Year Null. Brass Tower - Heaven

JIRA ne’JIRAL

The thing lunged at her with the speed of a cat and the ferocity of a starving bear. Jira ducked under the arm-blade that swung through the air where her head and been. She snarled, contorting her face as she blew out a long breath of air and sliced up through the thing’s chest and clavicle. It split in half at the cut, spilling blood and maggots across the dark brass floor of the passage. Nearby, Prokos pulled his blade free from the eyesocket of another one of these undead creatures, his face marred with the gore of the five he slew just moments prior. Insects crawled through his hair, prompting Jira to quickly brush them out as he stood silent — almost catatonic. They fell to the ground with audible thuds and cracks, skittering and writhing away into hiding.

“Are you with me?” she asked him. He didn’t answer. She slapped him hard and watched as his eyes focused on her in shock. “Are you with me, Prokos?”

“Yeah...yeah, I’m with you,” he nodded, breathing low and heavy. “I’m with you. Sorry. Just having a rough go of it right now.”

Jira took a deep breath through her nose, slowly exhaling through her mouth — trying to calm down. “I understand. It’s okay. We’re alive and have time to figure out our bearings again.”

Prokos slumped to his backside, ignorant or uncaring of the muck that sloshed against his legs. “That’s the keyword right there. Again. We’ve done this how many times now? Five? Six?”

“More,” Jira admitted, leaning against the cold metal wall as her attempt to regulate her heartbeat and breathing failed. “But we survived each time.”

Prokos scoffed, rueful. “The others didn’t.”

Jira looked at him with hard-set eyes. “We don’t know that. They’ve been trained well enough to survive.”

“Survive conflict against humans and humanoids. Do we even know where the twins are after they got chased by that...that...centipede? Likely in its stomach.”

Jira stepped away from the wall. Her sympathy for the man was there, but she needed him to be resolute in the face of despair. “No. They live, Prokos. Some of them are alive. I know they are. Now, collect your wits, or I will remove you from my guild when we escape this place.”

Prokos looked up at his captain and sighed. “Very well, captain.” He extended a hand, which Jira took to pull him up.

She smiled at him, attempting to display some level of confidence — confidence she did not have. “Let us figure this place out.”

The halls extended for miles. Miles turned to days, and days turned to weeks. Or so it felt. The sun never set in the wasteland outside, and there was no moon to be seen in the dusky light of the sky. No celestial beings to be seen through the fog, smoke, and ash. Only the things wandering the outside on the land could be seen, devouring each other in grotesque displays only to spawn some distance away like maggots from a corpse. A great city, roaming on wheels like those of Tahrir, could also be perceived in the far-away stretch — the furthest part of the horizon visible in the vapor. Atop it, a golden figure some two stories tall stood motionless. Statuesque. What disturbed Jira the most was that even as far away as they were, the bright-toothed grin they bore was diamond clear in its imagery. She could make out every flat tooth that thing bore in its maw, even at a distance, the miles of space. And she could see the minute change in its stance to look at the tower. To look at her.

“We’re not going out there unless absolutely necessary,” Jira told Prokos.

Prokos shared her gaze out the vast window to the wasteland. “Agreed.”

On they went, up and down crooked ladders and spiral staircases and through narrow tunnels and dimly lit hallways, clearing out entire rooms of horrid monstrosities that defied reason and reality. Gangrenous creatures on four legs with leperous sores and metallic arms that bent and whirled like the clouds of a windstorm. They assaulted Prokos and Jira in swarms, lurching and gurgling, their mouths drooling with rot and viscera from unseen victims. Jira stabbed her sword through the face of one, carved it out through the side, and decapitated another. Prokos bisected his own beasts, using growing strength to deflect their attacks and lead into brutal chops at their waists. Unlike the creatures from before, these ones remained moving. Halved bodies grew new legs or bodies, while sliced-off heads grew wings or tentacles to move. Jira slashed at them as Prokos hacked, taking down monster after monster until all that remained of them were chunks as decor.

