Chalice slit space between xX and yX, and a dark opening was opened surgically in the Veil before me. Without the slightest hesitation, Celestia, Jensa, and Keva stepped forward into it with me.

The second I stepped through, Briggs smashed it shut, and burned away any sign of it ever happening on Janus III’s end. Not that anyone was going to be looking for it out in the middle of nowhere...

My Null sliced through it on my end, reuniting the sides, and the Veil expanded back into and sealed up the opening flawlessly, like water filling in a gap, and we were sitting in the Gloom.

The air was filled with some kind of faux shadow particle, like a dust in the air that was actually motes of shadow energy. The Gloom was basically a shadow plane, the place where all shadows intersected... including the shadow of the Warp. That also meant it was between the Warp and reality, in its own way, even as it stood outside them, equally distant from both... except for the fact that a whole lot of psychopathic crazies with Warp Affinity had declared it their homeland.

Naturally, we had devilsight, and the darkness didn’t affect us, and the combination of smoke/fog/sand sight let us look through the haze. I should just call it hazesight, I mused to myself, sent that off to the girls, and they agreed that folding them all together was not a bad thing.

The local landscape was, hmm... crawling? Yes, it was moving subtly, mostly when I wasn’t looking at it. Before and after definitely had subtle differences in illumination and texture, and the landscape was shifting. Some areas were venting clouds of shadowy stuff, other areas were running or flowing slowly, almost oozing around.

I spun a whole circle, and half-smiled at something in the distance. The others saw it at the same time, and we all headed off that way.

Lightfoot still worked fine. We skated over to it, ignoring the yielding, icky texture of the surface and the way it was veeeeery slowly moving underneath us, coasting up to the ruins of the drow Portal.

The crystalline arch, a hundred feet in diameter, was cracked and shattered, warped and twisted by reality itself going bonkers around it. Still, it was unreasonably tough, having somehow survived a full-blown Warp shifting, and even the area around it had regrown from the rupture and returned to something approaching normal.

The Gloom had its own Veil, such as it was.

The crystalline structure was, of course, completely worthless and non-functional. The landing bore traces of a dozen different kinds of spatial, psychic, and atomic forces acting on it, and was cracked and warped even worse than the archway was.

I plunged the point of Chalice into a section of the arch, and let her feed on it. Crystals that hard with planar and psychic resonance could only be a good meal for her, a point I noted for the girls if and when they also got their orichalcum swords. I was promptly given a good ribbing, as they didn’t have a shard of the original Chalice and had to make do with merely Full-Tempered adamantine.

Doing a shape-changer infiltration of drow society was a non-starter. This was a race with TL 17 tech that went down all the darkest trees with a complete lack of restraint, and their psychic aura of ongoing corruption was not something that could be imitated by someone who wasn’t also Warp-tainted. While we could look flawlessly like a certain quartet of pink-haired bikini-wearing bladewitches, we’d completely lack the psychic aura and so stand out like sore thumbs, outsiders playing at being drow.

Our objective at this point was to get the four of us to the outskirts of Gloomheart to get a planar lock, and as more girls got their Swords up to Riftcutting status, get them here to establish a planar lock. My sword fanatic trio here had been going on rampant slaughter in some of the fallen cities to get their Swords up to snuff, a minimum of two uses per Renewal before I’d even think about bringing them here.

A lot of demons, animated tech, and xenos had fed their Swords to make it so, and there were a lot of other Ranthas coming in behind eager to do the same. The fallen cities were being purged with remarkable speed, such as it was, as Rantha-bloods weren’t the only ones who wanted to Feed their Weapons. Indeed, the Ranthas had to restrain themselves to allow all the others to get their Naming Karma per day, before everyone set off on getting Levels Karma.

The invaders on Janus III were feeding themselves to our people. It was rather charitable of them.

-Consensus?-, I /asked, and we all pointed in the same direction, off down one of the mountain-sized tunnels looming in the distance of this small offshoot to a planar cavern. -Well, who wants to queue up the traveling music?-

Dark wings erupted from all of our backs, formed by our hair. We’d all gone for a common theme here, with jet black skin and black hair, and Sama-blue eyes. The black hair alone meant we didn’t look like drow, our Curse-brands were up in their distinctive hue, and we definitely looked like we belonged in Gloom.

And no, we didn’t go for the bikini armor look, either.

Our wings began to burn softly, vented out behind us, and we began to move.

-------

Everything we could ascertain from our purloined memories indicated that Gloom might be the size of a solar system, with long threads of itself growing this way and that in an irregular, slowly shifting maze of tunnels, junctions, and nexus points. This change was slow but constant, so the way to reach any particular location or Portals would slowly change over time, and some passages would fray and be intruded on by the Warp before falling away and vanishing forever, flaking off like dried bark or a withered limb.

