Memories of the Fall

…Much can be said of the turning points in those dark days, the seeds of many evils long forgotten and many more yet to come lie in the fallow fields of Jerikhal, Valinkar and Solaneum, in the allure of Yogo Shada and the keening promise of objects like the ‘Sempronius Dagger’ or the ‘Tears of Solace’.

Yet, most compelling as a turning point, is an almost forgotten footnote to the great Ritual of Solaneum and the assault of the old powers afterwards: the second Sack of Portam Aurorae and its true obliteration, an event we only know happened because barbarian prisoners of the Ur folk spoke of it and a solitary record was discovered much later by happenstance.

The acknowledged narrative has been that after the survivors fled, the Prophetess of Orcus hid in shadow and the dark curse became stronger, until at last it was revealed by Laurentius; however, unlike others of the Nine Cities, like Merovin or Arleth – which also died silently, only Portam Aurorae was mute – her tale told through those few souls who fled it, and whose accounts, in light of later events, can only be considered deeply suspect on many levels given they counted both Menacanthus, Bishop of Simaris, and the eminent statesman of the nine cities Quintullus Karius Valtus among their number – both of whom were pivotal in its refounding as Solaneum some years later after the failed Old Kingdom expedition.

One account, though, does linger, and this draws me back to this event as perhaps the most overlooked point in this dark conflict, for with it, suddenly a great many other things come into question, and three disturbing things are revealed: firstly that Portam Aurorae was sabotaged from within not once, but twice, secondly that those who told its narrative were likely the culpable parties, and lastly that they did so to hide the link between the second sack and the rise of two other evil cults, far more long-lasting than that of the Mystery of Orcus: the ‘Blood Eclipse’ and the ‘Brothers of Life’ who would later become the ‘Longevity Cult’ that so plagued our more recent history.

In this tome, a first-hand account of the last days of Portam Aurorae, originating with a prisoner in a small Hibric tribe that eventually found its way to a scriptorium in Carrolan, it is told that five others like Cornelia also existed and were imprisoned, and that later, the retreating forces of Lord Consul Halicarus took with them five prisoners, none of them Cornelia (explaining her absence from many narratives, or unconvincing inclusion at this time), and vanished into the hills – obliterating or taking with them every written record of the town they could. The account then goes on to say that during his captivity, he saw first-hand two groups of barbarians captured by that tribe who had a supply of blood, of a powerful and dark aura, that were stored in pots from the shrine complex in Portam Aurorae…

Excerpt from ‘On the Origins of Darkness’

By Menoc of Tyre

~ Cornelia, daughter of the Sempronii – Solaneum ~

She opened her eyes to the sound of bells clamouring, even as the door to her room slammed open.

“Cornelia!” Arella, her handmaiden, barely dressed, scrambled into the room. “Cornelia…! CORNELIA!”

“Yes, I’m awake,” she sighed, sitting up and grimacing at the sweat slicking her nightgown from the humid heat.

Her dreams had not been good, not that they ever were. A nightmare of drowning, being caught up in a turbulent current of grasping hands – probably an allegory for their plight, now, as a city – dragging her down while a single, gentle hand grasped hers, trying to pull her clear, but never quite succeeding.

“What is it, another wall breach?” she asked, pushing those dark, fevered nightmares away.

“No… they… they…” Arella’s voice was strangled.

“Someone died? By some miracle, did a barbarian spear hit my cousin?”

“Uh…”

“Brother?”

“No, they… uh…”

She pushed her legs off the bed and looked at Arella properly. Her friend and companion, a year younger than her, was pale and shaking.

“They are all gone…”

“Gone?” she asked, trying to work out what Arella was—

“LADY CORNELIA!” a second, male voice yelled, and her estate factorum, Claudius Maresus, arrived, pale-faced.

“Lady Arella, you are…” He noticed her handmaiden, who was pouring herself some wine from a decanter, her hands shaking.

“What is going on?” she asked.

“They have all gone…! The main estate… your brothers, your sister, your father, your stepmother.”

“…”

She listened, blankly, trying to grasp what insanity the old man was stammering.

“How can they be gone?” she asked at last, after he ran out of breath.

“Not just… them,” Arella mumbled. “My uncle gone, my older brother, the tribune gone… senators gone…!”

“Senators… tribune?” her mind spun as she tried to work out what course of events transpired. “Was it an attack, some sorcery?”

“No… they… they… they have fled,” Claudius finally managed to articulate.

“Fled,” she repeated dully.

“… Taken the family vault… all the artefacts… The library is pillaged…” Claudius explained. “The main household is in turmoil.”

“Our household vault also…” Arella added. “Your fiancé, Lucius, took it.”

“…”

Five minutes later saw her standing in front of the ancestral hall of the Sempronii estate, staring at the blank walls. Everything was gone, all of the things that were hers, the artefacts, the scrolls, the ancestral tablets even – all taken.

“Lady Cornelia!” she glanced at another servant, Sullius, who had just come running up. “At the gate…” he panted, “the legionnaires…”

“…”

She stared at Sullius and at the dagger in his belt, suddenly wondering if that would not be a much more straightforward way to solve what was likely to come next.

…

…

She awoke from the memories and slowly opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling, which, contrary to her expectations, was not actually that damp. The tumbled-down room as a whole was remarkably dry, strewn with gently rotting leaves mostly. A forgotten ruin of a family estate where she had just gone to be… quiet.

“Arella…”

“…”

There was silence… of course.

She lay there for a few minutes, just listening to the dripping of water.

With a sigh, she sat up and dusted herself off. Her gown had long since rotted away, as had almost anything else that wasn’t made of stone in the place, it seemed. In a way, that was good: it meant that her long period of just lying there doing nothing had lasted some time… a few decades… a century maybe?

“Must be a record for this misbegotten land,” she considered, staring around at the leaves and the dereliction. “At least the roof hasn’t fallen in… much.”

Slipping off the bed, she stretched and finished wiping off the worst of the leaves and dirt. Her feet sank almost a foot into the carpet of them on the floor, having drifted in from the trees on the veranda. The view beyond was shrouded in darkness – night and thick mist. In a way, it was oddly nostalgic… not the darkness, because that could go sodomize itself, but the sense of gloomy, clinging envelopment.

Looking around, the door was still shut, and the other smaller door, which now doubled as a mirror, replacing her last one, which had been stolen by some misbegotten heroes… a very long time ago actually, now that she thought about it. Most of the other furnishings she had crafted last time she was up had all rotted as well from what she could see.

“So, no intruders at least… or they didn’t take the damn doors because they forgot what Orichalcum looks like,” she grumbled, kicking the leaves away and making her way to the door… which was stuck.

“…”

It was an inconvenient downside of Orichalcum that it tended to develop a patina, especially the finer mechanisms like hinges, if left alone in the humidity, and as such, it took her several minutes to actually succeed in kicking it open, much to her annoyance. The room beyond, adjoining to the atrium, was also leaf-strewn, but that was the price you paid for having a room with a view, even if the view was mist, mist and more mist in this instance.

Here, it was again sparse, mostly devoid of any real furnishing. Old abandoned piles tended not to go unexplored for very long anyway, and she had long grown tired of killing whosoever intruded. Idly, she ran a hand over a sword cut mark in the room, one of the few she hadn’t filled in with the paintings of happy family scenes of her and Arella, and sighed. It was easier to ignore them, truthfully, like unwanted suitors, and in a rather cathartic way it fucked with the bindings others had placed on her and her links to this monument to greed, which was a handy side benefit.

She had to pause briefly, again, to kick a door open and made her way through to the atrium, mist swirling between its columns, and stared up at the sky, not that there was much point, because it was just more mist and darkness.

“Pros: the pond is still here,” she mused, folding her arms, looking around and taking in the pond, statues and friezes. “Cons: here is still here…”

That the pond was still there was nothing miraculous, truth be told, because the humidity was foetid; it always had been. Even when you built your estate on the top of a small hill, or, in this case, a large rock, it was still odds on to flood somehow, at least once a year. Why anyone would have built a city here had beggared her understanding even when she was young and naive, before everything went to… well, hell.

“We take our victories where we can, I suppose,” she mused, staring at her reflection in the water… before grimacing at the cool pain in her breast and shutting her eyes. It was always at its worst when she had just stirred, just like the old memories were – especially the ones from those first few terrible hours, she reflected as she closed her eyes and reminisced.

…

…

She opened her eyes, and put her hand to her… bare bosom, trying to ignore the cold pains suffusing her body.

“I should have just stabbed myself in a warm bath…”

As far as a first thought upon ‘awakening’ from death went, it was doubtlessly a strange one.

“Not that it would have done any fucking good…”

All around her, the perpetrators of her situation were frozen, staring at her. The new tribune, whose blade was still wet with her blood, was staring at her like she was a ghost… which, based on what she had just seen, she possibly was, in some twisted way.

“What…?” the new pontifex maximus of Portam Aurorae, barely 30 minutes into his post, asked, staring at her blankly.

“The gods are unamused,” she rasped, wincing at the pain in her breast that told her her lungs were still damaged. “Very unamused.”

The pontifex, who was a follower of the new god, who held that the ‘old gods’ were just demons and devils of various ilk, recovered his mood and scowled at her.

“This is some new barbarian devilry…” Senator Carvallus hissed, grasping for a sword and stepping towards her.

“To go with the old devilries?” one of the centurions grumbled. “Because they have been remarkably and competently conventional in that regard.”

There was some awkward shuffling, and Carvallus pointedly ignored the centurion’s comment as those assembled stared at her and the other three figures: two minor scions from the Qintullus family who happened to be distant relatives by blood and an older woman lying slumped who appeared to have been viciously beaten already.

“…”

“MY LORDS! MY LORDS!” a messenger came scrambling into the room, without any care for propriety.

“What is it?!” the new consul, Halicarus Crastor, snapped. “Can’t you see this is—”

“The mountain barbarians are attacking… and the dead… the dead are not…!”

“An attack warrants this?” another senator, a new one, whose name she didn’t know – some plebeian merchant given opportunity, she supposed – snapped.

“No… the dead…! The dead are…!”

“Are what, man?” the pontifex snapped.

“The dead are not,” she finished for the servant.

…

…

Sighing again, she sat down and swept away a few leaves from the surface and stared at her reflection in the gloom: golden brown hair, lank with leaves, blue eyes holding a faint inner light, her flawless if somewhat pale complexion marred by dirt.

“We cannot live… We cannot die…”

Her hand trailed in the water, warm as it was, though cloudy from the decay. Flowers did grow here, although it was not the season, and in the gloom of night, they hid away. Even now, it was impossible not to remember the first sense of that other hand that had clasped hers as the voice whispered to her, across eternity, and told her of her doom…

…

…

“Awaken…”

A hand clasped hers—

She opened her eyes, and found herself lying in turgid water, unpleasantly aware of the stench of death and decay that suffused everything, even as the words spoken faded away. The temptation was just to close them again and try to relinquish one dark for another, but reality was cruel, it seemed.

“What… are they chanting?” a weak but familiar voice mumbled near her.

Up above, the distant sound of battle echoed, horns replacing bells, screams, explosions and the accursed chanting, a dull roar back and forth. The words filtered back and forth through the darkness, echoing through everything, the filthy water she was sitting in rippling to what were certainly drums and the impact of siege artillery on both sides.

“Mo’Kratha Ua’SHA, Vaaan Uaar Ma’Kahan.”

“Strength and honour! For the Nine Cities!”

“Mo’Kratha Shaaavrr, Ukaa Aouun!”

“The Gate of Dawn Stands!”

“Mo’Kratha Ar’Haaaan!”

“FOR GOD AND VICTORY!”

“Mo’Kratha Ar’Haaaan!”

“Fucking bastards, when I get out of here, I’ll kill them…”

“Kill everyone… Kill…”

She closed her ears to them, and to the other voices around her for a moment, while she got her bearings. It was easier than expected – mainly because she was naked – and her body was a mass of cold, stabbing pains and discomfort. Itches she couldn’t scratch, phantom twinges in her limbs, icy twists in her gut, in her neck…

-Ah… I did…

She shuddered, trying to push that all-too-vivid memory back into the darkness where it belonged. However, the chains that bound her now refused, pushing it back in her face, trying to twist her anger, even if it felt… hollow… somehow.

-Fuck that knife. Seriously, you worthless ancestor, you should die for all of us…

“Mo’Kratha Rises, His Blood is All, Mo’Kratha Conquers, Death to All…” an old voice translated, speaking in the dank and wretched gloom.

“…”

“Where… are we?” she asked at last, sitting up to better seek out the two speakers, her handmaiden Arella and the old philosopher and haruspex, Kerimandras, in the employ of the Valtus family, if she recalled right.

“Y-young lady!” Arella’s exclamation cut through the dull hubbub.

“In one of the old cesspits,” Kerimandras sighed.

“Brother… please…! Brother, don’t…!” another woman’s voice was sobbing nearby.

“Why did you leave me…?” came an old man’s voice, weak and broken.

“Traitors…! Please, God, condemn those villainous souls…” a youth spat, splashing his fists in the water.

“Almighty Father, your merciful…” More prayers, this time from an old man, before he was drowned out by a younger man to her right, who castigated him even as he paced back and forth himself.

She put her hands over her ears, blocking out the hubbub of curses, pleas and general anger that was echoing in the dark reservoir. Looking around, everyone else seemed… she wanted to say alive, but in truth, she doubted it – there was a wrongness here she could sense… that anger for starters.

They were… whatever they were now.

“What happened?” she asked instead, because that seemed like a question that would gain more traction, and help distract her from how… dissociated she felt.

“They… um… executed you, then you didn’t die… so they… cho—”

“I recall,” she replied, cutting him off with as much vehemence as she could, because she did not wish to relive that experience, even verbally. “Vividly.”

“Ah… um…” the old philosopher trailed off, as did quite a few others nearby.

-They will know soon enough, a weary voice sighed in her head.

-Know soon enough the ill deed that has been done.

“Um… then they tried to kill lady Valta, and she also didn’t… um… die. So they threw everyone else from your household and the Valtus household into here – the western Via Portia reservoir, the one—”

“—That’s being used as a cesspit for the trade district after the siege damaged the Via Arica Solus,” she interjected, to distract herself from the myriad pains in her body.

“Yes,” Kerimandras agreed, sounding tired.

“—And bricked up the exits,” another male voice, younger and gloomy, helpfully added from the darkness.

“Yes, they said that if we can’t die now, they can sort it out later,” another person replied bitterly in the darkness.

“How… optimistic of them,” she didn’t bother to hide the derision in her voice.

“What… was done?” the old man asked.

“You expect me to know?” she asked.

“…”

There was a broader ripple of silence, making her realise that perhaps those here did indeed expect her to know somehow.

It didn’t help that she thought she did know… She just wished she didn’t.

-That accursed dagger, why didn’t you throw it down a crevice in the jungles or something… she complained inwardly.

…

…

“We are immortal,” her reflection, shimmering back at her, murmured sadly. “Cursed by my unfilial family and others for their greed…”

That was the tragedy of the Gate of Dawn… the unknown darkness in the heart of this wretched land. Once Valinkar had been cut off, the other cities, Arleth, Rulani, Merovin, Aquilina… had been wracked by betrayal and retreat, just like Portam Aurorae… Unlike Portam Aurorae, which was later called Solaneum, their choice, to stand against death, had been ‘inspired’ by the dreadful, yet heroic choice that the ‘survivors’ claimed had been made. Oh, the fun that had transpired when that deceit was finally made known…

She stared at her broken reflection, then scooped up a cupped handful of water.

“Stately Aphrodite, gold-crowned and beautiful, daughter of Kythera, please send your supplicant strength to see in the day.”

The prayer was not really necessary, but in an odd way it did help as she scattered the brackish water over her face and felt herself somewhat invigorated.

The whole circumstance back then had been rather ironic, a bitter little part of her had to acknowledge. Out with the old gods, in with the new, yet nobody had stopped to think that maybe those old gods had held their power for so long for a reason.

With a sigh, she stood and walked on through the halls, pondering why she had felt compelled to be drawn back to the moment. It was something about the air, the mist, the night… the oppression.

“Oppression.”

She stopped in the great hall of the estate, pondering that. The air was oppressive, like a storm trying to break. The humidity didn’t help, certainly, but it was possible to nearly taste it.

“Really, it is just like that… day…”

She punctuated her disgust by spitting on the inscription of the statue she was passing. Most of those here were ones she had made herself, to serve as reminders mainly. Senators, nobles, free men… and women… of Portam Aurorae, those who fled… and those who had not. Reminders of what cowardice was.

Not of deed, like her own family, but of conviction. Weak fools who desperately sought to cling on to what they had had, who had believed that she and others would offer a way out, some final relief, some last opportunity, she recalled…

…

…

“Yes… you, uh… we don’t know what happened in the shadows. Your body was just whole again at some point,” Arella mumbled, her voice small in the darkness.

Groaning, she pushed herself up and crawled over towards her handmaiden’s voice. It took a minute of groping around in the darkness to find her, but when she did, she found her shivering, her heart actually beating in her breast…

“They…” Arella whispered, but she stopped her with a finger to her lips, having already run her hand up to the other girl’s neck and felt what was done.

“Cowards, all of them,” someone else, a woman…

“Lady Valta?” she asked.

“Yes,” the older woman replied wearily.

“How… come?” she wondered how to ask…

“That coward Quintullus ran off with his mistress – that whore Phaerinia – and my son,” Lady Valta spat, the pain evident in her voice.

“…”

-That pontificating old ass ran off with that busty young mistress and left his wife behind?

She wasn’t sure if she should laugh or sympathise with the matron. There was something so utterly preposterous about that in the circumstances, that it was hard to know where to start.

“Who else has fled, like the thieves they are, into the night?” she asked at last, looking at the other half a dozen figures in the room.

“Senators Turius, Qirinus, Quintullus, Publius, Callius, Uthgar, Serrinus… Lucillia and… Valtus…” the voice of Lady Valta muttered, the venom dripping from her tone in the darkness.

“Also Tribune Emarus,” someone else spoke, more clipped in tone, so presumably a military adjunct?

-Why would we be here, not sent out to die nobly in battle… ah… unless they don’t intend to give any of us an ‘honourable’ death.

“Menacanthus, the bishop of the Holy Church of the Sirimas Mount,” the man who had been telling the old priest to stop praying added, coming closer with splashing steps.

“The two Lord Magisters as well—”

“Perhaps it would be faster to ask who did not run,” another familiar voice muttered.