Peace was rare. For every moment they took to collect themselves, new hordes charged them. For every moment they took to examine their surroundings, a trap was activated. For every moment they took to consider their new route, waves of blood, gore, and decay blocked off three. It drove Prokos mad with fury the further they went into the tower, urging him to initiate the attacks with the creatures and shout defiling words to the heavens as he did so. His wrath was questioning. Why was he here? What had he done to deserve this hell? Jira wished she could answer his questions, but no answer save those from God would satiate the man. She was uncertain if those answers would be suitable enough as well.

At long last, after what Jira assumed was a month and a half without hunger or thirst and constant fighting for survival, the pair found a moment of true solitude and calm. With what supplies remained in their packs, Prokos and Jira constructed a make-shift camp in the center of the small, oval-shaped room that appeared to bear the aesthetic of a bookstore. Of course, Jira had little belief that that was what the room actually was. Too many encounters with similar areas had shattered that illusion. Still, it was calm, and the sound of horrors was far gone.

Prokos sat around the pathetic campfire they had panicked to make, staring grimly at the fire. “We’re in Hell,” he said to Jira as she sat across from him.

“What?” she asked.

“We’re in Hell,” he repeated, shifting his legs to his chest to hug them. “We’re in hell because we...sinned. We left God’s grace and were sent to hell.”

“Prokos, stop it. We’re not in hell,” Jira said, trying to hide her lack of conviction in that statement. “I don’t know where we are, but Hell, it is not.”

Prokos looked up from the fire, pressing his tongue against his bottom lip. “How can you be sure?”

She wasn’t. “Because have you seen any demons? I haven’t.”

“Then what are those things we’ve been fighting?”

“Monsters, for certain. But there are a lot of monsters in the world, Prokos. A lot of them.”

Prokos ran a hand through his hair and brushed debris out of it. Some fell in the fire, and Jira swore to herself it screeched. “Like what? Dragons? Trolls? Giants? Gíla already read me stories about them and told me how they are so common in Aqella. Her people have a blood feud with the Dragons. Those things we’ve been fighting are not like those. They are beyond understanding. Beyond logic. Someone made those things.”

He was right, but Jira wanted to know how much Prokos had seen. She needed to see how stable his mind was in this growing instability. “What do you mean?”

“Some had stitches. Sutures. Mended parts. Some were human, captain. I could see it in their faces. They were once human. Someone made them, and I can’t help but wonder who it was if not the Devil.”

A voice that was neither of theirs answered the contemplation. “Well, I wouldn’t call Him the Devil, but he certainly is a burning prick.”

Jira and Prokos shot up to their feet, quickly drawing their swords, to find a man in soot-black armor standing along the flattest part of the oval wall. In the dim illumination of their campfire, Jira could see that he was broad, not overly muscular like many of the Khirnians she had encountered, but powerful nonetheless. His black hair was shorn on the sides and slicked back on the top, and his face bore a thick, curled mustache. A large hammer, shaped much like a blacksmith’s, was at his side, with the head on the ground. He rested his elbow on the haft and lightly clasped his hands together.

“Who are you?” Jira demanded of the man.

“A friend,” he answered. “Working for another friend to get you reconnected with some more friends.”

“That’s a lot of friends,” Prokos noted.

The man smirked. “Indeed. You need friends in this place. You need many friends.”

“How do we know you’re a friend?” Jira inquired, slowly inching her stance closer to one that would enable her to lunge if necessary.

The man rolled his eyes. “You don’t except for me telling you. Which is as good as you’ll get in this place.”

Prokos stepped around the fire and stood next to his captain. “Some more information would be better. Who are you trying to reconnect us with?”

“Gíla and Orlantha,” the man answered, prompting the pair to share surprised glances. “My companion, Milligan, has or will have them in his care. It doesn’t matter because, ultimately, in five days, they will reach a Hall of Contemplation. And in that Hall, there will be revelations about things. The world. God. And they will be set to go about doing a thing that gets them unlocked from fate. You’ll want to join them before they do because, otherwise, you’ll be stuck.”

Jira scowled at the man. “Explain in simple terms what you are talking about. What is any of that?”

The man snickered. “Of all people not to know, I’m surprised you don’t. Some of you did. Guess just not you. Of course, that makes the most sense. You’re the real one. The real Knight of Secrets, destined to be the catalyst of the Fall and the Rise. You still need to learn.”

Jira stammered and stepped closer. “Learn what? Explain.”

