Zel made a quick mental note about the differing benefits that the specialized styles conferred even to the raw power of her traits, but she made the readout disappear right after and swiped to Fog Storage. A (Rusted) pot lid would work fine to catch loose gunpowder, she figured, since it was not exactly safe to use for cooking as it was.

After that, she took thirty more rifle cartridges out of storage, simply piling them onto the ground. It quickly became obvious why Zefaris wanted something to catch loose powder when she started ripping the cartridges open, pouring out the powder, and putting the bullets in the speedloader.

Cartridge by cartridge it went, and a question began to gnaw at the back of Zel’s head.

“What’s the issue with your left eye?” she asked. “I know it doesn’t work, but… Why the apprehension about getting a new one?”

Zefaris finished ripping up a cartridge and moved the pot lid and speedloader aside. With a deep sigh, she looked up at Zelsys.

“I… Think I’ve got some sort of shellshock from when I lost it,” she explained. “I could’ve had a Brass Eye put into the socket alongside the Homunculus Eye procedure, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s like the primitive part of my mind is too terrified of anything foreign ever coming near my left eye-socket ever again.

She pulled the Philosopher’s Eye out of her pocket, rubbing the stone against her shirt to polish it. “Maybe this is what I need to break past that. Can’t even imagine putting it in myself, though...”

For a few seconds she stared at the stone, then reluctantly held it out to Zelsys.

“I could probably grin and bear it if someone else did it,” she said, equally reluctantly. It was audible in her voice that she was fighting against her instincts even to consider having the artificial eye put in, but Zelsys quickly took her up on the offer.

In her opinion, the quicker an unpleasant procedure was done, the lesser its effects would be on a person. The idea of stapling a wound was, to her, preferable to having it meticulously stitched shut.

So, with a breath of Fog and a swift motion, she grabbed the eye with her right hand and pushed Zef’s hair out of the way with her left, holding her head. Putting her hands down the blonde held stone-still, her good eye shut tightly, even though her hands trembled.

Zel forced open the eyelids of Zef’s left eye-socket, greeted by a pinkish cavity with a featureless hole where the optic nerve would be. She pushed the Philosopher’s Eye into the eye-socket, and it sunk in without the slightest of resistance. Zef let out a single, quiet whimper when the eye went in, which Zelsys felt far worse for causing than every bit of suffering she’d ever inflicted upon others. A faint glimmer could be seen in the stone’s core in the moment before Zefaris closed her eye shut and pushed into a hug, one that Zel gladly reciprocated.

After a little while, Zefaris calmed down and pried herself away from Zel, cautiously opening her left eye. In the center of the black orb, a bead of shimmering white light formed. It darted to the surface, moving about in place of a pupil as Zefaris looked around.

Zef stared into Zel’s eyes, then hastily squeezed her left eyelid shut. She jerkily shook her head, remarking, “That’ll take getting used to… But at least it works.”

“See something weird?” Zelsys asked, curious.

“Just your optic nerve,” Zef answered as she gathered her things and continued filling the speedloader. “Could’ve sworn I saw those silver lines shaped into a glyph on the inside of your right eye”

While Zef continued her work, Zel made repeated attempts at manifesting ball lightning without the use of her hands, mostly focusing on her shoulders. After a stray arc struck the ground and ignited a few isolated grains of gunpowder, she made the choice to perform her experimentation elsewhere in the chamber.

The same results as before. The same struggle.

Not eager to keep trying the same thing until it worked she invoked, “Style: Beast…”

With the increased affinity to lightning and awareness of her own silver conduits that the style conferred, it became considerably easier to achieve her desired result. That is to say, it became possible.

It still took considerable effort, focus, and time, but after a couple attempts using Beast Style, Zel managed to manifest a pair of tiny lightning-beads, one above either shoulder. When she let go, they went zipping off into the air in random directions before fizzing out of existence.

She tried it again and again, and with yet more focus and effort, she even managed to direct the eyeball-sized beads of light in a general direction. They still wandered about in their zigzagging patterns, but at least they could be guided. It was still far too difficult and time-consuming to be of any use in a real fight, but Zelsys couldn’t help herself gnawing away at it even if she knew it wouldn’t reach a usable state during her time in the dungeon.

