I sat hard, my breath coming in gulps. Felix kneeled a touch more gracefully, supporting himself with his sword. The Champion's corpse leaked blood along the ornate carpets. The after effects of abusing my powers so much were beginning to settle in, transforming the world around me into a blurry haze. The migraine I had grown used to by now, but the physical strain of using the void added its own punishment.

After Felix mustered enough energy, he pinned the Champion's sword wrist to the ground with his boot and pried his sword from his fingers. After a moment of contemplation he stabbed the Champion several times in the torso. Just to be sure. Jokul made no sound except the sickening squelch of steel plunging into his flesh.

Felix patted down the Champion, searching his pockets and coming up with a coin purse and several wicked throwing knives. “Bastard doesn't keep much on him. We can’t stay long. Increate knows where the Archon is. Tending to a much bigger problem than us, I imagine. We don't want to be here when he comes back.”

I calmed my breathing enough to speak. “Where do we go?”

“Home, of course. There are powerful people there who should have some allegiance to us. Our only other option is to find somewhere random to hide where no one would expect us.”

“I have a safehouse I’ve been paying for in case something happens.” I spoke mostly to distract myself. “It’s not far from here.”

"This qualifies as ‘something.’ I have one too. But we want to avoid residential areas for now. Too high density. Clusters of people will draw the demons. It’ll be utter chaos.”

"Should we try to release the other prisoners?" I said.

Felix buckled Jokul's sword onto his hip. "I never really trusted any of the others from Amelie in Yellow. We were competing for Astaroth's attention, after all. Leave them."

He grabbed my arm and hauled me after him. I gritted my teeth and stumbled in his wake.

We wandered through the palace for five minutes until finding a side exit. The emptiness of the palace was eerie, silent save for the occasional shriek in the distance.

We stumbled out into the light of the setting sun, clasping each other for support. As exhausted as I was, I had spent much of my time recently meditating and recovering. The fight with Jokul had exhausted most of my power, but I still had around an hour of time magic and a few strong bursts of the void left in me. Compared to Zephyr's poison, a little exhaustion didn't matter.

The side exit must have been for delivery of goods into the palace. They were likely usually manned by some guards, but now the unattended gates had been flung wide open.

We followed the path until we came across the main roads.

People rode horses at full gallop down the streets, mindless of the others in their path. At least there seemed to be very little in the way of children. As innocents they would have been spared being trapped within the tesseract. Felix and I looked to be the youngest people around.

We avoided others as much as possible. Some people ran down the street clutching random belongings. A guard rode past on an unsaddled horse, not bothering to spare us a glance. Our bared weapons did not make us look suspicious under the circumstances. Most people clutched something, even if it was no more than a steel rod.

Every once in a while an inhuman shriek stirred people into a greater frenzy.

The Gardens seemed impossibly far away. One moment at a time we advanced forward. Easier to keep going when your battle is only with the present. The voice in the back of my head that loves to sabotage me whispered the time in fifteen second intervals. A unique sort of torture.

"There was something about the way you fought," I said, finally having caught my breath enough to converse while talking. "You've improved. Significantly."

Felix remained silent for a full minute. I gave him his space to talk whenever he was ready. I had my suspicions about what Felix had been hiding. He had killed the oracle and been trapped within the tesseract, but his involvement with Astaroth went deeper than that. I myself was no paragon of virtue, and could think of no criticism I could levy against him that wouldn't be hypocritical.

We continued along a side road. The landmarks were beginning to look familiar. We would make it to the Gardens within a mile.

"Astaroth first began speaking to me a year ago," he said, his voice going stronger as he went on. "At first I thought I had gone insane. This voice just appeared in my head. I was at Amelie in Yellow that night, smoking that damn opium. You know how you used that mesfera hallucinogen to communicate with Paimon? Whenever I smoked opium I would hear Astaroth, whispering to me. He told me things I couldn't possibly know---mostly mathematical formula and the like. When I looked them up, everything he told me was true. After that, I had to believe him."

"So you were talking with Astaroth the whole time," I said. "Whenever we were gambling together and you were smoking opium. You were hearing his voice."

"Not really," said Felix. "Most of the time when I was around you, the voice kept silent. As if you were some sort of blind spot. I don't think he can see what I see. It's not a possession, just communication. But eventually Astaroth noticed your presence and took interest."

"And the reason you've become so much stronger..." I said.

"Astaroth accepted me as one of his Echoes already." Felix looked away. "If he didn't end up having a use for me, I would have been dead. It's my fault, Leones. Lyra's involvement, yours. If we never met, you would have never been dragged into this."

"No," I said. "I think we were always destined to be trapped here. What power did Astaroth grant you?"

He sounded relieved to be discussing something besides his guilt. "It's almost like I can see the future, but not quite. It's a mental enhancement more than anything. I can calculate the trajectories of everything. The most likely paths to occur. It's like a hyper-awareness of my spatial boundaries and how they function. It's almost impossible to describe."