The man looked off into the distance, listless and barren. After a half-minute of this, he looked back to the pair. “You’ll learn with the others. Don’t have time. Have to get back. Things are getting bad in my city. Technological progress. Funny things.”

“Wait-” Prokos began to say before the man held up his hand to silence him.

“No time. Head through the door over there, go up the stairs, find the hallway with the orange lights, reach the end, climb the ladder, and don’t stop. Don’t look down. Don’t slow down. Keep climbing until you reach the top. Understood?”

“When-” Jira began to say before the man folded out of sight, instantly gone.

Jira gave a short yell and collapsed beside the fire, chewing her lip in frustration. Prokos threw down his sword in anger and began to pace around the room, stopping in front of Jira only after a full ten minutes of muttering and grumbling. “Are we trusting him?”

“Not at all,” Jira answered. “Might be forced to.”

“I loathe that idea.”

“It’s the first solid directions we’ve had in...a month? That’s better than nothing.”

“Or it could be worse than everything.”

It was not, in fact, worse than everything. It was entirely calm on the trek toward this supposed ladder, which only inflamed the worry in Jira’s heart and the propensity of Prokos’ verbal outbursts at the dangers of the tower, the hellscape outside, and what they had done to deserve this. Jira had tuned him out long ago on this newfound journey, instead focusing on trying to identify the mysterious man that had infiltrated their camp that night. She found little evidence to support any of her guesses and no evidence to hypothesize possible alternatives. The man was a true mystery, and for the Knight of Secrets, a secret she did not control was painful to deal with.

She tucked this thought away as she and Prokos finally reached the end of the long hallway lit with orange, the source of that light being humming orange-glowing glass orbs. Jira recalled similar inventions in the Orc-kin cities — entire streets of them, and even buildings, though those were a warm white or yellow rather than grimy orange.

The ladder was rusted and extended up the wall into a shaft long enough to become invisible in the darkness.

“What do we do now? Just...climb?” Prokos asked hesitantly, testing the ladder's durability with a tug on one of the rungs. It creaked but did not move.

Jira clicked her tongue and gazed up the shaft once more. “Yes. Looks like it.”

“That man...he said not to look down, right? To keep climbing.”

“That’s what he said.”

Tentatively, Jira took the lead. Each ascent of the rungs panged her heart, and each accidental slip sent shocks through her body. But she climbed still as the darkness of her rise shrouded her like a cloak. Prokos was slow after her, more cautious with his steps, and kept calling up to ensure his captain was secure. She always answered in the affirmative, calling back down to him to ensure he was also. Each time, he said yes until, at a point, he stopped asking and stopped answering.

“Prokos?” she called down to him. “Prokos, are you okay?”

Prokos did not answer. Nothing answered but a chilled wind that traversed up the shaft to make her fingers clench on the rusted metal and threaten to snap the rungs in half.

“Prokos! Are you there?” she called out to him again, but there was no answer. “Don’t look down. Don’t look down.”

Jira climbed and called out for her lieutenant with every step. He never called back to her. The only sound she heard was her own breathing and hands shivering on the metal. She reached the top of the ladder and pushed open the hatch that kept her locked in the dark, lightless shaft. She climbed into the illuminated chamber that awaited her and scrambled away from the pit that, in an instant, echoed with distant screams of a man in the purest form of agony.

Jira resolved her heart and crawled towards the ladder, prepared to descend after Prokos.

The hatch was slammed shut by a woman in reflective, platinum armor edged with polished maroon. Her skin was moon-white, glowing with an aura of ethereal purity. Her hair was darkened to a silver grey, darker than Jira’s, and her single red eye glowered at her with disappointment. She was strong in her body’s physique, a leaner form of Orlantha Xathia.

Jira was confused as she stared at the woman, trying to make sense of a senseless situation. “Lady ne’Banuus? Wh-what hap-happened? I need-I need to save Pro-Prokos.”

“He looked down,” Yvon ne’Banuus said. “They took him.”

“What did?”

Yvon sighed and turned away from the Silver Knight, heading towards the large double iron doors on the far side of the chamber.

Jira rose to her feet and ran after her. “Lady ne’Banuus! What took him? What took Prokos?”