It was her fourth, or perhaps fifth attempt when she noticed the Caster leaning out of his nook, staring at her. Her immediate assumption was that he must be staring at her rear, considering the angle, but his beckoning hand made her doubt the assumption.

She walked over, squatting down to look the sitting bugman in his beady little eyes. With a gesture, he made another pillar lower down to widen the entryway of his and the Spearman’s hidey-hole. He dispelled her assumption when, in awkward wording, he asked, “Your… Heavenly fire. How did you obtain it?”

A tilt of her head and an eyebrow raised in confusion clued him in on the clunkiness of his speech.

“How do you say…” he murmured to himself, looking off to the side before he seemingly remembered, perking up, “Lightning! That’s the word. How did you obtain it?”

Smugly, she smiled and answered, “I cut a lightning bolt from the Living Storm.”

“I-I see, that does… Does explain it, I think...” he stuttered, visibly taken aback by the answer.

“What about you? No visible breathing method, no incantation, you just throw a green lightning bolt and stand there twitching like it’s you that got hit,” she continued, digging at the Caster’s vulnerability to his own abilities. She was prodding at him not just for the sake of prodding, but also out of curiosity.

“Ah, I have no lightning of my own,” he smiled sadly. “I merely know how to draw on the strength of a willing other. Without outside help, I can only exert command over the aspect of earth. My role in the Divine Army was fortification support, before this mess...”

“This mess?” Zel raised an eyebrow again.

“The war,” the Spearman cut in while the Caster still ruminated on his answer, his voice bitter and angry. “They told us we’d quash some hillbilly upstarts and be back before the festivities. Half a year later, most of our battalion lay dead in ditches and the rest of us only live as these twisted parodies of our former selves. We were sent out on recon one day, and found this place. The Loyalists only moved in recently, forced their way in through the Fog Gate using some artifact.”

“Any ideas as to why they might want to take over the dungeon?” Zel asked. She had her own opinions about the matter, but was also curious about the view of someone from the other side of the battle-line.

“They think the dungeon’s treasures can just be stolen and taken back to the surface world, that most of them aren’t mirages never meant to leave the Sea of Fog,” the Caster cackled this time. Before Zelsys could ask the question that immediately sprung to her head, he added that, “They think everything in the dungeon is permanent like your rewards. Even the walls are just a big lie, paper-thin sheets of pseudo-reality made concrete by the Core for as long as there are living things nearby. The moment the Core loses control, the cogworks start jamming, sinking into the Sea. Though, I suspect that’s exactly what the Emperor wants.”

The longer he talked, the more confusing and audibly deranged he became. In only a few sentences, the bugman started to sound like some rambling hermit. Still, some of what he said made sense, and Zelsys recognized some of the things he said, so she decided to play along.

“Two questions,” she said, gesturing with two fingers. “No, make that three. First, why are you telling me all this? Second, what do you mean by the dungeon sinking into the Sea of Fog? And third, why would the Emperor want such a thing to happen?”

“You challengers are our only hope of what we know ever reaching the surface, so I suppose helping you understand would increase the chance of you spreading the truth of things,” conceded the Caster, shifting about in place and taking up a more comfortable sitting position. “For your second question, think of it this way: the world is an island, the dungeon is a boat, and the Core is both the captain as well as the tarred rope keeping water from flooding in. Without the Core, the whole thing floods and sinks. Your third question connects to this; when something sinks, it makes waves. The Emperor thinks the waves of a Dungeon sinking will be tall enough to breach the blackwall and let him in.”

Zel found it genuinely surprising that she got a concise and sensical explanation without mysticism attached, yet it did nothing to sate her curiosity. It was just redirected from the concept of something sinking into the Sea of Fog, to the Divine Emperor. She also sat down properly and threw out request for information, “Tell me about the Emperor.”

The Caster looked off to the side as if he were reluctant to speak, only for the Spearman to eagerly fill the silence.

“Let’s see…” the Spearman began, staring off into space as he counted out traits on his fingers. “Face so pretty it’s almost unsettling, sharp jaw and all. His hair is platinum blonde with golden and silver strands, always done up into some impossible spiky hairstyle. Left eye is silver, the right one is gold. Loves to wear lots of artifact jewelry, sometimes gives a ring or an earring to a subordinate he likes. Oh! And high collars. Very fond of clothing with high collars and deep v-necks. Has more scars on his chest than clear skin. Oh! And rumor goes, he also has a living tattoo of a dragon across his entire back. I… Think that’s everything.”

