The Zwaray Keep was Big. The industrial section went on for several miles on end, but that was only part of the picture. Established around it with meticulous diligence was a township, clean, precise and neatly arranged to a degree that it was enough to make any self-respecting Earthly societal planner jealous.

Much like the town outside, they constructed it entirely out of stone blocks with tile roofs. Svartalfars weren’t big on flaunting wealth through their houses and instead focussed on developing their social aesthetics. Intricate rows of spearlike spires and deep archways marked the subsections of the township, with everything from shops, educational institutions to open grounds and square patches of well-maintained vegetation — it was all there. Lukas and Tanya had been traveling in one of those platforms at speeds enough to make a professional race-car driver jealous, and they were yet to reach the ‘Well’.

As he said, Big. And yes, Tanya was correct. The svartalfars really didn’t get out of their territory. Why would they, when everything they needed was right here?

Finally, after some forty minutes, the Platform slowed down. Peaked spires and metallic pillars arose in front of them like dark talons, varying in thickness, as they jutted up into the sky. The construct standing before them was alien to look at, with a twisted, off-center symmetry, an almost-balance. Ash-black, something about it gave Lukas a depression, as if simply being close to this… thing was enough to suck away something fundamental from him.

And in the middle of this behemoth was a roughly oval construct, crafted out of several feet thick stone. It gave the appearance of an archaic archway with artistic sigils engraved on them. No, not sigils. Runes. Lukas didn’t need to be a scholar to recognize a few members of the Elder Futhark in them, which made sense. These were svartalfars of Svartalvheim. Of course, they’d use runes. He wondered if Inanna would have been able to understand these symbols if—

If she were there.

The thought drained all the enthusiasm out of him, leaving behind a sea of abject loneliness. Inanna — it all came down to her. All this that he was doing here — it was to get her back. He had already made a test run with the Pillar right after its assembly, draining a relatively small amount of power into himself. It had worked perfectly, and if his math was correct, he’d need at least thirty-six hours of drainage to refill his Omphalos Reserves back to their present capacity after a single attempt at Rollback Protocol.

Something to try after he returned from this mission, no doubt.

“Is this the…”

“Well?” said Tanya, “Not exactly. It’s what we call a Conclave. The actual well is in the middle of it. See, right there!”

She pointed at the center of the oval. It took him a moment, but then he noticed. There, shimmering in the air before him, was a thin denture. A bruise, floating in mid-air, with something pale blue and dense lining it. Now that he saw it, he could see micro-thin rays of dense light emanating out of that bruise, as if coming from the Other side that didn’t exist and yet—

Lukas looked away.

“You felt it?” Tanya asked, “the strangeness?”

Swallowing, he shook his head.

She smiled. “Good. At least that’s familiar territory. At least you didn’t have a major reaction. There was this one guy I knew who had gone insane by just staring at it for over ten seconds.”

Lukas stood still. Something about the bruise, or dare he call it, the crack, felt alien to his senses. It was like staring at Inanna’s memory of the Origin all over again.

“What… is it?”

“I told you. The Well.”

Lukas looked at it again, this time looking in its general direction. To his surprise, he couldn’t find it.

Tanya chuckled.

Annoyed, he turned at her. “What’s so funny?”

“You,” she said, “Trying to see it from the corner of your eyes. It won’t work. You’ve to watch out for it actively.”

She was right. The moment he looked again, searching for it, there it was, beckoning him. Taunting him to stare for just a while longer.

Lukas looked away.

“Wise choice,” came a male voice from his right. It was a svartalfar — a pair of them. A male and a female, from what he could guess. The male went on, “Few can overcome the desire to keep looking. It’s the sign of fortitude.”

“Eh, thanks?”

“I only spoke the obvious. No acknowledgement is necessary.”

Clearly svartalfars had mad communication skills.

“This is Kradir,” said the other creature, this one slimmer with obvious signs of femininity about her. Like Kradir, her eyes were pupil-less, pitch-black, and seemed to take in more than they had any right to do. She then pointed at herself. “I’m called Mori. He is an extractor, while I’m the sensor. You’ll be providing security to the two of us for this mission, correct?”

“Yes,” said Tanya.

