This time, Gora really pushed them to move fast. There was no time for introspection or sightseeing; they were nearly jogging as they passed through the ruins at an angle to their previous direction of travel.

Continuing the direction they had been going before would make them too easy to find, she explained when Ava complained about the longer route home. All they would have to do to find them would be to follow the straight route from Tree through where they had spotted them last.

Sure, the Inquisitors didn’t seem to care about them the first time, but Gora wasn’t going to take the chance that they change their mind down the line. Rather safe than sorry, after all.

It took them nearly a full ‘day’ of travel to reach the edge of the city, despite their increased pace. They didn’t take the shortest route to the edge, and constantly had to stop and hide while Ava rested and caught her breath. She still wasn’t back to her old self and probably wouldn’t be for a while. According to Gora, it could take several months to fully heal that much soul damage.

Or at least as fully healed as she was going to get. It was never quite going to be the same again, though hopefully it wouldn’t cause any long term issues as long as she didn’t make a regular habit of getting her soul butchered.

Rita herself was glad for the breaks. Apart from getting a chance to rest her many, many sore feet, she used a few of the longer rests to pop back into the white room where Alice was, or what she’d begun calling her ‘Mindspace’ in the (dubious) privacy of her own head. Each time she found Alice still fast asleep, horribly mangled chest somehow rising and falling rhythmically with each breath.

To her concern, the jagged tears in Alice’s mental body or whatever it was that this was showed no signs of healing yet. They didn’t bleed, but they hadn’t scabbed up or started closing in any way. Even a second dose of… whatever it was that she fished out of herself didn’t seem to have any more impact.

It was with a feeling of disappointment that she pulled back into the real world each time. She missed Alice.

Their new direction of travel took them through a section of the city that Rita hadn’t traversed before, in either this world or in her memories of the real world.

No, that wasn’t quite accurate. She had passed this way, back in the real word (or rather, the real Rita had), but whatever this place was, it did not look familiar at all.

It still appeared to be an empty and abandoned modern city, but the entire architectural style was different. Cardale City had been mostly modernist, with a few post-modernist influences here and there, all blocky and utilitarian. This place showed a clear new-classical bent to its architecture, with plentiful arches and pillars in aesthetically pleasing lines.

It still looked like a godforsaken ruin, but at least it looked like a godforsaken ruin with style.

Which made sense when she actually took some time to think about it. Cardale just hadn’t been that big. Back home, she could have walked from one side of the city to the other in an hour or two, but it took almost a full day just to reach the edge here from the Tree in the centre. Even accounting for detours and difficult terrain caused by collapsed buildings, it just did not match up. The Domain had to be made up of many different pieces of cities, all smushed together.

A theory that was all but confirmed when they reached the edge of the ‘City Zone’ and the buildings just stopped.

“Well. It’s certainly wild,” Rita remarked to the others as they stood at the edge of the city, staring out over the ‘Wilderness Zone’ from underneath a particularly impressive archway, a bit like a smaller Arc de Triomphe.

“I’ve never seen it like this before either,” Gora rumbled. “Usually, it’s all covered with fog. You can barely see ten metres around you. First time it’s all out in the open like this that I’ve seen.”

“Yes. It looks rather ridiculous this way,” Zaxier commented, lounging casually in his basket at Bob’s shoulder. “Like a terrible idea improvised by an inebriated diety.”

Almost as far as the eye could see, the land was made up little ‘patches’, each with a different kind of terrain on them, each maybe a single square kilometre in size, though not even remotely square. One would be swampy, with stale pools of water dotted with mangrove trees and next to it would be a dry, sandy desert or a blooming field of flowers and tall grass. It looked like some god had stitched together a patchwork quilt of as many different biomes as they could lay their hands on in a weird, interlocking pattern that only made sense in their head.

Without the Tree sustaining it, however, Rita could already see where the biomes were starting to bleed into one another, equalizing out into whatever the natural environment for this area was, which appeared to be rocky, relatively barren terrain with only a few hardened grasses and shrubs poking out.

“Usually, the fog is thick enough to blur the boundaries between the environments. Makes the whole thing seem surreal and mysterious. Like this, yeah, it looks kinda silly,” Gora continued.

“You should have let me take the big mouth-on-legs,” Ava sulked. “I’m going to be bloody useless here if we get attacked again.”

“You do not want an Inquisitor to see you raising the dead,” Gora countered. “And they already knew where we were. We had no choice but to get moving.”

Ava had animated the thing anyway, but as she’d explained it, she’d done it the ‘quick and dirty’ way, which, apparently, ruined the corpse for doing it the ‘proper’ way. She’d ridden the thing for maybe thirty minutes or so, helping them make good time initially, before it had simply collapsed like a rag doll.

They’d left the corpse right there where it had fallen.

“So what now?” Rita asked as Gora bashed in a nearby door to one of the buildings at the edge with one arm.

“Now we get some sleep,” she replied. “And then we tackle the final stretch fresh and rested.”