He looked over to the Caster with a questioning expression, looking for confirmation. “Is that all? Or did he change how he looks again?”

Giving a slow nod, the Caster agreed, “You described the Emperor as accurately as I would expect. Only missed the part about that flying sword of his that he rides around everywhere.”

The description had painted a pretty solid picture in her mind’s eye. It sounded exactly how she would expect someone called the Divine Emperor to look.

“So he looks about as self-absorbed as he sounds,” she quipped with a venomous smirk.

While the Spearman smirked back, the Caster flinched, thumping his staff against the ground. They kept on talking for a little while, with Zelsys making no attempt to hide her intentions of extracting military information, and the two locusts making no attempt to withhold said information.

They went through weaponry, to armor, to supplies, to rations, and through rations, to guidelines on producing sweet cakes made with glutinous rice flour. Then, it came to insults. From Pateirian insults against other nations, ethnicities, or even general social groups, to the insults of other groups against Pateirians.

“Many of our Ustrenese comrades were confused when they heard the snowmen call us cat-eaters, because such a thing is not insulting to them,” the Spearman said, himself sounding as detached from these people as Ikesians were from Grekurians. Zel supposed it made sense, if the Pateirian Empire was as vast as she had assumed it to be.

He continued before she could even ask the inevitable question, confirming that, “Yes, they indeed eat cats in Ustren, and their culinary traditions are not even particularly strange! Did you know that in some places they eat live newborn mice dipped in honey? They call it the “Three Squeaks Delicacy” because they squeak once when you pick them up, once when you put them in your mouth, and once when you bite down!”

“It’s no more disgusting than those islanders that eat raw fish, if you ask me,” the Caster cut in. “Now, what they do in Apresh…”

Instantly, the Spearman’s face went from the amused bewilderment of regaling a stranger with tales of bizarre regions from one’s homeland, to wide-eyed revulsion.

“That’s a myth, though…” he murmured, disbelievingly.

“Officially, yes it is,” the Caster nodded. “They still do it, though. I’ve seen them do it, I’ve been offered a piece of the meat.”

Zel’s thoughts instantly went towards cannibalism, but the clarification that she received when the Caster refocused his eyes on her was somehow worse.

“You see, in Apresh, they skin and cook dogs alive over the course of hours, because they believe the animal’s suffering enhances the flavor of the meat.”

This less serious line of discussion progressed to far more serious societal concepts, such as a Pateirian concept that the Caster translated as “Face”, or more generally “Reputation”. From Zel’s understanding, it was to some degree the more universal idea of a reputation mixed with a heavily stratified caste system, wherein prostrating oneself to one’s superiors could both increase the Face of the superior and the subordinate, whereas disobedience would degrade the Face of both.

On a surface level it just sounded like a different form of one’s general reputation among their peers, but the way the two bugmen spoke about it made it sound far more rigid. They made it sound like questioning an elder’s or superior’s opinion could completely ruin someone’s life.

At one point, Zel found herself driven past the point of trying to understand without judging. It came when the Caster said that anyone who cared about their Face would pay penance for any perceived offense to their superiors, even if the offense was not intended, and even if the superior acted maliciously in retribution. In this way, one might increase their Face while hurting the malicious superior.

“Why should I pay penance to those that would see me made a slave or killed and dissected?” she questioned without thinking. “If anyone goes after me, for any reason, I will visit upon them proportional retaliation. It doesn’t matter who they are. In fact, I’d much rather beat the life out of some degenerate oligarch than an impoverished thug.”

“Why would you exercise until it hurts? Or work a job you don’t like, but that your boss needs to be done?” the Caster asked with a calm sadness to his voice, his beady eyes conveying his exhaustion with the very system he had described moments earlier.

Before she could even think of an answer, a familiar sensation twanged through her gut. A moment later, she noticed the subtle sound of a Fog Gate coming awake and of people passing through. By the time she turned her head to look, she saw the Inquisitor and Strolvath striding into the chamber, the gate already fading behind them.