“Sir Caius?” she asked, surprised that he was here, and not gone… or been taken by her traitorous family.

“…”

“You expected me to go?” his voice also came closer and she finally picked him out in the gloom, a shadow approaching in the darkness with the other two.

“I find myself surprised you were not taken,” she conceded.

-Are you surprised though? another voice sneered in her head, making her put a hand to her temple.

Caius slumped down on a fallen rock nearby, silent, which was all the answer she needed really. She knew that Caius had been her mother’s… companion, childhood friend, certainly.

It was also no secret to her that her family had… changed, since her father and several other senators had come back from his audience with Eternal Consul Nerval Messenius, which had been arranged at vast expense through Aurorae’s teleport gate. Even before then, her father had had ambitions to be Consul of Aurorae, even First Senator of the entire Nine Cities, spurred on by her step-mother. After, though…

She had no idea what assurances had been made, but they had constantly advocated for supporting the efforts on the coast against the Isla Kingdoms… sent elites, sent sons and daughters to Jeris and Meltras that could have been used here. They donated wealth and bodies to that distant war, all with the aim of building closer ties.

When the savage barbarians came they had even gotten some support back, uniquely amongst the other Nine Cities, in truth. A detachment of the Golden Guard from Nerval’s personal legion to bolster a ‘strategic location to the Emperor Neron Augustus’s future ambitions’ – or something like it.

All gone now, and with them all those of influence, means and… leadership nearly, in Aurorae.

There was not much more to say than that, really. Arella, beside her, was just a shivering wreck. A few were trying to break down the exit, but that would be futile for now, she was sure. The entire aqueduct was built of veil stone, quarried out of the mines to the west. The silence, at least in regards to her, did give her time to try and process matters though.

-Useless descendants… an old voice, who she somehow intuitively knew belonged to her great uncle, scowled.

-And I say again, you should have thrown it down a crevice and never brought it back, she accused the voice, whose actions in life were almost certainly why she and possibly the whole town were damned.

“Why do I hear voices in my head?” she asked Caius instead.

“It should be a boon from Martial Quintus, using one of the ancestral banners—” Caius said with a grimace.

“—That the legionnaires might fight with the strength and blessing of the Good Lord, made manifest through the great deeds of our forebears,” the priest added, pressing his hands together.

“And is this also part of your Good Lord’s plan?” Lady Valta hissed, staring around. “That Aurorae be consumed from within by traitors, that our kith and kin abandon us… and whatever was done… was done… Or are we also devils now? Demons and cursed beings deserving of his ‘pure wrath’ as you priests preached from your altars every day?”

“…”

-What punishment can come from such meagre faith, an old voice in her head sneered.

-Such new gods, only amounting to this much, another ridiculed.

-God, she corrected absently, they claim there is only one.

Memories, older memories in her head, cackled and mocked at that idea, even as the old priest fell silent for a moment, before continuing, “Lady Valta… while I know this is…”

“If you say something like we shall be saved in death and all redeemed thereafter, I will elect to personally test whether or not you also come back,” Lady Valta sneered.

She had always felt it strange herself, and based on the disdainful laughs of others, she was not the only one. The idea of one god being supreme was not unusual, but the idea that there was only one god, and all others were less, had never sat easily with her, never mind the politics of it, and the message had always come with politics as far as she had observed.

The old priest, who she knew now to be the leader of the monastic Brothers of Saint Clement… just sighed softly.

That also explained why he was likely down here, politics – again.

The Brothers had a great deal of lay influence and long resisted oversight from the Eternal City or the Old Kingdoms. Their particular brand of faith had been rooted in the traditions of this land, and that, she was sure, was why they had been so successful here, compared to many others. A success that that new abbot had been pushing her father to help reclaim control over.

“So… what? Do we just sit here in the shit and the mire, waiting for the battle overhead to resolve itself one way or another?” a different voice, someone she didn’t recognise, spoke up.

…

…

Sighing softly, her breath making the mist shimmer, she contemplated the figures on their plinths around her hall and the carving of her, set amid the middle of the pond, that she had made to recall that more innocent self. Curses were weird, and cursed curses, even weirder, and as far they went, this forgotten place was probably among the absolute weirdest.

The means by which it had been done had eluded her for a long time. When that understanding had come, the recriminations had been savage. The perpetrators were never caught, not the true ones… Her hall missed several critical statues in that regard.

“How many years have passed…?” Idly, she reached down and picked up a handful of the mouldering leaves, scrunching them between her fingers and then letting them fall to the ground again.

The temptation really was to just go back to her room, sweep out the leaves and then just lie back down again and let this dark, dank eternity keep flowing. It was not Tartarus, but, denied that, this place was… fitting…

And yet…

And yet…

She stood in the tall, vaulted hall of the estate, the mist swirling around, wondering why she felt on edge…

…

…

“Do you understand your crime?” the haughty pontifex declared, addressing them… some 300 ‘criminals’ all told, in the great square before the senate house.

“What is there to understand?!” someone yelled from the crowd.

“Traitors!”

“Villains!”

“Heretical deceivers!”

“Cowardly scum, you will rot in Hell for this!”

“You and all your cursed family!”

“…”

-Why would we even be here, if we were? a part of her complained inwardly.

“In light of what has been done, of the curse your family has inflicted upon us, we cannot kill you, it seems. Your devilry exceeds rational comprehension, so we can only call upon the austere judgement of god to deliver final verdict upon you all,” the pontifex declared, before turning to the tribune. “Lord Amelius, if you would read the verdict set down by almighty god for the people?”

“Of course, Lord Pontifex, Lord Consul, Lady Vice Consul, assembled senators… the sentence deliberated for the high crime of treachery and godless devilry, is that the accused shall be armed with metal weapons, and set to hold the eastern gate. They shall do so, until such a state has been achieved as the vile demons have been pushed back, or they are redeemed in the eyes of the lord, our god, before whom there can be no greater mercy and joy than to die in his service.”

“Fucking cultists,” someone muttered from behind her.

“What say you else, Lord Consul Crastus?”

“No more need be said. Deport them with the other prisoners. Whether they live or die is in God’s hands, but at least their last moments shall be of some use to us and the brave folk of our city, so cruelly betrayed by them,” the Consul said with a vague wave of his hand.

“Bet he won’t be lifting a sword any time soon,” Caius muttered softly beside her.

She stood with the others, only to find one of the guards grab her by the arm and drag her out.

“Not you. The Consul and the new Haruspex want words with you,” the guard sneered.

She was half led, half dragged, not to the grand hall of Aurorae’s senate, but by a rather circuitous route back towards the main complex of estates that bordered what had been the Forum Aurorae, with its sacred park, gardens and old temples associated with the now defunct mystery cult to Despoina Aurorae. The gardens were repurposed now, for growing food, while the forum had become a military camp. Even the temples themselves were now mostly shrines to minor saints of the church. The only thing that retained something close to its original use was the sacred spring of Despoina Aurorae, where, beyond it, set into the rising cliffs, stood the city’s oldest necropolis, situated below the shadow of the acropolis and its much grander temples which held enough civic significance that it had endured.

-Disgraceful… another old voice snarled.

-Impious, without respect for our ancestors, another sighed, staring at the transformed temple complex.

That… change… was one she was still grappling with. Not the temples, but the fact that since she came back the first time… or rather, failed to die… her memories were no longer quite her own.

She had grown up with the ‘new faith’, though to call it such at this stage seemed odd in its own way. It had been with them in some manner nearly as long as Aurorae had existed as a regional power, with some of its earliest founders being believers, so at what point was it no longer new?

Back then… it had just been something like another mystery cult, tolerated because those were always strange. Now, that position had nearly flipped on its head. The old faith clung on only in odd places, retained by the folk who relied on the land and their labours, maintaining their temples with their ancestral associations, while the new faith had cast aside its humble beginnings and become a thing of the wealthy, of influence and laws of state, less interested in espousing morality than in enforcing it.

It didn’t help that as the daughter of a powerful noble family, she saw what few others saw – their hypocrisy – and found little to love in it. Saw how its wealthy adherents projected their piety, offered praise and ‘salvation’ to the point where it cloyed, and at the same time wined and dined with her father, accepted quiet donations and buggered servant girls… and boys just as much as anyone else and did so much less honestly.

At last, she was taken into the hall of the sacred spring, converted into a temple to the emperor – another of Neron Augustus’s directives to bring the two faiths together, that had been met with resignation until the Golden Guards came back with her father, at which point that change had been done before the guards were even in their opulent estate.

“So, we understand what was done, Lord Consul,” a voice drifted through the hall as she approached.

“Among the things missing from the Sempronii estate is that dagger that the old man of—”

“Surely it is just another trinket among the multitude they took,” the Consul’s voice was tired.

“So we thought, but I also had a chance to examine it, unofficially,” the old voice sighed. “And traces of its unique mana were found in the spring.”

“In the spring…” another voice, female, presumably the Consul’s wife, sounded disbelieving.

“So… they did something to the spring?”

“All those who have failed to die were at the grand banquet yesterday…”

“Where they all toasted with water from the sacred spring, blessed by the bishops, for our future victory…” the Consul said, as she was finally dragged into the room itself.

The spring glittered darkly in the lantern light, waters quietly lapping against the edge of the pool, where four figures stood: the Lord Consul, Crastus; the City Haruspex, a new one anyway, whom she didn’t recognise except for his robe; the consul’s sister, not wife; Halicara and another scholar, dressed in the robes that marked him as a philosopher and thinker associated with the city academy.

Someone had recarved the statues at the back, she noted with a bit of sadness. The founders of the town remained, but their patron deities now had new heads, depicting the saints, and their symbols of office had been replaced by those of the holy church.

“The traces in the spring are very weak, and several ritual vessels are also missing,” that scholar was saying.

“Remind me about the dagger,” Halicara said, barely glancing at her as she was brought forward and made to kneel.

“A bit of an enigma really, recovered by Fabius Sempronius some two centuries ago by chance when they were on campaign against the Eagle Mountain barbarians raiding the eagle crest Orichalcum mines,” the scholar replied respectfully. “It was in the ruins of an old rock-cut fortress that was in a similar style to the one the town necropolis has subsumed and was suspected to be an ancient temple to Dis Pater, the Lord of the Dead. The item in question, as it was found, was just a ritual knife stabbed into a stone-cut pool. However, he brought it back and built a small shrine to it in the Sempronii estate. He was an avid collector of old relics like that and an adherent to the old… faith.”

“A dangerous hobby to have in those times,” the Lord Consul noted.

“Was there not some tale about the spring here having a similar kind of dagger?” the Haruspex asked.

“Sempronius was a reclusive man, outwardly giving, and a war hero. Hard to impeach, though a few tried. He was also the last priest of the local mystery cult that was formally known. After his death in the second battle of Arleth, the family decommissioned them and put the artefacts into the vault,” the scholar sighed. “And yes, this spring also had similar artefacts, but they were lost in the sack by the Red Eye savages 500 years ago. That was why I had a chance to examine it, and a few others, at the request of the then head of the Sempronii family, the Lady Cornelia’s uncle, to determine if there was any merit to them beyond mere symbolism.”

“…”

Listening to their discussion, she felt her heart sink, because she was pretty sure she knew, even without the memories of those old ancestors bleeding through somehow, why she might be here. The town’s mystery cult had been abolished, and her ancestor had been among its last adherents… formal adherents. Her mother had been a member and she had been sworn to it on her sixth birthday, thinking the whole thing a bit of a lark and rather enjoying the mystery and seriousness of it. Thereafter, though, it had been largely unremarked on, apart from entitling her to attend a few more selective social banquets if she so desired.

“Clearly, you were—”

“—Ahem,” the scholar coughed, cutting Lady Halicara off. “Actually, at the time I stated that it and several other items were uncommonly odd and rather ancient, and that there was perhaps some significance to them, in line with the artefacts that were looted from here.”

“…”

“I see,” the Lord Consul frowned.

“That is not to say that they were the same ones, you understand,” the scholar frowned, staring at them. “There is an ancient – and I do stress ancient – record of a set of five knives of precious metals: Duramar Iron, Orichalcic Copper, Ictis Tin, Laurion Silver and Kynthian Gold, being used to adorn the altars of Pluton, representing the five rivers of the underworld.”

“…”

“Phlegethon is represented by iron, because it requires the highest temperature; Cocyltus, by tin… because it is the lowest; lead is sometimes substituted for tin… and in any case, it is for lamentation, because it is so commonly used.”

Nobody laughed at his bad joke about adulterated coinage, so he coughed and continued a bit more hurriedly.

“Acheron, by Orichalcic copper, because pain; Lethe by silver, because of the association with dreams and forgetfulness, and Styx…”

“Gold,” the Lord Consul sighed. “And the dagger that Fabius recovered had a blade of gold, did it not?”

“No… actually, the hilts are what is made from the metal,” the scholar shook his head. “All five blades were traditionally cast from Duraminium river cobbles, but any metal nodule will do. The key thing is that the metal be sourced not from the ground, but a river, bog or other wet place.”

“I see… so this dagger of Fabius has an association with Styx… and the oath sworn by all those present…”

“Mmmm, yes,” the scholar nodded.

“It does not explain why they left her behind though,” Halicara scowled, turning to look at her once again.

“Or why the vast majority of those who orchestrated its swearing left like thieves in the night…” the Consul scowled, staring at her as well.

“Or, why that oath, that we pledged to stand in the face of the savage barbarian tribes and not fall to darkness, in the name of the Emperor Neron Augustus, should see this girl rendered unable to die,” the voice of the pontifex echoed behind her.

“Yes… or that,” the Lord Consul frowned.

“However, not all is lost,” the pontifex added, “Out of this misfortune… comes providence, a blessing by the lord, to show us a route out of this disaster wrought by treachery.”

“And what, pray, is that?” Halicara sneered, combining insult and a dig at the new god’s believers’ approach to dealing with problems rather neatly in the process.

“Her,” the high pontifex pointed at her.

“…”

“How so?” the Lord Consul asked.

“Well, none of the others have risen, except her handmaiden, that philanderer Caius and Lady Valta, among those sent to fight at the gate,” the pontifex observed, walking around to stand before her.

“Do you know what binds those three and this girl?” the pontifex added, glancing at the Lord Consul and his sister, both of whom shook their heads.

“A secret, of blood,” the pontifex sighed. “A travesty of impiety and infidelity,”

“With the Lady Valta?” Halicara blinked.

“No… Lady Valta just has a potent lineage in her blood,” the pontifex replied. “No, the link I speak of is between the handmaiden, her father… and her half-sister… kneeling here… and that heretical little cult of theirs to ‘The Mistress of Dawn’.”

“…”

“That is quite an allegation to make,” Halicara chuckled, looking at her. “I will give you that the former Lady Portia was a dreadfully unhappy woman who lived in her cups. That said, the local mysteries are nothing more than an excuse for some raucous private parties. They are harmless.”

“Hah!” The pontifex shook his head derisively at Halicara’s observation, even though she was quite correct, based on her own experience of them anyway.

Mostly they were just used for shady business dealings and the occasional dalliance.

“So what are you saying?” the Lord Consul frowned, ignoring her own furious glare.

“I was a companion to the priest serving Lady Portia’s father, the Lord Augustus Sempronius,” the pontifex shrugged. “It came up a few times in conversation, when he was in his cups… All knowledge may be of use to the lord…”

“You know, you’re just as much a hypocrite as the bastards who fled,” she observed, spitting on his feet.

“The judgement of a traitor and heretic means so much to me. I am sure the lord will forgive,” the pontifex chuckled. “Not to mention the people of this city.”

“Still doesn’t explain why they left her,” the Lord Consul frowned.

“Are you stupid, dear brother?” Halicara sighed. “It does, perfectly… The late lady Portia Minor was married to Lord Sempronius after her older sister Portia Aurelia, his original wife, died in childbirth to what would have been his eldest son, leaving only the elder sister of the girl here as issue. Cornelia is the only child Portia Minor bore Lord Sempronius, and she was born only a year before her handmaiden, the ‘daughter’ of a commoner on their country estates and Caius Atullus.”

“She is not the legitimate daughter?” the Lord Consul frowned.

“Hard to say, but the marriage was not a happy one and was done entirely at the behest of the Lord Sempronius and Lord Portius for political ends,” Halicara shrugged, “intended to secure links between the two families. However, with two daughters, one wife and a son dead in childbirth and the replacement wife a depressed alcoholic at being forced to marry her sister’s husband, was it little wonder that he was happy to divorce her and send her back home that he might marry Quintillus’s youngest daughter?”

“…”

“So they left her, Caius and the handmaiden here because…”

“They are awkward, and unnecessary. The older sister gives a link to Portia blood, and Cornelia’s parentage is potentially dubious,” Halicara judged… cruelly.

All four considered her, still kneeling there, her gut twisting with rage and embarrassment now, to hear her family situation so dissected. It was certainly not without merit, she was not so childish as to refuse to acknowledge that, but it was still none of their damn business, especially given it was her mother being slandered, and not the coward and blood traitor who had slept with anything that had a shapely ass, including two of her own friends… and fled this hell hole with a woman a year younger than she was.

“But why?” the scholar frowned. “Wait… Caius is a minor cousin of Lady Valta, and Lady Valta married into the Valtus family. Her original family is…”

“Junia Aquillae,” the pontifex smirked.

“…”

She never even had time to react, as the consul stepped, grabbed the sword from the guard and swung it down—

…

—She opened her eyes, and found herself lying where she had been, a splitting, cold ache across her face and cold, wet, iron-tasting gore sticking her face to the floor as a reminder of what had just occurred.

“So… she is immortal,” the Lord Consul observed, from where he was sitting on a bench nearby, sword still wet with her blood resting beside him.

“So it appears. What was important is not the oath that was sworn, but the water itself,” the scholar nodded.

“However, what you propose… will never be accepted,” Halicara said slowly. “And it still does not explain why.”

“Perhaps, but there is no need for such a crude way to do things. She is the key, a substitute for the dagger itself in many ways… an unsuspecting source of deliverance sent to us, through the petty greed of her family,” the pontifex nodded. “A miracle from the Lord, to deliver us a path to salvation.”

“I take it back…” she managed to rasp, pushing herself up. “You’re an even bigger hypocrite than those traitorous bastards who fled.”

“On the contrary, you should consider this a path to your salvation,” the old priest sighed, staring at her. “Just like our most gracious lord, through your sacrifice, your act of redemption, can all the innocent souls condemned by those who fled for fear and greed, be granted a means to break free of this horror.”