Our collective memories told us that it had been at least ten thousand overland miles from Gloomheart to get to this location, not really all that far away for a Portal of such small size and status. Why it was originally here was lost to the millennia... perhaps there used to be an elvar settlement on Janus III that was abandoned, and their original family had a Gloom outpost here. Perhaps lack of use simply meant it was slowly severed from a nexal point and organically drifted out here, or even that this was the simplest and fastest point in the Gloom to establish a location to, i.e. Janus III’s shadows naturally converged here.

It didn’t matter, but it was fun to speculate. In any event, lived-lining meant we were going on the ground, and besides, we got more Karma that way.

Naturally enough, the Underweb had tons of nasty shit in it. All the nasty horrors on the Material could have big, nightmarish equivalents here, with a heavy dose of fear and dread, shadow-morphing, and hatred of light to go with them. The Warp was always wiggling its way in, so there was plenty of demonic corruption here and there, and so there were constant calls for entertaining the locals.

Vivic fire was, of course, not the thing here. Vivus was the energy of the material plane, and a hostile invader in the Gloom, as unnatural as necroic energies and Warp fires were. The applicable energy for a shadow-based realm was naturally shadowfire, the Shadow equivalent of flames, and one of our objectives here was to find a font of it to anoint our Swords so we could add it to our Arsenals... and establish a planar lock so my kids could do the same.

Time and distances were kind of mutable here, but being Nulls the dimensions didn’t play around us so much. Thus, we actually separated after cautiously assessing the threat level and speed of the locals (tolerable and slow compared to us), fanning out over hundreds of miles looking for the equivalent of a forest fire or a magma field.

---

It became swiftly apparent the cavern we appeared in was rather aberrant, probably healing from the Warp rupture that had likely torn a chunk of it away and since healed over. The landscape began to roll beneath us, turning into shadows of natural vistas. Given the nature of shadows, that meant the more broken the landscape was, the more shadows were generated, and so it was all dominated by hills and mountains, with occasional stretches of flatlands literally overshadowed by pinnacles and peaks all around.

There was water, as well, as long as the source was sufficiently deep to generate shadows and darkness.

Caves yawned everywhere, shadows of subterranean enclaves reflected here and there, mixing with the organic nature of the plane. It was noteworthy that artificially-generated landscapes never touched in here, as if the plane couldn’t reflect them.

Did that mean an ecumenopolis like Tellus was effectively sealed against the Gloom? It was an interesting thought...

The whole place, overlaid with the hazy shadow mist, definitely had a kind of dark fey vibe. The first forest of alien trees we entered loomed up like impossible skyscrapers, shadows dancing beneath them as if alive. Darkness rippled across impossibly high mountains, too sharp and severe to be real, knife-edged and dragging into the distance.

Naturally there were natives, elvar who had gone feral out in the Underweb and teemed throughout the shadowy realm, as well as escaped slaves, prisoners, and monsters of all sorts, all of whom existed in a happy, timelost existence of hunting one another and slaughter. Being naturally chaotic, those elvar were basically all in shades of grey, starting pale and gradually turning darker as they grew older, often becoming full-on drow and journeying to the great cities to form the violent lower classes there.

As we were outsiders, they naturally attacked us without thought, or tried to trail after us and hunt us. That was fine, had to add the ol’ Hunter of Foes: Elvar to the Feat Register, and Bane/Elvar to Slaughter on our Swords. They didn’t justify themselves, we didn’t justify ourselves; it was a fight, and they died when they attacked us.

Most of the time, we just ignored or bypassed them, and if they hesitated at all, we were past them and pulling away faster than they could follow without aerial mounts. Some of them did have aerial mounts, and thought they’d be clever with the tracking and dive-bombing. They did not enjoy finding out we could all fly in our way, and faster than their drakes and great raptors could.

Word did spread ahead of us, presumably through psychic means of tribal Shamans or Seers, as there were a few ambushes laid, or scouts on land or sky in position to track us and our movements. That we were roving about and not really stopping unless there was something interesting to kill or we were attacked was noted, especially after the complete slaughter we inflicted on anything that threw itself in our way.

But them gathering and coordinating meant information convergence. That was a good thing.

-------

The Shaman glared at me with bright orange eyes and purple hair, his skin almost black, and then my stinger poked him in the neck while my Tail administered his first Brand.

His whole body trembled, and his eyes grew frantically wide. “Yes,” I told him in Elvar learned a very long time ago. “This is where you end. Now, where can I find a discreet source of shadowfire?”

He tried to stop his lips from working, and then the second Brand lit up crimson on his spine. His body shuddered, his knees gave way, and he sank to the ground. “It is... I cannot...”

There was another snap, and he convulsed again. “M-Mistress, I beg you, do not...”

Snap! “Mistress...”

Snap! “Mistress... I will guide you there...”

Snap! “Yes, Mistress, I will guide you quickly there...”

Snap! “Mistress, I will handle everything, rest assured!”

Snap! “Mistress, thank you for this chance to serve you!”

Snap! He had no words to express his joy in the throes of ecstasy.