Her mind raced with thoughts of quickly, concisely, and clearly bringing across that the two Locust Nobles were allies, but… There was no hostility to be seen. She saw Strol’s eye wander over to the Caster, his eyebrow raised, but no hostility. The Inquisitor was different, her gaze as hostile and angry as ever, but it was the familiar anger that was directed purely towards Zel.

Once they sat down to rest before the whole group would depart for the next floor, it quickly became clear why there was no confusion over the presence of nonhostile bugmen.

“We talked to Delta,” Strolvath said between glugging down elixir and downing more of his rations that he probably should have. “The machine went out of its way to let us know about the roach deserters that’re meant to lead us straight to the final chamber. Not so sure if that’ll count for a full extermination, but I suppose it’ll alleviate the threat of an organized hive eating the whole fuckin’ valley.”

For a little while longer, they ate and rested. As before, the Inquisitor went out of her way to conceal her face from them, this time walking all the way to the other side of the projection glyph altar and sitting down there with her food and drink. Zel returned to Zef for the time being, seeing that the markswoman had already loaded nearly fifty shots’ worth into the speedloader and even figured out a way to clip it to her belt in a position similar to a holster.

Strolvath froze for a moment just as he swallowed a piece of dried meat, remembering that Delta had given him something to be delivered to Zelsys in person. It was a thin, playing card sized slate of black-stone, a thing that the subcore golem gave to him after he chose his gifts. Whereas the machine only offered the Inquisitor one gift it offered him two, justifying it by saying that he hadn’t received proper recompense for the thorough purification of his path on the first floor.

Twofold were his gifts: the first, an upgrade to his Brass Eye to improve its connection to his brain and thus allow it to read subtler things than broadcast inner monologue, such as a person’s general aura or disposition, without the person actively trying to broadcast any particular aura.

It was a replacement for the interface stake; where the original one replaced the damaged part of the optic nerve by clamping onto what was left of it, the new black-stone one was far subtler and far less irritating to insert, simply touching the surface of his brain. He could tell that Zelsys hadn’t gotten any taller or more muscular, that unlike Zefaris she hadn’t obtained any new equipment. Even her attitude hadn’t changed. And yet, she gave off an even greater sense of danger than before.

The second gift was a simple device embedded into his throat next to the larynx; a Rubedo-fueled sound amplifier. Somehow, he found the seconds-long implantation process more unpleasant than all the pain of the Brass Eye combined.

“Hey, I’ve got something I’ve gotta give you,” he beckoned her, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the card. It was etched with a dead, grey glyph that came alive at her approach, though it only projected anything once she took it into her hands. He couldn’t see what it said even though he was curious, but after the beast-slayer’s eyes flashed across the text, she read it out loud in an amused tone.

“This is Delta. Please excuse the off-colour behavior I displayed in my smaller shell. It appears the shell contained a depreciated personality imprint that awakened upon my full-size shell’s destruction.”

In the time she took to read the card, he got a good look at her, waking his Brass Eye in an attempt to get a read on her out of pure curiosity.

He took a breath, and recognized the smell of ozone, at which point an idea crossed his mind. Though he wouldn’t have asked other Fog-breathers about it, he felt secure in asking Zelsys.

“You’re givin’ off some awfully intense static,” he said. “Didya advance that electric trait?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah I did. Let me get rid of the static,” she said, raising at first an eyebrow, then a finger. She took a breath, and a thin wick of Fog came forth from her fingertip, forming into a tiny bead. Before he could ask what she was doing, small sparks crackled across her skin and the bead turned to a blindingly white ball of lightning. A moment later, she had pointed her finger off into the distance and sent the ball zipping off through the air.

The feeling of static vanished alongside it, but that didn’t change how Strol felt about it.

He’d both heard of and experienced the so-called cutting-edge aura of a skilled swordsman. Gunslingers, axemen, knights, even tank drivers; all exceptional warriors had a particular aura about them that Strolvath could discern thanks to his Brass Eye, but nothing like this.

Zel’s aura before was much like a swordsman’s, only rougher, more arrogant, more sexually charged; a perfect reflection of who she was as a person, as far as he could tell. As she was now, however, there was a different aspect added to the mix. It reminded him of the way he had felt a long time ago when he found himself being stalked by a mountain lion. It… It almost felt like there was some invisible monstrosity watching him through Zelsys, constantly scanning her surroundings even if she wasn’t paying attention.