That sounded almost like a far more advanced version of my magical awareness. The benefits for someone like Felix would be enormous. I was almost jealous. Would my void magic nullify his ability? As much as I hated thinking about fighting my friend, he may not be the only Echo of Astaroth we encountered.

If we were going to make it through this, I needed to start trusting Felix. Defeating Jokul was only the first step of surviving this ordeal.

We passed through the Gardens in silence after that. We did not even speak after noticing the iridescent trees marking the beginning of philosopher territory. Felix pointed at something glistened between the branches: thick strands of a glistening material that reminded me all too much of a spider web. My grip tightened on Dasein as we continued along the path.

One of the trees had been sliced cleanly in half so it fell directly along the path. The cut was so smooth it appeared to have been made with a single stroke from a giant axe. Unsure why I did it, I stopped to run my hand along its smooth trunk. It was a peaceful being that had basked in the light of the sun since ancient times, after all.

Strange, to pay homage to a tree when demons would soon take countless human lives in the city.

Farther along we found a woman’s corpse. Philosopher Vera, a kind and uncommonly humble person I had spoken with a handful of times. She strolled down the path every morning to---she would say with a smile---stretch out her old knees. Her head was a dozen feet from the remains of her body. Felix insisted we had no time to waste staring.

I muttered a prayer for her under my breath.

A resounding boom cracked in the distance. The ground shook below our feet.

“What was that?” I said.

Felix’s only response was a shrug and picking up the pace.

Farther along, we discovered our first spider-demon. A vile abomination, humanoid enough to evoke a visceral disgust at its sheer wrongness. Its skin was translucent, organs the color of bruises visible beneath. A broken spear jutted from its abdomen and blue ichor leaked from an assortment of puncture wounds. An array of many-jointed legs at least a dozen feet long sprouted from its scalp, armored in a metallic-looking chitin. Whenever it was upright it must have balanced its humanoid body between the legs; the thought of how it must have scuttled around made me feel nauseated.

Felix pointed above us to where Philosopher Aeron’s body dangled from the branch skewering his heart. I swallowed bile.

“At least they don’t kill like spiders,” I whispered, a strange attempt at a joke I immediately regretted.

“Demons have no need to eat. They kill only for pleasure.” Felix’s gaze lingered on the man before we continued along.

How did it feel to be him, looking at all these corpses of people you knew, knowing that you were in some way responsible for it? I felt numb to each new sighting, my mind refusing to truly consider what I was seeing. But from the tension in Felix’s face, I knew he felt each and every one of them.

The nervous knot in my stomach grew the deeper we went. Dasein’s weight offered some small reassurance. I would have loved nothing more than to lie down for a twelve-hour nap.

Once I thought I saw a figure scuttling between the iridescent trees.

“We aren’t far from Augur’s place,” said Felix.

Would we find my teacher’s corpse there, impaled on one of his precious trees? I picked up my pace---more of a frantic shuffling than a dignified march, but it would get me there. Felix glanced back at me and nodded.

We turned the corner to the arboretum. The sight made us pause.

At least five spider-demons scuttled around the immediate area, suspended on their webs. Their movements were purposeful, encircling the lone man in the center. Surrounding him were several massacred demons as well as the body of an unfamiliar woman. Judging from her expensive clothes she may have been a random noble who fled towards the safety of the philosophers.

The top half of her skull had been completely sheared off.

Judging from the look on Augur’s face, he was taking that personally. The difference from his usual tranquil expression made my heart speed up even more. His snarl transfigured his face into something feral.

The defeated foes around him had either been crushed or dissected into neat chunks. Soon, I understood why.

Augur disappeared and reappeared in a tree some thirty feet away, poised on a heavy branch next to one of the spider-demons. No flurry of snow or wind marked his initial location like when Zephyr moved quickly. One second he stood one place, the next he was in another.

The spider-demon sensed his presence and lashed out with one chitinous leg. Augur’s hand sliced the air in front of him. The leg scything toward him simply disappeared, ichor leaking from the perfect wound left behind. Another gesture and its entire upper half vanished. The remains of the demon collapsed from the branch, throwing up a plume of snow on impact.

Simultaneously two other bodies plummeted to the ground. The missing leg had skewered one of the spider-demons through the head, teleported directly through its skull. The other sight was more gruesome: the upper half fused directly into another demon, forming a ghastly collection of frantic limbs until it slammed into the ground.

Everything stopped moving. The remaining spider-demons must have had enough intelligence to recognize they were in trouble.

Augur noticed us.

He appeared at our side. No displacement of wind. The snow around us didn’t so much as shift.

“You boys have some explaining to do.”

Neither of us spoke.

My teacher pointed at the tree containing the last two demons. Wood groaned. Leaves trembled. Hairline fractures appeared in a spiral pattern over every inch of the tree before it collapsed in on itself, fragments of glimmering wood and occasional demon exploding into a controlled storm. It coalesced into an orb no wider than a man’s head, rotating at a gentle speed.

“Talk.”