“We’re not going to push through?” Rita asked. Not that she was complaining, she was exhausted. She had four times as many legs to move as the others!

“We’ve been up for nearly twenty hours,” Samual said, pushing past them and into the building, mace in hand and head on a swivel.

Twenty hours?? Rita glanced up at the sun, still sitting in the same place in the sky.

Fuck, this was going to take some getting used to.

After an all too short nap, Rita was shaken awake by an apologetic looking Bob, his face and head still wrapped in bandages.

Turns out that similarly how these crazy people picked their own day length, the length of a ‘night’ was equally arbitrary and depended on when you woke up and how much sleep you wanted to have.

Before she’d even properly wiped the sleep out of her eyes, Samual had stuck another ration pack in her hands which she quickly devoured. Nothing fancy, just some salted and dried meat and a few dry biscuits, but she nevertheless practically inhaled it.

Where he kept getting these, she had no idea. His pack was large enough for them, sure, but surely they had been eating rations on the in as well? Their packs were proper backpacks, not like Rita’s own, but it still seemed odd that they had filled the entire thing with water and rations. What about a change of clothes? Mind you, she had also never seen him take off his armor, so maybe Samual didn’t have changes of clothes in there. Presumably he did so when he went to do his business, but he even appeared to sleep in it.

That was weird, right? Rita really didn’t know much about suits of armor other than the pictures of knights that she’d seen in documentaries, but surely those things were uncomfortable to sleep in? Even Gora took off her leather jerkin when she slept.

Still, before Rita had time to gather up the courage to ask questions, they set off again. Now they were no longer hiking between eerily silent, empty buildings, but rather crossing quickly from one patchwork piece of land to the next.

It was during this part of their travel that Rita made two observations.

One, the sun, while stuck in a permanent noon-like position that made escape from it near impossible, was nowhere near as blistering as the one she remembered from back home. That, or her new body was somehow resistant to sunburn, because despite walking through the sun for hours on end and having milky white skin, the only effect she experienced was that where her skin was exposed to direct sunlight, she eventually turned a very light shade of pink. Since nobody else seemed to be suffering from sunburn, the first possibility seemed quite likely.

Two, rocky fields of boulders sucked to cross, but were still mildly better than wet, sucking swamp-mud that you sunk into up till your first leg joint and turned the entire bottom of your abdomen and thorax an even, muddy brown. But that was still far better than loose, shifting sand dunes. And she could state this with absolute certainty after their journey took them through all three, in sequence.

They saw plenty of monsters as they walked, like the gigantic butterfly that briefly fluttered past or the pack of two-headed jackal-like creatures that watched them from a distance. For the most part, however, they were skittish, behaving more like animals in the wild than bloodthirsty monsters. A large, many-limbed crocodile that Gora called a ‘Crocapede’ stalked them through the shallows of the swampy area for a little while, until Ava, on Zaxier’s suggestion, sent her badly damaged rhino-monkey to stagger over to it. It quickly snatched up the offered treat and disappeared back into the deeper water, happily munching on its meal.

It was actually rather relaxing. Like a nature hike while spaced out on mushrooms.

Eventually, they crested a particularly hilly biome which gave Rita a fantastic view of their destination. A bizarre structure was visible in the distance that had to be the ‘Outpost’. For some reason she had imagined something like a large wooden mansion, perhaps with a palisade wall to keep out the Crocapedes.

Instead, right at the edge of the patchwork quilt of the Wilderness Zone was a section of very 21st century looking construction. A modern office block, embedded in and seemingly growing out of a mound of smooth stone, like a massive, squat stalagmite.

The windows had been reinforced with metal and wooden covers which looked like they contained arrow slits and several other Mad-Max-meets-King-Arthur style additions had been made to it, but the original shape of the building was unmistakable.

“Is that…?” Rita asked, pointing at the strange building.

“Yeah, that’s Triskellion’s Outpost,” Gora sighed happily. “Thank the gods, I can’t wait to take a bath.”

At the mention of a bath, there were several murmers of agreement from the rest of the group. Rita couldn’t disagree. Her own raggy clothes were basically more filth than cloth at this point and the rest of her wasn’t much better. She’d basically been too scared to touch her hair since they’d set off.

“But… that’s a building!” she exclaimed. “Like, a building from my world!”

“You mean the Otherstone?” Gora asked. “Yeah, biggest single piece of it ever dragged out of the City Zone. It doesn’t actually go all the way down, what you see there is basically the entire thing. It’s really just a cap resting on top of a normal mage-stone fort.”

Rita hurried after them as they set off down the final hill, still staring at the strange construction. She could make out what appeared to be inwards curving stone walls just barely peeking out from behind the towering bulk of the structure, possibly enclosing a courtyard or something else back there.

At the end of the day, she supposed it was just a slightly funny-shaped medieval castle that someone had dragged a giant piece of…

“Wait a second… did you say dragged!?”