She looked at the card again and furrowed her brow.

“I uh… One second, apparently now I’m to give this to our insectoid friends,” she said with some measure of audible confusion, turning on a heel and beelining straight for the slightly hunched one with a plain staff.

The text had flickered right after she looked at the card again, directing her to give it to one of the locusts before they left for the next floor. It said that they had something to show her and her alone.

She needn’t get the Caster’s attention as he instantly turned to face her when she approached, looking up at her, then down at the card in her hand, then back up at her.

Black and beady though his eyes were, she could still see his expression grow wide-eyed, his mouth gaping a little with a subtle creeping smile hidden amidst the myriad tiny plates.

He snatched the card from her fingers without her needing to say so much as a single word, bringing it up within inches of his face and reading it with utmost undivided attention. Once, twice, thrice over he read the card before he let his hand down and looked at her again, his face plastered with barely-concealed excitement.

“It appears Delta has decided you deserve more explanation than he had time to give you in regards to self-cultivation,” the Caster said, turning and beckoning her to follow him as he walked towards the projection altar.

Zel looked back at the others, chiefly at Zefaris. The markswoman had sat down a little distance from Strolvath, busying herself with cleaning her bayonet to a painstakingly thorough degree. She looked at her with a mix of curiosity, confusion, and concern.

“I’ll be back in a bit, Delta wants them to show me something,” Zel explained as she walked by.

It prompted a slow nod and a half-whispered, “I’m not going to the next floor without you.”

Zel gave a nod back, then briskly caught up to the Caster as he outright stepped onto the projection altar. When they both stood atop it, he raised his staff high into the air and brought it down onto the projection glyph’s center. In the moment before he brought it down, Zelsys just barely managed to make out a branching, key-like protrusion coming out the bottom of the staff.

It sunk into the stone a forearm’s length, at which point the Caster turned it clockwise with a jerky motion. Portions of the glyph lit up in a pattern that spread from the staff and wisps of Fog rose from them. At first it looked random, but soon the glyph-within-a-glyph became familiar.

Indeed, Zelsys recognized the shape of a Fog Gate glyph only a split-second before the ground gave beneath her feet and she fell through the newly-opened Gate alongside the Caster.

They emerged from a Gate situated on a ceiling, finding themselves momentarily suspended in mid-air as if they'd been stripped of all momentum in transit. A fraction of a second later, they dropped about half a meter’s worth to the floor. The Caster raised a hand and snapped his fingers, causing the floor to sink and revealing that it was, in fact, some type of elevator. Zel saw that somehow, he had retained his staff. Three of the four walls had lightgems at regular intervals, though they glowed a dim blue rather than the usual stark white.

“Alright, we’re alone. Now explain,” she said, dusting herself off despite the absence of dust in the Dungeon.

“There is no more to explain than I already have,” the bugman replied giddily, walking up to the wall without lightgems. “It will be better to show you. I wager that soon you will have more answers than I do.”

After a little while riding the elevator, it arrived at a spacious hallway with a domed ceiling, lit by the very same dim-blue lightgems as the elevator. It differed from all others in that there were no floor panels, no glowing lines, not even the slightest seam intermediate chamber. The whole thing was a single long, solid hallway that stretched onward for dozens of meters to an apparent dead end.

Tok. Tok. Tok. His staff echoed through the hall as they walked.

Zelsys felt a tangible pressure bearing down on her, as if she were passing through barrier after barrier the closer she approached the dead-end. Meanwhile, the Caster seemed utterly unperturbed, ambling onward at an ever-casual pace.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

There was no sound besides that of their footsteps and that clacking staff, not even the usual distant sound of the cogworks.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

The intangible resistance grew until she felt the need to begin Fog-breathing. A deep breath in and a slow exhalation, just enough to take the next step.

When she first exhaled, the thread of Fog flew towards the dead-end as if snatched up by an unseen hand. It clung to the wall, sinking into it as a silvery inlay. Another step, another breath.

Step by step, breath by breath, she watched a glyph being drawn on the wall by her own exhalation, covering the surface utterly by the time they reached it. In its center was the sole continuous empty space, its shape perfectly mirroring that of her right hand.