Yvon stopped just shy of the doors. “What you were warned not to look at.”

Jira grasped Yvon’s pauldron and spun her around, finding that the Belanorian gave no resistance. “What!? What took him? We were only told not to look down, not that there was-”

“You were to climb and only climb. Prokos looked down. He’s gone.”

Jira narrowed her eyes and shoved Yvon away by her shoulder, shaking her head. She backstepped away. How was she here? She was in Acocaea, fighting the Runemaster. Everyone couldn’t have been transported to this hellish place. It couldn’t have been everyone. “No! No! You...are not Yvon. You are not the Great Blade.”

The Yvon imposter breathed sharply through her nose and looked past Jira’s shoulder. The Silver Knight followed her gaze and only just became fully aware of the chamber she was in. It was dirty and cluttered, much like a workshop, with meathooks, nails, hammers, and saws adorning the tables that lined the base of the walls. Jira shuddered and turned back to the Yvon imposter, who shrugged. “I am much of Yvon as you are of Belanore.”

Jira’s blood froze in her veins as her muscles stiffened. “Wh-what?”

The Yvon imposter exhaled that sharp breath and opened the double doors, revealing an interior room full of more gruesome decor and technology that would put the Orc-kin and Nujant Chhank to shame. The Yvon imposter spoke. “You named yourself Jira ne’Jiral, a lie of lies. You are Guile Eclipse of the Black Desert, an agent of your people sent to Khirn to discover the source of the rising levels of arcaeno and destroy it or reveal it to your people’s army for them to do the deed. ‘For the greater good of the world. Khirn cannot be trusted with such power.’ Only... that’s become an issue. How can you be expected to destroy that which is natural to life itself?”

Jira felt herself growing dizzier and dizzier with each truth this thing uttered, barely able to follow it into the grotesque scene. Bodies by the dozens lay on stone slabs, angled to be slid into ever-roaring furnaces. She recognized them all. Soldiers of her guild. Soldiers of Duke Audax. Soldiers she had killed personally. Men and women she had failed to protect or succeeded in taking the life of. Her breathing was shallow. Sweat ran down her face. Muscles throughout her body clenched and stiffened, and her bones ached and cracked.

Jira’s left arm began to hurt tremendously. Her chest felt clogged. Her throat ran dry. “How-how do-how do... you’re wrong. I am of Belanore. I am Jira ne’Jiral.”

The Yvon imposter shook her head, clicking her tongue in a tsk-tsk fashion. “You can lie to everyone else but not yourself, Guile Eclipse. You are a traitor to traitors, and your facade will fail in time. And when it does, they will hate you. They will execute you.”

Jira stumbled, bracing on a table full of sharp, rusted knives. Another door opened somewhere, and a man entered the room. Gibbering, old, wretched. He waved his hand at the Yvon imposter and reduced her to a puddle of blood on the floor. He glared at Jira and snarled with needle teeth as his head was swiped from his shoulders. Jira fell to the ground as she gazed at a radiant pillar of light standing over the headless corpse of the old man. Her eyes filled with darkness, and she knew nothing for a time.

“Jira! Wake the fuck up!”

Jira opened her eyes and saw Prokos looking down at her, his face a mess of worry and anger. She was on the ground, a cold hard ground that chilled her through her armor. “P-Prokos?” she mumbled through crackled lips and sticky teeth.

“Yes, it’s me. What the hell were you thinking, captain?”

“What are you-what are you talking about?”

“You looked down on the ladder. I had to catch you before you fell past me. We almost fucking died!” Prokos jabbed his finger into her forehead with each new sentence, emphasizing the severity of her mistake.

Jira quirked a brow and weakly batted Prokos’ hand away. “I...I didn’t look down.”

Prokos clapped his hands once and buried his face in them. “You did. You did, captain. Right as we reached the top. You looked down. It was a short climb, thankfully enough.”

Jira opened her mouth again to protest but fell silent as three new figures appeared in her vision. One furry and ursine, armored in the thickest plate ever forged in Khirn. The other, a monstrous giantess of muscle and raw power. The last was a man in a green coat, his visage as feral as it was human.

“You good to walk yet?” Orlantha questioned. “We got a lot of work to do.”