…

She was sure she screamed when they dragged her into the sacred spring.

Certainly, she screamed when they drove Orichalcum spikes through her, impaling her to a block in the middle in the ritual pool associated with the spring.

Screamed for a while at least, after that… between cursing them, her family, the gods, god… and anyone else who probably didn’t care to listen… at least until a guard jumped over and tied a rag around her, gagging her.

…

When she came around, she was no longer the only one there. Arella, Caius, Valta and both youths from the Qintullus family were all bound to the pillars around the ritual pool, which was now dark with their blood.

How long she lay like that, drifting between life and death, she had no idea. There was no point in screaming, or cursing even, and the pain didn’t really get any worse, which was… depressing somehow. They were left alone in deathless misery, misfortunate beings cursed by the desperation of others and shackled by a blessing they were born with.

Periodically, servants came, taking away amphorae of the infused spring water, mixing it with wine and rare herbs, while the battle around the city still raged.

How long she hung there, in the dark, nearly drifting away, she had no idea. Priests came, to say prayers, light braziers, extol them to repent and recant their sins, to show humility and acknowledge a crime that was never even theirs in the first place. Not that any of them did, that in and of itself would have been a humiliating capitulation, to those cowards who fled, and those cowards who tormented her now, trying to save themselves a miserable end.

The pontifex came a few times, to denounce her, and the scholar to try and entreat her to speak more of the dagger and its effects, even the Lord Consul came, to try and goad them with knowledge that others had ‘seen sense’ and that all they were doing was prolonging their own suffering, but she, and the other five, ignored them, until at last a part of her, at least, drifted away, consumed by cruel, numbing pain.

…

“Awaken…”

The words surfaced, even as she was dragged back to life somehow, the whispered words—

“AWAKEN, FURY OF THE LORD!”

The war cry reverberated through the lantern-lit gloom, the sound of fighting echoing outside much more clearly. Abruptly, several priests, servants and a group of soldiers hurried through the door.

“How can we take all of them?” one snarled.

“You lot, hold the door. We will do what we can,” the priest snapped, directing the soldiers to take up positions somewhere beyond her line of sight.

“HIS GRACE PROTECTS!”

Another shout echoed from outside as the priests rushed over to the nearest pillar and put silver manacles around first Quintullus Marius then Quintullus Darius and dragged them down. They then did the same for Valta; however, by that point, the fighting outside was fierce enough that—

A shockwave tore through the whole shrine, a direct hit from some siege attack perhaps, and a second group of six soldiers ran in, yelling something and pointing behind them. The priests shook their heads, pointing at her, then at Caius, at which point the soldiers grabbed the two already freed and ran out with them.

As she watched, the remaining soldiers took up positions around the chamber, and the servants, after some protesting, waded into the shallow pool and set to freeing her, Valta and Caius.

“Fuck… I can’t believe we are actually saving these three…” one servant sighed, struggling with the bindings on Valta.

“Without them, we cannot find that fucking dagger, or so my master says,” the one freeing her sighed.

“They should have been cut up and buried in lead boxes—”

“Hurry up!” the soldier nearest her yelled.

“…”

“We are out of time!” a soldier snarled, hopping into the pool and splashing towards her. “Get back.”

“What are—?” one of the priests called over.

She grunted as the blade bit into her arm, above the wrist, cold and hot pains conflicting with each other as the bone shattered. A second blow severed the arm that the servant had been struggling to free, and she hit the water to the sound of cursing, even as she felt the sustained trauma finally drag the last of her lingering awareness away.

“Shit… I thought you said she couldn’t die!” an annoyed voice distantly echoed.

“It’s not permanent. Just get on with it!” the soldier’s voice echoed, fading away.

…

Something grasped her, hauling her up out of the turgid waters, even as grasping arms, whispering voices and memories of dead ancestors tried to drag her back down. A woman stood, naked, in the shallows of a vast river, grimacing with a certain distaste as she considered her.

Two things stood out immediately: the woman was three times her size, easily – she was like a doll in her hands – and the darkness around her was crushing, as if trying to reject her very presence here.

“Will you aid me?”

The woman’s voice was melodious and gentle, stirring her heart and somehow calming her, even if her features were themselves hard to make out, as if veiled by the mist that swirled around them both.

“Aid?” she managed to ask, still dangling.

“…”

The woman stared at her, then shook her head, almost wryly, putting her down in the shallows, whereupon, suddenly, they were both of the same height.

“You cannot leave the river, so this is the best we can do,” her tone was apologetic.

“What…?”

“Usually, people ask where, or why,” the woman looked a trifle amused.

She stared around, the dark current tugging at her ankles, unable to shake the sense that she knew in her heart where this was, and also why she could not ‘cross’. All around her, there was a great shrieking and wailing, yet she was somehow dissociated from it, as if the mists themselves veiled her from a part of its reality.

“Don’t focus on it too long. You are… already in a strange position, because of who you are, what you are, and what was done,” the woman mused. “This is not a land for the living, nor is this river a place for the dead. You who are neither are… unusual, and that is why, I suppose, we have found each other. That, and a supplication from one of your old ancestors.”

“My old ancestors?”

“Old ancestors,” the woman stressed, with some amusement.

Almost unbidden, she found among the clamouring recollections still plaguing her a memory of a time before their family arrived in this new land, from when the Eternal City was just a small town, and a different power was still on the ascendancy around the Mare Nostrum.

Her ancestor’s mother had… travelled in that ancient world and had a dalliance with a mercenary on an island called Kythira… where she had given the child up to the temple of the Hellenistic Cult of Venus, a child who had grown up in the temple, become a priest, and been anointed as a Dawn Immortal, a servant… companion even… of a goddess far different in hue than many viewed her now.

“Yes, Anthousa. She was a supplicant at my shrine, who bore a child to a pleasurable dalliance on the road. Fearing retribution from her family, she gave up the child at my shrine, where he became a priest of my cult, then my champion.”

“…”

“You are… V-venus?” she asked at last, proud that she barely stuttered, not sure she could even credit that as a genuine question.

The woman, hazy and beautiful, laughed. “I suppose I have gone by many names, but in this instance… you may call me Ambologera.”

It took her a moment to grasp for the meaning, because, while the tongue of the Hellenes was spoken, it was mostly scholarly, compared to the Imperial language.

“She who postpones old age,” she murmured, bowing.

“We are… complicated beings, even more so than the tales suggest,” Ambologera sighed. “So I will ask you again: will you aid me?”

“And if I choose not to?” she asked.

“I will drag you ashore, because that is the kind of thing I do, and because it will annoy her terribly,” Ambologera chuckled, sitting down on a handy rock.

At this point, she had no need to ask who ‘her’ probably was – the rivalry between those two figures was… mythological in its own way.

“What of the others… my friends…?” she asked, thinking especially of Arella and of Caius, who was at the very least someone whom her mother had relied on and someone who treated her like a daughter, rumours or no.

“…”

“You ask that… and not what I would have you do?” Ambologera mused, the conflicted expression that flickered across her features all but answering the question in any case.

“If I go back, if I aid you, could I help them?” she asked at last.

“You would give up… this shore, for your half-sister and your mother’s lover?” the woman almost smiled, in the process apparently confirming her earlier suspicions, though that in truth only cemented her decision.

“…”

“Would I be deserving of a place on that shore, if I did not?” she asked in turn. “Would you have found me?”

Ambologera… no… Aphrodite, smiled at her and then took her head in her hands, kissing her forehead.

“Awaken, my Dawn Immortal, and wreak pandemonium on my foes.”

…

She opened her eyes, the words of a goddess of old still echoing in her mind, along with the knowledge of what had been done… was being attempted… and found herself slumped against the ruins of the pillar that had held her, half submerged in the bloody spring.

Corpses lay everywhere, savage barbarians and soldiers alike… illuminated by the first rays of sun from a new day that shone through the open door, making the bloody remains of the pool in which she was lying seem all the darker. In that light, she could see that the outer temple had lost a decent portion of its roof, the statues beyond, of the saints, decapitated or tipped over…

And yet, that was all secondary to the terrifying revelation that Ambologera… Aphrodite had delivered to her.

It was hard to know which was more shocking really: That that old dagger of Fabius’s had been quenched in the river Styx… That her ancestor had been a favourite of one of the many faces of that goddess… just like the Trojan Prince Anchises and so many other mythological persons. Or that the Emperor Neron wanted to grasp Elysium and that the Holy Church was willing to aid him in that, seeking out ancient relics associated with it…

“HERE!” a harsh voice, speaking old Latin, cut through her reverie, even as she became aware that other figures around her were stirring; the nearest was the soldier who had tried to cut her down.

“How did any survive here…?” a woman’s voice, less harsh echoed.

“Devilry. Their sorcery is an abomination,” someone else muttered.

“How…?” the disorientated soldier had pushed himself up, then saw the barbarians and froze, before scrabbling for his—

A spear smashed through his head, impaling him to the ground and sinking a full forearm’s length into the pillar beside her. Death in all its forms was no stranger to her now, not least her own, but to find herself face to face with the twisted and deformed face was… unnerving in ways that stirred elements of emotion in her she was sure she had lost.

“Others live,” the spear was pulled away and she found herself staring up at a rather naked male barbarian wearing a mask made of a skull, adorned with Orichalcum.

“This devilry of theirs knows no bounds. We should not be fighting to claim this place, but to obliterate it,” a female barbarian muttered, standing at edge of the pool with her arms crossed, mostly naked apart from a red silken cloth around her waist and an Orichalcum mask crafted to resemble a smiling woman.

“It seems they have escaped with the perpetrators,” another, older-sounding barbarian, wearing an Orichalcum mask in the form of a grinning man, observed, sounding angry as he stabbed another barely moving soldier through the head.

“What of the pool?” another younger, female barbarian, similarly attired to the woman, but covered in white war paint, asked. “Should we destroy it?”

“Destroy it?” the old barbarian wearing the Orichalcum mask sneered. “This is a great prize, Grimvak. Why should it be destroyed?”

“Because it is an abomination, as corrupt and defiled as that which has afflicted our people,” the red-garbed shamaness murmured, still looking around with eyes that radiated dark discontent.

“You are not wrong,” the barbarian who had stabbed the guard beside her observed. “However, this war must end, and we must be the victors. For if the humans overcome, our kind will be ruined…”

“Erishkar—”

The older barbarian cut off the red garbed woman, “To do that, I will use whatever tool I can, Naakara, ally with who I can, even use their own devilry against them.”

“You wish to use this?” the female shamaness sounded disgusted.

“This war must end, and we must be the victors,” Erishkar stated flatly, lifting his spear and looking at her, still slumped motionless—

She never even saw his arm move, just experienced flat pain in her face and a sense of dissociated crackling as the afterimages of the scene faded away into dark mist… again.

…

…

She touched her forehead involuntarily, and stared at the statue of her from so long ago, sitting there, chatting with Arella on a salvaged divan, dedicated to ‘Aphrodite Ambologera’, because no matter how many years passed, some memories were just hauntingly vivid…

Even to this day, it still struck her as amusingly ironic that the seeds of all that unravelling had been sown not with any great endeavour, though presumably it had been enjoyable for her mother and Caius, but with an unhappy young girl who loved her childhood friend more than the arranged marriage she had been forced into for political means.

Shaking her head, she stood and sighed as memories of those events continued to shimmer through her mind—

Portam Aurorae had never risen again.

When she had next awoken, it had been to darkness and wretched soldiers wailing in grief and fury, entombed within the remains of the shrine. The barbarians had taken their dead, the priests, the contents of the shrine pool and tried to burn the rest of them to cinders, near as she could tell… However, they had been unable to hold the city, mainly because, due to various factors, the citizens of Portam Aurorae no longer stayed dead.

In many ways the curse was twofold: they had defiled a spring sacred to both Despoina and Aurorae, the local name for Aphrodite, converting it to a new god, and many had used her blood and the strength of what they believed to be a holy spring blessed by ‘the Lord’, to relinquish their mortality in a desperate effort to endure the barbarians’ savage siege.

Neither goddess was known particularly for their forgiving natures, and as a result, what most of those cowardly, profane souls got was a cruel facsimile of what she had: a cursed curse, born of the same defiling rot that had seeped deep into the whole wretched conflict by that point, and the terms of it, unlike her own ordeal, were not negotiable.

In the end, many barbarians had departed, and those who did not were eventually overwhelmed by others from the west, more in thrall to the defiling insanity slowly gnawing at everything at that point.

She involuntarily put a hand to her breast and then ran her hand down the wall next to her, scrawling her fingers against the rock for a few moments before sighing and turning away and walking on, out of that hall and into the next, heading for the main courtyard of the old acropolis.

It didn’t take long to get there, passing through halls carved with the tale of how the first expedition, from Menacarus, had managed to make it here, driving out the remaining barbarians and founding a new outpost by the river, Nova Aurorae. It had endured for less than a year before the enraged former inhabitants and returning attentions of the barbarian tribes managed to wear it down and the forces occupying it retreated.

The main courtyard was not as overgrown as she had expected, truthfully. Vines and hardy tangle thorn were growing out of quite a few damaged buildings, but there was only so much purchase for them – if nothing else, those who built and re-built Solaneum had known how to put up walls. As such, it only took a modicum of effort to force open the smaller door out of the grand audience hall.

The original acropolis was easily… ancient… She didn’t dignify it with actual years, but there had been a circle of stones and a cairn there long before the first temple of Jupiter Feretrius.

She stared up at the main façade and columns of the central temple, now remade as the Grand Cathedral of Saint Laurentius of the Solace. It was somehow fitting that that memorial to greed was slowly being gnawed itself by nature, just as the founders of that cult had sought to gnaw at everything else.

Much of what was here related to that second founding, and the more she stared up at it, barely visible in the roiling mist that bled into darkness, the more certain she became that her unease was because of it…

Turning again, to look out across the river, she grimaced, because there was no question of seeing Caeracht from where she now was with the mist.

“River, augury, river… augury… river… augury…” she plucked a few leaves off a plant and picked the old augury platform to Despoina Aurorae beside the temple of Jupiter Feretrius.

The path up was fairly treacherous but not so overgrown as to be impassable, thankfully. In her day, it had already been converted into a chapel for a minor saint, Maris if she recalled. Later, when Solaneum was founded, it had been a speaking platform for the courtyard below. Now, its main appeal was that, outside of climbing on the roof of the temple of Jupiter, it offered her the best vantage point across the valley.

Arriving at the top, she scrambled up a vine-covered wall and onto its lower roof, to look out across the valley in a much less impeded manner, and sighed again. Above the worst of the mist, it was still cloudy, overcast and, if anything, even more oppressive, with the darkness pushing in and even the moon obscured, which was unusual.

Though the land below looked rather broken up and scattered, with the occasional ruins peeking through the mist and the shadows of low hills extending out to the river, in her mind’s eye, she could see most of the traces of various later occupations.

“For a city founded on the imperial writ of a defiled devil, by betrayers and cowards, traitors to their own kith and kin, you have endured far longer than any such edifice has any right to,” she grumbled, staring into the mist, looking in the direction of Caeracht.

The worst part of it was that, to a greater extent, their endeavour was hailed as a great success, and the Sempronii family had gained immense favour and fortune, as had the Valtus, Quintullus and Karius among others… The Holy Order of Mortal Solace, founded there and supported by their strength, had become the bright blade of the Holy Church and the resurgent symbol of the Eternal City’s might in those lands.

Its members had forced out the undead, quelled the deathless demons – ignoring that they were largely of their own making – purged the savage barbarians who had sacked both previous cities and even managed to make gains against the terrible grasping curse of defilement that was slowly turning lands wracked by war to the west and north into demon-infested hells, one village at a time.

Since that time, there had been no less than four revivals of the city, notwithstanding Caeracht, re-founded by the barbarians as the original settlement that had been here, even before Portam Aurorae. Its most recent incarnation, built out of the Capitoline of Solaneum, overlooking the river, still should have been visible as a faint haze in the distance, even at night, in the mist – and yet there was no sign of it.

“A city of 40,000 barbarians does not just go… dark…”

She trailed off as the distant, northern horizon wavered, briefly visible in a raging flare of white lightning that drew the eye in uncommonly disturbing ways despite being several hundred miles away.

“…”

That flash of lightning did, at least, cut through the mist for a moment, silhouetting the collapsed dome of the second largest church in old Solaneum and picking out a few rooftops amid sunken streets, buried by the passing of years, a few egregious wars’ worth of terraforming and a propensity for everything to flood given half a chance.

It was weird, in a way, because, despite it being buried deeper than any grave, tens of metres below the current ground surface, in her mind’s eye, she could still see the ghost of Portam Aurorae. Recall standing here, millennia ago, with Arella, leaning on the balustrade, watching crowds go by…

“Arella…”

She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the relatively cooler air wash over her, before opening them to stare at the distant horizon, casting the word into the wind. An ancient ritual… that if you spoke the name of the person you desired the most, in the hour before dawn, Despoina Aurorae would hear your plea and send you—

A second searing bolt of lightning skittered across the distant sky, black cracks on black, draining colour from the world and evoking a suffocating sense of chthonic gloom, while with it… She narrowed her eyes, as something within the nature of the mist, and the darkness, shifted, becoming eerily covetous…

“…”

The grasping claw connected with her head, and her whole body screamed in twisted cold agony—

~ Fuan Hao – Ruin on the outskirts of Solaneum ~

“What, by the nameless fate, even is this place?” Brother Li muttered, staring at a smashed head of a statue that he had picked up.

Fuan Hao, standing in the middle of the lower story of the leaf-strewn, half-buried hall, found himself nodding grimly, even though the question had no clear answer beyond the obvious. It was a creepy, mouldering ruin, part of an even bigger creepy and mouldering ruin he would have happily stayed out of, except that Senior Brother Shu was annoyed and wanted to explore.

The town – Caeracht, as the demons had called it, or Solaneum, as it seemed to be called on some old Easten inscriptions – was, it transpired, just part of a much greater ruin. The scope of that ruin had surprised even the Imperial Princess’s party, truth be told, but the leaders of the main exploration had decided to let the lesser influences poke around it, and so they had wound up here.

“Do you think the demons built this place as well?” Junior Brother Feng asked, his voice echoing oddly in the cavernous and somewhat misty darkness.