The Caster needn’t beckon her to place her hand into the outline. When she did the wall split, shuddered and slid downward, revealing a chamber beyond.

Stepping past the precipice, she entered the chamber and saw that it had seven walls, with seven seven-sided pillars in each corner that were connected at the top by seven arches that merged together in the center.

Embedded halfway in the the perfect center of each of the chamber’s walls was a black quartz sphere, half a meter beneath which sat a dim-blue lightgem.

Most importantly, in the center of the chamber were four concentric glyph-etched rings surrounding a circle a little larger than a meter across, and in the circle there was a subtle impression that immediately made Zelsys think a great many people had to have sat here, hundreds or thousands perhaps. That, or the circle was designed that way to subtly guide people to sit in it.

The four concentric rings on the ground came alive with bright light, projecting an image of all four rings rising into the air above it. The outermost ring rose only about Zel’s waist height, the second outermost one to her exact eye height, the third one nearly a meter above her head, and the fourth rocketed to over twice her height above the ground, nearly reaching the ceiling.

The outermost ring contained myriad flickering points, each of which branched off into a dazzling blur of glowing pathways that shifted about and changed in number the longer one looked at them. It felt like the more one tried to untangle the webway, the more complex and tangled it became. However, one pattern could be discerned even amidst the confusing projection.

All of the paths from the lower circles inevitably led either to a dead end, to another path, or reached the next circle.

The second circle had far fewer lights and far fewer paths, few enough that after observing for a little while she noticed that it was cycling through seven groupings of lights and paths in twenty-eight second intervals.

The third one didn’t even change, with only some eleven lights and corresponding paths in total. Of these eleven, five reached the fourth circle.

One light ended in the fourth circle, and from another a glowing path shot off into space in a twisted, spiraling path that only ended at the wall. From the three remaining lights, three paths spiraled upward, winding around each other and reaching up into empty space where they faded into nothing; not ending, but not yet having reached anything beyond either.

“According to the tenets of the Three Kings there are four circles of existence and infinite paths to divinity,” the Caster said.

Zelsys felt that the construct looked incomplete, and made clear her thoughts to the Caster, “The construct looks unfinished.”

“So it does,” the Caster nodded before pulling out the black-stone card again and reading off its surface. “According to the card, you are to sit in the center and observe the construct in motion whilst thinking of what self-cultivation means to you. It will then somehow project a vision into your mind’s eye.”

Looking back at him, she noticed that he remained squarely behind the door’s precipice. She wondered if it was because he couldn’t enter, or because he chose not to. In the end, it didn’t matter.

Zelsys stepped onto the circle and sat down, craning her neck to look up into the swirling web of lights and paths. She took a deep breath, slowly exhaling a long wisp of Fog as she considered what cultivation meant to her. Without the awareness of what it should mean to her, of where the agreed-upon constraints of it lay, she could only grab for the most fundamental of meaning.

To be aware of the limits of one’s own capabilities, yet to confidently endeavor to break past them - that is the true essence of cultivation. It is neither arrogant overconfidence nor an inferiority complex, but a true desire to forge oneself into something greater than nature intended.

At heart she didn’t want to be a ruler, a conqueror, or even a god. Zelsys simply felt an urge, a blazing will that told her she could be so much more than she was, and she knew it would burn her up if she didn’t act on it. She felt that complacence fundamentally went against who she was, that in the end, she was lying to herself when she said she would be happy just working as a beast-slayer.

She wouldn’t be happy. If forced into the role of a beast-slayer she would seek out more and more dangerous contracts with bigger payouts, and when the contracts dried up, she would go looking for more dangerous beasts of her own volition. Without an outside force pushing her into the work, she would likely use the money from her beast-slaying work to fund her inevitable pursuit of yet greater self-refinement. Better training equipment, better materials for actual equipment, maybe workers to go digging around in the ruins of fallen cultivator-families.

A chuckle escaped her.

In the end she knew that driving flame to be ego, but she didn’t view it as a sin, or as a flaw. She felt egoism to be a vital part of the self, an ember without which one would become fuel for another’s flame. And much like a flame ego had to be controlled, lest it consume one utterly.

Yes, that was it.

She had it.