Mori continued with her unrepentant drone. “We will travel through the Lava Ridge to extract at least twenty kastrians of lochil ore. That will require several days of travel. We estimate a Level-3 risk factor. Be warned that the area on the inside is a volcanic terrain, with minimum sixty-two percent fire mana saturation, and infested with fire elementals, chiefly ifrit-kind. You may do or collect whatever strikes your fancy during this period, as long as it does not hinder your duties. As per the contract, you’ll get fifteen percent of our collection post successful completion of the mission. That, or mezals equivalent to its current market-value. Standard entry, standard exit. In the event of our demise, our technicians on this side will refuse you exit. We advise you to do your best to protect us.”

Lukas blinked. “Hang on a minute, I think I heard something fairly outrageous in there.”

Mori cocked her head.

“The demise thing. Not that we want you to die or anything, but why won’t the technicians allow us out?”

Mori gave him a blank stare, a slow blink and then asked, “Is this your first mission?”

“Yes.”

“It shows.”

“Its standard protocol for svartalfars,” Tanya intervened. “They do this to ensure that we take extra care to get the job done.”

“And why wasn’t I told about this?” He hissed.

Tanya gave him a dry stare. “You speak their tongue. You know their customs. What am I supposed to think?”

His left eye twitched as he turned to face his protectorates. “You realize we’re supposed to protect you, right? This… doesn’t exactly paint an image of trust.”

“We’re not paying you for trust,” Mori corrected him meticulously. “we’re paying you for security. The contract ensures you’ll protect us from others, but nothing ensures our protection from you.”

Lukas blinked.

“It’s common sense to be wary of everyone,” Mori said without the slightest affliction in her voice, “even of one’s protector.”

Tanya grabbed his arm. “Don’t think about it very much. It’s protocol. Be grateful they’re carrying our rations for us.”

“Unnecessary,” Kradir said, his tone entirely neutral and eyes flat. “Your job is to provide security and handle anything that comes our way. Having to take care of baggage decreases your efficiency.”

Lukas glowered at them, but to no avail. These were his clients? And he was supposed to deal with these guys for the entire time they’d be on the other side?

Joy.

“Do you have questions?” Mori asked. “Objections?”

Tons. Like how was this Well supposed to work? What were the things he was supposed to keep in mind? But Tanya was traveling with him, and she had promised to make this a training regimen for him. He supposed he could just wait and watch for now.

“I’m good.”

“I have a question,” said Tanya. “Are we operating on a time limit?”

Kradir shook his head.

Tanya frowned. “I see. Very well, no objections.”

That seemed to please the svartalfar. He let out a strange noise from his throat, and the surrounding air shimmered, revealing at least… twenty soldiers, several pairs of what looked like technicians, and a couple of helpers, holding large, thick, squarish travel bags. They had camouflaged themselves, only to unveil at Kradir’s command.

“Let me guess, protection from one’s protector.”

Kradir’s expression relaxed. He looked like a hyena with a fully loaded stomach that would not run after you unless you attracted its attention. Meanwhile, the technicians hurried, getting the Conclave running for what he could only imagine was transportation to this borderland. Olfric’s and Tanya’s descriptions of ‘lands existing between reality and fantasy’ sounded interesting, but ultimately not very useful for picturing them in the head. The closest he had come to imagining was a small zone filled with all kinds of monsters — kind of like the insides of the Crypt, only with fewer slimes.

Maybe.

An electric noise gained his attention. The floating bruise — or Well, he supposed, was letting out spitting and frothing noises, as the runes engraved upon the surrounding archway glowed with power. Occasionally, the bruise would be pulled in one direction, only for it to constrict back into the barest shimmer. It was almost like it was resisting whatever the Conclave was getting at.

“They’re opening the Well,” Tanya said, reading his expression. “That Well is a crack in reality, and the World rejects it. The World’s energy is always pushing it from all sides and directions, keeping it closed. What they’re trying to do is fight it, constantly drain out the World Energy into those spires, creating a vacuum… where the Well can open. Once it opens, we can walk through it into the borderland.”

“Sounds simple enough.”

“It isn’t, really.”

Lukas frowned for a long moment, his expression taking on several nuanced shades of doubt.

“You’ll see.”

“... I suppose I will.”

Meanwhile, the crack had expanded, now nearly the size of a small horse. Enough for a single person to crouch his way through. The crack frothed and spat angrily as the Conclave drained power from the environment into something he couldn’t really see, except that it felt wrong, if the rising tension inside him was any sign. Whatever this vacuum was, the Anomaly inside him abhorred it. It wanted him to act out, to unleash a volley of pure anomalous energy and destroy this — this abomination on the face of reality.

And the best part? He had no way of knowing how he knew all that. Guess the Omphalos was having a greater effect on him than he thought.

