up three fingers. “Three lives. Your mentors will be both arbiters and teachers.” Ash smiles, his fangs glinting in the violet light of the sky coil. “And based on what I’ve seen of your skills, if you intend to kill the centipede with raw strength, you’ll be in for a nasty surprise.”