“It doesn’t look like it,” Brother Yuang mused, staring at one of the fluted columns. “The quality of craftsmanship is exceptional, in comparison, and…”

“And why, if they had this kind of place right on their doorstep, were they living in a triple walled fortress, with most of these ruins outside the walls?” he finished.

“Well… yes,” Brother Yuang agreed.

“Would you lot stop whinging?” Shu Wentian hissed, from where he was crouched, staring at an inscription on the headless statue that dominated the middle of the room.

“It’s an old, creepy, half-buried ruin,” Brother Li grumbled, putting the statue head down carefully where he had found it at the broken base of the statue between two columns. “Without any obvious threats and within which no geomancy compass worth a damn works—”

“—Which only becomes remotely obvious at night,” he added for good measure.

“So allow us our complaining,” Brother Li finished.

“Anyway… what does the statue say?” Brother Yuang asked.

“It’s dedicated to a fellow… ‘Val’…‘tus’…” Shu Wentian trailed off for a moment, muttering to himself.

“It reads something like ‘In honour of Publius Terrus Valtus, bestowed upon him for… great… merit’, or maybe ‘service’, ‘to founding’, or maybe ‘through founding our great city of Solaneum’,” Shu Wentian said, standing up and staring at the headless stone statue. “Apparently he was one of the founders of this city.”

“Wait… we are in a place associated with a person who founded this ruin?” Brother Yuang blinked.

“No, sadly… Why am I the only one here who can even read the old Eastern scripts?” Shu Wentian sighed, shaking his head and looking around.

“Because in day-to-day life, the number of uses for them is exactly this one?” he pointed out with a sigh of his own.

“…”

“And because our sect is on the western coast of the central continent? Not the Eastern backwater one?” Brother Li grumbled.

“So what is this place then?” he asked, looking around at the tall columns, the upper layer, with vegetation creeping in and growing through the cracks, and the partial flooding on the floor.

In its heyday, the hall would have been grand, as grand as anything in a small sect – maybe 100 metres long and 25 wide, roof and upper gallery supported by gracefully carved columns of white stone. The walls were all carved, with alcoves for statues and, between them, various friezes depicting day to day life in a great city, which, if the scale was not an exaggeration, was as big as a regional capital back on Eastern Azure.

Around its extremity there were a few stone couches, some smashed statues in alcoves, their inscriptions nearly illegible and some hints that the walls and friezes might have been painted as well as carved, before flooding and the passage of years obscured it all.

Even the floor tiles, where not under a thin film of water originating from a large shallow ornamental pool encircling much of the large statue, were exquisite in their quality, depicting flowers and strange beasts or stylized faces.

“Some kind of reception hall, I would guess,” Wentian said, also looking around pensively again. “I guess all we can do is wait for Brothers Yu and Qin to come back from checking the other hall.”

“Sorry, you won’t have to wait long,” Yu’s voice echoed, on cue, from the only exit that was open, and the pair in question emerged, looking muddy and a bit fed up.

“The way is blocked beyond the next small set of halls,” Qin added.

“In what way?” Wentian asked, staring up at the gloomy, vaulted ceiling.

“The usual way? With a slumped pile of dirt?” Yu shot back, rather snarkily. “I imagine that there was some courtyard or plaza beyond, but given the land surface is some 15 metres above us, it’s all buried under millennia of dirt…”

“Dirt that won’t be being moved any time soon,” Qin added, dusting off his robe.

“…”

“Anything in those halls?” Brother Yuang asked.

“Just more stuff like this. Anything not made of stone… or…”—Brother Qin’s gaze turned to the four doors leading off the sides of the hall—“or that strange metal, has basically decayed. We did find a few oddments though.”

Brother Qin passed over two coppery-brown metal plaques that it took him a moment to realise were actually inscription plates.

“These are?”

“You tell me. My knowledge of Eastern languages extends to asking the lady with the big boobies and the exotic complexion to shake it harder,” Brother Yu chuckled.

“Right…” Wentian sighed and the rest of them rolled their eyes at his crude joke.

They stood there, in the gloom, with only dripping water for company as Wentian stared at the plaques for a minute, before handing them back to Brother Yu with a further sigh.

“This one is a plaque for a door, just says that the person in a room is an official who oversees laws in what must have been a district of this city. The other seems to have been awarded to commemorate the appointment of the possessor to a similar post. Beyond the metal, neither have any spiritual aura that I can make out.”

“I guess we take them then?” Brother Qin asked.

“I hardly think our seniors are going to care about it unless you volunteer it,” he pointed out. “Their eyes are firmly set on starrier skies.”

“That is true. I can’t help but wish that Senior Cang had agreed to come…” Brother Yuang sighed.

“Cang Di this and that,” Shu Wentian grunted. “Not everything must circle around him…”

“…”

There was some awkward silence at his outburst. It was fair to say that Cang Di was the reason why they were here: the princess had been somewhat disappointed that he had been unwilling to come help explore this ruin, and as the party who had ‘failed’ to convince him, they had suddenly found themselves landed with these kinds of assignments, exploring on behalf of Senior Brother Shu Erwei, who had himself found his position of influence a bit less… as a result of Cang Di apparently not caring to trek a thousand miles and waste precious teleport talismans to help them.

“No luck with the doors either?” Brother Qin asked, to change the topic, probably.

“Nope,” he sighed, having given up on poking them some time ago. “They appear to be made of a similar metal to those plaques, but even with my strength I can’t make them budge.”

“They also have a sort of rejection to soul-based perception,” Brother Yuang volunteered helpfully, having tried by art and with several of his talismans to peer beyond them or the walls.

“Well, this place is an ancient city in what is likely a shard of a supreme world. I’d be worried, honestly, if it all wasn’t so bloody mundane,” Brother Yu observed.

“I’m worried because it is so bloody mundane,” he shot back, staring at the shadows of the upper gallery again. “The demons had some big walls on that settlement of theirs.”

“For all the good it did them,” Brother Li noted.

“…”

“Hmmm…” he nodded, uneasily.

“No evidence of them being sealed though,” Brother Li added, switching back to the doors. “They just appear to be dense… If we were properly attuned, it might be a different matter.”

“Maybe,” Yuang agreed, though he didn’t sound convinced. “So… where next?”

“Up,” Wentian sighed. “They want to know about the buildings further along here, with the overgrown ruin on the hill that was barely noticeable until yesterday evening. The other group had some success heading towards the lake and thought there would be rock-cut passages there.”

“And why do they merely ‘think’ that?” Brother Feng asked.

“Because they were so unnerved by the ‘shrine’ that the demons seem to have put up there that they came back,” Wentian sighed. “Or at least that’s what I was told – Senior Brother Erwei was of the opinion that it was because they were a bunch of Nascent Soul cultivators.”

“…”

“Right…”

“From one creepy ruin to another,” Brother Feng, who had been mostly silent during their discussion, said with a resigned sigh of his own.

Wentian stared at him then just shook his head and headed back for the stairs to the uppermost layer of the ruins.

…

Stood in the ‘shrine’, a rock-cut edifice with a sacred pool, Fuan Hao found that he had an unexpected amount of sympathy with the Nascent Soul cultivators from the Peaceful Chimes Pure Pagoda, who had taken one look at this place and walked the other way.

The hall was not big, dominated by two sacred pools supported by five pillars. The only obvious anomaly in the whole thing was the block sat in the middle of the shallower one, a plinth of a statue he supposed that someone had dragged over and placed there, perhaps as an altar of some kind. All of that was… normal… It was the four main carved panels on the walls that made his skin crawl in different ways.

The first scene depicted six figures bound to pillars, three men and three women, of various ages, weeping, while soldiers stood around and men and women prayed in the background.

The second scene showed soldiers… well, he had thought they were freeing the figures and trying to flee.

The third scene, showed the soldiers being brutally slain by another group wearing masks and swirling warpaint, who then sealed up the whole place.

Up to that point they were not too bad… From the fourth scene, of a young woman – the woman from the middle pillar, he was sure – pleading with the soldiers, somehow extolling them to try and get them out, while the soldiers looked enraged, fearful or just slumped down… the nature of the whole thing changed.

“What is this?” Brother Li gulped, staring at the fifth and sixth vivid friezes.

He forced himself to look at the fifth scene, of those same soldiers somehow holding the woman they had tried to capture, or maybe kill, responsible for their plight and ravishing her in various ways, even as she in turn killed them, over… and over… and over.

The sixth scene was the same: twisted, life-sized forms of torment scoured into the rock.

That alone would have been bad enough, but the final, seventh diorama was so…

It encompassed the whole back of the shrine. Centre stage was a young woman carved of white stone, her pale hair tumbling down, dishevelled, empty eyes staring down from a blank, slightly sad expression at the pool and anyone who entered the shrine. She was seated, or perhaps lounged, as if terribly weary, on an altar rather like the one in the middle of the pool. In her left hand, she held a sword, a broad bladed weapon of the same metal as the plaques had been, while her right rested on the severed head of the leader of the twelve soldiers.

The wall behind her was graven in the shape of swirling waves and sun’s rays, making it almost seem like she was emerging from the pool, while all around her, trapped in that pool, the life-sized, screaming forms of the twelve soldiers were arranged. Some supplicated to her, some trying to flee her, some begging her forgiveness, some lost in rage and some just empty.

'Aphrodite Melainis'

The words below the shrine, visible at this distance, made his soul shake just to look at them, not helped by the only illumination in the whole place being the dim embers of a fire someone had set up in a broad stone bowl in the middle of the shallow pool.

“It’s hard to know if this is a shrine, or a tomb,” Wentian nodded, also appearing slightly unnerved for once.

“Can’t it be both? I can see why they didn’t linger here. This place is already unnerving enough, never mind whatever might be in the inner chamber,” Brother Feng shuddered.

“Is this meant to represent the fate of the woman bound to the… altar…?” he trailed off, casting his eye across the crystal clear pool to a line on the altar that had…

Looking back at the second frieze, where the soldier was cutting away the woman, severing her arm as she fell into the water, then at the pillar turned altar holding the broad brazier with its dying fire, he gulped.

“What is it?” Wentian noted his reaction with a frown.

“That block, in the middle… is the same one she was attached to,” he pointed out the sword cut.

“The reason this place feels so horrifying is that whatever happened here is etched into the very rocks,” Yuang nodded grimly. “This is not an auspicious place.”

“You think?” he muttered, trying not to look at the seventh frieze, because the creeping unpleasantness of the sad expression of the female figure was at a level where it was not a question of if the shrine was cursed, but how badly.

“I say we go back,” Feng muttered. “Tell them it’s this fate-thrashed creepy and Senior Erwei can come give himself nightmares. My loyalty to the sect doesn’t extend to shouldering these burdens in his place.”

“We should at least make an effort to check out the rest of it,” Qin muttered.

“Well?” Wentian looked at the rest of them.

“I say go back,” Feng said.

“Me too,” Yuang nodded.

“…” Qin grimaced, then reiterated. “We should at least make an effort to check out the rest…”

“I’m with Qin,” Yu nodded.

“Li?” Wentian asked.

“It’s creepy, but if we cave at this kind of test, why did we even come here?” Li sighed.

“Brother Fuan?” Wentian glanced at him.

“…”

He looked around at the friezes and at the passage beyond into the inner chamber and shuddered. “I’m with Yuang and Feng on this, I am afraid.”

“…”

Wentian sighed, rubbing his temples, “I guess that gives me the deciding vote… so we look—”

Feng and Yuang both groaned.

“—quickly,” Wentian grimaced. “And disturb nothing. Let it not be said that our Eastern Fire Wind Pagoda is disrespectful. Not to mention, if we go back as it is, they are only going to blame us and give us an even shittier task.”

“Are we cultivators or are we servants?” Feng grumbled.

“Yes,” Shu Wentian replied.

…

The inner chamber, carved out of a natural cavern through which the spring ran, turned out to be more of the same, although the carvings were unsettling in different ways. The woman escaped through a dark door, fleeing into darkness, the different carvings depicting nightmares of a city burning, of kith and kin fleeing, of betrayal, madness, demons and death. It was hard to tell if the whole thing was an allegory for her ‘death’ or she had actually been locked away in the darkness.

In the third chamber, the source of the spring, which flowed out of a fissure into a small pool, also held a similar shrine. The woman was carved from the rock of the wall, strange shapes and formless figures from her nightmares fleeing her or trying to grasp her in turn as the friezes bled through it. The shadows and the lines were such that with any illumination at all, the scenes scattered almost infinitely. The only word to identify her was ‘Skotia’, the intent within it dark, gloomy, abandoned even to itself, yet also holding within it an almost hypnotic sense of desire within which self slowly started to bleed away.

He had to look away from it after a few seconds, and the others were similarly affected – which spoke volumes to the comprehensions of the person who had carved it.

“You know, do you get the impression that this place was opened up?” Qin was frowning, looking at the walls.

“Opened up?” he asked.

“Yes, look at the carvings. They are rather specific in the details, very specific in fact, yet the layout of what is here doesn’t match what is shown. This is neither the last chamber, nor the only chamber.”

“…”

“Come on,” Feng grimaced, “it’s three chambers of deeply unsettling carvings as a shrine or mausoleum to some ancient expert or cult in this land. Can we just not go back and say that?”

“I’d rather go back and say it was a dead end. That way we won’t get blamed for anyone coming here and cursing themselves stupidly,” he noted.

“Uh…” Yu, who had gone back into the hall, returned, looking unhappy.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“You should come look,” Yu muttered, looking both embarrassed and angry.

They walked back to the entrance and stared, because the cave was… off.

“This is a natural feng shui alignment, isn’t it?” he said at last.

“Yes,” Qin looked shamefaced.

“And we just walked right through it?” he asked, annoyed at himself for not noticing either.

“Yes. This cavern is far larger than it looked, something about the shadows. We can probably find our way out, but…”

“I hate to be the person to say I told you so…”

“Sorry,” Qin sighed.

“At least this explains the fact that the carvings showed a bigger cavern,” he mused, while tracing the spring by hearing rather than sight.

A few minutes’ further, much more careful exploration of the caves showed that it was not, in fact, that hard to get out. It was just that the aura within them was disorientating and the way the walls, pillars, even the floor in a few places had been carved with figures and nightmare scenes that scattered shadows in odd ways made keeping your bearings difficult.

Given the profound, lingering darkness that shrouded everything, he wasn’t convinced that soul sense would have helped much either.

“Over here…here…here!”

Brother Li’s whisper resonated through the cave, drawing him and Qin back to close to the third chamber, where they had found a fourth one, of all things… and the stairs up into more caves.

This one was a broadly semi-circular room with more wall carvings and a bunch of smashed statues, showing a group arriving out of the mountains, finding the spring, speaking to a shadowed figure within it and then building a town. The words beneath, that appeared to have been destroyed at one point, then recarved, explained that the City of Portam Aurorae had been founded here, as directed by a revelation from its protective… entity… called ‘Despoina Aurorae’.

“Mistress of Dawn?” Brother Yu frowned, squinting at it.

“So your brothel linguistic courses are good for something,” Brother Qin snickered.

“Does your knowledge of Eastern scripts extend to the word before her name?” Wentian scowled.

“…”

“Well, enlighten us,” Qin chuckled, making a bad joke to hide his embarrassment mainly, he supposed.

“Divine.”

“As in Fairy?”

“No, as in Revered,” Shu Wentian sighed, looking around.

“Oh…” Qin and Yu both stopped laughing.

“This isn’t related to whatever seal they are undoing?” he asked.

“Don’t think so, the rest of the scene here says that this place was destroyed, according to the last frieze here…” Wentian pointed to the one opposite where they came in.

He hadn’t gotten to that one, but, looking over it, it showed the city being devastated from within and without, some of its inhabitants carrying many riches and fleeing in a flash of light while others wailed and lamented or cursed them, even as others overran it.

“Seems this was once a disguised door,” Yuang mused, squatting down to peer through the open passage revealed in the side of the plinth belonging to a statue of a bearded man whose head was now in three pieces at the base.

“I will again say that we could just turn around and go back?” Feng muttered.

“…”

Wentian shot him a look and just sighed, then knelt down and carefully poked his light talisman through. The shimmering illumination revealed a short passage and stairs winding up, all very undecorated and rough-hewn.

“Yep, definitely a secret passage, but surprisingly simplistic,” Wentian confirmed.

“Simple is not necessarily bad,” he pointed out.

“True, and the way the feng shui alignments are set in this place is beyond masterful,” Yuang agreed. “If it wasn’t so creepy and inauspicious you could likely get some benefits just from seeing how the carving was done.”

“Shall we?” he sighed, somewhat resigned to the fact that circumstances just kept conspiring at this point.

…

The passages beyond did indeed turn out to be much more utilitarian, winding up stairs inside the massif, linking natural caverns and a few artificial ones besides. A few rooms had shattered pottery, and the odd stone crate and in the largest cavern there was a further small spring with a shrine above it depicting a portly man with a huge cock pissing. However, beyond that, there was little of anything remaining.

The caverns finally finished in a spiral staircase, which, when they finally clambered out of it, turned out to be a nondescript storehouse-like room filled with various pots and a lot of ambient damp.

“Based on the height, we must be in the ruins on the hill now?” Yuang mused.

“Yeah,” Qin agreed, sounding a lot more jovial now, spirits buoyed by the aggressive normality of the caverns.

“So… what now? Do we just cut back out and head back down the hill to tell them the good news?” Feng asked hopefully.

“Senior Erwei was hopeful there would be actual stuff here,” Wentian noted, not sounding at all enthused by that.

“We can bring him back a storage ring full of broken pottery and dead leaves?” he suggested sourly, looking around.

“As amusing as that might be, I suspect it would not go down well,” Wentian sighed.

“I say again, are we cultivators or servants?” Feng grumbled.

“…”

Li and Yuang both rolled their eyes, but Wentian just shook his head and started towards the exit of the storeroom, looking around warily.

Following after, also looking around warily, he was struck by how stylistically similar the construction of the buildings here were to the halls they had checked out on the way to the shrine. The walls depicted scenes of day to day life in a city with domed palaces, temples with peaked roofs and terracotta roofs. People bustled hither and thither in them, and it all looked very prosperous… and yet… something nagged at him as he traced little stories through them, until at last it clicked about two thirds of the way down the corridor…

“This place… whoever painted this hated this city…” he said, stopping at last, before one of the panels.

“Say what?” Yuang, who had been walking behind him, stopped to stare at the frieze.

“Look at this,” he gestured to a market day scene depicted.