“It’s time,” Mori declared.

The two helpers walked up to them and handed over the travel bags, which they quickly equipped. Both Lukas and Tanya had already brought their own baggage with them, but apart from some tinned food and a bottle of water with a spare set of clothes, there had been nothing else. The svartalfar pair walked past them and entered through the crackling, spitting portal, with Mori heading out first and Kradir following right after.

“Don’t panic, and touch nothing,” Tanya whispered. “Just walk through it.”

Lukas ran his fingers through the pendant around his neck. A sense of strength throbbed within it, as if giving him silent support. It was the only tangible thing left of his world, and the greatest proof that Inanna was there, and even though she was gone, she’d be back.

He didn’t look at Tanya, but he could feel the sudden intensity of her interest.

“Let’s go,” she said, and walked into the portal.

“Okay,” Lukas mustered a little courage. “Let’s do it.” He walked up to the portal, feeling the alien energies shifting, contorting, craving to consume something. An immense pressure threatened to tear him apart from all directions and then—

He was gone.

The first thing that greeted him was a wafting smell of sulfur.

As the fleeting moment of disorienting pressure passed, Lukas felt a sudden, hot wind driving even more of that scent at his face, pushing his hair back from his forehead.

Then he saw it.

Flames.

It was everywhere. The terrain beneath his feet was hard rock, with a thin fissure within every fifty feet, oozing out thin streaks of crimson, hot lava, slowly trickling across the terrain down into the craters on the sides — lava pools frothing angrily and popping out blisters of super-heated air. Some fissures diverged from the trend and spat out crimson flames into the air, only for the sparks to fall down upon the reddish, igneous floor. Lukas could see shadows of mountains far ahead, and at least one precipice from which lava fell downwards — a twisted mockery of a waterfall, to meet a sea of crimson liquid as it splashed and frothed in chaotic rage.

Mori had mentioned they were about to enter a volcanic terrain. She hadn’t mentioned jack about traversing through Christian Hell.

Behind him, the Well spat out another set of electric noises before collapsing onto itself, leaving them stranded in this hell. And the best part? If these two svartalfars died on his watch, this would become his permanent home address.

“This job just keeps on giving, doesn’t it?” He asked no one in particular. “How long do we have before time’s up?”

Kradir let out a throaty cackle. “Not only is this your first mission, it seems you know nothing of the ways of the Empire. What rock were you living under all these years, Stranger?”

Before Lukas could reply, Kradir turned towards Tanya. “Explaining things to your partner falls under your responsibility, Tanya of the Wind. Allowing his ignorance to affect his performance will be a blame on your head, since you’ve done business with us before.”

Lukas took careful note of that title as he turned towards Tanya. “Told me what?”

Tanya kept her tone neutral. “Remember how I told you there’s stuff I need to teach you about borderlands?”

“Yeah?”

“There are a lot of things you’re going to have to learn. Techniques, rules and exercises. But there are some things that cannot wait for later. Two rules that you need to keep in mind. Number One,” she wiggled a finger, “Time flows differently here. For instance, one hour in the real world is a little over two and a half hours in this borderland.”

Time Dilation. Great. What else was new?

“We told you. The task will require us to travel a lot. We’ll have to go past those mountains,” droned Mori. “The technicians will open the Well in exactly three-days’ time, so we have around eight days to get it done.”

“Peachy.”

“The second rule,” Tanya gestured, “is that no one knows where the portal will open. Not us, not the technicians out there. When they open the Well next, the Rescue Squad will come in and send out flares into the air constantly for an entire hour. We'll signal back with our own flares if we can spot it. If that happens, they can keep it open for eight hours maximum, our time. If we cannot make it by then, they’ll have to shut it down.”

“What happens if we cannot make it in time?”

“They wait another day to recharge the Conclave before trying again,” Kradir replied. “That means two and a half days of waiting before our next opportunity.”

“This keeps getting better and better.” Lukas scowled. “What if they send their flares and we don’t see them?”

“Not a problem,” Mori answered. “they stop after an hour, and then open the portal again after a break. Eventually, we’ll spot it. Or become dinner for the ifrits and muspels that have made this place their home, whichever is earlier. Or convenient.”

Kradir laughed. “You see, Stranger, our jobs aren’t for the faint of heart. Most adventurers just perish during our missions. You better bring your A-game, or this will be your last.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Lukas replied, inwardly wondering why life kept throwing such curve balls at him. “No pressure at all.”