1

The team waited anxiously for the rock to come back through the portal. It seemed like a long time, but in reality, it was only seconds before it returned. Zack dodged the rolling rock, then jumped into the portal himself. His transfer into the room was instantaneous and uneventful. Damon stood ahead of him in the murky room, and he walked to him.

The room was completely empty. Behind them and to their sides were three large stone walls constructed of gray bricks, two feet wide by one foot tall.

Zack stared up at the ceiling. “Hey, Jordan was right. It does have high ceilings,” he muttered, bemused. The ceiling came to an abrupt end where the fourth wall should have been. Instead, the space in front of them opened onto a vast circular courtyard in the center of the tower. A soft white light filtered in from above the ceiling’s edge, giving the room what little illumination it had.

The two orcs walked into the courtyard as more team members zipped through the portal behind them. They peered up. The open space extended up the full height of the tower. The circular walls tapered inward as they got closer to the top. The light descending through the tower came from a small opening in the roof. Through that hole, they saw the morning sky.

The same large bricks that composed the walls of the first room ran in a spiral pattern up the courtyard interior. The members saw openings in the courtyard wall scattered throughout the structure. They looked much like the opening they had just walked through, except these openings were lined with stone guardrails.

Near the top of the tower, the wall stopped. They saw only pillars and guardrails that circled the courtyard. Suspended high above the courtyard floor, two bridges crossed over the open space at opposite angles and differing heights.

As the members flocked around the two orcs, Emma cast Fire Glow and sent the orb toward the top of the tower. With the extra light, the members observed more details on the interior wall. Vines crawled from the seams between the bricks in erratic spots. As the orb ascended higher, they had a better view of the bridges and saw that they were perfectly flat with no guards or handrails. The bridges led to openings in the interior wall.

“Just so you know,” Janna whispered. “I’m afraid of heights.”

Emma drew the orb back but kept the spell active because of the main floor’s dim lighting. They walked back to the first room, which had another green portal that shimmered on the eastern wall.

“I guess that takes us to the next room,” Harper said.

“Damn. I thought we’d be taking this floor by floor,” Zack grumbled. “Do we have to step through those things for every room?”

Harper shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“See if you can punch a hole through the wall, away from the portal,” Damon instructed Harper. “Maybe we can bypass the portals.”

Harper raised her eyebrows. “You want me to pound through every wall we come across?” she asked doubtfully. “You know how long that’s gonna take?”

“Just do it,” Damon replied thinly.

She glanced at Emma. “Can you conjure Acid Fly while I use Fire Bullet?”

Emma nodded and sent the acid-dripping bug to a section of the wall three feet away from the portal. The cartoonish insect banged repeatedly against the surface and deposited its purple acid, which sizzled on the stone’s surface and produced a dry cracking noise.

Harper charged her spell and thrust it toward the fractured rock. The brick exploded. The teammates ducked as rocks whizzed past their ears, flying to the far side of the room. As the smoke around the hole in the wall cleared, the members saw what was on the other side.

2

“That’s just fucking great,” Zack muttered.

He gazed through the hole, seeing nothing but compacted earth and soil. A clump of dirt dislodged and fell unceremoniously onto the slate floor.

Harper glanced at Damon and smirked. “Unless you want to break out the shovels, we’re gonna have to take the portals.”

“Oh, shut up,” the general said, grinning.

3

Harper suggested that the members turn on their Defense Buff before transferring to the next room. The spell used .75 mana per second and even Zack, who had an MPR at .86, could cover it. The spell boosted their endurance and constitution by 25%.

They passed through the portal and discovered that the second room had been cleared. The smashed remains of skeletons lay strewn across the floor.

“Harris might have killed them,” Harper offered.

“That’s promising,” Ethan muttered to Jordan. “Maybe he’s in here.”

“It could have been Brett, too,” Janna said. “He could be somewhere in here.”

The team agreed.

“Damn. I wanted to bag a skeleton,” Zack sighed.

When they entered the room, the members noticed that they were at a much higher altitude in the tower. The air was thinner, and the room was well lit from the opening in the roof above them. A three-foot-high stone guardrail ran along the side facing the courtyard. They walked toward it and peered over the edge.

Janna groaned. They were above both bridges now.

Damon gazed up at the roof opening. He saw the blue sky through the eight-inch circular aperture. Ethan counted the floors above them and determined there were only fifteen.

Emma stared across the expanse of the courtyard and saw the opening to another room across from them. She moaned. “Look, more Dryads,” she said, gesturing across the open space.

The team turned their attention to the room.