“It’s a market in what is a prosperous city,” Yuang frowned… then frowned harder before really looking. “Oh…”

“You see it as well?” he said, staring at the scene hidden behind the prosperity.

“The market vendors cheat everyone, the princely figures enchanting that lady by the fountain… are raping her in the shadows over there…” Yuang murmured.

“And the soldiers over there are stealing from poor people,” he noted, pointing to another part.

“In the temple up there, the figures faces are all painted as smiling, but each shadow has a sneering face,” Yuang agreed, “and with their gestures, they are welcoming the… young nobles, I guess… yet their shadows are laughing behind the backs of the common people.”

“Every panel has something like it,” he nodded. “And there’s more.”

“More?” Qin, who had been also stopped, asked.

“Yes, this girl here,” he pointed to a golden-haired woman carrying a basket of flowers in a flowing robe. “She lays…”—he walked on, finding her in the next frieze—“here. She gives flowers to the noblemen who raped the girl… and they take her back… and…”

He traced her through two more scenes, where she slept with the nobles and was pictured disposing of their belongings to a grinning man who had a dagger behind his back. In the next, he stabbed the woman, who fell into the river, yet later, in the next scene, she was climbing back out of the river and becoming a beggar, where she informed a nobleman his wife was cheating on him and led to the beggaring of his whole family… and so it went on. The two scenes diverging further and further as the glory of the city hid its shadow and the golden-haired woman slipped between the two, sometimes hunted, sometimes hunter, slowly gnawing at it from its roots.

The titles, beneath the paintings, were also strange, elusive things, esoteric in their presentation to the point that even Wentian could make little of many of them. Many were half description, half declaration, others just read like curses and a few were numbers and what were presumably days or some other calendrical notation.

By the time they had gotten to the other end of the corridor though, and arrived at a vexatiously shut metal door, two things were clear: as he had intuited, the woman had a serious grudge against the city and its people, and the events depicted covered almost 60 years, during which she waged a shadow war against… everything, pretty much.

“I wonder who she was…” Qin asked at last, as they reached end of the dark corridor, having discovered that the scenes traced into side rooms as well.

“And who painted this, because it doesn’t strike me as the work of a city grateful to remember her,” he pointed out.

“There are also other themes,” Yu pointed out, staring at one of the last paintings. “See, where she falls in the river… here… and there on the other side as well.”

There were, he had noticed, a few. Some were stylistic, he was sure, to do with the presented composition, but others seemed more allegorical in a way, like how the woman, when she was undone, or stabbed, tended to fall into the river, or a shadow or something, and next time was always seen climbing out of water. The eyes of the powers on high in every painting were always searching for her, if you followed the lines of their gaze.

It was the kind of attention to detail you would need a high level of cultivation to pick up, truthfully, due to the subtle intent imbued into each scene, and the flow of events, the interchange between scenes and such.

“This is nearly a visualization canon regarding the conceptual mandate of heaven,” he realised at last.

“Say what now?” even Wentian turned to look at him.

“Look, the progression of events, the righteous scenes, the inner rot slowly overtaking good intentions, the flawed decisions compounding in each scene, even the woman herself is part of it, almost like an allegorical representation of the flaws slowly tearing the city apart. The inequality, the lack of consequences, the poor leadership, the cruelty and the determination not to see it,” he explained.

“I suppose,” Li agreed. “But why is it painted on a wall in what appears to be a storehouse?”

“That is the question,” he agreed, turning his eyes back to the door.

“Now you want to go on?” Feng scowled at him, making him wince.

“I agree, something about this feels… off, but it also feels like there is something…” he trailed off, suddenly unsure how to articulate it.

“Important?” Yuang frowned.

“Yes, important,” he agreed, “about what is being shown here.”

“For what is going on with trying to unpick that seal, for the artefact that is associated with the Huang clan?” Yu asked, frowning as well now.

“…”

“I dunno,” he sighed, putting it to one side. “Maybe it was just something about how Senior Cang was when I spoke to him. I know he is not of our influence, but he seemed oddly unenthused about this place, after I sent him the image of it.”

“Rumour has it that a whole bunch of cultivators ran into trouble with the demons up north. Maybe he was worried about that?” Qin shrugged. “The timing would fit, and we are indeed not from the Shu Pavilion, even if we are sort of aligned with them on occasion.”

“Well, in any case, we either have to get this door open, try to find a window… or go back,” Feng pointed out.

“Hmmm… that is true,” Wentian nodded. “There is nothing to show that this place is actually above ground either.”

~ Cornelia – Solaneum by Memory ~

…

…

“So… you really are the root of this curse, the priestess of this cult that has tried to subvert our Solaneum so?” the melodious voice shifted her out of her cold, agonising torment as recollections flooded in.

“Yes, Princess Karia Amelliana,” a weirdly familiar voice ran out. “And the Nine Cities before it. Even her own family were not spared, though they managed to flee at the last to evade disaster and shed light of that terrible tragedy.”

“Mena…canthus?” she guessed, having had to sit through a depressing number of his sermons courtesy of the rest of her family.

“You remember me, Cornelia,” Menacanthus, Bishop of Simiris in Aurorae smiled at her, far too warmly, truth be told.

“…”

She managed to sit up, finding that she had been bound by chains of pure Laurion Silver laced with what was probably Kynthian gold around a Duramar iron core.

“Should I be honoured that these chains are resembling those that bound Prometheus himself?” she grimaced.

“Certainly this manner does suit you better,” the princess smirked, walking around to look at her.

“You are still just as gullible as I expected a provincial princess to be,” she shot back, annoyed that Menacanthus was spouting such bull crap.

“Mouthy too, although I hear that your virtues there were extolled by any number of my male compatriots,” Amelliana smirked, tossing her dark hair to the side with a bejewelled hand.

“Former compatriots,” she chuckled.

“…”

“Well, I will admit, their place in society will not be much missed,” Amelliana observed, a trifle more coolly. “However, you also killed my brother.”

“Was he the one molesting cats, or the one who had small children—?”

The blow took her in the side of the head, hard enough to really hurt, but not to kill, because they had gotten quite good at that.

“Disrespectful, criminal!” a male voice behind her sneered, reminding her that of course someone like her would have a bodyguard.

“You can’t even hit me yourself?” she chuckled, shaking her head to clear her own vision. “At least your brother could… I remember him now, he wanted me to pretend to be you…”

She watched, laughing as Amelliana stormed out of the room, followed by her bodyguard, leaving her and Menacanthus alone.

“Was there a point to that?” she asked him.

“To amuse me,” Menacanthus chuckled, walking over to sit on the chair by the wall. “To see her face. She had said she wanted to confront you, but I know you…”

“…”

“So, what will you do, have me tormented day and night? Keep me hanging by a thread, as they did back in Portam Aurorae?” she sighed. “I know you well enough to know that you only care for one thing…”

“And what is that?” Menacanthus asked, leaning forward, looking interested.

“Yourself,” she grinned back.

…

The cold, searing pain coursed through her, her skin feeling like it was being slowly shredded by a thousand blades as the darkness seeped into her, or tried to at least. Eyes prying into her mind, words whispering, cajoling, commanding, devouring.

"Get... out... of... my... HEAD!"

…

“She is tenacious, is she not?” an erudite voice murmured as she opened her eyes and found herself still bound by chains in the cell beneath the Solaneum Capitoline. “And the blood recovered from those barbarians resonates…”

“Truly, to think that such a thing was being squirrelled away by the Holy Church, right under my nose,” a pudgy, older man, with close cut, well-oiled dark hair, dressed in a fine linen toga slashed with red and green, mused, staring at her with piercing blue eyes. “That new Holy Preceptor, Menacanus…”

“Menacanthus,” the first speaker, a middle-aged man of scholarly demeanour wearing a long tunic slashed with red and green, hems embroidered with swirling leaves and picked out in black and gold, corrected the elder.

“That’s the one,” the old man waved a hand dripping with gold rings. “He has a big appetite with this plan of his.”

“And you are minded to support it, father?” a third voice, who she had to turn to see, interjected.

It took her a second to place him, without his mask and in different robes, but he was certainly the other companion of Laurentius, the one who had not travelled to Rulani where she had encountered them as a group in person – Caecillius.

Now, he was dressed like the older man, in a toga trimmed with red and green, and carried a stole embroidered in black and gold leaves. There, however, the similarities ended, because, had she not heard him speak, she would have thought him a woman, such was his beauty, and because he kept his dark, oiled hair long, tied back by a ribbon, framing his pale face, too red lips and almost sapphire blue eyes.

“I think I am, yes, Caecillius,” the older man nodded, coming to stand before her, cupping her face in his clammy hand, his own, piercing blue eyes, far too beautiful for his face, staring into her. “She has just what our little group needs.”

“Longevity…”

…

Clawing, greedy heat raged in her flesh and blood, trying to worm its way through her, sublimate her into some crude, distorted thing of what she was, remake her into a broken image as those blue eyes sank even as the turgid waters tried to pull her back.

"Get Out!"

…

The binding was removed from her eyes and she found herself facing a tall, plain youth… and Menacanthus.

“She is not what I expected, Holy Preceptor,” the youth said, looking… conflicted. “Compared to the others… she is?”

“Evil never is, young Laurentius,” Menacanthus sighed, rather affectedly, patting him on the shoulder and walking over to the table in the room she was now in.

“Others?” she managed to ask, her throat dry, not from fear – that was buried in the shrine beneath the acropolis on the other side of the city – but from simple thirst because they barely fed her or let her drink.

“Do you not regret what you have done?” the youth asked her, sitting down on the upholstered divan. “Will you not repent? That all this might be averted?”

“…”

Menacanthus eyed her, when she didn’t immediately laugh, though clearly the ‘fact’ that he had somehow managed to get through to the Saintess of Six Eyes had gone to his head.

“Once… long ago, if people had just asked, so much might have been averted,” she sighed. “But you should ask your mentor here, about why he fled in the night, laden down with a church’s gold, while children and womenfolk died to barbarian spears, defending a gate that should never have fallen…”

“He has told me of the tragedy of your home town,” the youth sighed. “It was piteous, but you should not delude yourself as to your part in it.”

“And you would know?” she asked.

“I… I have seen it,” he said. “There are records, you know, testimonies, of a few who survived, several who have managed to overcome their circumstances to become—”

“Nobody survived,” she chuckled bleakly, cutting him off.

“You survived,” Laurentius pointed out.

“You think this is survival?” she bit back a laugh. “You are a good fit for him,” she added, glancing towards Menacanthus, “But you should remember, your teacher, master… whatever he is to you… he only loves his own prospects…”

“Look, I know—” Laurentius started to say, a trifle over-earnestly, trying, she noted with some broken sense of amusement, to only look at her face, and not the rest of her naked body.

“How will you save me?” she rebutted, cutting him off and, leaning back a bit, because her femininity clearly made him uneasy. “I imagine your god would welcome me with open arms, but not for the reasons you think.”

Laurentius sat back, looking… annoyed, which amused her somehow, as if her reply was not quite what he was able to fit into his understanding of events.

“…”

“Look at you two,” Menacanthus chuckled, cutting her off. “Trying to ‘save’ each other… Now do you see, Laurentius, how enticing she can be, and how so many have fallen to ruin because of her?”

“I… I think I do…” the youth sighed softly.

…

She lay, chained onto an altar in the middle of the transept of the Grand Cathedral, watching the youth, Laurentius, garbed in a breastplate and white robes of the church with two swords scabbarded at his waist, bow before Imperial Prince Neron Appius, accompanied by five companions: Princess Ameliana; the youth Caecillius; Akaton, a freed gladiator; the Saintess of Six Eyes, wearing a mask marked by her eponymous sign and the robes of a magister, and a barbarian, Sharaz, who had scoured away the marks of his tribe and replaced them with signs of the church after agreeing to follow Laurentius over some honour debt as far as she knew.

All around, the great figures of Solaneum watched on in silence, their faces obscene masks of triumph as one after another, Neron passed them each a dagger from a cushion held by an aide next to his throne, while the heralds saluted each, Princess, renowned Magister, redeemed Saintess, gladiatorial champion, holy warrior… and the Hero of Light, as declared by the Eternal City, Laurentius himself.

“Behold, Imperial Prince, Honoured Dignitaries of the Old Kingdoms, Scholars, Sages, Luminary Senators and Leaders of Solaneum! At last, we may bury the vile plague upon our lands. This is the villainess Cornelia and her dark companions! The root of the curse which afflicted so many good folk here, whose means condemned good men to damnation and set mother against son, father against daughter!” Menacanthus’s voice rang from behind her, addressing the assembled figures and the prince, golden-haired on a throne of gold-gilt wood.

All around her, liturgical hymns hummed, like the background babble of a brook.

Laurentius rose, followed by the others, accepting the last dagger from Neron, the archaic-looking golden-hilted one her ancestor had recovered, then turned and approached her, flanked by the others who were all glaring or smirking at her. As he walked, she could see that its blade was now replaced by a trapezoidal silver shard of metal on which the symbol for ‘Los’ was vaguely visible. If you turned it upside down, it could actually be read as ‘Sol’, which got points for style, a part of her thought sourly. The blades of the other daggers were all of a similar metal, also with different bits of script on them.

“Through the wise stratagem of our Imperial Prince!”

“By the merciful will of almighty god…”

“By the righteous gaze of our emperor’s august eye…”

“By the glorious strength of…”

The Hero of Light walked past Arella and Caius, who, along with Valta, Marius and Darius, were chained to five other points around the circle at the heart of which she was restrained, to stand in front of her.

“I am sorry it has come to this…” he muttered softly, his face holding a surprising amount of pity. “I still can’t believe that this is actually all about vampires.”

“Sir Laurentius, by the grace of almighty God, we pray that you, our most august servant in this endeavour, and your valiant companions strike true!” Hundreds of voices echoed in simultaneous salute.

Laurentius grimaced faintly, looking at her, then at the dagger, then sighed sadly… and stabbed the blade into her heart, all the way to the hilt.

Agonizing pain wracked her, and for a brief moment, in her mind she heard a chime—

{Returning Solace, Blossom. Bestow Mortality}

It ran through all of them, simultaneously, a white heat that sank into her, trying to consume and convert the touch of the Styx in some profound way, and also… twist it—

At the last moment, something interfered with the dagger blade… blades, a wrongness, and it exploded, taking half her bared chest with it as white fire blossomed everywhere, swirling out around Laurentius who was staggering back, screaming, and in the last moments before her awareness faded, rebounding across half the hall as a glowing white-robed figure seemed to descend from the firmament, above her, bringing with it a boundless sense of oppression.

…

…

“I’d say awaken, but this is becoming more regular than is convenient,” Aphrodite muttered, seated on her rock, staring at her as she stood up in the shallows of the Styx under her own capabilities this time, patting off the last vestiges of white fire from her body.

“Tell me about it,” she grumbled, spitting out some water, wondering if Achilles had also thought that it tasted like dirty bathwater. “This is not quite what I imagined when…”

“When you became my immortal?” the goddess sighed. “You’re not wrong, but in a way, you’re closer to the truth than you think. How did people think of me, in your myths and legends… in your most famous tales, when they spin that yarn of my grandson founding your great city?”

“…”

She resisted staring, because it was a good point. The reputation that Aphrodite had… was, frankly, within the mythology, as flighty, whimsical, rather conniving and, when pushed, a bit of a…

“That can’t be right?” she frowned.

“The rot goes deeper than you think. This war has gone on a long time, though only one side is still fighting it at all seriously,” Aphrodite mused, crossing her legs and brushing a few strands of her hair away in the dark mist.

“Sure, I am a bit of a… how did you just phrase it… bitch?” Aphrodite grinned, not at all nicely suddenly, making her feel a bit… embarrassed. “However, over the years, society has changed how they see me… The barbarians have a very different view of me than you do. Do you know who my first Immortal was?”

“…”

The question was so unexpected she actually opened and shut her mouth a few times.

“Well, it’s not that important,” the goddess shook her head, not giving her the opportunity to answer. “What matters more is that my aunt may have excelled at making cages, but I was the one who set those morons to keep walking cock-first into them every time. Just take that misbegotten boy from another time they called to this place to become a hero. He thinks you’re a vampire and he just stabbed you in the heart with a blade embodied of the concept of mortal severance.”

“Uhh?” she stared at the goddess, not quite sure she was getting the nuance of what she was implying, because that was actually rather—

Aphrodite poked her between the breasts and she fell backwards into the water with a splash.

“There is an art to this, and over the years few are better at it than me. Now go back, and make them weep, my Dawn Immortal, because there is one thing a boy like that wants to truly believe…”

The waters of the river closed back over her as she wondered, not for the first time, why she had ended up with such a really weird patron… even if her advice was rather spot on.

“It’s that every girl with a pretty face in a desperate situation needs saving…”

…

…

“So… this was your plan, little mortal…”

She opened her eyes as the words rasped across her, yet they were not directed at her.

“To use that ancient…”

Prince Neron Appius had picked himself up, she saw blearily as she struggled to move, but he was no longer the figure he had seemed, his skin was golden and his face twisting to become more bestial, like a half-man, half-pig chimera as he supported himself on the staff of his office, white fire burning away at his flesh.

“You… you…” Neron Appius’s eyes locked on her and she felt her mind waver, darkness clawing at it from within and without, trying to find a connection, a link by which they could unify, even as she struggled against it, grappled for the dagger which was somehow in her breast and also… not? Its form lying on the floor by Laurentius and Arella.

“I feel it from you… such hate… such lust… such darkness… You are… suitable, far more suitable than any other!”

He arrived before her, effortlessly swatting aside Laurentius and sending the white-bladed sword in his hand spinning across the floor, and grasped her, dragging her up to be level with him, the chains that bound her in place partially breaking as he did so.

She screamed, except, rather than sound, it was the turgid river water of Styx she had accidentally swallowed when Aphrodite pushed her back in that spewed forth. It went all over Neron Appius, tarnishing his unnatural golden flesh, and started to rapidly pool on the floor all around them.

It washed over Arella, Caius and the others also, whose chains now also began warping and corroding at its touch—

All hell broke loose, literally. Shadowy forms surged, shrieking out of the stygian pool, orphaned souls of her own ancestors and theirs, along with those of many others bound from Portam Aurorae by the their greed, or their misfortune… or desperation.

Beyond it, she saw the pudgy man in the green robe grasp Valta, ripping her free from the chains somehow, even as Menacanthus drew his own blade and leapt back, cutting at the waters which were now a surging torrent washing into the transept and knave as dignitaries tried to flee.