“Cultivation is supremacy over the self,” she thought out loud. “It is to accept one’s limits and move past them, to live with one’s flaws without being a slave to them. To cultivate is to mend one’s cracks with silver and from them derive greater strength and beauty.”

Something within her snapped, like the neck of a bottle, split open by colossal pressure from within. That thrumming, warm buzz ran down her scalp, the back of her neck, then down her back and arms, spreading out in waves as it filled the inside of her head and something coalesced in there.

It wasn't a sight within the mind’s eye as the Caster had suggested, or even a voice that resounded inside her head. It was… Remembering. Flashes of memory in clarity more pure than any real memory could convey. Like using her tablet’s mnemonic record function.

The individual words that she was remembering didn’t make sense. They were in an old-sounding language, with syllables and pronunciations that vaguely and remotely resembled the Ikesian that she understood. And yet, she understood; not the words themselves, but the intended meaning behind them.

“Manyfold are the ways to reach heaven, of which three are those that we have walked. They are ours and ours alone, yet our knowledge might yet aid others to discover their own walking way. My lessers are unwilling to share of their secrets, but I can sense the end of us coming. As such, I have chosen to construct this place, to put this place’s Living Core to work on something other than challenging the aspirants.”

“Whatsoever this oracle shows you, know that it is a murky reflection of what you are, a muddled refraction sharpened ten-dozen times, the empty spaces filled in by the arcane mechanisms of this edifice.”

For a moment there was nothing. Then, there was everything.

That self-same thrumming buzz washed over her once more, this time utterly consuming all other sensation within and without, and Zelsys found herself motionless. She sat stone-still, her mind filled by the sight of words in an ancient script and the sound of an equally ancient voice reading them out loud. A deep, wizened voice, so natural it felt like it was this place’s builder personally speaking to her. Even still she could not understand the words, and even still she instinctively knew the meaning behind them.

“Thy gestalt kaleid forges a sky’s worth of lights into a heaven-scorching star.”

“Stand atop the beast-mountain’s bones and tear the fire from the heavens, walk the path of contradiction.”

Between the lines, the words, even between the individual letters, she caught flickerings of machinations beneath the surface. Impurities in the flow of pure cognition, as if the arcane conduits of this place were leaking. She saw flickering images of a great, stone city glimpsed from the top of a tower through some long-dead person’s eyes, perhaps one of the Three Kings himself. Spires of black-stone stretched to the sky, a great citadel floated far above just beneath the clouds, and among it all, vast roof and terrace gardens broke up the sea of stone buildings.

Then, it all burned. The rivers ran red with the blood of more than could be counted. The sky rained fire. It was all flattened into dust, scourged from the earth, the remnants buried beneath dearth. A metropolis, erased.

The images stopped.

The words returned.

The voice was sad and angry.

The voice of a dead man, living on as a ghost in a machine.

Seething for vengeance beyond the grave.

“Plunder the old world and build from the spoils anew, usher in the new unfolding.”

“Pull thy lessers from their mire and they will gladly oil the chains of your machines with their own blood, stoke the embers of your forges with their own bones.”

There were four thuds in quick succession. The thrumming sensation vanished in an instant and she lurched back into the waking world, finding herself in the dimly-lit chamber with the four rings back in their places as part of the floor.

“H-how did it go?” the Caster’s voice resounded, unsure and shaky.

Chest heaving and breaths heavy, Zelsys stood to her feet and turned to face him, asking along the way, “How did it look like it went?”

“You uh… You started talking, threw your head back so far I could see your face, and then your eyes rolled into the back of your head,” he recounted with some reluctance while Zelsys made her way out of the chamber.

He nearly tripped over himself trying to keep up when she didn’t even wait for him and briskly walked back down the hall.

“Fog started coming out of your tear ducts, and then you woke up,” he finished when he caught up, prompting Zelsys into a momentary smile of equal bitterness and brevity.

Then, they walked in silence.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

It wasn’t until they had reached the lift and it began to rise again that the Caster asked another question.

“Did… Did you get any answers?” the bugman asked.

Zel gave a nod, “Yeah. Some that I don’t have questions for just yet.”

The glyph on the ceiling came alive, raining Fog down on them before the elevator sped up with no signs of stopping, forcing them upward and out.