“Uh-uh, those aren’t Dryads,” Harper said. “They’re shorter and their eyeballs are configured differently.”

Only four feet tall, the creatures looked like moving tree trunks. Two lines of yellow eyeballs ran down the vertical axis of the trunks. There appeared to be a dozen of the creatures in the room. Even from their distance, they heard the monsters making strange belching sounds.

The team considered picking off the mobs from afar with their long-ranged weapons and spells, but decided not to, afraid they would miss out on an Epiphany cloud.

Damon insisted Harper try shooting through the wall again.

She stared at him, exasperated, but complied. She charged her Fire Bullet, shot it at the portal-side wall, and got the same result: a large hole that revealed more earth on the other side.

“Happy now?” she grumbled.

He nodded, ignoring her tone.

They looked for loot, but found nothing and proceeded on to the portal.

4

The third room was also cleared of mobs. On a floor that was covered with a thick layer of mud, dead goblin-like creatures were piled in heaps. They inspected the corpses, which were badly decomposed. Mold had formed on their remains.

“Whatever happened here, I think we missed it,” Zack said.

Damon grunted. He scanned the room’s perimeter. Mud squeezed between the bricks on the three walls that framed the room. A large opened treasure chest, constructed of wood and iron banding, sat in the room's corner.

“It’s been looted,” Harper said glumly.

The pervasive stench of mud and earth overwhelmed Damon. The air was humid and hard to breathe. As he inhaled, he felt dirt particles enter his throat. “Man, it’s disgusting in here,” he muttered.

The room’s only opening showed a darkened courtyard. Damon walked with Harper to the guardrail and peered up. They noticed tiny shafts of light penetrating through a stone ceiling above them.

“I think we’re in a basement,” Damon said.

Harper nodded.

The room they occupied was at the very bottom of the basement level, making the guardrail completely unnecessary. Mounds of solid mud packed the courtyard floor. Damon saw water trickling through the bricks and pooling in the silt. Harper coughed against the microscopic sediment floating in the air.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Zack grumbled.

5

Once Brett watched them enter the tower, he hiked down from his perch on the opposite hill and retraced their steps. He struggled to get over the enormous stone slabs at the tower’s base, but the wolves helped him. He pointed to the edge, and two wolves braced against the rock. He stepped on their backs, which were as stiff as a wooden plank, to reach the next step.

A pack of thirteen wolves followed him now. A baker’s dozen, he mused. They were his family. He thought about going into the tower after his ex-teammates but reconsidered. He did not know how long it would take them to advance through the rooms, so he decided to wait.

He turned away from the tower, climbed back down, and waded into the small lake, approaching the black glitch. Standing a foot away from the black shape that had ripped through the boundary, he could feel its heavy force. The hair on his body fluttered on a horizontal vector, drawn by its magnetic energy.

Brett squinted against the intense rays of light projecting from the glitch. While his wolf pack whined restlessly around him, he stared, mesmerized, at the glitch. He was sure the water realm was on the other side. It had to be where the water was coming from. But how could he know for certain?

He wanted to escape to that realm and leave the team’s rejection and betrayal behind him. He gazed down at his wolves, sitting patiently in the turbulent lake water. “If I go through,” he said. “I want you to follow me.”

The alpha wolf whined.

As a test, Brett raised his arm, letting it pass through the glitch. The muscles in his body clenched as an icy scourge sped through his veins. He cried out painfully and struggled to tear his arm away, but he couldn’t move it even an inch. Black lines shot through his veins and the pain became unbearable. Simultaneously, a multitude of human voices screamed at him; cries of agony and despair overwhelmed his mind.

Brett lost the strength in his legs and buckled into the water, but his arm remained fixed to its position in the glitch. His shoulder wrenched painfully against his own weight. He hobbled back up to lessen the pain and saw that the black glitch was expanding over the realm border, widening. More water flooded in through the larger opening, rushing past him and pushing against his hips.

It’s feeding off me, he thought. The black thing is feeding off of me. The glitch’s black lines swarmed through his arteries and the rims of his eyes turned dark as charcoal.

But his pain decreased. The screaming voices clamoring into his fragile mind were muffled now. Over the rush of water that streamed against his leather armor, he looked for his wolves and saw that they had retreated to the shoreline. He didn’t blame them. The current was too powerful. The only thing that kept him from being swept away was the glitch’s grip on his arm.

The voices in his head stopped completely now, and a singular being spoke to him from within the black mass. Brett recognized the voice from the prep work the team had done before entering the realms. It had changed fundamentally, becoming less human, almost primitive, but it was still the voice of Will Harris.

Brett listened as the new life-form told him of its plans for him.