Arella, who had broken free of her chains by now, screamed and lunged for Neron Appius, attempting to stab him with the dagger she had ripped from her own body, only for the depraved prince to grow an extra arm and grasp her—

Caius surged up, dark shadows rolling off him as he tried to interfere as well, to save his daughter only to be smashed away by a vicious blow from the staff Neron Appius wielded now with a fourth arm—

Darkness tried to tear at her, something in Neron’s touch trying to warp her, even as she clawed at his arm and the waters of the Styx smoked on his skin. Aphrodite had been right, she acknowledged. The essence of it was that she was not a brawler. She had realised that long ago, cruelly, in the darkness. A fighter, yes, someone who could wreak terrible havoc and confusion on others, but, despite being immortal, she would never be Achilles, or Hector, or Horatius, or any other of those famous heroes.

Grasping for something to direct the spirits, help the others… the word she whispered came from the water itself.

"Melainis"

Something connected, between different places, and twelve soldiers stood around her, rising out of the still rapidly expanding dark pool around them, embodiments of her darkest moments, bound to her by bonds of blood and hate. They screamed, attacking the demonic thing, dragging him down, stabbing at him with blades manifested out of the very waters of the underworld, even as others fled in every direction.

Laurentius staggered up, screaming as the water also clawed at him, and cut at them both with the white stone blade he had drawn from the other scabbard—

“HARMONIOUS SEVERANCE OF EARTHLY SOLITUDE!”

…

…

Her consciousness returned, as she was man—elf handled by two members of a detachment of Isla Kerrig soldiers, up the steps and out of the crypt of the knave of the grand cathedral.

Everywhere, Isla Elves, Hibric tribesmen and Barbarian warriors were standing, watching, their faces twisted with fury, or triumph. Through the shattered wall, she could see the fires consuming the city and still hear the distant clamour of fighting in some quarters.

The shrine to Saint Laurentius stood tall in the middle of the chancel, and before it, surrounded by armoured soldiers, stood five women, draped in clothes of sea silk and ancestral seals of gold and silver. Each was easily identifiable to her by the symbols on their foreheads as much as their appearance.

On the left were ice-haired Beira, Mother of Snows, Queen of the Veil, and golden-haired Anura of Kerris, Queen of Kerrig, whose daughters had been seized and offered to Neron as tribute by the Old Kingdoms and the Saintess of Six Eyes.

On the right, a tall red-haired woman, was certainly Macha Cimbaeth, Hibric Queen of the Dawn Gate, whose people had been pushed off that land by her own ancestors, while beside her, a dark-haired beautiful woman, with cold eyes and blood-red tattoos covering much of her visible flesh, had the symbol for ‘Slaughter’ on her brow, marking her as Fea Fen Elcmar, Consort to the Hibric King of Brugh.

It was the woman veiled standing in the middle, however, that drew all eyes, her golden hair falling across dark golden robes of sea-silk embroidered with golden flowers.

“I am Aynia Danann,” the woman murmured, stepping forward to approach her. “I trust I need no introduction, child?”

-The Empress of Isla Dannan, foremost of the disciples of Arianrhod.

“The seeds of that tragedy of old lie within you… Child of this land, if you must curse anyone, curse those old thieves who stole from your forebears and broke the old treaties, not us, who seek merely to do what is right by the soul of this land,” Aynia said softly.

“If you intend to take away my immortality, you are welcome to try,” she replied, wondering what their game was in truth, or she had then, at least, because this memory was wavering in her consciousness now as if stared at by a dark shadow.

“Take away?” Beira chuckled. “You are a poor Pandora to match against the last. Why would we take it away? It is the very reason you are useful to us.”

“Indeed, a second Akalaraltis or Taranaleth cannot rise,” Anura said, looking at her.

“…” the other two just looked at her, with grim expressions saying nothing.

Aniya, Empress of the Isles, shook her veiled head. “Perhaps, but this land also has no need for a second Tyrant of Lives or Shaper of Solace. The seeds of that ruin echo too loudly already.”

“Of that at least, we are agreed,” Macha muttered.

“This plot on the blessed lands will be lost with you,” Anura agreed.

“…”

“Bring them…” Aniya said, waving a hand.

She watched as four priests in white and red robes were dragged forward by masked elven mages, struggling and forced to kneel at the four directions around the circular plinth and statue of Laurentius stabbing her and Neron in triumphant sacrifice.

“Be bound to blood, servants of betrayal!”

The four mages grabbed the priests and slit their throats, before dashing their heads against the plinth. As she watched, Beira, Anura, Fea and Macha all gestured and threads of white, blue, red and black swirled out from each in turn, meshing with a fifth golden one that Aynia conjured.

The spiralling forms unspooled the four sacrifices and then the shrine slowly started to flake away, revealing the frozen moment, turgid dark water boiling around Laurentius and Neron Appius, her, the grasping phantasmal soldiers… and Arella, who had managed to stab Neron in the arm at the last moment with a silver-hilted dagger, even as he pushed her away and into Laurentius’s strike to try and block it.

Below all this, in the centre of the now-broken ritual circle, lying on the altar, was her other body, the Sempronius dagger still embedded in its chest, bleeding Stygian water in a never-ending torrent.

The golden threads completed their circuit, binding into first her, where she was held, and then through the phantasmal connection she held to the dagger, forming five sets of spiralling seals that snared up the remnants of the shrine, Laurentius, the barely living Arella and both her bodies preserved—

“HARMONIOUS SEVERANCE OF EARTHLY SOLITUDE!”

The vast, booming voice blazed through the whole hall, consuming everything with white fire—

…

…

She opened her eyes with a gasp and found herself on rocks amid some wizened grass and a very smashed thorn bush, being poked by a nine-year-old girl wearing a clay mask from a comedy who was squatting beside her.

“You alive?” Rhanis asked critically, adjusting the hand drum slung from her chiton.

“Fuck off,” she groaned, sitting up and swatting the hand away and touching her face, relieved she had pulled herself back from the brink of that last memory. “What just got me?”

“Uh… unspeakable lizard boy,” the masked Okeanid said sympathetically, patting her on the shoulder. Nearby, in the grass, was a half-crushed head of a lizard-crocodile thing with a coppery-gold short blade stabbed through its largest eye.

“Ohhh, that explains that unsettling parade of memories,” she grimaced, touching the back of her head and then considering her condition more carefully. There didn’t appear to be any lasting damage, thankfully, which was surprising, given she had just stared down the faces of four ancient villains in as many memories. “—Might explain why I was feeling uncommonly maudlin as well…”

Except… it didn’t, because the lizards were not stupid and knew what they could poach and what they could not. Unless it wasn’t really one of the damned lizards but something more esoteric.

Looking around, she finally matched up the landmarks with the bottom of the cliffs below the acropolis, telling her that she had just been thrown off the edge of the augury platform and apparently landed at the foot of the northern necropolis.

“Did it throw me off… and how is one of them here?” she asked, sitting up to look at it more clearly.

“You didn’t bounce too badly… if it’s any consolation?” Rhanis said with as much childlike apology as it was possible for a masked huntress of many moons to possess. “As to the other thing, where do you want to start?”

“…”

“With how an abomination so chthonic that even the old chthonic powers don’t like them just tried to seize my soul and rummage through a bunch of very worrying memories while scrupulously avoiding most of those relating to my patron?” she complained, wishing the itching, like bugs under her skin, covering most of her body, would go away. “And why it has a physical body?”

“That is the question of the hour,” Rhanis agreed. “It looks like a bunch of stupid mortals are casting auguries for loot with either the best, or the worst compass ever. There is all hell breaking loose up north, near where Vashada used to be as well.”

“Relating to… Tyche and Quazam?”

Bits connected in her mind, associations in the memories, the Daggers of Dis Pater, the sacred springs and their various corruptions, that of Despoina Aurorae, Tyche Rulani, Quazam… the golden flowers of Arianrhod, all intertwined…

She reached to her breast and grimaced at the faint chill that lingered there.

The bit that eluded her was the Sar’Katush… who almost uniquely among the major villains of this corner of the world had not been involved in some part of the attempt by the Cult of Solace to seize Elysium or its aftermath.

At a guess, it had tried to ‘seize’ her, potential… as a link to the golden flowers? However, that was impossible because there was no physical link to her, beyond memories… which meant that something had been…

“Is someone trying to get that motherfucking dagger out of the seal Grimvak stole?” she groaned, putting her head in her hands.

“When you stopped asking questions I was going to say that,” Rhanis pouted. “Although, perhaps the only crime that dagger cannot be accused of at this point, is fucking its own mother.”

“…”

“You’re making better jokes than I recall,” she grimaced, choosing to ignore first part.

“It’s been a funny week,” Rhanis sighed, offering her a hand, which she accepted, getting up.

“The question is whether it’s the Sempronius Dagger, or…”

It was hard to resist pinching the bridge of her nose as they started to walk back down the slope, towards the old shrines to Despoina Aurorae and others as well as the edge of Solaneum’s old city. Just thinking about Grimvak, the theft of the Sempronius dagger and the moving of part of the seal, after the fall, made her want to hit things.

Looking again at the distant shadow where Caeracht should be, she turned that over in her mind.

There were two reasons why you would mess with that seal: the first was for the reason Grimvak did – to play puppet master to those cursed through it… and the second would be to get the shards that made up the replacement blades…

Given that someone or something seemed to be poking at things related to the powers involved in forming it…

“You said mortals… You’re not talking about the Ur folk…”

Rhanis looked at her, head tilted on one side and she sighed, inwardly. The Okeanids were an odd bunch. Although they tended to be wise in accordance to their years, if not always with their looks, their outlook on things could be strange and a bit off kilter.

She would have said fey folk, if she meant elves, or sea peoples… the Ur folk were mostly clay figurines fuelled on stolen gifts to them… so mortals meant… humans.

“There are humans here?” she asked. “The Ur killed the few survivors after this place fell…”

“Yes, mortals,” Rhanis nodded, following along beside her, hopping from rock to rock.

It didn’t take her long to find a rough track down to the various ruined shrines and the waters of the shallow lake that had formed before them over the years. She contemplated going through the shrine, but didn’t – that place always made her moody and angry, even after all this time – so instead, they continued on around several rather amorphous hills and twisted piles of rock that were the remains of buildings until she hit the curve of the main street that ran from the river to the old acropolis.

Off to her right, in the darkness, she could make out a larger hill, which her memories reminded her had been the Merchants Guild Hall of Old Solaneum, now buried to its third story, identifiable by a few jutting outcroppings of carved stone.

The main street itself had once been a grand thing, with marble colonnaded buildings of administrators and beyond it, the circus, where games and tournaments had been held. The circus itself was now another lake, flooded by the river and now obscured by more rolling broken ground to her west.

Cresting the last rise, she slipped down the slope, made of the remnants of a slumped and now buried roof, and stopped, to look at the scene before her.

“I gotta say, this is a whole lot of dead clay people,” Rhanis observed, jumping down some of the jutting rocks to land beside her and consider the scene.

Looking around, she had to agree that it was – someone had dumped a huge number of bodies into the hollow of the collapse and set them on fire with some kind of fire mana that had not really made much of an inroad into this place, given the roots of thaumic decay here.

“Was there some war while I was day dreaming?” she mused. “They never leave bodies outside their sanctified necropolis and certainly never within the confines of the old city where the Stygian curse still lingers.”

Ever since Grimvak and her helpers had reclaimed it, the barbarians had been scrupulous about that, not fully trusting to their stolen seal, the Sempronius dagger and the remains of the Lethe one. No doubt Grimvak had told them about her as well, but she so rarely bothered with them now, given she was unable to leave the bounded domain of the Stygian field thanks to the sword, that most local barbarians just viewed her as another dark legend of a haunted past.

“This is a lot of dead clay people,” Rhanis stressed, peering off into the gloom. “Like hundreds. Men, women, children.”

Rhanis wasn’t wrong there either, and her eyesight was probably better given her nature. Frowning, she knelt down and put her hand to one, an old barbarian whose flesh was badly burnt.

"Awaken"

Her word sank into the warrior and his body twitched after a moment.

“What killed this barbarian?” she asked.

“My… lady,” the rasping words came back in ancient Latin, the language of Portam Aurorae. “It… does not know… One moment it was eating dinner, then… blackness, pain and suffering, such suffering.”

“Well that’s not useful,” she muttered, looking around at the other bodies lying thick in the shadow of the collapsed area where a building had eroded away.

"Awaken, Restless Souls of My Homeland, Your Penance is not yet done - Tymborychos"

Her voice, stronger this time, echoed through the mass grave, as Rhanis looked on.

“It’s easy to forget that your patron has almost as many hats as our mistress did,” the Okeanid chuckled.

“The ‘Chthonic Arts’ are just a matter of attitude, and if Aphrodite claims to be the second most vengeful goddess out there, even Hera will pause before pointing out she is first,” she pointed out, watching her words take hold.

“Right… will someone explain to me why there is a mass grave on my front lawn and what is going on with Caeracht?” she asked the rapidly rising crowd of barbarians.

~ Fuan Hao – Upon the Acropolis of Old Solaneum ~

In the end, it took almost ten minutes to get the door open, which had nearly broken Wentian’s star halberd in the process and eventually required all of them to pry open a gap large enough to slip through.

Beyond it… rather anticlimactically however, turned out to be another hall, rock-cut with various other metal doors set into it, mostly half-open, and stairs at the far end leading up to a second layer and a larger door that was also half-open.

Walking through the hall, he found that the paintings on the walls continued the same story, showing the woman drawing others to her cause… slowly working her way up through the town’s society in various guises, playing a game of cat and mouse with the ever-watching eyes at the top of each scene.

“You notice that she doesn’t seem to do much to the common folk?” Yuang eventually commented as they arrived at the door.

“It’s all directed against the powers at the top of the pictures,” Li agreed.

“The text on some of these is more informative as well,” Wentian mused, staring at the last panel to the left of the door up. “Here, it basically implies that her vendetta is against her own clan.”

He peered at that scene, looking at the details – of visiting dignitaries, of a youth in fine clothing at home, talking to a beautiful woman, then going to brothels… and getting women to… dress up as that woman, who all then vanished. The blonde-haired woman slipping among them before seducing the youth herself, dressed as the beauty, and as another older woman who, now he looked carefully, appeared to be the mistress of that house…

“His mother?” Feng muttered dully.

“Given the resemblance, the other should be his sister or similar…” he agreed, again not sure if he should be horrified or impressed at how fundamentally rotten a society this city was.

“It seems that we have to go up, in either case,” Qin observed at last, looking around the hall. “The only other open door goes into a storeroom that is empty apart from stacks of painted pottery.”

The ascent of the staircase all but confirmed that they were still within the rock, as much of it had been graven into it directly. The degree of ornamentation was remarkable, worthy of anything he had ever seen in a large sect, in similar kinds of constructions, but holding within it a sort of intensity and realism that was usually lacking in the much more allegorical carvings favoured on Eastern Azure. They passed two more doors, both firmly closed, identified in Easten words that even Wentian didn’t know, though he was able to guess they could also be more storerooms.

At the top, they found another hall, roof supported by the same fluted columns. The walls had once held various plaques, many of which were now tossed in a corner and smashed, as were the statues, their heads stacked up in the alcoves like trophies. The scenes painted in the blank spaces were more of the same… but also, as they walked through the hall, not.

“Look at this one…” Yuang said at last, waving for them to come over and look at the one shown by his light talisman, which, now that he looked at it, was actually in the most prominent position in the whole hall.

It took him a moment of looking to realise what had drawn Brother Yuang’s attention. It had to be the first one where the blonde woman was not present in any way, shape or form. Instead, the series of scenes it depicted started with a group of men in a grand temple, praying or meditating around a white circle that looked remarkably like a stylized formation array of some kind.

In the second scene, a jagged tear was depicted appearing in a rural idyll, with what could only be the great city depicted in the other paintings in the distant background. Out of it, a lanky youth with curly brown hair fell, landing in a pond. He got out, wandered around, was chased by some large serpents and saved by a band of what appeared to be farmers.

They took him to a village, patched him up, and he started to teach them various things while they told him about the world. Eventually the youth went to the city, where he was noticed by the priests and eventually fell in with a young noblewoman…

“That woman… isn’t she the same one whose brother was sleeping with—?” Feng finally said.

“—Prostitutes who looked like her?” Wentian finished for him.

“And maybe killing them after,” Li muttered.

“Yes, the resemblance is…” he trailed off, staring at the background, because every other painting in the background had had…

In a way, once he put on what he could only describe as his ‘does this shit stink’ hat, it was surprisingly obvious, but not at all easy to spot in the same way. There was a farmer accepting money from a hooded figure in the second scene, who had the same shadow, a grinning face, as one of the priests meditating. Hidden away in the background, the same shadow was directing another member of that woman’s family to ensure that the visitor met her.

“Is this youth an Immortal ascender, who someone called up or roped into the priestly faction?” Wentian mused at last.

“It does look like it,” he agreed.

“The next two are also about him…” Yuang said, walking on up the side of the hall towards the far door.

They all were, as it turned out. Various scenes of him getting stronger, making friends, getting ever more involved in the city, all the while the woman with him kept searching for the person who had killed who they presumed to be her brother. The youth, who was simply called ‘the hero’ in the descriptions, killed monsters, saved children, got awards from nobles – the same nobles whose debauched and dreadful depredations had been the theme of the previous paintings.

By the time they got to the end of the hall, it became apparent that there were two parallel stories being shown by various means. The woman setting up a cult… hunting for others, two women and three men, and occasionally murdering people. The ‘Hero’ meanwhile, had a journey parallel to hers but entwined in odd ways. He gained another companion, a man who fought battles as a prisoner in the city, and as they followed the stories up two more corridors, gained a third, a youth in a green and red robe who always had a smiling face, but was always shown to be duplicitous and working with strange nobles or shadowed figures, helping the hero or cleaning up awkward problems after them.

Finally, they stopped at a third hall, the door again almost shut, to consider matters and take stock. The halls here were strange, giving him the feeling that there should have been more, but most of the fittings had been stripped out. The few doors they passed were all of the same metal and refused to budge, and most statues had been defaced in passing.

“You feel it as well?” Yuang asked at last, staring back at the dark hall.

“The oppression is getting more and more,” he agreed, shining the talisman around, wishing he had eyes on the back of his head.

“Makes me feel like something is staring at me,” Feng grumbled, looking at the top of the nearest painting, depicting the hero’s party investigating murders in the city that had previously been perpetrated by the woman to undermine a noble family who were friends of the woman travelling with him.

It was true, the sense of creeping dread that was slowly permeating out of the paintings as their stories converged was as oppressive as anything he had ever felt from such a thing. The eyes of the plotters followed you everywhere, and the juxtaposition between outward-facing purity and inward-facing debauchery was ever more prominent in all kinds of ways.

“The next hall takes us up again, it looks like,” Li, who had taken on the task of recording their path on a jade scrip, interjected. “Based on what I recall from outside, we should be quite close to the top of the cliffs now, below the ruins buried on the top?”

“Well, I guess we get to the surface and see what is what,” Wentian nodded. “They can’t accuse us of having found nothing at this point.”

“No, they cannot,” he agreed with a soft sigh.

The door out of the hall was surprisingly easy to shift, at least in comparison to the others, and the stairs on the wall were again adorned by various events of the two experiences, before finally truncating in a small shadowed hall that had several other doors leading off it in various directions and a larger one half open at the far end.

The hall itself had a statue in the middle, again with its head smashed and a bunch of others sat around the base of the plinth, like trophies. Looking around, he guessed they came from the alcoves in the walls, which were now occupied by various hewn sculptures of the woman in different guises. The paintings, when they started looking at them though, were odd. It took him some minutes of walking back and forth to see the eventual rationale, that there must be other stories beyond the two closed and one open smaller doors. A quick check in that hall confirmed it, with the woman hunting for traces of the other young woman who looked like her, while the hero travelled over the mountains and met a blonde woman in a white dress painted with six eyes who was living alone in a ruined village.

That story was strange, because the other companions were very hostile to her, even the youth who plotted about everything, yet the hero insisted she accompany them and helped her out with various things until eventually she took him aside and, hidden from the other companions, confided him about various scenes, just painted as strange recollections of war and a ruined city and barbarians.

After that, around the large hall, it was possible to see the woman’s story unfold: she had rallied the common folk to throw out invaders, received a revelation of some kind or an enlightenment, then been betrayed by cruel nobles and her efforts to save a city undone. At the same time, the others started off remonstrating with the hero, trying to convince him not to go along with the other woman, though as time went on their protestations became less and eventually all welcomed her. The subtext of this was a plot by the priests to get two daggers with black and grey hilts, from an ancient ruin and a deep pool in the mountains.

Back in the hall, that story re-joined the others in the main hall. The other two depicted the conclusion of a tale where the hero seemed to have journeyed away and then come back with a savage man who cut off his old markings and prayed down to priests, accepting new white and gold markings.

In the last scene, before the main door, the group at last met the priests who had always been shadowing along in the background in the city, doing various things to further those searches for the daggers. They asked the hero to recover a third dagger, a silver one, and the green-robed youth left them for some other task.

“Huh… see here, at the end of the scene, they meet up with a lot of other… experts, I guess, to search for the dagger,” Li remarked, pointing at the right edge. “The woman is among them.”

Peering at the painting, he found that she was dressed as a scholar in the company of a few others dressed in similar ways, talking about some ancient records and silently observing the hero’s group, even as other, even more subtle shadows, barely visible amid the crowd, observed her in turn.

“Well, I guess there is only the next hall,” Wentian said at last, looking around.

“Aye, let’s hope it lets us out,” Yuang grumbled. “The sense of ominous potentia and creeping disquiet in this place is really something, you know.”

It was impossible to disagree there – the sense that something was staring at the back of his head was close to overpowering now, and the creepy aura of the paintings was not helping at all, nor was the almost aggressive mundanity of things aside from that. There were no arrays or any evidence of obvious protections. Had he not seen the feng shui alignments in the cave and a few of the scenes shown in the paintings, it would have been easy to believe this a mortal ruin, not anything fantastical.

“Yep,” he agreed, also giving it one last look around. “Let’s get this over with.”

“It can hardly be worse than that shrine,” Li muttered.

“…”

It took all their effort, once again, to push the door open a bit and slip through. He went first this time, because they had been taking turns, and found the hall much larger than the previous one, or any of the previous ones, in fact.

“Hey, are you just going to stare? Help us through,” Qin muttered from behind him.

Shaking his head, he grasped the door and helped pry it open a fraction more, so the taller, more broad-shouldered Qin could also get through without dislocating something.

“Bigger,” Qin remarked, once he was through and Li was squeezing after.

“Yes,” he agreed, finally sending out the light from the talisman and then stopped.

“Uhh…”

Looking at the scene illuminated, it was hard to know where to begin, beyond indulging the urge to hit Junior Brother Li for invoking misfortune.

The hall was indeed large, large enough that the light stone didn’t reach all the way across. The pillars were carved as usual, but the walls were lined with life-size friezes, set back from the floor slightly by channels that held dark water flowing from a fountain placed in the middle of the left wall. Turning to look at the nearest one, on his right as he came in the door, it turned out to be a life-size depiction of the culmination of one of the woman’s scenes where she slept with a noble of the city, and he died suddenly, leaving lots of riches to another youth she had also been seducing, turning his entire household inside out.

In each scene, as he shone the talisman down the wall, everything was vividly coloured, except for the woman, who was always in pure white stone, with golden hair and a sad face, usually turned aside. Each scene in turn held a sense of nigh bewitching allure, paired with that soft, creeping dread, even those just glanced, and made his heart palpitate slightly, in ways that should have been impossible for a cultivator of his realm.

In a strange way, it was almost instructional, much like the paintings, but in a far more profound way, as you were led to contemplate all of the different ways that the central figure drew in the greed, cruelty, debauchery and so on of the perpetrators, how they absolved it, and in the process almost always brought thorough and complete ruin on the perpetrators in ways karmically fitting to the crime.

“Um… this is?” Qin, who had come to stand near him, was sweating visibly, and not approaching anywhere near as close as he was currently standing.

“The source of the ever-growing sense of oppressive unease,” he guessed, looking around at the hall and finally alighting on the far end with a sense of trepidation.

-Does this place also have a shrine?

Leaving the visibly nervous Qin behind as Yuang and then Wentian finally made their way through, he walked slowly into the hall, holding up the light talisman to illuminate it as best he could. As expected, the deeply unsettling synthesis of the previous halls’ and corridors’ scenes covered everything. All the walls held friezes, broken up by statues of the woman holding epitaphs for each event.

Finally, his gaze and the illumination reached the far end, revealing what he had expected. The friezes culminated into a swirling plinth of twisted forms, many recognisable in style as the perpetrators of the crimes depicted in the paintings, who were now cast in vivid, lifelike colours, their faces etched in terror… mostly, as they were buried, literally so, in a pool fed by the fountains at either side of the hall.

“What insanity is this?” Feng mumbled, coming to stand beside him as he reached the edge of the pool.

“…”

Staring up at the woman, whose statue was pure and white, her golden hair done up in an enchanting style, her naked form lounging like an empress on a throne, it was impossible not to feel oddly entranced. The beautiful figure, a book in her left hand, a flower in her right, a jar of wine by the throne and a blade resting against her thigh, drew him in, whispered to him somehow.

Everything about her was…

He struggled to find words for it, as her piercing blue eyes, like sapphires, sank into him, dragging him down, almost seeming to peer through him, to see if he was like the damned souls depicted below who she had sent to Yama for their crimes.

Beside him, he was aware of Feng dropping to his knees, weeping, muttering something about abandoning someone.

With a supreme effort, he pulled his gaze away from her flawless, inexorable form, realising he was sweating and pallid, and found the inscription, below her feet, to identify her form in the ancient script that was used here.

'Aphrodite Tymborychos'

“Lu Mei… I’m sorry… I was wrong…” Feng was slumped on the floor, his face pallid, as if the very life in him was draining away, he realised.

Grimacing, he grabbed Feng and dragged him backwards, away from the statue, away from the all too lifelike forms—

“By the Three Pure Ones!”

The exclamation came from Yuang, who had stepped over to investigate a frieze more closely and was now recoiling in horror himself.

“What is it? …And what happened?” Wentian asked, hurrying up from where he had also been staring at another frieze with an unsettled expression.

“They… they…” Yuang was staring at the hand he had touched one of the carved figures with.

“They are not carvings…”

“…”

“What happened to Brother Feng?” Wentian asked.

“The shrine statue… is… much more dangerous than the one down below…” he managed to articulate, before turning back to Yuang, with a sense of ominous trepidation in his heart. “What do you mean they are not carvings?”

Yuang was staring at his hand, rubbing it on his sleave. Wordlessly, Li leant over and gingerly touched one, then also recoiled.

“These… are… bodies…” Li hissed.

“Bodies?” Qin echoed uneasily.

“Or… flesh…” Li mumbled.

Wordlessly, he turned back to look at the statue, at the words on it, at the wretched forms being buried in the waters of the pool by the woman’s endeavours, all their actions having culminated in her being their undoing, literally sending them down to their graves for their greed, debauchery, lust, cruelty and more.

Exhaling, he steeled himself and, recalling how vivid the representations on the paintings had been, stepped along to get a better look at the subject of the scene in question, a jovial-looking older man who had cheated those whom he should have been protecting while extorting their wives and daughters to work for him in depraved ways to repay false debts.

The features were indeed lifelike, to the point where it was hard not to wonder. The man, Publius Karius Cestor, had been accused, his schemes revealed and yet he had been pardoned, because his family had the favour of the youth in the green and red robe. He had gone back and had a great party with his family, only to vanish into the night, his wealth departing with him, leaving his family influence unable to pay their own debts and exposed to the very unscrupulous actions they had inflicted on others.

Reaching over, he poked one of the women, who had delighted in the suffering of others, depicted sold as a brothel slave herself and being stabbed to death by a young noble she had once counted a friend.

The frieze was soft to the touch beneath his fingers and faintly clammy. There was no soul sense here, but with qi, and sensation, it was undeniable…

Wordlessly, he stared around at the other friezes, his body cold. If everything here was a body, and not a dead one… then the person who made this whole place…

Unbidden, he turned back to the statue…

“Does that mean the soldiers in the shrine were…?” Wentian had also reached the same conclusion.

“How horrific,” Yu muttered, holding his arms and looking about. “This is demonic… What kind of—?”

He cut Yu off, putting a hand over his mouth before he could say something stupid… It made sense to him now that there were no traps, no wards, no guards. In a way, there didn’t need to be. Whoever had made this place, presumably the woman or someone close to her, in her cult perhaps, given how it venerated her achievements, knew enough about space and time laws to somehow freeze these victims like this and ensure that they were… if not living, forever preserved like this as a memorial to their own misdeeds.

It was indeed grim, but this place didn’t feel… demonic. Not in an unholy sense anyway, and in a way that just made it more dangerous.

“We leave, now,” was all he said, pointing to the far door.

“No argument here,” Wentian said grimly.

“S…shouldn’t we?” Qin mumbled, looking around.

“No.” he replied as emphatically as Wentian, their voices overlapping slightly as they refuted that very stupid idea.

“You want to offend who or whatever made this?” he hissed, helping Feng up, who was still a bit glassy-eyed.

“…”

Qin, Li and Yu all shook their heads.

“Yuang?” he turned to look at Yuang… who wasn’t there.

“Where did he?” Wentian blinked, stepping back and holding the light talisman up.

He turned around and then saw Yuang. He had crouched down to wash his hands in the water and was slumped on the ground, the water pooling around him, a shadowy… grasping…

He summoned a spear and used it to flick Yuang away from the water, and the hand briefly materialized into a spectral shimmering figure, face haggard and enraged, before scattering back into yellowish mist and returning to the water.

“What in the fates…?” Li hissed, looking at the spot where it vanished.

“Grab him, we get out of here no—”

Wentian never finished his sentence as Qin turned and suddenly grasped him, a ghostly form surging out of him, its mouth opening and in an instant scattering most of the qi in his body.

Without thinking, he cast the spear at Qin, only for Yu to catch it and snap it, his arms deforming under the artificial force of the act, not that it mattered because now he could see that Yu was also, like Qin, possessed by something.

-When they left to scout those rooms and came back with the plaques!?!

That was the first time they had been out of his sight, as far as he could remember.

With a crack of light, a talisman protecting Wentian triggered, consuming Qin in golden fire before it faded away unnaturally fast. It did, however, buy Wentian, now haggard and pale, bleeding from his eyes and nose, time to stagger back and draw his own treasure weapon.

Without comment, Feng, who appeared to have pulled himself together at last, grasped Yuang by the collar and dashed towards the exit they had come from—

To his shock, Yu was somehow faster, as fast as he would have been were he not suppressed, arriving at the door before they had covered half the distance and smashing into it with a deafening bang.

A shadow, of a youth wearing a tunic like those seen on some of the carvings, stepped out of Yu’s broken body with a hungry grin.

-The plaque? Or was it something else they picked up and didn’t say? The answer undoubtedly lay in Yu’s storage ring; however, getting at it was likely suicidal, so it was what it was.

“Other door!” he snapped, grabbing Wentian, who was weakened, and bodily throwing him ahead of him.

Li and Feng reached it a moment later, dashing through, and he palmed a talisman—

Qin appeared before him, hand grasping, and he twisted away, relying on superior experience to evade the blow rather than speed. In reply, he kicked Qin in the side, watching him fly back, relieved that it was only his physical strength that had returned somehow.

The ghostly youth appeared before him like a literal ghost, poking a hand towards his forehead.

Cold strength tore into his body, grasping for his consciousness as something old and malevolent tried to claw its way into his psyche. His Nascent Soul shifted, grasping his spirit flame, a hard-won treasure from the Dragon Pillars trials, and attacked the invading strength directly.

The spirit flame snuffed out instantly, telling him clearly that the thing attacking him was using Soul Laws—

Golden fire blossomed around both of them, a talisman cast by Wentian surely, and the spirit snarled and was repelled slightly, giving him the moments required to get to the door where Feng grabbed him.

{Mu’s Manifold Mountain}

The force of the Yang Earth talisman Feng used on the metal door made the whole corridor judder faintly as it closed with a clang.

He scrambled up, in the darkness, sweating at his terrifyingly close brush with death, but no follow-up came.

“They can’t go through the doors,” Wentian panted. “At least I don’t think so, based on what happened to Brother Qin’s body.”

“…”

In a weird way, that made sense, although it was a bit of a leap of faith to take right now. Rather than debate about it though, he grabbed the still-stunned Yuang and started to move rapidly down the corridor, no longer caring about the scenes, which seemed to depict the hero’s party hunting the woman and slowly cornering her.

“What if another door is—?” Feng hissed, rushing alongside him.

“Shut up,” Wentian gasped, “positive thoughts!”

That got no disagreement from him, and thankfully, the next door was open to the point where they could worm through. Behind them, the sealed door shook suddenly, as if something and collided against it with great force.

“How long does that talisman last?” he asked Feng, who just shrugged.

“Damn, more friezes… What is this hall called?” Wentian groaned, staring around at the twisted forms locked into eternal suffering.

“…”

The shrine in the middle was of the woman, Aphrodite, burying those who tormented her in captivity, but they didn’t bother to linger, dashing around it and through the next hall, scrambling up the stairs and out into…

Despite the threat of imminent pursuit, it was impossible not to stop and stare, honestly. The sub hall they had emerged into opened out onto one side of a vast open space, tall columns stretching into the darkness with a hint of tangled vegetation here and there. The scene in the middle was still visible, however: a statue of a man… the hero, impaling the woman and another… genuinely demonic figure, with a twisted pig-like face and horns.

Below it, four figures – the hero’s companions, presumably, from what he recalled – were attacking upwards in stylized fashion, aiding him. Columns swirled up around it, merging with the roof, and the whole thing was illuminated by a strange inner glow.

“…”

“On the face, doesn’t that look like the seal they are trying to break?” Feng gawked, pointing at the design barely visible amid some later addition to the plinth at the bottom.

In the gloom, it was possible to make out what looked like half a red circle, reminiscent of the design that the princess and Huang JiLao had had others looking for around the city.

Looking left and right, he saw no other open exits. There was a large double door to their right, but it was firmly shut, which meant that the only way out from possible pursuit was towards the giant statue.

“You know when I said we should have turned back at the first shrine?” he complained, starting forwards after checking Yuang was okay.

“…”

“If we survive this, you can remind me every damn day,” Wentian groaned.

~ Dun Lian Jing – Solaneum Capitoline ~

“Insanity… What even is this?”

Dun Lian Jing found herself watching Gan Renshu – disguised as ‘Huang JiLao’ – pace around the central chamber, as she watched the scattering stars of the great divination with a curious sense of satisfied elation.

“Uh… I mean, it has caught what we wanted…” one of the diviners muttered from where they were seated, focusing on keeping the flow of qi through the central array stable.

“Yes, but this is…”

Yes, elation was a strange emotion, and stranger because, for once, it was genuine – because they were so distracted by the mess unfolding around them, for a short while nobody was messing with her. The cruel part of it was that she knew that this short-lived respite would simply make a return to the twisted containment all the worse, but that was a future problem… and a part of her was quietly hoping this all collapsed into chaos before her ‘part’.

Above them, the swirling stars of the array and golden threads crossing everywhere as they wormed their way into the various seals were slowly darkening. This was the third attempt, already, and it was starting to show in the nerves of all concerned.

The first attempt had actually been aborted by Gan Renshu and the Gan diviners, for reasons she found faintly laughable, and also slightly terrifying – the divination array seized on a connection to the yellow flowers, yet the strength that flowed into the array very briefly was one she was familiar with – that of the prestige of the Turquoise Pond of all influences.

When others had asked why, Gan Renshu had basically fobbed them off, saying that the auspice was wrong and the diviners had backed them up, but a few, especially the Shu clan, had been looking at them oddly ever since, for all the good it would do them in the long run, she suspected.

The second attempt had been much more promising, as the array then managed to divine to a further suitable vector, near as she could tell, only to nearly collapse again – not because anyone stopped it, but because despite divining the purported opportunity, no actual opportunity ever connected with the array. Several attempts had been made to scry why, using rare and expensive talismans, but those had been wasted, in effect, because it turned out that both events had been off to the north-west, in a vast area of riverine swampland that was shrouded from any kind of external view by swirling mists and chaotic qi currents.

Weirdly, though, that ‘opportunity’ had persisted, in the eye of the formation, even as the various groups continued to divine the alignments relating to the seal itself, and finally culminated with the third attempt, which had connected a few hours earlier… and was now the source of her slightly fatalistic elation, because it was also not going according to plan.

“We think we have answered the other problem!” a junior disciple of a sect said, from one side, bowing deeply.

“Other…?” Gan Renshu frowned.

“The second failed attempt,” a disciple from the Jade Gate Court said, a little more quietly.

“Oh…” Gan Renshu nodded, before turning his attention back to the array, which was still trying to run out of the diviner’s control.

“Um… well, it appears to have been a Good Fortune core…” the Jade Gate Court disciple muttered.

“…”

Gan Renshu turned back to look at the disciple dully.

“We tried various divinations and got an auspicious reflection relating to manifesting good fortune,” the disciple nodded. “Someone formed a Good Fortune core… except…”

“Except what?” Gan Renshu frowned.

“Except they did so without a tribulation.”

“…”

Various eyes stared, dully, at the disciple from every quarter, making him shift back awkwardly.

“Yes… well… We did some asking, admitting that there are very few pre-Core Formation disciples here of any standing… or still alive, frankly; however, one small sect, the Wing of Chi Pei, did have a junior disciple who attained a lucky opportunity and formed their core… and did so without evoking any tribulation, apparently forming a 24 rotation core as well.”

“…”

“I see…” Gan Renshu grunted. “So the rules regarding advancements here are not quite in synch with Eastern Azure.”

“It does seem to be the case; however, near as we can tell, this place is becoming more and more associated with Eastern Azure,” the Golden Immortal said with a grimace.

“You mean…”

One of the more trusted helpers in this plan actually face-palmed.

She had to struggle not to laugh as well, because that was actually… hilarious. A place where the rules of advancement were different was absolutely priceless. You couldn’t purchase that kind of pocket realm for money as far as she was aware, certainly not in a Great World. That all their interference and actions might actually be ruining such a treasure land, all for the sake of wanting to grasp it, was nothing short of karmic—

“AIIIIIIIIIE!”

One of the lesser diviners suddenly let out a wretched shriek and his body withered away, making everyone flinch, even Gan Renshu.

The spinning gold and blue jade cube that was forming the middle of the whole array, surrounded by ten different Fate Seizing talismans, wobbled ominously. Above them, the constellations dimmed, a faint shadow creeping across the divination array until nearly a third of them were eclipsed.

“What is…?”

“The denial tribulation…!” Kung Tuo hissed, his aura shifting rapidly as he drew more and more qi from the treasure he was using to maintain his part of the divination.

“Y'ah mgepnogephaii!”

A second diviner emitted an inarticulate shriek of nonsense that made her senses waver as his soul power imploded and collapsed. The talisman he had been maintaining was barely kept stable by the group behind him, most of whom coughed up blood.

“What is this!?!” another cried out. “This is not any kind of normal denial!”

“Vulgtmah uh'eog h' ah mgepmgah'n'ghft!”

A third diviner, seated on the far side, on the outer circle of the grand formation linking the different formations outside, also screamed, his body twisting and distorting into some sort of strange and inhuman aberration before simply exploding into a pile of gore, slimy tentacles manifesting from the remains of his organs.

“…”

All around, cultivators were sweating now, their faces pallid and fearful, as the entire divination started to twist. She could see that black cracks were slowly spidering out of the four secondary symbols on the seal now – however, in counterpoint to this, almost half the stars above were shadowed and a good quarter of them had gone genuinely dark as the balance of the array tilted perilously towards some inexplicable deviation, from what she could see.

Gan Renshu stared at it… face agonizing for a second, then turned to Quar Fan, Qing Xing and Gan Jiao-Ran Hao. “Get another group in here! We need Ancient Immortals, 10 of them, with a complete elemental spread!”

Gan Jiao and Quar Fan of Zhi Zhi Mountain both nodded and raced outside to the other supporting arrays while Qing Xing pulled out a blood red talisman and stepped forward to shore up the array.

“Princess, go to the centre. When I say, start stimulating the seal!” Renshu commanded, waving to her.

Without any means to refuse, she strode through the edge of the chaotic array and arrived before the metre-high plinth. Behind her, Ancient Immortals were racing into the room and Gan Ulang was directing them to set up a new associated formation, linking to the blue and gold cube.

All around her now, she could feel creeping darkness, invisible and inexplicable, also pushing at her body, even as her ‘physique’ once again resonated with whatever was sealed away.

{TEN REFINEMENTS COURT – SUPREME SEAT OF JIANG}

Gan Ulang focused the strength of the ten Ancient Immortals on the cube, using the new formation as the words reverberated through the whole hall and probably beyond. The spinning cube blazed with myriad colours of fire and ten stars slid out of its faces, one after another, shooting up into the divination array and meeting the encroaching darkness that was trying to overtake their own efforts to subvert the golden flowers.

The constellations collapsed upwards, swirling around those ten shining stars to form a vast symbol that read ‘Jiang’ within the divination array that projected a vast prestige inwards, into it.

Each of the diviners focusing on an array from one of the auspiciously divined places around the city blazed with auspicious strength as the gold and blue cube reflected a boundless, commanding shadow on a great throne into the whole array, drawing on the strength of almost everyone there to do so, she guessed.

As all those standing by looked on, 99 points of light blazed within the spiralling constellations, a boundless sense of acquisition radiating out from them and extending through the firmament to some other place. It made her sigh, sadly, because that meant, almost certainly, that some other unfortunate soul had—

*crack*

*crack*

*Crack!*

Before her, the stone on the plinth around the golden flower slowly peeled away and the flower itself started to unravel as the entire momentum of the formation turned on it and the combined efforts of all their treasures and 500 odd cultivators—

“Now!”

Gan Renshu yelled at her, and she found herself placing her hands over the two points they had determined were the focal points of the formation—

“Great Envoy, the sacrifices are found!”

The words sank through the world like a dark shadow, a silent hiss of boundless covetous greed.

“The one unbound, the one unfound!”

She stood in three places at once.

A stunningly beautiful, if rather naked and somewhat muddy, young woman with golden hair leant on a balustrade of a dark ruin, peering out through the mist… On her brow was a faint, dark symbol that re-arranged itself to read ‘Dawn’… The woman whispered a word, unheard, but holding some ancient sense of longing—

A young woman with brown hair stood on a rock, darkness rolling around her, the shadows of the vast vault consuming the heavens above her, facing a vast, imperious figure, the emperor of a Retribution Hall, garbed in the colours of – the Kong clan?

A young woman with dark hair wept upon the water, holding a golden flower that was wilting away in her hands as her reflection consumed her and her heritage abandoned her—

…

She screamed, her body somehow caught between those three moments, the golden seal before her crumbling away, even as she became aware that something was dreadfully wrong, even beyond all the other things that were dreadfully wrong.

The inexorable draw of the cursed physique in her body and the command of Gan Renshu refused to let her step back, even had she been able to, as a terrible shadow descended from above, blotting out the whole divination array, the stars growing cold within it, the vast imperial shadow itself grasping and seizing.

Dimly, she was aware of the other diviners screaming wretchedly, their forms deforming as dark, four-armed shadows, faintly discernible as some lizard-like abomination with a long head, grasped them, holding their arms and their heads, merging with them—

The dread shade, now cloaked in tattered ribbons of flayed yellow flesh, its five eyes like black starless holes into the void, reached down, through the divination array, and effortlessly grasped the golden flower from the woman by the water, grasped it from the weeping woman and tried to grasp something else from the woman by the—

Pain.

Cold.

Darkness.

Shadows.

The world around her warped, the hall still there, but cast in timeless shadows as events flowed bizarrely around her, jumping back and forth, as if forgetful of exactly what moment they were in. The seal floated before her, unbent somehow from its previous shape into a swirling collection of red, blue, white, black and gold threads… all of which were rapidly collapsing apart as the gold ones withered away.

The white dispersed into snowflakes.

The blue scattered like rain.

The black and the red didn’t collapse, but instead warped and wavered.

“Grasp IT!”

Renshu’s command, presumably yelled, sank through the strange space, sounding distorted and aloof… and she realised she didn’t have to obey it… or rather that she had forgotten how…

Forgotten why she was even here…

She felt something drag her down, into… darkness…

In that darkness, all her worries flooded away, the world fading around her…

Gentle warmth washed away all her woes…

Gave her a peace she had, in some part, longed for… yet never really expected to find…

The path of cultivation was one that walked over a path of blood and bones, not flower petals and gentle music, warm summer days…

She could languish here for eternity… and be happy…

She could lie here… and let oblivion take her…

She froze. The water was cold, her body numb and unanswering… the darkness slowly drawing her away…

A hand grasped hers, small and feminine, then another grasped her shoulder, dragging her up, out of a warm, dark river, as a haunting, faintly familiar voice whispered softly.

“It is not your time…”

She tried to open her eyes to see who it was… but the water, now turgid and icy, stung them and she couldn’t see. The arms held her for a moment longer before melting away—

Something cracked inside her, a tiny chink of an ancient memory long forgotten, or suppressed somehow, stirred by that voice. Her mother’s words, after she had woken from some panic in the night…

“Dear one, don’t fear, it was just a nightmare… Remember the words I told you… Come, let us say them together…”

She realised she was screaming as she regained consciousness, clawing at her shoulders, trying to find those hands to grasp them… the loss she was feeling profoundly outweighing the soul-shaking fear of the whole experience.

“The Bright Star shines, becomes the Bridge between our Hearts, how Enchanting…”

Unbidden, she found herself speaking them again, to herself, just as her mother had instructed all those decades ago, when she was a… child. Five little words, a part of a phrase, their little secret, truthfully, never shared with anyone else.

Her mother had said she should put all the bad thoughts into them, and they would make them into good things… which she had done for some time, but in the Imperial Court, there had been so, so many… bad things, and the words never really seemed to do much… so she had cast it aside, like all those other childish things, when her mother entered the Imperial Court as a handmaiden to the Empress, and then a concubine.

Now though, as she spoke them again in her heart, she realised that they were all she had… and that, strangely, even what had been done to her by the Gan clan, by the Imperial Court, by Dun Jian… didn’t seem to really touch them, now that she was aware of them.

~ Cang Di – Escarpment North of Udrasa ~

“Right, shall we deal with the manipulation then, before the opportune moment passes?” Origin said with a resigned sigh, turning to look to the south-east.

“Yes…” Divide said with narrowed eyes. “However…”

“…”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Divide muttered, as the other three all looked at her in a sideways manner that was… unnerving to see in such powerful beings.

As he watched, however, Divide took both the dagger-wielding woman’s hands and nearly pulled them to her bosom, smiling beautifully. “All I need is one teeny favour.”

“This wouldn’t be why you got those two troublemakers to vacate in the aim of causing a distraction?” Origin murmured, raising an eyebrow.

Divide tried to ignore her for a moment as far as he could see, then just pouted and sighed.

“Yes, fine, okay, I did, and this will annoy a few people who deserve it, including both the perpetrators of that crime in the jungles below Thunder Crest.”

“Okay, you had my suspicion, but now you have my interest,” the third sister said, extracting her hands. “What do you need?”

“One lightning bolt,” Divide smirked.

“…”

“For who…”

“Not who… what… kinda.”

“…”

“It’s been a while since you hit a temple… How do you fancy turning the seat of a crime into metamorphic glass to help me square a rather awkward bit of implication regarding Aphrodite and Elysium?” Divide said winsomely.

“…”

“Oh… that,” Origin nodded, distaste dripping from her tone to the point where the dawn light dimmed slightly and the sky itself seemed to shrink as the world turned claustrophobic. “How are you involved in that mess with the Cult of Solace?”

“A certain six-eyed bitch gave a winsome youth a sword which he used to split a pig’s head in,” Divide muttered shiftily.

“Why was that?” the fourth woman frowned, before shaking her head… “On second thought, some reasons are just too petty.”

Origin, who had looked south-east for a moment, seemed like she wanted to say more, but finally just sighed and replied. “They are… but we do it so well, do we not?”

“Umm…” the blonde-haired woman bowed very politely.

“The reason this mess exists,” Origin said a bit archly, “and that mess actually, is because people didn’t leave well enough alone. Because of that, other, somewhat more competent parties saw the benefits of a certain approach to dealing with old problems in new, forward-thinking ways, and as a result, I along with several others found ourselves very unfortunately implicated in things we should not have been… partially because your forebears brought far too much attitude and not enough sense to the aftermath… so pick your next words carefully, Alalia.”

The rather bedraggled blonde-haired woman with pointy ears opened and shut her mouth a few times then lowered her head.

“That’s what I thought,” Origin said blandly, before turning back to Divide. “Rather than Cetana, I’ll do it.”

“You sure?” Cetana asked.

“It is a…” Origin trailed off for a moment, then just shook her head. “I’ll do it. First, though, we deal with the new vermin infestation, rather than the ones inherited unawares with the property.”

Looking on, he found himself still totally adrift concerning what they were discussing, as the four women formed a circle, hands touching, and simply spoke as one.

{~Extinction of Four Directions~}

Their voices were neither loud nor soft, yet the whole world seemed to settle faintly as their words flowed outwards. The grass shifted, trees swayed gently, the dawn-tinted clouds above drifted, the blue sky deepened and a faint sense of oddness he had never marked in the world up to that point, because it had always been there, he realised, vanished, memorialised in his awareness only by its vanishing.

“Oh goddesses, radiant at dawn, standing against the world… peerless…”

The old man, who had been sat there slack-jawed, staring at the dwindling tribulation, fell down on his knees with a look of silent horror and awe now almost graven into his features as he mumbled the kind of praise that would have made even an emperor embarrassed.

Alalia, also now staring at the sky, gulped softly and hugged her arms, making him wonder what had just transpired. In comparison to the defeat of the warped hall, it seemed very slight, yet clearly, for this act the four had worked together somehow to a much greater degree, yet, beyond that sense of oddness vanishing, the immediate effect was not at all obvious to him.

“What just…?” Dongmei was staring around, just like him, and warily nudged the old senior.

“Don’t ask that brat,” Divide giggled. “He is just an idiot who sat so long in his pagoda with his eyes shut that he forgot how to see… or read.”

“Most radiant and harmonious goddess is right,” the old man bowed deeply. “This villain offended senior with his ramblings and has already started to reflect on his actions…”

“Really, he is very good at this,” Divide’s smile deepened. “Perhaps we could?”

“…”

The other three just looked at her, ignoring the old man who was shaking like a leaf.

“Well, it’s a bit annoying, but we basically severed the means by which this world interacts with external fate,” Origin said, turning to look at the two of them.

“…”

He realised his mouth had just fallen open, because while those were words, and they strung together to make a sentence, he didn’t want to ask if he had just misunderstood what she said.

“It’s not as grand as it sounds,” Divide murmured, with a bit of a stage whisper to them. “It should have been like that already, or at least much less permeable than it has become, given where we are; however, thanks to some old events, that giant bolt of trouble that landed, both of them, shook the entire place up something horrid.”

“The issue was finding an opportune moment to act without it being immediately obvious,” Origin agreed.

“Immediately… obvious?” his own words echoed in his ears, confused.

“To any onlookers, it will seem that the aftermath of the insanity here and to the south, which we can now do something about, is responsible for this. They twisted the fated connections to the world so much they snapped or something,” Divide elaborated with a shrug.

“Uhh…”

Qing Dongmei had to sit down, and he noticed that the old man was just grovelling harder.

Somehow, he still just felt numb, even though he was sure he should be thoroughly terrified at the offhand way in which they had just explained a feat nobody in the Azure Astral Starfield could probably achieve.

-Or have I been around my teacher so long, that absurd stuff like this just no longer phases me as much as it should? he wondered with a sad inward sigh.

“But… revered and esteemed celestials…” Dongmei finally managed to speak, curtsying as deeply as she could, “if… external fate has been severed from the world, doesn’t that mean we cannot… leave?”

“You want to go back to that Eastern Azure?” Divide asked dubiously, the aura around her suddenly coalescing to the point where she might as well have been the only thing there.

Dongmei gulped and the old man grovelled harder, while he felt cold sweat suddenly drenching his back.

Divide leaned forward, her expression rather arch as she stared at both of them. “Are you telling me that I, glorious and esteemed, and my dear sisters, radiant goddesses all, are not suitable for your grand ambitions? Do you know what happened to the last person who told me I wasn’t good enough?”

“…”

“…”

“Sister,” Origin’s voice took a certain edge; however, the moment was thoroughly broken by Cetana who just started laughing as if this was a hilarious joke, and even the veiled woman shifted as if amused.

“Boo… you lot are no fun,” Divide’s tone changed on a heartbeat, as she crossed her arms and pouted… and he was able to breathe again… and not stare at her largely naked form.

Dongmei sat down, sweating, and he leant back against the boulder, exhaling softly, not sure whether to laugh or cry at what had clearly been a ‘joke’.

“Forgive her,” Origin reproached with a sideways look at Divide. “She so rarely goes out and socialises, sometimes it goes to her head. All that has happened is that those tools and means that leverage the strength of fated principle outside this world, that do not have roots within it, can find no purchase here and are now broken.”

“…”

He pulled out a minor talisman relating to deflecting fate and sent his qi into it and watched as it did… nothing.

“And whose fault is that?” Divide sniffed, glancing at the fourth woman, who, even veiled and rather unnoticeable as she was, became somehow even more veiled and unnoticeable in the landscape for a moment, as if slightly embarrassed.

“Right… that’s that dealt with…” Origin said a bit more brusquely.

“Attend me, My Moros”

A vast noise, beyond audible comprehension in truth, shook the land around them.

He flinched, searing light sinking into his eyes and heat making his skin prickle as a terrible crack of sound split the morning dawn around them. When he managed to recover his sight, he saw… Origin holding a lightning bolt, a literal lightning bolt, like it were a spear she had just grasped from the firmament itself. The furious strength of heavenly yin and yang coiled between heaven and earth like a multi-coloured mirage of all colours and none as qi in its most fundamental state corroded the very spatial fabric of the world around her.

As he stared, along with Dongmei and the shivering old man, the bolt twisted and distorted, its aura growing both less and more simultaneously as the colours bled into each other and it became a kind of absence of colour reminiscent of the same deep dark that lingered between the stars.

Without comment, Origin passed the frozen bolt, which was dropping sparks of colours he was sure no mortal should ever see, to Divide.

"Display thee, dread spectre, the undying Death, and fly true!"

With those words, which hung in the air like dark chimes, Divide cast the bolt high into the sky, where it transformed into a vast shadowy bird, flying across the sky, marked only by a sense of dark, like a shadow chasing clouds to the south-east.